The Confederate Central Government Was a Form of "War Socialism"; A Central State as Well Organized and Powerful as the Confederacy Did Not Emerge Until the New Deal and World War II Mobilization

The large and powerful Confederate state presents another anomaly for the “limited government” interpretation. Although southerners rebelled against growing centralization of the federal government, they had no qualms about establishing a strong national state of their own. Scholars have classified the Confederate central government as a form of “war socialism.” The Confederacy owned key industries, regulated prices and wages, and instituted the most far-reaching draft in North American history. The Confederacy employed some 70,000 civilians in a massive (if poorly coordinated) bureaucracy that included thousands of tax assessors, tax collectors, and conscription agents. The police power of the Confederate state was sometimes staggering. To ride a train, for example, every passenger needed a special government pass. Designed to ferret out deserters and draft dodgers, the pass system curtailed civil liberties and inconvenienced travelers, who often had to wait in long lines to get their passes. Political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel writes that “a central state as well organized and powerful as the Confederacy did not emerge until the New Deal and subsequent mobilization for World War II.”

--John Majewski, introduction to Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation, Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 6-7.