Arkansas, Forgotten Land of Plenty by Ronald R. Switzer

Author:Ronald R. Switzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2019-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Confederate Commissary Department found the same shortages of fresh beef and flour in the south, but it could supply some of the Army needs by contract. George W. White was under contract to provide “1,000,000 pounds of bacon, or a sufficiency for Fort Smith and Fayetteville, Arkansas,” at 15 cents a pound. He also was to provide “all required [beef-on-the-hoof] by the troops in West Arkansas, the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw Nations, and as far north as Springfield, Mo., at 6½ cents net per pound.”37

Although White was a Texas supplier to the Confederacy, the name should be researched further because he apparently was involved in fraud against the United States government that had further ramifications in the legalities of Texas statehood. In 1851 Congress and the Supreme Court were considering the question of whether to admit Texas to the Union as a state and where its northern boundary should be. In that year Congress gave Texas 5,000 U.S. bonds with a face value of $1,000 each, redeemable in gold in 1865. During the last few months of the Civil War the Texas Military Board turned over some of the bonds to George W. White and John Chiles in exchange for promised delivery of supplies needed for the Confederacy. The Confederate army was desperate, and the agreement called for White and Chiles, if they could not deliver the supplies, not to return the U.S. gold bonds, but an equivalent amount in worthless state bonds. White and Chiles did not deliver the supplies, and at the end of the war they produced the totally worthless Confederate bonds to fulfill their contract obligation. The provisional Union governor refused to accept the paper bonds and declared the agreement a swindle. In 1867 Texas filed suit in the U.S. Supreme Court alleging that Article III of the constitution allowed a state to invoke the Court’s original jurisdiction and asking for an order that White and Chiles return the U.S. (gold) bonds. Two years later, in 1869, in the case of Texas v. White, the court ruled that because Texas was not a state at the time, owing to secession, the agreement between White, Chiles and the Confederacy was null and void and could not be considered until Texas restored its constitutional relations with the United States.38

Further reflections of supply shortages are found in newspaper ads of the time. Major John Palmer, chief commissary, Trans-Mississippi District of the Confederacy, placed an ad in several papers on June 5, 1862

ARMY SUPPLIES

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