Davis had gotten more than he bargained for in the way of aggressive fighting by Hood. He wired the general on August 5 that “the loss consequent upon attacking [the enemy] in his entrenchments requires you to avoid that if practicable.” Instead, Davis urged Hood to send his cavalry to raid Sherman’s rail supply line, which would “compel the Enemy to attack you in position or to retreat.”25 Hood’s horsemen under General Joseph Wheeler did raid Sherman’s rear, but they did little to disrupt his supplies. Sherman’s cavalry also conducted a failed raid south of Atlanta. And instead of assaulting the Confederate defenses, Sherman settled down for a siege. Atlanta remained in Confederate hands, which seemed to justify Davis’s removal of Johnston.
In a masterpiece of understatement, Senator Herschel Johnson of Georgia, a Davis supporter, acknowledged that Hood’s appointment did not “meet universal approval. It took the army & country by surprise, & produced momentary alarm.” In the end, Johnson predicted, “nothing short of the success of Genl. Hood in closing the campaign, will procure a final verdict of approval.”26
The apparent stalemate in front of Atlanta compounded the sense of futility and failure that spread through the North in the summer of 1864. Grant had bogged down before Petersburg and Richmond after the Army of the Potomac suffered sixty thousand casualties in two months with little to show for all the carnage. “Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the beginning of Grant’s campaign?” asked a New York newspaper on July 12.27
Northern war weariness revived the prospects of Copperhead Democrats, who hoped to nominate a peace candidate for president and defeat Lincoln’s reelection. A clamor for negotiations with the Confederacy became insistent. Lincoln had no faith in such a parley. He was running for reelection on a platform calling for “unconditional surrender” by the Confederacy and an amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery in a restored Union. But the United States president could not ignore the pressure for peace. When Confederate agents in Canada convinced New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley that they were empowered to open negotiations, Greeley in turn pressed Lincoln to respond. He did so, specifying Union and emancipation as preconditions for any such negotiations. This proviso gave Confederates a propaganda victory by enabling them to accuse Lincoln of sabotaging the chance for peace by laying down conditions he knew were unacceptable to the Confederacy. So long as the war seemed to be going badly for the North—as it did in July and August 1864—this impression dimmed the prospects for Lincoln’s reelection.28
Jefferson Davis had no more faith that negotiations could achieve peace with independence for the Confederacy than Lincoln believed they could achieve peace with reunion. But while Davis did not have to face a reelection campaign, he too was subject to pressure from Southerners who longed for peace. Vice President Alexander Stephens led an informal coalition that urged Davis to cultivate Northern Peace Democrats by agreeing to negotiations without insisting on Confederate independence as a precondition. Davis rejected this approach. Since independence would be an ultimate goal of negotiations, he maintained, it would be dishonest and useless to pretend otherwise.
Nevertheless, Davis did agree to receive under a flag of truce two unofficial envoys from the North whom Lincoln had allowed to pass through the lines. They met with Davis and Secretary of State Judah Benjamin in Richmond on July 17—the same day that Davis relieved Joseph Johnston of command. The Northerners began by asking Davis how peace might be attained. “In a very simple way,” he replied in words recorded by one of the envoys, James R. Gilmore, a journalist who later published the interview in the Atlantic Monthly. “Withdraw your armies from our territory. . . . We are not waging an offensive war, except so far as it is offensive-defensive,—that is, so far as we are forced to invade you to prevent your invading us. Let us alone and peace will come at once.” The envoys mentioned Lincoln’s terms for peace: reunion, abolition, and amnesty. Davis’s one good eye glared as he responded: “Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. . . . At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. . . . We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE—and that, or extermination, we will have. . . . You may ‘emancipate’ every slave in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves . . . if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”29
The publicity generated by this meeting and by the Greeley encounter with Confederate agents in Canada made clear that no compromise peace was possible so long as Davis and Lincoln remained the heads of their respective governments. As Lincoln later put it in a message to his Congress, “the insurgent leader [Davis] does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue that can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”30
Except for the reference to himself as an insurgent, Davis would have agreed with every word. And until September 2, the momentum of victory seemed to be with the Confederacy. Three days before that date the Northern Democratic convention in Chicago had adopted a platform declaring that “after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war . . . [we] demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union.”31 This plank made peace a first priority and Union a distant second; “ultimate” and “the earliest practicable moment” might never come. A New York Republican denounced the tone of “surrender and abasement” in this resolution. “Jefferson Davis might have drawn it.” Alexander Stephens proclaimed happily that “it presents . . . the first ray of real light I have seen since the war began.” Even though the Democratic presidential nominee, George B. McClellan, reversed the priorities of peace and Union in his acceptance of the nomination, the Charleston Mercury declared that Democratic victory “must lead to peace and our independence” provided that “for the next two months we hold our own and prevent military success by our foes.”32
But on September 3 a telegram arrived in Washington from General Sherman: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”33 The previous day Union troops had occupied the city that had become such a potent symbol of Confederate resistance. Sherman had carried out one of his patented flanking movements, which cut the last open railroad into Atlanta at Jonesboro. To avoid encirclement of his army, Hood had evacuated the city on the night of September 1–2 after burning and blowing up everything of military value.
This single event had a huge impact on public opinion in both North and South. Combined with Admiral David G. Farragut’s earlier capture of Mobile Bay and General Philip Sheridan’s subsequent victories in the Shenandoah Valley, the capture of Atlanta reversed the midsummer decline of Northern morale and assured Lincoln’s reelection. It had the opposite effect in the South. A Richmond newspaper lamented that “the disaster at Atlanta” came “in the very nick of time” to “save the party of Lincoln from irretrievable ruin. . . . [It] obscures the prospect of peace, late so bright. It will also diffuse gloom over the South.”34 Gloom was indeed plentiful. “Never until now did I feel hopeless,” wrote a North Carolinian, “but since God seems to have forsaken us I despair.” Mary Chesnut also despaired. “We are going to be wiped off the earth,” she wrote. “Since Atlanta I have felt as if all were dead within me, forever.”35
Many Southerners were sure that they knew whom to blame. Davis’s removal of Johnston was the direct cause of the disaster, according to the Richmond Examiner. “Is it not cruelly hard, that the struggle of eight millions, who sacrifice their lives . . . should come to naught—should end in the ruin of us all—in order that the predilections and antipathies, the pitiful personal feelings, of a single man may be indulged?”36 Davis was unapologetic about his decision to replace Johnston, who he believed had been
preparing to abandon Atlanta. “I resolved that it should not” be abandoned without a fight, he said in a public speech. “I put a man in command who I knew would strike a manly blow for the city, and many a Yankee’s blood was made to nourish the soil before the prize was won.”37 Left unremarked was the much larger amount of Southern blood in the soil.
Davis was more concerned about declining public and army morale than he was about his own growing unpopularity. On September 20 he once again left Richmond for a wearying trip on rickety railroads to the Deep South. His purpose was threefold: to rouse public spirits; to deal with command problems in Hood’s army; and to settle on a strategy to counter the consequences of Sherman’s capture of Atlanta.
The president gave more than a dozen speeches during this trip, from Danville, Virginia, to Montgomery, Alabama, and back through the Carolinas. They amounted to pep talks lauding the contributions of each community to the war effort, chastising laggards and croakers, urging absentees to return to the ranks, prodding able-bodied men not performing essential home-front duties to enlist, predicting the revival of Confederate fortunes that would drive Sherman out of Georgia and take Confederate armies to the Ohio River, damning Northern atrocities, and extolling the willingness of the Southern people to make sacrifices for the cause of liberty. Many commentators praised Davis’s speeches and credited them with stirring up public enthusiasm.
At Macon, Georgia, Davis declared that if half of the men AWOL from the Army of Tennessee returned, Sherman would be destroyed. The Yankee general “cannot keep up his long line of communications, and retreat sooner or later, he must. And when that day comes, the fate that befell the army of the French Empire in its retreat from Moscow will be reenacted. Our cavalry and our people will harass and destroy his army as did the Cossacks that of Napoleon.” Like the French emperor, Sherman “will escape with only a body guard.”38
When General Grant read a newspaper report of this speech, he riposted: “Who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat?”39 Some Southerners criticized Davis for getting carried away in the Macon address. But he ignored the criticism and kept to the theme in subsequent speeches. The president worked it into his argument that peace with independence could not be accomplished by negotiations but only by military victories that would force the enemy to sue for peace on Southern terms. “Does any one believe that Yankees are to be conciliated by terms of concession?” he asked a large crowd in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. “Does any one imagine that we can conquer the Yankees by retreating before them, or do you not all know that the only way to make spaniels civil is to whip them?”40
Some Southerners—particularly Alexander Stephens and Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia—continued to put their faith in the Northern Copperheads. Davis was skeptical, but he told an audience in Augusta: “Let fresh victories crown our arms, and the peace party, if there be such at the North, can elect its candidate. . . . We must beat Sherman, we must march into Tennessee—there we will draw from twenty thousand to thirty thousand to our standard; and so strengthened, we must push the enemy back to the banks of the Ohio, and thus give the peace party of the North an accretion no puny editorial can give.”41 In Greensboro, North Carolina, where peace sentiment was strong, Davis likewise predicted that Sherman would soon be “driven out of Tennessee and Kentucky, even across the beautiful Ohio, by our advancing and conquering armies. Then we shall have thousands of recruits . . . that will so augment our armies that our foes will sue for peace.”42
It is not clear whether Davis believed his own rhetoric. But it did elicit cheers from the crowds. In his strategy meetings with Hood and other generals, however, the mood was more sober. One of Davis’s purposes in making this trip was to sort out command problems in the Army of Tennessee. Back in July, General Hardee had resented the promotion of Hood over his head—even though the president had offered Hardee the position seven months earlier and he had turned it down. When Hardee had requested a transfer after Hood’s promotion, Davis had appealed to his patriotism and professionalism in a successful effort to persuade him to stay.
William J. Hardee
But by September, matters had deteriorated further. Hardee commanded the corps that Sherman had beaten at Jonesboro to force the evacuation of Atlanta. Hood blamed Hardee for poor generalship, and Hardee in turn blamed Hood. After meeting with Hood at his headquarters in Palmetto, Georgia, Davis resolved the issue with a wholesale reshuffling of command personnel. He left Hood in charge of the Army of Tennessee and transferred Hardee to a new post as commander of the defenses of Charleston and Savannah. Davis had recently brought Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor from the Trans-Mississippi (where he had been feuding with General Edmund Kirby Smith) to command the troops in Alabama and Mississippi. To take charge of the whole theater in which all these armies were to operate, Davis named none other than Beauregard, who had come south with the president after an uneasy reconciliation between the two proud men. It remained to be seen whether Beauregard would be able to make more of this “Military Division of the West” than Joseph Johnston had done two years earlier, when its resources and manpower were greater and the enemy occupied much less of it.43
Hood’s army was the largest in this theater, and the third purpose of Davis’s trip was to consult with that general about what to do with it. The president’s public speeches, of course, predicted that it would invade Tennessee and Kentucky. Hood, and Davis himself, may have harbored a desire to do just that. But as a practical matter, there was the small problem of what to do about Sherman’s army occupying Atlanta and pointing like an arrow at the heartland of the Deep South. Davis approved Hood’s proposal to move north of Atlanta along Sherman’s rail supply line from Chattanooga, destroying tracks and bridges and gobbling up the small garrisons along the way. This action, they believed, would pry Sherman out of Atlanta and force him to come after Hood. If Sherman decided instead to move south, Hood would follow on his tail and do all the damage he could.44
Hood started north on October 1. Leaving one corps to garrison Atlanta, Sherman followed. For the next two weeks the two armies skirmished and maneuvered back over the same territory they had fought over from May to August. Forrest’s and Wheeler’s cavalry also raided Union-occupied territory from northeast Alabama to western Tennessee. Sherman finally drove Hood off his supply line. But the Union general expressed frustration with this kind of warfare, which seemed to play into Confederate hands. “The whole effect of my campaign will be lost” if he continued to play that game, Sherman complained to Grant. “It will be a physical impossibility to protect the [rail] roads, now that Hood, Forrest, and Wheeler, and the whole batch of devils, are turned loose without home or habitation. By attempting to hold the roads we will lose a thousand men monthly and will gain no result.”45 Sherman pleaded with Grant to turn him loose to march through Georgia to Savannah, destroying war resources as he went. To deal with the possibility that Hood might ignore him and head into Tennessee, Sherman sent two corps under George Thomas to bolster Union defenses in that state.
While Sherman was persuading Grant and Lincoln to approve his march, the Northern presidential election took place. As Davis had expected, Lincoln won a decisive victory. The Confederate president had perhaps even hoped for this outcome to dispel all notions of a negotiated peace and to harden Southern resolve to fight on. In a message to his Congress, Davis declared that the Confederacy remained “as erect and defiant as ever. Nothing [has] changed in the purpose of its Government, in the indomitable valor of its troops, or in the unquenchable spirit of its people. . . . There is no military success of the enemy which can accomplish its destruction.”46
It was this last-ditch defiance that Sherman set out to break in his march from Atlanta to the sea.
7.
THE LAST RESORT
As Sherman departed Atlanta southward in the third week of November, Hood turned his back and began to move north into Tennessee. This actio
n was contrary to the strategy agreed upon by Davis and Hood in their meeting at Hood’s headquarters on September 25, which required Hood to follow on Sherman’s heels if the Yankees moved south. But Davis’s public speeches during his trip to the Deep South had alluded to an invasion that would take Hood’s army all the way to the Ohio River. And in a letter to Hood on November 7, Davis seemed to endorse the general’s intention to do just that. An invasion of Tennessee was consistent with the president’s continued commitment to an offensive-defensive strategy, even though the Confederacy’s waning resources made such a strategy totally unrealistic.1
Hood’s campaign in Tennessee ended disastrously. In the Battle of Franklin on November 30, his army lost twelve generals killed and wounded; at the Battle of Nashville on December 15–16, the Army of Tennessee was virtually destroyed as a fighting force. Hood retreated to Mississippi with fewer than half of the forty thousand troops with whom he had started the invasion. On January 13, 1865, he resigned his command. In his memoirs, Davis claimed that he had not approved of Hood’s campaign. But contemporary evidence contradicts this effort to deny responsibility.2
Hood had left behind only Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry and Georgia militia to impede Sherman’s progress from Atlanta 285 miles to Savannah. From Richmond Davis sent a flurry of telegrams to Beauregard, to Howell Cobb (commander of the militia), and to William Hardee (commander at Savannah) trying to coordinate these efforts. He ordered the mining of roads with “subterranean torpedoes” and the destruction of bridges, livestock, and food crops in Sherman’s path. These actions did little to slow Sherman and much to anger him. Denouncing the use of mines as “barbarism,” Sherman forced prisoners to precede his soldiers to pry them up and defuse them. A Georgia citizen informed Davis that Wheeler’s horsemen had obeyed Davis’s instructions too literally. They burned “all the corn & fodder, [drove] off all the stock of farmers for ten miles on each side of the Rail Road,” and took most of the horses and mules. These exploits created such a backlash among the people that they “will not care one cent which army are victorious.” Davis, however, believed that his orders had not been carried out thoroughly enough. If they had been, he maintained after Sherman reached the sea and captured Savannah on December 21, “the faithful execution of those orders would have defeated his project.”3
Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief Page 14