by Shelby Foote
An invocation had opened the proceedings. Now another closed them. Davis lifted his hands and eyes to heaven as he spoke the final words. “My hope is reverently fixed on Him whose favor is ever vouchsafed to the cause which is just. With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the Providence which has so visibly protected the Confederacy during its brief but eventful career, to Thee, O God, I trustingly commit myself and prayerfully invoke Thy blessing on my country and its cause.”
Under the spell of that closing prayer, the people dispersed in silence and good order, “as though they had attended divine service,” one remarked. Later, however, away from the magic of his voice and presence, they doubted that there was “unity in policy” or “fraternity in sentiment” or “just effort” in the prosecution of the war. Prompted by hostile editors, whose critiques of the address came out in their papers the following day—along with the news from Donelson and Nashville announcing the loss of Kentucky and most of Tennessee—they began to consider not only what he had said, but also what he had not said. He had outlined no future policy for raising the blockade, whose pinch was already being felt, or for overcoming the recent military reverses. Though his words were obviously spoken as much for foreign as for domestic ears, he had not foretold international recognition or the receiving of assistance from abroad. Except in vague and general terms, including the closing appeal to the Almighty, he had announced no single plan for coming to grips with the host of calamities they knew were included in his admission that “the tide for the moment is against us.”
The fact that he refrained from explicit mention of these reverses did not mean that the people were unaware of them. They knew all too well that even a bare listing would have doubled the length of his address. Foremost among the disappointments, at least to men who took a long view of the chance for victory, was the failure of Confederate diplomacy. Original computations had shown that, before spring, England would have begun to suffer from the cotton famine which would bring her to her knees. Yet the looms and jennies, spinning away at the surplus bulging the warehouses, had not slowed. Ironically, the shortage there was not in cotton, but in wheat, the result of a crop failure in the British Isles. They were buying it now by the shipload from the North, which had harvested a bumper crop with its new McCormick reapers: another example of what it meant to fight a race of “pasty-faced mechanics.”
Back at the outset, Southerners had predicted that the great Northwest—meaning Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, along with northern Illinois and Indiana—would be pro-Confederate because of its need for an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico. Some who lived there had thought so, too. The Detroit Free Press had declared at the time: “If troops shall be raised in the North to march against the people of the South, a fire in the rear will be opened against such troops, which will either stop their march altogether or wonderfully accelerate it.” But events had not worked out that way at all. The men of Grant’s army were mostly from that region, and they had been accelerated, not by any “fire in the rear,” but rather by an intense concern that the Union be preserved. Then too, instead of working an economic hardship, as the Southerners had predicted, the war had provided the farmers of the area with a new and profitable market for their wheat. The Northwest had not only stood by the Union; it was growing rich from having done so.
To some, this one among the many was the greatest disappointment of them all. The main hope of redress was that foreign intervention would be won by the new team of professional diplomats, Mason and Slidell, who had made a spectacular entry into the field. Yet here, too, there was disappointment. After serving the South so well from their cells in Boston Harbor, they were proving far less useful now in freedom at their posts. They stepped onto the London railway platform as if into obscurity, unwelcomed and unnoticed save by the late friendly Times, which announced their arrival with the following observations: “We sincerely hope that our countrymen will not give these fellows anything in the shape of an ovation. The civility that is due to a foe in distress is all that they can claim. The only reason for their presence in London is to draw us into their own quarrel. The British public has no prejudice in favor of slavery, which these gentlemen represent. What they and their secretaries are to do here passes our experience. They are personally nothing to us. They must not suppose, because we have gone to the verge of a great war to rescue them, that they are precious in our eyes.”
Bitter as it was for Mason to see himself and his partner referred to as unprecious “fellows,” the reception he received from the Foreign Minister dampened his spirits even more. Ushered into the presence, he was about to present his credentials when his lordship checked him: “That is unnecessary, since our relations are unofficial.” Icily polite, but disinclined to enter into any discussion of policy, the most Earl Russell ventured was the hope that Mason would find his visit “agreeable.” In parting he did not express the hope that they might meet again. This was the treatment Yancey had broken under, and the Virginian took it scarcely better, reporting: “On the whole it was manifest enough that his personal sympathies were not with us.”
Slidell, continuing his voyage across the channel, also encountered conditions which had plagued his predecessor. Unlike Mason, he had no difficulty in securing audiences. He got about as many as he wanted, and Eugénie was obviously charmed—a fact which he reported with some pride—but Napoleon would only repeat what he had said before: France could not act without England. That was the crux of the matter. The Crimean War had been a struggle between West and East, which the West had won, and now in the normal course of events, as demonstrated by history, the victors should have turned upon each other for domination of the whole. Yet it had not worked out that way. There was no such tenuous balance as had obtained at the time of the American Revolution, bringing France to the assistance of the Colonies. On the contrary, the entente remained strong, drawing its strength from the weakness of Napoleon, whose shaky finances and doubtful popularity would not allow him to risk bringing all of Europe down on his unprotected back. Slidell could only inform his government of these conditions. It began to seem that, economically and politically—so far at least as Europe was concerned—the South had chosen the wrong decade in which to make her bid for independence.
Like others who took the long view, seeing foreign intervention as the one quick indisputable solution to the Confederacy’s being outnumbered and outgunned and outmachined, Davis received this latest news from abroad with whatever grace and patience he could muster. He could wait—though by the hardest. Meantime he had other, more immediate problems here at home, within his own official family: in evidence of which, as even the short-view men could see, the chief post in his cabinet was vacant. The Secretary of State had left in a huff that very week.
At the time when he accepted the appointment, Hunter had announced that he intended to be a responsible and independent official, not just “the clerk of Mr Davis.” As Virginia’s favorite-son candidate at the Democratic convention of 1860, he had his political dignity to consider. Besides, in the early days of the secession movement, when it was thought that the Old Dominion would be among the first to go, he had been slated for the presidency of the impending Confederacy. Virginia had held back and he had missed it; but there was still the future to keep his eye on, and his dignity to be maintained. The result was a personality clash with Davis, a build-up of bad feeling which reached a climax during a general cabinet discussion of the military situation. When Hunter expressed an opinion on the subject, Davis told him: “Mr Hunter, you are Secretary of State, and when information is wished of that department it will be time for you to speak.” The Virginian’s resignation was on the presidential desk next morning.
Davis of course accepted it. He made no appointment to fill the post immediately, however. Vacant for a week at the time of the inauguration, it would remain so for three more. The man he had in mind was too deeply embroiled in other matters, filling another cabinet position, to be co
nsidered available just yet. And this was one more item which might have been included in any listing of reverses.
As Secretary of War, the rotund, smiling Judah P. Benjamin had been under fire almost since the day of his appointment: not under actual bombardment from the enemy beyond the gates, but rather from the plain citizens and congressmen within, whose ire was aroused by his summary treatment of the nation’s military heroes, coming as they did under the jurisdiction of his department. Benjamin had no such notion as Hunter’s concerning the duties of his post. As head of the War Department he considered himself quite literally the President’s secretary for military affairs, and it did not irk him at all to be tagged “the clerk of Mr Davis.” The field of arms was one of the few that had not previously engaged the interest of this myriad-minded man, whereas Davis, a West Pointer and a Mexican War hero, had been the ablest Secretary the Federal War Department ever had. Benjamin’s duty, as he saw it—and here the two men’s concepts coincided—was to execute the will and, if necessary, defend the actions of his Commander in Chief. Besides, he saw Davis’s needs, the desire for warmth behind his iciness, the ache for understanding behind his stiff austerity. Judah Benjamin was one of the few who perceived this, or at any rate one of the few—like Mrs Davis—who acted on it, and in doing so he not only made himself pleasant; in time he also made himself indispensable. That was his reward. He gained the President’s gratitude, and with it the unflinching loyalty which Davis always gave in return for loyalty received.
Whatever he lacked in the knowledge of arms as a profession, he brought to his job a considerable facility in the handling of administrative matters. Unlike Walker, who had fumed and stewed in tangles of red tape and never got from under the avalanche of army paperwork, Benjamin would clear his desk with dispatch, then sit back smiling, ready for what came next. What came next, as often as not, was an opportunity for exercising his talent in dialectics. Here his skill was admittedly superior—“uncanny,” some called it, and they spoke resentfully; for by the precision of his logic he could lead men where they would not go, making them seem clumsy in the process. In taking up his superior’s quarrels with the generals on the Manassas line—which seemed to him one of the duties of his post—he gave full play to his talents in this direction, undeterred by awe for the military mind. That was what had caused Beauregard to reach for his pen in such a frenzy, writing with ill-concealed irony of the pity he felt, “from the bottom of my heart,” for any man who could not see “the difference between patriotism, the highest civic virtue, and office-seeking, the lowest civic occupation.” It was Benjamin he meant. But in making the charge the general entered a field where his fellow Louisianian was master; and presently he went West.
Even more vulnerable in this respect, though banishment did not follow so close on the heels of contention, was Joseph E. Johnston. After Johnston’s protest at being outranked, and Davis’s quick slash in reply, Benjamin took up the cudgel for his chief. Johnston was a careless administrator, and whenever he lapsed in this regard, the Secretary took him to task with a letter that prickled his sensitive pride. Infuriated, the general would reply in kind, only to be brought up short by another missive which proved him even further in the wrong. A later observer wrote that Benjamin treated the Virginian as if he were “an adversary at the bar,” but sometimes it was worse; he dealt with him as if he were a prisoner in the dock. Johnston’s outraged protests against such treatment did him no more good than Beauregard’s had done. Once when the Creole complained to Davis that the Secretary’s tone was offensive and that he was being “put into the strait jackets of the law,” the President replied: “I do not feel competent to instruct Mr Benjamin in the matter of style. There are few whom the public would probably believe fit for the task.” As for the second objection, “You surely do not intend to inform me that your army and yourself are outside the limits of the law. It is my duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed and I cannot recognize the pretensions of anyone that their restraint is too narrow for him.”
Exalted thus at the expense of those who attempted to match wits with him, Benjamin continued to maintain order at headquarters and to ride herd on recalcitrants among the military. Then, unexpectedly, he ran full tilt into a man who had no use for dialectics, who stood instead on his own ground and gave the Secretary his first check. T. J. Jackson, called “Stonewall” since Manassas, had been promoted to major general in the fall and assigned to command a division in the Shenandoah Valley, from which strategic location he had proposed that he be reinforced for an all-out invasion of the North. Having just rejected a similar proposal from Beauregard at Centerville, the Administration would send him no reinforcements, but attached to his command the three brigades of W. W. Loring, the one professional in the quartet who had tried the patience and damaged the reputation of R. E. Lee in West Virginia. Told to accomplish what he could with this total force of about 9000, Jackson launched on New Year’s Day a movement designed to recover the counties flanking the western rim of the Valley theater.
The first phase of the campaign went as planned. Marching in bitter midwinter weather, Jackson’s men harried the B & O Railroad, captured enemy stores, and in general created havoc among the scattered Federal camps. This done, Stonewall stationed Loring’s troops at Romney, on the upper Potomac, and took the others back to Winchester, thirty-odd miles eastward, to begin the second phase. Just what that would have been remained a mystery, for Jackson was a most secretive man, agreeing absolutely with Frederick II’s remark, “If I thought my coat knew my plans I would take it off and burn it.” He did say, however, that he left the attached brigades on outpost duty because his own were better marchers and could move more swiftly toward any threatened point. Loring’s volunteers did not subscribe to this. Rather, it was their belief that Stonewall was demented. (They saw various symptoms of this—including the fact that he never took pepper in his food, on grounds that it gave him pains in his left leg.) And so were his men, for that matter, since they had a habit of cheering him on the march. Exposed as they were to the elements and the possible swoop of Federal combinations, Loring and his officers petitioned the War Department to withdraw them from their uncomfortable position. On the next to last day of January, Jackson received the following dispatch signed by Benjamin: “Our news indicates that a movement is being made to cut off General Loring’s command. Order him back to Winchester immediately.”
Jackson promptly complied with the order. Acknowledging its receipt and reporting its execution, the next day he addressed the War Department: “With such interference in my command I cannot expect to be of much service in the field,” wherefore he asked to be returned to his teaching job at V.M.I., or else “I respectfully request that the President will accept my resignation from the army.” The letter went through channels to Johnston, who forwarded it regretfully to Richmond. He too had been by-passed, and he told Benjamin: “Let me suggest that, having broken up the dispositions of the military commander, you give whatever other orders may be necessary.”
Eventually the trouble was smoothed over and Jackson’s resignation returned to him, Governor Letcher and various congressmen exerting all the pressure of their influence, but not before violent recriminations had been heaped on the head of the smiling Secretary, especially by Stonewall’s fellow officers. Tom Cobb of Georgia, a brigadier in the Virginia army, stated flatly: “A grander rascal than this Jew Benjamin does not exist in the Confederacy and I am not particular in concealing my opinion of him.” Nor were others particular in that respect, their fury being increased when Loring was promoted in mid-February and taken from under the stern control of Jackson, who had recommended that he be cashiered.
Benjamin kept smiling through it all, though by then the indestructibility of his smile was being tested even further. Previous recriminations had come mainly from army men, outraged at his interfering in tactical matters. Now he was being condemned by the public at large, and for a lack of similar interference.