Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Grant believed that Vicksburg had more than made up for the damage done to his military reputation at Shiloh, and he fully expected that he ought to be given a free hand in mounting a new campaign into the vital interior of Alabama. But Halleck had other plans, none of which included independent action for Grant. “The possession of the trans-Mississippi by the Union forces seemed to possess more importance in his mind than almost any campaign east of the Mississippi,” Grant wrote, and Grant found himself reduced to policing the Vicksburg area “against guerilla bands and small detachments of cavalry which infested the interior.”

  This, however, was not what Lincoln and Stanton had in mind for Grant. Both the president and the secretary of war had been keeping a close and inquisitive eye on Grant ever since the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, and Lincoln defended Grant after the Shiloh debacle. When Alexander McClure accused Grant of drunkenness and incompetence at Shiloh and urged Lincoln to cashier him, Lincoln “gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that I shall never forget, ‘I can’t spare this man; he fights.’” Francis Carpenter remembered one “self-constituted committee” that visited Lincoln in 1863 to warn the president against Grant’s reputed alcoholism. “By the way, gentlemen,” Lincoln remarked after hearing them out, “can either of you tell me where General Grant procures his whiskey? because, if I can find out, I will send every general in the field a barrel of it!”67

  Behind the jokes, Lincoln remained unsure about Grant, and in 1863 Stanton sent Charles Dana to keep an eye on Grant during the Vicksburg campaign and report anything untoward. As it turned out, Dana gave Grant the highest possible praise: “the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man I ever knew, with a temper that nothing could disturb, and a judgment that was judicial in its comprehensiveness and wisdom… whom no ill omens could deject and no triumph unduly exalt.” That clinched the matter for Lincoln and Stanton. In October, unwilling to face the prospect of the destruction of an entire Federal army at Chattanooga, Stanton wired Grant to come up the Mississippi to Cairo, and thence to Louisville, and meet with him personally. Their trains crossed instead in Indianapolis on October 17, with Stanton boarding Grant’s car, mistaking Grant’s medical attaché for Grant, and confidently informing the aide that he recognized him from his photographs. Once the proper identities had been sorted out, Stanton informed Grant that Lincoln had decided to consolidate all Federal military operations in the west (except for the occupation of Louisiana) and put Grant in command of them all. Next, Grant was to take himself and whatever troops he had at hand over to Chattanooga to rescue the Army of the Cumberland. Grant never hesitated. Three days later, he relieved Rosecrans of command of the Army of the Cumberland and turned it over to the hero of Chickamauga, George Thomas. Three days after that, Grant himself was in Chattanooga.68

  What Grant did to lift the siege of Chattanooga looks almost ludicrously simple from a distance, but that only underscores the real genius of his accomplishment. First, Grant reopened the Tennessee River supply line to Chattanooga on October 28. Then Grant brought up substantial reinforcements, including two army corps shipped by railroad from the Army of the Potomac under Fighting Joe Hooker in October, and two more from the Mississippi under William Tecumseh Sherman by mid-November. With these forces in hand, and with Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, Grant now turned on the complacent Bragg and prepared to drive him off his positions atop Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. The inevitable confrontation came on November 24 and 25. After a preliminary skirmish the day before, Grant sent Hooker’s men up the steep sides of Lookout Mountain (on Bragg’s left flank) and threw Sherman’s men at a railroad grade and tunnel on Bragg’s other flank. Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, angered and humiliated, was held in reserve in the center to await the results.

  As it turned out, Hooker’s men easily cleared the Confederates off Lookout Mountain, but Sherman’s attack on the tunnel stalled. To relieve pressure on Sherman, Grant ordered Thomas’s men to seize the trenches the Confederates had dug along the base of Missionary Ridge. But when the Army of the Cumberland finally got moving, it scarcely bothered to stop at the trenches but kept right on going up the 200-foot-high face of Missionary Ridge and over the top. The Confederates up on the ridge were taken completely by surprise. The colonel of the 24th Mississippi watched in slow-motion disbelief as “under a galling and destructive fire the Federal army climbed up the steep sides of the mountain. I thought they could never reach the summit, but a short time before night set in I had the bitter mortification of seeing our line, about one hundred and fifty or two hundred yards to the left of our brigade, give way and run in confusion. I heard the triumphant shout of the Federals as they placed their colors on the ridge.” The center of Bragg’s line caved in, and the rest of the Army of Tennessee stumbled back along the roads down to Georgia, with Bragg berating his men for the disaster.69

  This time, however, no amount of shifting and excuse could disguise Bragg’s incompetence. Instead of crushing Rosecrans in Chattanooga when he could have, Bragg had settled into a comfortable and indolent siege. He had quarreled with the best of his officers again, including a wrathy Nathan Bedford Forrest, who finally descended on Bragg and shook his fist in Bragg’s face:

  I have stood your meanness as long as I intend to. You have played the part of a damn scoundrel, and are a coward. … You may as well not issue any more orders to me, for I will not obey them, and I will hold you personally responsible for any further indignities you endeavor to inflict upon me. You have threatened to arrest me for not obeying your orders promptly. I dare you to do it, and I say to you that if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.70

  Then, as though the presence of Grant in Chattanooga meant nothing, Bragg had sent Longstreet’s corps off on a wild-goose chase to recapture Knoxville. In short, Bragg had done almost everything necessary to destroy the morale and order of the Army of Tennessee, and Chattanooga just about finished it. Five days after the battle, Bragg was officially relieved by President Davis and recalled to Richmond, where he would finish out the war behind a desk. Between Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, it was now beginning to be a good question in Confederate minds whether there was much of a war left to win.

  THE PROBLEM OF THE CONFEDERATE NATION

  For many Southerners, the secession of the southern states from the Union was the ultimate solution to the political and economic problems that confronted them inside the Union. On the other hand, it was also true that, like the soldiers in their armies, the Southern people were not always of one mind about which of those problems was the most important. For the Georgia secession convention, secession was an act of racial revolution, a necessary reconstruction of the republican ideology along racial lines so as to secure the existence of “a white man’s Republic” and keep African American slaves firmly in their place as slaves. Alexander H. Stephens told an enthusiastic audience in Savannah in 1861 that “our Confederacy is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man. That slavery—subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. Thus our new government is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth.” One lonely Georgia Unionist was shocked to find how strongly Southern women agreed with Stephens. “I had rather every one of my children should be laid out on the cooling board,” snorted one, “than to have Yankees get my niggers.” One Georgian, interviewed in the 1930s after he had spent a lifetime drifting from one poorly paid farm job after another, still felt that “I’d rather git killed than have these niggers freed and claimin’ they’s as good as I is.” In the delirium of the hour, recalled John Singleton Mosby, “we all forgot our Union principles in our sympathy with the pro-slavery cause, and rushed to the field of Mars.”71

  Other Southerners pulled shy of justifying secession from the Union solely for the sake of protecting slavery. Even
among the elite of the planter class, there remained an acute sense of embarrassment over slavery as a necessary but unpleasant economic necessity. Robert E. Lee claimed after the war that he had seen “the necessity at first of… a proclamation of gradual emancipation and the use of negroes as soldiers.” Instead, Southerners such as Edward A. Pollard spoke about the preservation of a Romantic agrarianism, a culture of leisured and independent agriculture that was standing deliberately aloof from the hard-handed industrial money grubbing of the North. “No one can read aright the history of America,” said Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, “unless in the light of a North and a South: two political aliens in a Union imperfectly defined as a confederation of states.” The North, envious of the South’s “higher sentimentalism, and its superior refinements of scholarship and manners,” chose to divert attention away from its real animosity toward Southern culture “in an attack upon slavery,” but this was “nothing more than a convenient ground of dispute between two parties, who represented not two moral theories, but hostile sections and opposite civilizations.” In that light, it was the North that represented revolution against the past, and secession was the South’s cultural antidote to it.72

  Then there were those for whom the basic justification for secession arose from neither slavery nor culture but from the more practical considerations of profits and politics. Southerners such as Alabama governor John Gill Shorter argued that for too long, Northern politicians and bankers had been fattening themselves off the tariffs they charged on the imports Southerners needed and the cotton Southerners consigned to their commission houses. Dissolving the Union, declared Shorter, would result in “deliverance, full and unrestricted, from all commercial dependence upon, as well as from all social and political complicity with, a people who appreciate neither the value of liberty nor the sanctity of compacts.” Once independent, the Southern states could solve the tariff problem for themselves, and swing firmly into the great network of transatlantic free-trade that was centered on the British textile economy.73 Henry L. Benning of Georgia was sure that

  the South would gain by a separation from the North, for [by] the mere act of separation all these drains would stop running, and the golden waters be retained within her own borders. And the grand option would be presented to her of adopting free trade, by which her consumers would gain eighty millions a year clear money in the consequent lower price at which they could purchase their goods or a system of protection to her own mechanics and artisans and manufactures by which they would soon come to rival the best in the world.74

  Or else, in a similar vein, Southerners simply complained that the Union they had played so large a role in creating in the eighteenth century was no longer listening to their concerns. Northerners “know that the South is the main prop and support of the Federal system,” declared the New Orleans Daily Crescent in January 1861. “They know that it is Southern productions that constitute the surplus wealth of the nation, and enables us to import so largely from other countries.” Knowing that, “they know that they can plunder and pillage the South, as long as they are in the same Union with us, by other means, such as fishing bounties, navigation laws, robberies of the public ands, and every other possible mode of injustice and peculation.” On those terms, it was high time for the Southern states to reclaim their individual sovereignty as states, assert the supremacy of “states’ rights,” and resume an independent status in which they could be sure of putting their own affairs first.75

  But the southern states were not permitted the luxury of a peaceful and uncontested separation from the Union. So Southerners found themselves compelled to do two things that, as it turned out, flew straight in the face of the principles they held so dear. First, in the interests of survival, the Southern states were forced to cooperate with each other; so they began their war for state sovereignty by immediately subordinating themselves to a confederation arrangement and the authority of a central government in Richmond. Second, they were forced to wage a major war of national defense, which would strain their resources to the breaking point in simple economic terms, but which would also strain their own self-perception, as more and more nonslaveholding whites balked at the sacrifices they increasingly had to make to defend the planter elite, and as Southerners who valued independence even more than slavery began tinkering with the slave system so that the Confederate nation might survive. At first, neither of these undertakings appeared difficult. The convention that assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861 to form a Confederate government for the first wave of seceding states worked hard to avoid any suggestion of ultra-Jeffersonian radicalism and seemed to give remarkably small place to the states’-rights fire-eaters. The convention, in fact, turned itself into the Confederacy’s first Provisional Congress, and the constitution that the Provisional Congress adopted for the Confederacy was a close replica of the U.S. Constitution. Just like the old Constitution, it provided for a president, a bicameral Congress, and an independent judiciary. Though the Confederate constitution explicitly recognized the principle of state sovereignty in its preamble, stressing that each state was “acting in its sovereign and independent character,” its announced intention was to form a “permanent federal government.” The states were given authority to initiate constitutional conventions (with consent from only two-thirds of the states needed to ratify amendments) and to remove Confederate officials operating within their boundaries, but no mention about a right to secession or to nullification was added. The principle of judicial review was restricted to specific constitutional questions (and not “all cases in Law and Equity,” as in the U.S. Constitution), and the Confederate Congress was forbidden to “appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce.” Yet, at the same time, the Confederate president was granted powers that even the federal president lacked, such as a line-item veto over appropriations, a six-year term of office, and the provision for cabinet members to be allowed a voice on the floor of the Confederate Congress. Even more to the point, the decision to elect Jefferson Davis as provisional president and Alexander H. Stephens as provisional vice president neatly skipped over the slavery and state-sovereignty ideologues.76

  The principal challenge to making this constitution operate was that it would have to do so under the immediate pressure of outside attack, although even on that point, the Confederacy appeared to have a major advantage in the person of Jefferson Davis, its president.

  Despite Davis’s reputation as the ideological heir apparent of John Calhoun, Davis’s political outlook on banking, tariffs, and internal improvements had sometimes been as close to Whiggery as a Democrat’s could be. From the very beginning (and to the disgust of the states’ rights fire-eaters), Davis warned the Southern people to stop thinking of themselves as citizens of states and start seeing themselves as the members of a new political nation whose overall survival was of greater importance than the survival of any of the separate parts—slavery, culture, states’ rights—which made it up. “To increase the power, develop the resources, and promote the happiness of the Confederacy, it is requisite that there should be so much of homogeneity that the welfare of every portion shall be the aim of the whole,” Davis warned. “Our safety—our very existence—depends on the complete blending of the military strength of all the States into one united body, to be used anywhere and everywhere as the exigencies of the contest may require for the good of the whole.”77 That led Davis to stretch his war powers as president of the Confederacy in precisely the same ways Lincoln stretched his: Davis acted to extend Confederate control over former U.S. arsenals and navy yards within the Confederate states, to justify Confederate military control over Southern rail lines, and to secure presidential oversight of the Confederate army’s officer selection process, and all before the end of 1862.

  Davis’s political flexibilities surprised many observers even within his administration, since in many ways Davis was not a particularly charming or attractive personali
ty. Erect in his bearing, rigid in his conception of his own correctness, thin to the point of emaciation, and virtually blind in one eye, Davis was crippled throughout the war by bouts of illness that would have killed most people and by levels of political catcalling that would have killed most politicians. The raw willpower that kept him at the helm of state through all these storms was his greatest asset, but it also made him impatient, unforgiving of failure, and excessively sensitive to criticism. Still, no portrait of the Confederate president can ignore his political canniness, his ability to draw all but his most violent critics back into cooperation, and his sterling dedication to the idea of a Confederate nation. “There may have been among them some equal to or even superior to President Davis in some one department or study or branch of knowledge,” wrote John H. Reagan, the Confederate postmaster general, “but taking into view the combined elements of character and ability I regard him as the ablest man I have known. … In all my association with him, I found him thoughtful, prudent, and wise.” Like Lincoln, Davis ruthlessly overworked himself and failed to delegate responsibilities; like Lincoln, he turned most of his attention to managing the war effort rather than domestic politics; like Lincoln, he was notoriously inclined to issue pardons to condemned soldiers; and like Lincoln, he tasted tragedy in his presidency in the death of a young son.78