Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  In the North, where nearly all state governors were Republicans, the ties of party bound them to the war effort. In the South the obstructionist activities of several governors hindered the centralized war effort because the centrifugal tendencies of state's rights were not restrained by the centripetal force of party. The Confederate Constitution limited the president to a single six-year term, so Davis had no reason to create a party organization for re-election. Such government policies as conscription, impressment, the tax in kind, and management of finances were the main issues in the congressional elections of 1863. Opposition candidates ran on an individual rather than a party basis, and the government could not muster political artillery to shoot at all these scattered targets.3

  2. Journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865 (Washington, 1904–05), I, 846.

  3. For many of the ideas in these two paragraphs I am indebted to Eric L. McKitrick's stimulating essay, "Party Politics and the Union and Confederate War Efforts," in William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, The American Party Systems (New York, 1967), 117–51.

  Historians have identified "proto-parties" emerging in the Confederacy by 1863. Former Whigs were most prominent in the crystallizing opposition, but the lack of a definite pattern was illustrated by the prominence of Louis Wigfall and the private influence of General Joseph E. Johnston among Davis's adversaries. A fire-eating Democrat who had served briefly under Johnston as a general in Virginia before being elected by Texas to the Senate in 1862, Wigfall became a bitter critic of Davis's "pigheadiness and perverseness" in 1863. While Davis blamed Johnston for the loss of Vicksburg, Johnston and Wigfall blamed Davis for the ambiguous command structure in the West that had led to disaster. Although Johnston did not speak out publicly, his letters to friends made no secret of his opinions. By the fall of 1863 Johnston had become, in the words of another Confederate general, a "shield" behind which critics of the administration "gathered themselves . . . and shot arrows at President Davis."4

  Worsening inflation and shortages heaped fuel on the fires of political opposition. In the four months after Gettysburg, prices jumped nearly 70 percent. "Yesterday flour sold at auction at $100 per barrel; to-day it sells for $120," wrote a resident of Richmond in November. "A genteel suit of clothes cannot be had now for less than $700. . . . We are a shabby-looking people now—gaunt, and many in rags. . . . Every night robberies of poultry, salt meats, and even of cows and hogs are occurring. . . . There must be an explosion of some sort soon." The head of the War Department's administrative bureau, a loyal Davis man, confessed in November that "the irretrievable bankruptcy of the national finances, the tenacity with which the President holds to men in whom the country has lost all confidence, the scarcity of means of support . . . are producing deep disgust. . . . I have never actually despaired of the cause, priceless, holy as it is, but my faith . . . is yielding to a sense of hopelessness."5

  In this atmosphere the congressional elections took place. They produced an increase of openly anti-administration representatives from 26 to 41 (of 106). Twelve of the twenty-six senators in the next Congress were identified with the opposition. The proportion of former Whigs

  4. Richard M. McMurry, " 'The Enemy at Richmond': Joseph E. Johnston and the Confederate Government," CWH, 27(1981), 15–16.

  5. Jones, War Clerk's Diary (Miers), 302, 303, 304, 309; Edward Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean (New York, 1957). 119.

  and conditional unionists in Congress grew from one-third to half. Erstwhile Whigs won several governorships in 1863, including those of Alabama and Mississippi for the first time ever. Although the administration did preserve a narrow majority in Congress, this margin rested on an ironic anomaly. Support for the Davis government was strongest among congressmen from areas under Union occupation: Kentucky, Missouri (both considered part of the Confederacy and represented in its Congress), Tennessee, and substantial portions of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia. Regular elections were impossible in these areas, of course, so the incumbents merely continued themselves in office or were "elected" by a handful of refugees from their districts. These irredentist congressmen had the strongest of motives for supporting "war to the last ditch." They constituted the closest thing to an administration party that existed in the Confederacy. They provided the votes for higher taxes that would not be levied on their constituents and for tougher conscription laws that would take no men from their districts. The areas of the South still under Confederate control, by contrast, sent an anti-administration majority to Congress. From the two largest such constituencies, North Carolina and Georgia, sixteen of the nineteen new congressmen opposed the government.6

  As in the North, the opposition took two forms. Most anti-administration southerners backed the government's war aims but dissented from some of the total-war measures intended to achieve those aims. Other opponents, however, branded the war a failure and demanded peace through negotiations even if this risked the country's war aims. In the North such men were called copperheads; in the South they were known as reconstructionists or tories. In both North and South the peace faction grew stronger when the war went badly.

  The pro-war but anti-administration faction was most outspoken in Georgia. There the triumvirate of Vice-President Alexander Stephens, ex-General Robert Toombs, and Governor Joseph Brown turned their opposition into a personal vendetta against Davis. Stephens likened the president to "my poor old blind and deaf dog." Resentful of the "West Point clique" that had blocked his rise to military glory, Toombs in 1863 lashed out at Davis as a "false and hypocritical . . . wretch" who

  6. Wilfred B. Yearns, The Confederate Congress (Athens, Ga., 1960), 49–59; Beringer, "The Unconscious 'Spirit of Party' in the Confederate Congress," loc. cit., 314–23; Alexander, "Persistent Whiggery in the Confederate South," loc. cit., 308–9; Alexander and Beringer, Anatomy of the Confederate Congress, passim.

  had "neither the ability nor the honesty to manage the revolution." The government's financial policy, said Toombs, was "pernicious," "ruinous," "insupportable"; the impressment of farm products was "force and fraud"; conscription had "outraged justice and the constitution." "The road to liberty for the white man does not lie through slavery," thundered Toombs in November 1863. "Mr. Davis's present policy will overthrow the revolution in six months." Governor Brown did more than speak against the draft. He appointed several thousand new constables, militia officers, justices of the peace, coroners, and county surveyors to exempt them from conscription.7

  A Georgia crisis erupted in February 1864 when the lame-duck session of the old Confederate Congress authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus to suppress disloyalty and enforce the draft.8 Both of Georgia's senators voted against the bill. Vice-President Stephens condemned it as a "blow at the very 'vitals of liberty' " by a president "aiming at absolute power. . . . Far better that our country should be overrun by the enemy, our cities sacked and burned, and our land laid desolate, than that the people should thus suffer the citadel of their liberties to be entered and taken by professed friends." Stephens also helped write an address by Brown to the legislature denouncing the law as a step toward "military despotism." "What will we have gained when we have achieved our independence of the Northern States," asked Brown rhetorically, "if in our efforts to do so, we have . . . lost Constitutional Liberty at home?" The legislature passed resolutions written by Stephens' brother condemning suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as unconstitutional.9

  From Richmond's viewpoint all this was bad enough, but worse was a proposal by Brown for peace negotiations. Alexander Stephens seemed

  7. Stephens to Herschel V. Johnson, April 8, 1864, in O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 278–80; Ulrich B. Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb (Washington, 1913), 608, 611, 619, 623, 627, 628, 629; Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924),
256–70.

  8. A few judges in North Carolina, Georgia, and elsewhere had been granting writs to petitioners to restrain conscription officers from enrolling these petitioners in the army.

  9. James Z. Rabun, "Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis," AHR, 58 (1953), 308; Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy, 270–71; John B. Robbins, "The Confederacy and the Writ of Habeas Corpus," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 55 (1971), 93–94.

  to support this suggestion in a three-hour speech to the legislature, and his brother introduced additional resolutions urging the people "through their state organizations and popular assemblies" to bring pressure on the government to end the war. This had an ominous ring. It smacked of treason. In reality, Brown and Stephens wanted to begin negotiations after the next Confederate victory, with independence as a precondition of peace. No one, Stephens included, expected Lincoln to negotiate on such conditions. The resolutions were intended to divide northern opinion and strengthen the Peace Democrats for the 1864 election by giving the impression of a southern willingness to negotiate. But this subtlety escaped most southerners, who regarded Brown and Stephens as reconstructionists advocating peace at any price. Instead of dividing and conquering the North, their peace gambit seemed likely to play into the hands of Yankees hoping to divide and conquer the South.

  Most of the southern press, even in Georgia, reprimanded the vice president. Georgia regiments at the front passed resolutions condemning Brown and the legislature. Georgia's senators privately slapped Ste-phens's wrist. "You have allowed your antipathy to Davis to mislead your judgment," Senator Herschel Johnson told the vice president. "You are wrong in view of your official position; you are wrong because the whole movement originated in a mad purpose to make war on Davis & Congress;—You are wrong because the movement is joyous to the enemy, and they are already using it in their press." The legislature hastily passed a resolution pledging Georgia's continuing support for the war.10

  While the dissidents in Georgia hoped for peace through victory, in North Carolina a part of the opposition seemed to want peace through reconstruction. The last state to secede, North Carolina's commitment to the Confederacy had remained shaky despite her contribution of more soldiers than any other state save Virginia. North Carolina also contributed more deserters than any other state.11 The western part of the

  10. Rabun, "Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis," loc. cit., 311. See also John R. Brumgardt, "The Confederate Career of Alexander H. Stephens: The Case Reopened," CWH, 27 (1981), 64–81; and Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy, 272–73.

  11. Most studies of this question list 23,000 deserters from North Carolina. This was more than a fifth of all Confederate deserters and nearly twice as many as from any other state. But working from samples of North Carolina regimental rosters, Richard Reid concluded that the total number of deserters from the state should be reduced to about 14,000. While still higher than any other state, this total would give North Carolina a desertion rate not appreciably greater than the average for all Confederate states. Reid, "A Test Case of the 'Crying Evil': Desertion among North Carolina Troops during the Civil War," North Carolina Historical Review, 58 (1981), 234–62. But Reid's data are based primarily on the regiments enlisted during the first year of the war, and the records for many of these regiments are complete only through late 1864. Since desertion from later-organized regiments tended to be higher than from those formed early in the war, and since desertions increased disastrously in the last months of the conflict when it became clear that the war was lost, Reid's estimate of 14,000 deserters appears to be too low.

  state resembled east Tennessee and West Virginia in socio-economic structure and unionist leanings. The inaccessibility of this region to northern armies, however, inhibited the development there of a significant unionist political movement before 1863. In that year the Order of the Heroes of America, a secret peace society, attained a large following in piedmont and upcountry North Carolina as war weariness and defeatism grew after Gettysburg. Thousands of deserters returned to the state, where in alliance with "tories" and draft-dodgers they gained virtual control of whole counties.12

  North Carolina's most powerful political leaders were Zebulon B. Vance and William W. Holden. An antebellum Whig and in 1861 a conditional unionist, Vance commanded a regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia before winning the governorship in 1862. Though he feuded with Davis over matters of state versus Confederate authority, Vance backed the war effort and continued to "fight the Yankees and fuss with the Confederacy" until the end.13 Holden was of another stripe. Beginning his career as a Whig, he became a Democratic secessionist in the 1850s but broke with the party and resisted secession until the last moment in 1861. As editor of the Raleigh North Carolina Standard he championed civil liberties and attacked administration policies during the war. Emphasizing the rich man's war/poor man's fight theme, Holden won a large following among yeoman farmers and workingmen. His "Conservative party," composed mainly of old Whigs and conditional unionists, had supported Vance for governor on a platform of state sovereignty within the Confederacy. By the summer of 1863, however, Holden became convinced that the South could not win the war

  12. Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1934), 107–35; William T. Auman and David D. Scarboro, "The Heroes of America in Civil War North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 58 (1981), 327–63; William T. Auman, "Neighbor against Neighbor: The Inner Civil War in the Randolph County Area of Confederate North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 61 (1984), 59–92.

  13. John G. Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1963), 242.

  and that conscription, impressment, "military despotism," and economic ruin represented a greater threat to North Carolinians than reunion with the United States.

  Aided by the Heroes of America, Holden and his associates organized more than a hundred antiwar meetings which adopted resolutions lifted from Standard editorials urging negotiations for an "honorable peace." What this meant was anybody's guess; to committed Confederates it looked like treason. One observer unsympathetic to Holden reported in August 1863 that at several peace meetings in the western part of the state "the most treasonable language was uttered, and Union flags raised." In September 1863 a War Department official noted that Holden's followers "are throwing off all disguises and have begun to hold 'Union' meetings in some of the western counties. . . . Reconstruction is openly advocated."14 A brigade in Longstreet's corps en route to Bragg's army stopped in Raleigh on September 9 and plundered Holden's newspaper office, whereupon a mob of Holden's supporters next day demolished the office of Raleigh's pro-administration newspaper.

  Against this background at least five and perhaps eight of the congressmen elected from North Carolina in 1863 were "reported to be in favor of peace." The meaning of this remained unclear, but after the elections Holden began to call for North Carolina to invoke its sovereignty and open separate negotiations with the North. He insisted that such a course would produce Confederate independence, but few took that seriously. As one of Holden's backers put it in a letter to Governor Vance, "we want this war stopped, we will take peace on any terms that are honorable. We would prefer our independence, if that were possible, but let us prefer reconstruction infinitely to subjugation."15

  Vance had earlier vouched for Holden's loyalty, but by the end of 1863 he became convinced that the editor wanted to take North Carolina out of the Confederacy. This he could not tolerate. "I will see the Conservative party blown into a thousand atoms and Holden and his understrappers in hell," exclaimed the governor, "before I will consent to a course which I think would bring dishonor and ruin upon both state and Confederacy." Yet Vance could not move precipitately, for he

  14. J. C. McRae to Peter Mallett, Aug. 21, 1863, in O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 29, pt. 2, p. 660; Younger, ed., Inside the Confederate Government, 103–4.

  15. Tatum, Disloyalty, 125 and n.; "An Old Friend"
to Vance, Jan. 2, 1864, in W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War Documentary (Chapel Hill, 1980), 296.

  believed that a majority of North Carolinians supported Holden. So the governor sought Jefferson Davis's help to outflank the peace movement. In a letter to the president on December 30, Vance urged "some effort at negotiation with the enemy" to allay "the sources of discontent in North Carolina." Of course, added Vance hastily, the South could negotiate only on the basis of independence. If these "fair terms are rejected," as he expected them to be, "it will tend greatly to strengthen and intensify the war feeling, and will rally all classes to more cordial support of the government."16

  The Machiavellian subtlety of Vance's suggestion eluded Davis.17 What possible good could an offer of peace achieve? he replied. It would merely be treated as a confession of weakness. "That despot" Lincoln had already made clear that the South could have peace only by "emancipating all our slaves, swearing allegiance and obedience to him and his proclamations, and becoming in point of fact the slaves of our own negroes." The true path to peace, Davis lectured Vance, was to continue the war "until the enemy is beaten out of his vain confidence in our subjugation." North Carolina must do her part in this struggle; instead of dallying with traitors, Vance must "abandon a policy of conciliation and set them at defiance."18