Dixie Betrayed

by David J. Eicher

  Rhett—who in 1838 had pretentiously changed his name from Robert Barnwell Smith in order to add distinction—had taken on a dual role in the conflict. In addition to leading the South Carolina radicals, he had bought the Charleston Mercury, installing his son and namesake as editor. As the secession crisis approached, Rhett had used the Senate dais to lash out at Northerners who were destroying the Southern lifestyle and used the paper back home to stir up support for leaving the old Union.

  Rhett had fiery, ghostly eyes, a prominent nose, and was balding, with wisps of hair on the sides and top of his head. He was clean shaven and had a stark, savage stare that penetrated, leaving the appearance of an evangelical preacher. Rhett had used his amazing powers of rhetoric to play an important role at the South Carolina convention in 1860, earning him the name “father of secession.” He argued strongly that slavery could never survive the presidency of Lincoln. But though he urged an independent South, Rhett feared that the new Confederacy would fall victim to its politicians and would never prosper as he imagined it could. He had no idea how right he would turn out to be.

  Rhett had traveled to Montgomery as head of the South Carolina delegation. He had recently gone through a difficult personal period, one in which his confidence and ego had received a series of blows. One of these was the death of his granddaughter Ann “Nannie” Rhett from scarlet fever. 19 “Nannies [sic] departure has broken one more link which bound me to life,” he wrote. “My life appears to me to be as worthless as any body. . . . Let us try to bow with and conform to his will—and at the foot of the cross bury all our rebellion and wrong. Pray for me.” 20

  To make matters worse, Rhett’s daughter Katherine, Nannie’s mother, died shortly afterward. It was perhaps inevitable that his heartbroken anger would search for an immediate target, and as the Montgomery landscape thawed and war became closer, Rhett turned his attention to the new Confederate president. Charged with a bitter spirit and a devout certainty in the absolute correctness of everything he felt, Rhett unloaded on Jefferson Davis in every way he could.

  Another caustic member of the Georgia delegation in Congress was Robert Augustus Toombs. His coal black, puffy eyes and robust physical appearance made him a man’s man and a magnetic personality for women. He was, physically, the anti-Stephens. He stood six feet tall, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and had long, wavy hair and a bit of a beard. A vehement and overpowering speaker, Toombs was prone to sarcasm and overstatement. He drank, smoked, gambled, and mastered an obscene vocabulary that ranked among the most spectacular and horrifying of his time. From his earliest days he was arrogant, combative, and rebellious toward authority.

  Thanks to this combination of traits, Toombs sank to the bottom of his law class at the University of Virginia at age nineteen. But he eventually prospered despite his limitations—and sometimes because of them. Born in 1810 in Wilkes County, Georgia, Toombs was fifty when the war started. He was a large man who lived large. Toombs resided in a Greek Revival mansion in the town of Washington, Georgia—the result of his success as a lawyer whose courtroom speeches often were stunning to both juries and opponents. He had served as a captain in the Georgia volunteers battling Indians in the 1830s and was a veteran of the Georgia House of Representatives, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, where he spent most of the 1850s and the days immediately before Georgia’s secession.

  Toombs was an ardent state rightist, a Southern radical who had been a Whig but converted in the mid-1850s to the Democratic Party. When Lincoln was elected and secession winds blew, Toombs had balked at first, but then his hotheaded rhetoric returned, and he had become an ardent supporter of the revolution. He had been considered by many Southerners a contender for the presidency of the Confederacy and may have succeeded at snatching the nomination, but his excessive drinking sealed his fate. “He was tight every day at dinner,” wrote Aleck Stephens.

  Toombs had strongly disliked losing the presidential bid to Jefferson Davis, and an afterglow of bitterness was left in the fiery Georgian’s eyes. As a member of the Provisional Congress, his surly disposition would not be lost on others.

  Loyalists to Jefferson Davis made special note of two others in town. William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, who had introduced Davis when the man met his hour, was thought by many to be the leading fire-eater of his time. A quick-tempered, pasty-faced man with hair that curled behind his ears, a prominent nose, and beady eyes, Yancey had killed his wife’s uncle in a fight in 1838. Furiously in support of Southern independence, he was a native Georgian whose life had taken him to Massachusetts under the wing of an abolitionist stepfather. Yancey’s relationship with his stepfather was far from close, and the orator savagely attacked abolitionists in every possible public speech.

  Yancey’s subsequent careers in politics and as a newspaperman led him to prominence. After stints in the Alabama state legislature and the U.S. Congress, he gained notoriety by fighting a duel with Congressman Thomas L. Clingman, a future Confederate general. (The duel ended in a harmless exchange of pistol shots.) He also spoke around the country. He repeatedly asked groups around the South to “fire the Southern heart” against the hated Yankees. Considered too radical to be a delegate to the Montgomery convention—the majority of delegates wanted to project an air of moderation—Yancey instead served as a political envoy for Davis as the weeks passed.

  A legitimate member of the Montgomery convention and subsequently of Congress, South Carolina politician Lawrence M. Keitt had been another, with Rhett, in the forefront calling for South Carolina’s secession. Keitt was so outspoken about state rights and hating Yankees that he had joined his friend and fellow South Carolinian Preston Brooks in the U.S. Senate when Brooks attacked abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane in the U.S. Capitol Building in 1856. A gruff, burly man, with intense eyes, willowy hair, and a thick beard, Keitt may have developed some of his intense hatred for Unionists because his brother had been killed by slaves in Florida. Indeed, Keitt—like Aleck Stephens—remarked plainly about how slavery was indeed the cause of the whole war. “It is the great central point from which we are now proceeding,” he flatly said. 21

  Keitt, like Rhett, had made a career out of being a critic of the government, and when he found himself in session in Montgomery under a new government, he could hardly contain himself—it was simply a way of life; his seething antigovernment feelings couldn’t screech to a halt, even in Montgomery. They would have to be redirected—if not at Lincoln, then perhaps toward Davis. Rhett and Keitt, after all, each entertained notions of leading the Confederacy, as did many who flocked to Montgomery. That sense of loss coupled with personal unhappiness for Keitt, Rhett, and others was the formula for trouble ahead. Lost dreams change people. And they change revolutions, too.

  The stage had been set for disaster.

  Chapter 3

  Portrait of a President

  AS he sat in his suite at the Exchange Hotel, poring over letters coming in from all over the world, Jefferson Davis’s dreams were rapidly coming true. He was now the leader of the newest nation on Earth. He had a large circle of advisers around him. He had a busy Confederate Congress meeting down the street to help him push through legislation that would forge a new government. And he had the will of the South to raise armies against the tyrannical Lincoln administration. What more could the Confederate president want?

  When journalist William Howard Russell passed through Montgomery, he sought out Davis and met him, describing his impressions of the Confederate leader in his journal. Russell found Davis a “slight, light figure,” presented “erect and straight,” but also “anxious,” with a “very haggard, careworn, and pain-drawn look, though no trace of anything but the utmost confidence and the greatest decision could be detected in conversation.” 1

  Amid the tornado of creating a government, the new president had his comforts. He was both relieved and distracted by the arrival of his family from Mississippi. In March Varina Ho
well Davis, now the president’s wife of sixteen years, arrived at the Exchange Hotel along with their children, the mainstay and focus of Davis’s life. The children were Margaret Howell (“Maggie”), age six; Jefferson Davis Jr., age four; and Joseph E. Davis, age two. A fourth child, Samuel E. Davis, had died in 1854, at age two. Two more children would arrive during the war and be christened “babies of the Confederacy.”

  The Davises all lived in the Exchange Hotel for the next few weeks. Then, in mid-April, they moved to a house two blocks away from their first Montgomery address. Celebrated as the “First White House of the Confederacy,” this two-story clapboard, Federal-style structure, the Edmund S. Harrison House, was leased by the Confederate Congress for use as an Executive Mansion. Varina would quickly put her stamp on the place, decorating it and arranging things to be just the way she wanted them, suitable for the household of the leader of a nation.

  In the weeks that followed the Confederacy’s birth, Davis did his best to incite a national feeling of unity from the people of the South, as well as to justify the South’s political stand. In Montgomery in late April, he told the Congress:

  All these carefully worded clauses proved unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern States of a political school which has persistently claimed that the government thus formed was not a compact between States, but was in effect a national government, set up above and over the States.

  An organization created by the States to secure the blessings of liberty and independence against foreign aggression has been gradually perverted into a machine for their control in their domestic affairs.

  After relating how slavery did not work economically in the North, Davis wrote that African slaves had “augmented from 600,000” at the constitutional compact to “upward of 4,000,000.” “In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers,” he claimed, “and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction.”

  “Under the supervision of a superior race,” the Confederate leader asserted, “their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people.” 2 As far as President Davis was concerned, slavery worked well for all parties involved.

  UNLIKE the purely festive mood of Montgomery, tension plagued the Yankee capital as Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln stood before the Capitol and was inaugurated. Sharpshooters roamed the rooftops of buildings on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s inauguration drew throngs. Some twenty-five thousand people came to the nation’s capital to see what would happen on this most uncertain of days. Early in the day the early March weather was cool but pleasant; later it turned “bleak and chilly.” 3 Such was the national forecast, too: both sections of the country knew they were headed for war, but few knew how fast it might come.

  Only the day before Lincoln’s inauguration, Bvt. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, still general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, had written a note to New York politician William H. Seward, declaring that one of the options available to Lincoln was simply, “Say to the seceded States, Wayward Sisters, depart in peace!” 4 But Lincoln was unlikely to entertain such an idea. He seemed firmly to believe the motto of the United States, e pluribus unum —“one out of many”— embodied all that America stood for. As Lincoln rode from the Executive Mansion to the Capitol beside James Buchanan, a military guard stretched throughout the town, boarding and blocking entrance areas, nervously watching windows along the route of travel. It was hardly a confidence builder. 5

  “It is safe to assert that no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination,” bellowed Lincoln, when he arose to deliver his inaugural address. After a tedious exploration of the standoff of North versus South, he spoke to the secessionists: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” 6

  But the angels would offer no solutions on that day. Rather, the Yankees faced a growing set of problems, and one in particular that seemed promising to the South was a possible power struggle between Lincoln and Seward. An experienced New York politician who had been chosen by Lincoln as secretary of state, the wily Seward exceeded his authority right away under the guise of helping the lesser Lincoln with valuable advice and counsel. In a memo titled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration,” Seward suggested Lincoln alter the platform of opposition to the Confederacy, changing the prime question from the allowance of slavery to one of Union or disunion. He also asked if he could effectively act as a prime minister in approaching the Confederacy and carrying out Lincoln’s orders. This might have opened up an avenue of negotiation with the South, but it would also have granted Seward an inordinate amount of power. Lincoln would have no part of it. He, not Seward, would direct the nation, the president informed his startled secretary of state.

  As Lincoln and Seward parried, the Virginia State Convention met in Richmond. If Virginia would enter the Confederacy, all knew it would become the largest and most important state in the compact because of its location. In Montgomery, as everywhere else in the South, hopes were high. As they waited for word from Richmond, Varina Davis set about to create a new social Confederacy. She held a levee at the Exchange Hotel and established a regular schedule of receptions that would be attended by the social elite of Montgomery as well as Confederate officials and their wives. Bonding among the new South came easily, and Jefferson Davis himself found time to attend most of the parties. “Playing Mrs. President of this small Confederacy [was] slow work after leaving Washington,” Varina’s friend and confidant Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote of the First Lady’s attitude toward her new role. 7 (Chesnut, wife of South Carolina congressman James Chesnut Jr., was a native Charlestonian who started keeping what would become the most celebrated diary of the Confederacy.)

  It was inevitable that discussions at these social gatherings eventually became political. To almost everyone the reason for war seemed to come down to “preserving our way of life.” But state rights philosophy often seemed a veneer that covered local conceptions of what “our way of life” actually meant. Money, politics, and control seethed underneath, and with the loss of power in Washington and the potential loss of billions in property (slaves) looming overhead, preserving the way of life meant stirring the collective patriotism of the New South—as well as creating fissures within.

  Davis knew his whole political existence and that of his colleagues had been built around state rights as supreme. To have a chance at winning the new war, however, he would need sweeping, central powers—both organizationally and militarily. State rights had allowed sovereign states to secede and determine their own destiny without consultation with other states. But now the Confederate States of America needed to act as one.

  Davis felt that in order to have any chance at all, he needed to implement a five-part strategy. First, he would need to build an integrated and well-trained army for the defense of the Confederacy rather than depending on state militias controlled by the governors. The state forces had little uniformity and coordination from state to state, and they depended on local, limited resources in terms of leadership, manpower, money, arms, supplies, subsistence, manufacturing, and transportation, all of which probably could have been better procured and allocated on a national level.

  Second, Davis would need to make the most of international politics. A national, Confederate effort would stand a much better chance of obtaining recognition from Britain or France than could the accomplishments of individual states. Davis felt that a comprehen
sive national plan for the export of cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar could build credit and trade so as to produce economic stability and recognition.

  Third, a national effort would be required to build a navy in order to break the blockade of Southern seaports, open the rivers to commerce, and disrupt Yankee shipping on the high seas.

  Fourth, Davis realized that in order to win any war against Lincoln, the South would need to organize massive raids that would threaten Union strongholds such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Harrisburg. Such offensive moves would cause the Yankees to tire of their “aggressive” warfare, he thought, and yearn for an armistice. It would be far more practical to wage war against the United States from Virginia than from Alabama. But on April 4, a Thursday, the convention rejected—by a vote of eighty-nine to forty-five—a motion to pass an ordinance of secession.

  Fifth, Davis desperately needed to believe that the North was only marginally interested in the slavery issue. Although the vast majority of Yankees certainly didn’t go to war to end slavery, and many were as racist as the most racist Southerners, Davis risked the question. He hoped that over time most Northerners would decide a war over slaves was not worth the effort.

  Whatever the Yankees thought, there was no turning back now. On Saturday, April 6, Lincoln sent a message to South Carolina’s governor, Francis Pickens, informing him that the Federal fort in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter, would be resupplied with provisions, but no arms. Lincoln also stated that if there was no resistance from the South Carolina militia, the Yankees would not reinforce the fort with more troops or weaponry. It was an aggressive move, but after vigorous debate, the infant Confederate government ordered Brig. Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard to stop any Yankee supply mission, even if it meant firing on the fort. Influenced by the Confederate Congress, Jefferson Davis had appointed Beauregard, the first brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, to supervise the military district around Charleston. One of the most colorful military men of the day, Beauregard was short and slight, bristled with energy, and was expertly trained in a wide variety of subjects. Not only was Beauregard a superb engineer, but he had also been trained in artillery under none other than Robert Anderson, the current commander of Sumter. Beauregard was so liked within the War Department that he had been appointed superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in January 1861, an assignment he was relieved of a few days later when his Southern sympathies became starkly clear. With his widespread experience and general popularity—with nearly everyone except Davis—Beauregard was destined to become the first great Southern hero of the conflict.