Dixie Betrayed

by David J. Eicher

  One clerk in the War Department was John B. Jones, age fifty-one, a Baltimore writer whose Wild Western Scenes had sold 100,000 copies in 1841. The father of a large family, he made the journey southward seeking employment in the War Department after publishing the Southern Monitor in Philadelphia, a weekly that espoused Southern rights. Jones met President Davis on May 17 in Montgomery and described him as being “overwhelmed with papers.” After introducing himself, Jones scrutinized the president during their brief interview. Davis was “tall, nearly six feet; his frame is very slight and seemingly frail; but when he throws back his shoulders he is as straight as an Indian chief. The features of his face are distinctly marked with character,” Jones continued, “and no one gazing at his profile would doubt for a moment that he beheld more than an ordinary man.” 3

  Two days later Jones visited Secretary Walker, who told the visitor he needed significant help with his correspondence. Walker was “some forty-seven or forty-eight years of age,” he penned,

  tall, thin, and a little bent; not by age, but by study and bad health. He was a successful lawyer, and never having been in governmental employment, is fast working himself down. He has not yet learned how to avoid unnecessary labor; being a man of the finest sensibilities, and exacting with the utmost nicety all due deference to the dignity of his official position. . . . The only hope of his continuance in office is unconditional submission to the president, who, being once Secretary of War of the United States, is familiar with all the wheels of the department.

  Jones offered to accept a clerkship for relatively scant pay, telling Walker he desired “employment and facilities to preserve interesting facts for publication.” 4

  The Confederate Quartermaster-General’s Department, charged with providing matériel of war to the troops, got off to a rocky start thanks to its leader, Abraham Charles Myers. Age fifty and a native of Charleston, South Carolina—a descendant of the city’s first rabbi—Myers was a particularly poor choice for this position. A West Point graduate, Myers had served as a quartermaster on frontier duty and in the Mexican War, after which he moved to New Orleans and served as a quartermaster there. Resigning his old post at the outset of hostilities, Myers quickly proved unable to cope with the demands of supplying Confederate troops—his miscalculations about supplying uniforms and nonordnance equipment upset numerous officers throughout the army. He fell out of favor with the president almost immediately. Nonetheless, he had many influential friends. He was also the son-in-law of David E. Twiggs, the U.S. brevet major general who had abandoned the Military Department of Texas to Confederate authorities. Myers initially bolstered the nightlife among Confederates, as his wife, Marian, considered herself a social superior to Varina Davis and set out to prove it via parties and receptions.

  The Subsistence Department was no better off. Assigned the difficult task of finding food for the swelling army, Lucius Bellinger Northrop, its chief, was “one of the most disliked of all Confederate officials,” as a modern historian put it. Fifty years old and a native Charlestonian, Northrop was a West Pointer who went on a campaign against Indians, during which, in 1839, he had accidentally shot himself in the knee. It was an omen of things to come.

  Befriending Jefferson Davis early on, Northrop had received a sustained sick leave because of the crippling wound and set up a medical practice in Charleston. Because he was “on sick leave,” Northrop kept collecting pay from the army, and many officers deeply resented a situation in which they saw Northrop as collecting two salaries. Nonetheless, Davis did not hesitate to call on his old friend to take on the challenge of serving as commissary general of subsistence. Northrop did not want to accept the post and did so only after Davis’s pleading. A writer visiting Montgomery caught a glimpse of Davis and his new commissary general together and published a pen portrait after the war: “With Mr. Davis walks an old gentleman, who bears so striking a family resemblance to him that one would be likely to consider him the wealthy ‘Uncle Joe’ to whom the nephew owed so much,” penned the writer, referring to Jefferson Davis’s older brother Joseph, not an uncle.

  He seems an erratic old personage, and jogs along with a limping, lazy stride. What marked features he has—as marked as those of Jeff. [Jefferson]—only more cadaverous. Nature made the two men like enough to be counted kinsmen; art and taste made them prefer similar colors in costume and cut of beard. But there the similarity ends. The old man’s coat hangs as loosely as if it were four sizes beyond his measure, and his pants are “shapeless misfits,” while his hat—such a shocking bad one.

  To make matters worse the Subsistence Department was immediately riddled with corruption, hoarding, and schemes that allowed only poor distribution, the many bad apples more interested in enhancing their own lives than preserving a way of life. Complaints against Northrop’s department were voiced right away, and Northrop soon descended into an aura of gloom and despair. 6

  The Confederate Bureau of Ordnance was ably handled by Josiah Gorgas, a forty-two-year-old Pennsylvanian who had graduated West Point and served in the Mexican War as an expert on ammunition. Gorgas was a dark-haired man with a dark beard, prominent nose, and by the time of the Civil War, a receding hairline. He was an independent man who was highly competent yet enjoyed constantly complaining about others. His marriage to an Alabama girl tied him to the South, despite duty at Northern arsenals as the war came. Gorgas began his tenure as a bureau chief with the seizure of about 429 artillery pieces and 154,000 small arms from former U.S. arsenals—a nice start for the fledgling department. It was, in fact, the most significant act in building the storehouse of Confederate weapons.

  Gorgas also was acting as chief Confederate engineer, a post that would be taken over by Danville Leadbetter, another native Yankee. Age forty-nine, a Maine man, Leadbetter had graduated high in his West Point class before becoming a career engineering officer. He served on the Pacific frontier and in New York State before transferring to Mobile, Alabama, where he settled in the 1850s. Prior to the outbreak of war, Leadbetter became chief engineer for the state of Alabama, and he remained loyal to his adoptive state when shots were fired at Sumter. His counterpart in the Engineer Bureau, the so-called corps of engineers, was Alfred L. Rives.

  Finally, there was the Confederate Medical Department, charged with overseeing the system of hospitals and surgeons assigned to regions and military units. It, too, started on shaky ground, as David C. DeLeon and then Charles H. Smith each acted as bureau chief before Samuel Preston Moore, another Charlestonian, took over as surgeon general. Moore, age forty-seven, was a graduate of the Medical College of South Carolina and a longtime army doctor who agreed to serve as surgeon general only reluctantly.

  As Davis was pulling together his War Department, the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy met in Montgomery for the first time. Sessions began on April 29, 1861, just seventeen days after the shelling of Sumter, and lasted for three weeks. Amid all the chaos and furor, Jefferson Davis had a great deal to attempt to balance. There were the politicians who thought they should have received appointments in the Confederate government but didn’t. There were old friends who wanted favors and old enemies with scores to settle. There were many who thought Davis would be a fine battlefield commander but would make a lousy executive officer. And there was another problem, bubbling already in the infant Congress, that the president could not have expected: an unpredictable fight between the generals and the politicians.

  Every armed conflict carries internal struggles for influence between the military and its civilian commanders, and the Civil War was no different. The first flash point in the Confederacy was Joseph Eggleston Johnston, a veteran of the U.S. Army and an old associate of Jefferson Davis’s—yet another of those experienced officers who had come to Montgomery to offer his services to the New South.

  Joe Johnston was fifty-four at the time of Sumter, an artillerist and engineer who had graduated high in his West Point class and served ably in the Florida Wars (the 1830s clas
hes against mostly Seminole Indians) and the Mexican War before rising to staff assignment as quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, in 1860. As such he knew a great deal about the workings of the army and had wide knowledge of many of the officers and politicians involved with it, including Davis.

  In April 1861 Johnston and his wife, Lydia, were staying in Richmond, attempting to help Governor John Letcher organize Virginia’s state forces for the coming action. Letcher had appointed Robert E. Lee commander of the Virginia forces as a major general; a few days later he commissioned Johnston in the same grade and assigned him to command the forces in and around Richmond itself. Johnston frenetically started drilling, organizing, and supplying the several thousand troops, who had volunteered and marched in from various counties. He also began issuing orders to procure blankets, muskets, uniforms, and tents.

  But after just two weeks, the Virginia legislature, not yet part of the Confederacy, determined only one state major general should exist and that it should be Lee. Gravely disappointed, Johnston accepted a brigadier general’s commission instead—in the Confederate army, however, not the Virginia militia.

  Already disappointed, Johnston and his wife boarded a train for Montgomery, arriving there to meet with Davis, Walker, and Cooper. After much deliberation in the Government Building, the war office sent Johnston to take command of the forces in and around Harpers Ferry, which he did near the end of May. He said good-bye to his wife and boarded a train headed to the front line. 7

  Yet more disappointment was in store for Johnston. During the first term of Congress, in May, Davis determined the Army of the Confederate States of America (the so-called regular army of the Confederacy) should have five full general officers. Davis handled the nomination and made sure they would outrank the many general officers of the state militias, who had been appointed by the governors. He decided the generals should be ranked by seniority, as follows: Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and G. T. Beauregard. Davis evidently based his ranking on year of graduation and class standing at the U.S. Military Academy, which was Cooper (1815), A. S. Johnston (1826), Lee (1829, number 2), J. E. Johnston (1829, number 13), and Beauregard (1838).

  But because of his high-ranking assignment as quartermaster general, not to mention his considerable ego, Joe Johnston thought he should be the ranking general of the South. Others argued that the selections should have been made based on their relative rankings at the time of the men’s resignations from the U.S. Army. Still others argued that Cooper’s and Joe Johnston’s staff grades as adjutant general and quartermaster general should have been totally ignored and only their lineal ranks considered. Others argued that special brevet commissions (commissions issued by the president for special reasons) should have been included. Each of these arrangements would have given a different order of ranking among the generals of the Confederacy. (Hindsight would show that Davis’s simple method worked pretty well.) Whether Joe Johnston was capable of being the South’s leading general is debatable; clearly, Johnston felt he was more than good enough, and Davis felt he wasn’t. But the deed was done, and Johnston ranked fourth.

  The press had a field day speculating on the different possibilities of what might have been. Johnston, too, would not let it rest. “Cabinet meeting today,” Stephen Mallory penned in his diary in mid-September. “The Presdt. shows us a letter from Genl Joe Johnston; a protest against the appt. of Cooper, Lee, and Sydney Johnston over his head in the grade of Genl.— It is an intemperate letter, written evidently under great excitement of feeling. The Presdt’s answer is short, and abrupt, & this terminates a lifelong friendship, for a time, at least.” 8 In his capacity as president, it was Davis’s first lesson in not being able to please all the people all the time. 9

  To be sure, such difficulties with officers were not limited to the Confederacy. The U.S. Army had its own long-standing concerns over command. The term “commander in chief” engendered confusion, for example: by Constitutional specification the president was defined as the supreme military leader, despite the fact that many politicians believed the president to be the nominal head only, dependent on the leadership of a professional soldier during a time of war.

  The Union’s vague notions of a commander had deep roots. Bvt. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, hero of the wars of 1812 and Mexico, was commander in chief of the U.S. Army by custom. He was titled “general-in-chief” to differentiate his role from that of the president. As the ranking officer of the army, Scott was regarded by most as too aged and too infirm to remain in active command. This, despite his engineering of the Union “Anaconda Plan” to infiltrate the South by Mississippi River invasion and weaken its military resolve. As a Virginian Scott was considered by some Yankees as leaning too much toward the South. But in early 1861 no obvious successor to Scott existed. Lincoln needed Scott’s expertise as politicians challenged the president’s complete lack of military experience, and Scott needed Lincoln’s support to thwart any negative comments about his Virginia background. Despite the instability the Scott-Lincoln partnership functioned reasonably well, at least relative to what was happening in the South.

  In the midst of the squabbling over rank, the Confederate Congress had business to conduct. The second session of the Provisional Congress, held in Montgomery, lasted from April 29 through May 21. During these early meetings, which continued in the State Capitol, Davis discovered new enemies. Members of the Congress, who considered themselves, not the president, the supreme authority of the Confederacy, now included Robert Rhett, Howell Cobb, Aleck Stephens, Louis T. Wigfall, and Robert Toombs, as well as Virginian Robert M. T. Hunter, Louisianan Edward Sparrow, and South Carolinians James Chesnut, Lawrence M. Keitt, and William Porcher Miles. Although some like Chesnut, Wigfall, and Hunter were Davis friends, others wanted to test the president immediately. On May 11 Congress began that test. Anxious for a location that would serve the war front better logistically, and following Virginia’s secession, Congress voted to move the Confederate Congress to Richmond, Virginia. Among the strong supporters of this move were Cobb, Keitt, Miles, Wigfall, and Hunter. President Davis objected, reminding Congress that Montgomery was the seat and that “great embarrassment and probable detriment to the public service must result from a want of co-intelligence between the coordinate branches of the Government incident to such separation.” 10 In other words Davis had no intention of moving the executive branch to Richmond following Congress’s lead.

  Congress again debated the move on May 17, following Davis’s objections, and took a vote three days later. After vigorous debate a motion to remove the whole government to Richmond was voted on, and the motion carried by one vote, with the Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia delegations voting for the move, and Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia delegations against. Congress had won out, and Davis lost. Preparations for moving the Confederacy’s capital began in earnest.

  Moving the government was made more complicated by the fact that the government itself was still rather amorphous. Officials needed to be chosen, policies established, defensive preparations made, and all the trappings of society reinvented for the Southerners on the home front. Lacking time to produce a permanent government, the whole experiment was declared a “provisional government” that would explore its workings based on the U.S. Constitution. One discouraged delegate nearly melted at the size of the task that lay ahead:

  With no Treasury at command no machinery of government to raise & collect money, no national existence where credit can be pledged to get money & if it existed no credit upon which to raise it, no commerce to pay duties, no custom house system to give commerce a start, no navy to protect it & no merchant marine with which to carry it on, no army to hold the ports on our seaboard, no postal arrangements for conducting intelligence & all these wants in the face of apparently determined policy on the part of the old government to act quickly in seizing & closing our ports & cutting of our mail facilities I feel r
eally like I was called on to build a great edifice in a short time without any tools or materials to work with. 11

  The Provisional Congress could look at a small but growing list of accomplishments, however. It had produced a provisional constitution that attempted to instill state rights into the document, referring in the preamble to “Sovereign and Independent States.” The Constitution allowed states to raise peacetime armies and navies, though it did not allow them to make war on a foreign nation unless invaded first. The word “United” was excised from the document, “The Republic of Washington” rejected as an alternative, and finally, “Confederate” chosen, which according to one delegate, “truly expresses our present condition.” 12

  Vice President Stephens, along with Robert Toombs, pushed for the English cabinet form of government, wherein cabinet officers were chosen from within Congress. This was not made mandatory but was possible under the new system, as was simultaneous holding of political and military offices—something the United States Constitution forbade. An export tax initiative suggested that Congress expected to raise significant funds from exporting tobacco and cotton. Congress would determine judicial districts in the New South, and a Supreme Court would be organized from all the district judges.