The many governmental departments of the Confederacy, although just forming, duplicated the United States system with one exception: the Post Office Department. The U.S. postmaster general was operating under a huge deficit, which Southerners felt was wasteful and, in effect, a subsidy for businesses. So the Confederate Congress ordered their postmaster to turn a profit by March 1, 1863.
The Confederacy also had to plan for expansion, since Congress saw promise among the border states. Such areas, which might support the South or remain behind with the old Union, were critical to the Confederacy’s success. Until April the border states had divided loyalties; Lincoln’s call for 75,000 men from the North ended this. In response the Confederate Congress had sent commissioners to woo the potential partners. In Missouri the state’s pro-Southern governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, called a special session of the legislature, and the state teetered on secession for several months. Secession was brewing in Kentucky, too, and a pro-Southern contingency began meeting in the southern part of the state to start a Confederate government. Arizona Territory considered itself pro-Confederate, and rumblings of secession were heard there. Native Americans scattered across the Plains and American Southwest felt a strong attraction to the Confederacy. Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks, and Cherokees held meetings, declared themselves free nations, and appointed commissioners to meet with the Confederacy. On May 3 Lincoln had called for more volunteers, building the Yankee army to nearly 160,000 strong. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina seceded, making eleven Confederate states. The potential for others to join the Confederate cause seemed real.
On the battlefields, events were moving slowly. Soldiers like John Worsham of the Twenty-first Virginia were drilled to within an inch of their lives but wondered if they would see real action. In the late spring of 1861, Worsham’s men, equipped with the best uniforms and guns they could obtain, moved slowly into the Shenandoah Valley under the guidance of Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, an eccentric ex-professor from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. The overall commander of this force of several thousand, consisting of Virginia state troops, was Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee. Near month’s end, on May 29, Worsham had his first taste of battle. Near Aquia Creek, Virginia, a Federal gunboat stopped and fired a few shots before voyaging away. It was rather a letdown. But a week later three Yankee gunboats approached the position of the Twenty-first Virginia and, in Worsham’s words, “commenced to bombard the earthworks near the wharf.”
Worsham reported that “the enemy threw six-, eight-, and ten-inch shots at Captain Walker, who put some of his small three-inch rifled cannon into the works and replied. The firing lasted several hours.” During the action, nearly all the Yankee cannonballs whizzed over the heads of Worsham and his comrades. “The family living inside the earthworks had a chicken coop knocked to pieces,” Worsham wrote. “The old cock confined in it came out of the ruins, mounted the debris, flapped his wings, and crowed. That was the only casualty on our side.” 13
Action began to sprout elsewhere across the American landscape. Yankee Brig. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, without authority, moved forces into Baltimore and occupied the city, which had well-known Southern sympathies. Riots erupted in St. Louis, in the center of another area of divided loyalties. Near the end of May, Yankee troops advanced into Virginia, occupying Alexandria and pushing out three small Confederate brigades.
Late in the month the Confederacy pulled up stakes and moved to Richmond.
Chapter 5
A Curious Cabinet
THE first weeks of summer 1861 produced a terrific swell of war across the South, particularly after Lincoln had called for troops to bring the Confederates back into the Union. As young men rode horses, fitted uniforms, tested weapons, and organized companies all across the South, Davis organized his cabinet. The secretary of state would be Robert Toombs. Christopher G. Memminger of South Carolina would be the secretary of the treasury. The secretary of war was Leroy P. Walker. Floridian Stephen R. Mallory was secretary of the navy. John H. Reagan of Texas was the postmaster general. The office of attorney general was filled by Judah P. Benjamin, an intellectual who many would call the “brains of the Confederacy.” (In the U.S. government, the attorney general was not a cabinet-level post; the Confederacy tried to correct this by making it so.)
At the government’s formation in Montgomery, no foreign policy for the proto-Confederacy existed; Toombs had to invent it piecemeal as he went along. Before long the Georgian became irritated at being the foreign minister of a nation with no foreign relations. It was Toombs who, when a visitor to Montgomery asked him where the State Department was, famously replied, “in my hat,” as he withdrew some papers from it. As springtime ebbed across the Southern landscape, Toombs increasingly turned his attention to military matters, becoming bored with the affairs of state.
In addition to everything else, Toombs was a realist. Once summer approached he wrote his friend Stephens with worries over the coming war:
The North is acting with wild and reckless vigour . . . They act as tho’ they believe they will be impotent after the first effort (which I believe is true) and seem determined to make that overwhelming and effective. . . . [Winfield] Scott has near eighty thousand threatening Virginia and full command of the bay, rivers, and inlets. The prospect ahead looks very gloomy. It will take courage and energy to avert great disaster and we have far too little of the latter for the crisis. 1
Later he fretted to Stephens over the scant money available to the Confederacy. “Men will not see that the revolution must rest on the treasury,” he wrote, “without it, it must fail.” 2
The treasury secretary, Christopher Gustavus Memminger, was an old South Carolina aristocrat. He was a distinguished-looking fellow, a well-dressed, detail-oriented man, with silvery hair that waved over his ears, a fit, erect bearing, a prominent nose, and small, penetrating eyes that exuded a sense of confidence and precision. Nearing his sixties, Memminger had been born in Nayhingen, Württemberg, in what is now southern Germany, and was brought to the United States as an orphan at age three. Raised in a Charleston orphanage, Memminger eventually was taken into the home of a trustee, Thomas Bennett, who adopted him. (Bennett later became governor of the state.) Memminger thereby was grafted into South Carolina society from complete anonymity. He was a hardworking, deeply religious young man. Studying law, as many upper-class young men attempted to do, Memminger was admitted to the bar in 1824. Well known as a leading light in his state by the time war clouds approached, Memminger served as director of a variety of professional companies in and around Charleston and owned a large plantation house and property in excess of more than $200,000. He also held titles to fifteen slaves.
Memminger had spent a good portion of his youth admiring the Federal Union, but his support for a central government slowly dissipated. By the time of John Brown’s raid into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 (which scared the daylights out of slave owners as they imagined a mass uprising of ax-wielding former servants), Memminger had solidified himself with the secessionists. As a leading attorney and one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, he was selected to go to the Montgomery convention, where he wasted no time divining thoughts on the proto-Confederacy. Memminger had a treatise printed up, “Plan of a Provisional Government for the Southern Confederacy,” and, like Benjamin, stood out as calm and intellectual amid the hyperemotion.
Davis’s appointment of Memminger as secretary of the treasury had been a little startling, as the two were not known to each other. The original plan, according to Mary Boykin Chesnut, was that Davis wanted to make the politician Robert W. Barnwell secretary of state and Toombs secretary of the treasury. Barnwell refused, and so the plan was altered, bringing the dark horse Memminger in as a second choice, as recommended by various members of the South Carolina delegation.
The choice to head the Navy Department was also made on political grounds. A significant factor in the selection of Stephen Russell Mallory as secreta
ry of the navy was his residence in Florida, another state Davis wanted to appease by including it in the cabinet. Mallory was about fifty when war commenced; he had been born at Port of Spain, in the British West Indies, in either 1811, 1812, or 1813, depending on which source is to be believed. He was stout, balding, with wavy dark hair trimmed meticulously and brushed with gray, a distinguished-looking, practical politician. His father had been working in the Caribbean as a construction engineer at the time of Stephen’s birth, and the family moved around until settling at Key West, Florida, in 1820. During the family moves Mallory had received only snippets of formal education; finally, in his early twenties, he became inspector of customs at Key West and set about improving his education by studying law. Admitted to the Florida bar, Mallory took part in the Seminole War, married, served as a county judge, and spent much of the 1850s as a U.S. senator, elected as a Democrat. As chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee in the Senate, he well understood navy business. He had declined an appointment as U.S. minister to Spain and, despite his initial opposition to secession, resigned from the Senate in 1861 to support his beloved South.
To head the postal department, Davis looked to Texas, appointing John Henninger Reagan, a Tennessee native who had moved to the Lone Star State at age twenty-one. At the time of the firing on Sumter, Reagan was forty-two, a former clerk, bookkeeper, tutor, and plantation overseer. While in his twenties, Reagan had become interested in military affairs and joined the Republic of Texas Army as an Indian fighter. He subsequently was a planter, surveyor, lawyer, judge, and finally, a Texas legislator. Elected a U.S. representative from Texas in 1857, Reagan spent the years leading up to secession in Washington as a staunch Southern supporter, but he opposed radical measures. Hoping that a compromise could be found in the days preceding the Civil War, he had returned to Texas in January 1861.
Reagan had a formidable physical presence, with a hefty frame; jet black hair brushed back over his head and ears; a thick, black beard; and coal black eyes. At the Provisional Congress in Montgomery, Reagan caught the attention of Jefferson Davis when the Texan told him he “would not have voted for you as president.” Reagan explained that Davis would have been great as the South’s leading general, and this flattery may have laid the groundwork for Reagan’s appointment as postmaster general.
The final member of Davis’s inner circle wielded enormous influence within the administration. Judah Philip Benjamin, age forty-nine, had been born in St. Croix, British West Indies, a British subject of Sephardic Jewish settlers. He was raised in Charleston and grew to adulthood in New Orleans; at the time these cities were home to two of the largest Jewish communities in the nation. His father was one of the founders of the first Reform Congregation of America, and it’s likely Benjamin was confirmed at its temple. At the tender age of fourteen, Benjamin left his deeply Jewish upbringing to attend Yale Law School. He was admitted to the Louisiana bar at the age of twenty-one and married Natalie Martin, the daughter of a wealthy New Orleans planter, which propelled him into the life of a sugar planter and politician. A plump, good-natured man with a perpetual smile, Benjamin had neatly combed, slightly curled hair, a short beard with no mustache, and sad eyes that seemed to signify wisdom in a glance. Elected to the Louisiana legislature, Benjamin was active in state politics in the Whig Party until he exploded onto the national scene with his election as a U.S. senator from Louisiana, in 1853. More than once he had to defend his religion, one time rebuking Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio with these words: “It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the ancestors of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain.”
Later switching to the Democratic Party, Benjamin was reelected and stayed in the Senate, befriending Jefferson Davis and encountering odd situations and trouble as his influence grew. Benjamin was once so insulted by Davis that he challenged him to a duel, but the future Confederate president apologized, and the situation was diffused. Because of scandalous rumors about Benjamin’s wife circulating in Washington, Mrs. Benjamin took the couple’s daughter to Paris, and the Benjamins saw each other only about once per year thereafter.
ALL these men came together in the great move to Richmond, which was accomplished by the end of May 1861. Before the war Richmond was something of a contradiction. A city of 37,910 built along the James River, it embodied the upper South as well as the cultural and historical richness of old Virginia. Richmond consisted of a blend of old aristocrats, ambitious lawyers and businessmen, farmers and marketers, and plantation aristocracy with their precious slaves. The travelers bustling in and out of the countryside to and from Washington to the north, Petersburg to the south, and Charlottesville and Lynchburg to the west could be considerable—not to mention the river traffic. To the east lay the Virginia peninsula, with the towns of Hampton, Norfolk, and the old Colonial center of Williamsburg. The mountains of western Virginia spread to the west and north, separating the Virginians from the Yankees in Ohio, though the mountain men were more loyal to the North than Southerners initially imagined, and even most of Richmond initially balked at leaving the Union before Virginia itself adopted its ordinance of secession. Many Richmonders were conservative Whigs who were not particularly keen on seeing the Union dissolve. So the Confederacy would be hosted by a somewhat inhospitable city.
Richmond ranked third in size among Southern cities, after New Orleans and Charleston. About a third of the city’s population consisted of slaves. Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, supervised the slaves and free blacks in the city, all of whom had to be careful in their conduct and lived with considerable limitations on their freedoms. For white Richmonders, be they professionals, merchants, farmers, planters, or simply poor, bloodlines were held supreme: if you could trace yourself back to an early Virginia Anglo-Saxon line, you were in good social standing among the city’s elite. If not, you simply didn’t matter. Many important families with money and accomplishments stuck together in business and social events; they also intermarried, building wealth and networks of social purity and aristocracy. Most labored in the city, which had the greatest concentration of heavy industry in the South and a booming tobacco business fed by vast farms and plantations scattered throughout the Virginia countryside.
Richmond was a gridded city laid along the James River, with its central business and government district built on the northern riverbank, north of what became known as Mayo’s Island. Two bridges, Mayo Bridge and the Richmond & Danville Railroad Bridge, spanned the island. A second railroad bridge, that of the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad, stood to the west, halfway to the largest nearby island in the James, Belle Isle. The southern riverbank held the city of Manchester. North of the Petersburg bridge was Brown’s Island and the industrial area that was home to the Tredegar Iron Works, the most significant iron factory in the South, chartered in 1837. West of this area sprawled Hollywood Cemetery, the city’s extravagant burial ground, founded on a hilly plot in 1848. (James Monroe was entombed here.) Overlooking Hollywood and Brown’s Island stood Gamble’s Hill, near which the Spotswood Hotel, the city’s most famous, was the place to be seen. North of the city lay a geographical rise that came to be known as Shockoe Hill, which contained Shockoe Cemetery as well as many residences. The hill on the southeastern edge of the city supported an extensive military drilling camp and was termed Chimborazo Hill, named after an Ecuadoran mountain. (A Richmonder who had visited Ecuador likened the hill to the South American mountain, and the name stuck.) As the war accelerated, this area was transformed into the largest hospital in the Confederacy. Nearby stood Oakwood Cemetery, another significant burial ground. Southwest along the river was Rocketts Landing, the major docks of the city, and extensive tobacco warehouses, as well as the fledgling Confederate States Navy Yard.
When the Confederacy went to war, Richmonders got organized. The organization focused on one spot: the city’s central, monume
ntal building was the Virginia State Capitol, a fantastic, Greek Revival structure with stunning porticoes finished with Ionic columns. The cornerstone was laid in 1785, after the structure had been designed by Thomas Jefferson. By the mid-1800s the surrounding ground, Capitol Square, had become a fashionable city park for all Richmonders. The square stood on high ground overlooking the James River to the south. Inspired by the Roman temple at Nîmes, France, Jefferson had carefully planned the structure, had plaster models of it created in Paris, and had personally overseen the building’s detailed construction until the final exterior was finished, in 1797. 3
A walk of just a few minutes’ duration brought Richmonders to several other areas of interest around Capitol Square. Northwest past the green grassy lawns, abundant spring flowers, and tall, handsome trees was the showpiece of the city, a bronze equestrian statue of George Washington, which had been dedicated on Washington’s birthday in 1858. Southwest, parallel to Ninth Street, down a terrace of lovely brick steps, was another prominent feature of Capitol Square, the Richmond Tocsin, or bell tower. Constructed in 1824, this square brick building served both to warn Richmonders of fire and to commemorate glorious or sorrowful events. On April 21, 1861, the Tocsin had sounded, warning of the reported approach of the gunboat USS Pawnee on the James. Citizens scrambled along with militia to high ground in the city as well as down to Rocketts Landing on the James. The gunboat never came, however, on what was later recalled as Pawnee Sunday.
The remaining corner of the square, to the northeast, held the Executive Mansion, finished in 1813. This Federal-style house, on the corner of Governor and Capitol streets, served as Governor John Letcher’s abode at the start of the war.
Wartime Richmond was, by modern standards, a small city with a downtown district that would today be considered quaint. Most of the government buildings were clustered in the area between Capitol Square and the riverfront to the south. On Main Street, between Tenth and Eleventh streets, on the southern side of the square, was the U.S. Post Office and Customs House, a Tuscan-Italianate edifice constructed in 1858 (and rebuilt and enlarged since). On its move to Richmond, the Confederacy took over this building and used it as the Treasury Department quarters and as an executive office for Jefferson Davis. The Confederate State Department met on the building’s second floor, which also hosted cabinet sessions. The Confederate president’s office, where much of the business of the war took place, was on the third floor of this building, facing the Capitol. Mechanic’s Hall, the site of the Confederate War and Navy departments and the offices of Samuel Cooper and Robert G. H. Kean, chief of the Bureau of War, stood on the corner opposite the Richmond Tocsin. In between the Customs House and Mechanic’s Hall stood a block of offices housing the Signal Corps, the Paymaster’s Department, the Bureau of Nitre and Mining, and the Quartermaster’s Department. The Signal Corps facilitated field and telegraphic communications. The Bureau of Nitre and Mining was charged with mining resources.
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