Dixie Betrayed
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John Wilcox of Texas asked if the Confederacy didn’t already have great commissioners in Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Hines Holt of Georgia offered a modified resolution, similar to Foote’s. The president, on hearing of all this, must have simply shaken his head. 47
As if his worries weren’t enough, Jefferson Davis spent the final weeks of 1862 with a growing level of noise from a collection of Southern governors who felt he should do more for each of them—much more. Often he could do little other than simply thinking on paper. “I have not been unmindful of the condition of the Eastern portion of your State and can make allowance for the anxiety felt by those who reside there,” the president wrote newly elected governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina. 48 Davis’s thoughts about Joe Brown, who carped at him, were no more specific. “Nothing could be more unfortunate,” wrote the president, “not only for the success of the cause in which we are engaged, but also for the future reputation of the great State of Georgia than any other conflict between the authorities of that State and the Confederate Government.” 49
He was mildly reassuring to Governor John Shorter of Alabama that the Richmond government sympathized with the potential loss of Mobile to the Yankees. “I entirely concur with you as to the immense importance of Mobile and the adjacent country,” Davis penned, “and the unfortunate results that would follow its fall. I have felt long and deeply the hazard of its condition and an anxious desire to secure it, but have vainly looked for an adequate force which could be spared from other localities.” 50 Shorter was outraged, feeling left alone by the Richmond government. Governor John Milton of Florida also received vague assurances of support. “Your letter of the 10th ult., calling my attention to the dangers now threatening the State of Florida,” wrote Davis, “and asking for additional forces and munitions of war, was submitted to the perusal of the Secretary of War and Genl. Lee. . . . General Lee reports he cannot send the Florida regiments home; and we have no other reinforcements that could be spared without injustice to other sections equally important and equally threatened.” Could the national government of the Confederacy do much of anything for Confederate States that existed away from the central war zone of the east? It seemed to many the answer was a clear no. 51
Yet the governors still pleaded for help from Richmond, which in turn, actually needed all the help it could get from the states. “Can you not spare us a few thousand arms for this State?” wrote Francis Lubbock of Texas, increasingly seeming an island in the far west. “If we could get back the old rifles & shot guns that have been cast off by our men, & which we trust have been laid aside for more improved ones, we would feel better able to defend our state.” 52 This, when the Confederate army begged for manpower.
Near the end of 1862, Davis begged the governors to help the Confederacy as a whole. He wrote asking them for special cooperation with enrolling conscripts, restoring to the army all officers absent without leave or who had recovered from disability, and sending to the Confederacy all supplies not absolutely essential to home state use. He also begged the governors to enact legislation that “will enable the Governors to command slave labor to the extent which may be required in the prosecution of works conducive to the public defence.” 53
The war was a desperate struggle, and the resources of the Confederacy were stretched badly. Yet those who should have known better seemed to have blind faith in the Cause and self-interest. They still felt that victory was inevitable. “Lee has an army which I believe is invincible,” wrote the politician-turned-soldier Lawrence Keitt. 54 Indeed.
Chapter 11
Jockeying for Position
WITH the New Year the topic on everyone’s mind—in the South and the North—was exactly what Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would mean to the country and to the world. “The Emancipation proclamation upsets the peaceful and contented condition of the slaves in the Confederacy,” wrote Davis. “[The black soldiers of the North] are encouraged to assassinate their masters. . . . All commissioned officers of such assassins, hereafter captured by our forces, will be turned over to State authorities to be dealt with as criminals inciting servile insurrection.” 1
By now the toll of tens of thousands of deaths had saddened, shocked, and grieved every family in the land either directly or by acquaintance. Soldiers in the army and sailors in the navy felt a sad, sinking feeling that they might not return to see another New Year’s Day at home. There was good reason for such dread. As 1863 opened, with Congress convening again in Richmond, the sounds of battle spread thickly across the fields and in the woods of Tennessee. Farther east the principal army of the Union, the Army of the Potomac, was entrenched in the hills around Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Robert E. Lee’s Confederates could pause to rest for a short time—but only a short time. Other threats from the Union army and navy existed. Along the Mississippi River the stronghold of Vicksburg was endangered, and Union forces slowly occupied more of the Atlantic coastline. Amid these conflicts many in the South began to consider geography in a new way: east versus west. Which area was more important? Which should garner the preeminent resources? Which should the Richmond government bolster most quickly?
But despite the challenges the Rebels had plenty of reason to hope. The Confederacy’s military necessities were still far different from those of the Yankees. Rebel armies were fighting essentially a defensive strategy, hoping that Union citizens would grow weary of war and that Britain or France would recognize the burgeoning Southern nation. As long as the Federals had to attack southward, sustaining heavy losses, and as long as the daring chances taken by commanders such as Lee and Jackson paid off, the Confederacy could look forward to increasing odds for a peace movement and an armistice. The chances looked good during the first few weeks of 1863, and during the coming months, they would look even better. In both theaters, east and west, short-term military successes seemed to favor the Confederacy. The South had the momentum and the spirit. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had been turned back from Northern soil the previous autumn, but it had scored a stunning victory over the disorganized and apparently dazed Federal army at Fredericksburg just two weeks before New Year’s Day 1863. Braxton Bragg’s inconclusive campaign in Tennessee had, nevertheless, upset the Federal army under Rosecrans, and Bragg had the notion to telegraph President Davis from the battlefield at Stones River that God had “granted us a victory.” In the far west John Pemberton seemed to be holding off a succession of attacks aimed at capturing Vicksburg, the Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi.
For the armies in the field, the first weeks of cold winter in 1863 were quiet. As the Confederacy anticipated a spring thaw and a new series of victories, the aims of the war were slowly changing in Washington. The issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day transformed the struggle in the minds of many Yankees into a holy war for freedom. No longer was it simply a fight for the continuance of the Federal government, but now was for a nobler, higher cause.
Yet in the ranks the conflict remained earthbound, a soup of mud and blood. “In every direction around men were digging graves and burying the dead,” wrote David Hunter Strother, a western Virginian colonel in the Federal army, following the battle of Antietam. He continued:
Many [dead soldiers] were black as Negroes, heads and faces hideously swelled, covered with dust until they looked like clods. Killed during the charge and flight, their attitudes were wild and frightful. One hung upon a fence killed as he was climbing it. One lay with hands wildly clasped as if in prayer. From among these loathsome earth-soiled vestiges of humanity, the soldiers were still picking out some that had life left and carrying them in on stretchers to our surgeons. All the time some picket firing was going on from the wood on the Hagerstown turnpike near the white church. 2
Such terrible losses hung heavily over both sides. In Washington Lincoln had removed Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside from command of the Army of the Potomac following the disaster at Fredericksburg and a
pointless, muddy march, but he had no ideal replacement in mind. In desperation Lincoln turned to Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, a brash, forty-eight-year-old, hard-drinking egotist. Lincoln wrote Hooker, “I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. . . . Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.” 3 The great eastern Union army had a new chief.
Between January 10 and 11, Yankees under Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand and Acting Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter attacked the Confederate stronghold, Fort Hindman, at Arkansas Post, Arkansas. There, on the Arkansas River, some thirty-two thousand men together with three ironclads and six gunboats assaulted the fort, which was garrisoned by three brigades commanded by Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Churchill and Col. John W. Dunnington. The action demonstrated the value of river gunboats in shelling a position, as Porter’s naval forces contributed substantially to the fort’s capitulation following a murderous bombardment. The result was a surrender of more than five thousand Confederates, a major loss to the South.
In the east little of note occurred until March 17, when a cavalry battle erupted at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia. Three weeks before the battle, Confederate Brig. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry had stunned a series of Federal outposts, capturing 150 prisoners. Lee left a note for a Federal division commander, his old friend Brig. Gen. William Woods Averell, asking him to “return the favor and bring some coffee.” Averell arrived at Kelly’s Ford on the Rappahannock before sunrise, and the battle was joined at about noon. Both mounted and dismounted, the troopers fought all afternoon, the Yankees repulsing Lee’s attacks. The battle ended inconclusively except that Union cavalry had withstood their legendary opponents with great skill.
During recent battles in the last several months of fighting and maneuvering, several Confederate leaders had begun to stand out. They were not the army’s top leaders, but they were important young generals who were making their presence felt strongly. Following his heroic actions in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, at the battle of Second Manassas, at Antietam, and at Fredericksburg, Stonewall Jackson had become the most celebrated of the bunch. On the cusp of his thirty-ninth birthday, Jackson was now a lieutenant general and commanded the second army corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. He engendered a great fighting spirit in the South that would grow as the weeks rolled on.
Jackson’s brother-in-law, Daniel Harvey Hill, was a cantankerous South Carolina native who had been a professor of mathematics and commandant of the Military College of Charlotte in North Carolina before the war. Two years senior to Jackson, D. H. Hill began the war as a colonel of North Carolina troops before being commissioned a brigadier general and moving around to a voluminous number of assignments in part because of his argumentative persona. Now a major general and veteran of leading troops at Antietam, Hill had quit the army on January 1 in a huff but was quickly talked into withdrawing his resignation. Hill would continue to bounce around the army over the coming weeks, serving as something of a barometer of the relationships between army officers and the War Department and the importance given to various theaters of the war. Plagued by poor relations with the War Department, he drew their least glamorous assignments.
And then there was John Bell Hood. The Kentucky native, just thirty-two years old, had served on the Texas frontier before commanding Texas infantry for the Confederacy. Wounded on the peninsula at Gaines’s Mill, Hood subsequently led troops at Second Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg and was commissioned a major general late in 1862. Young, yet appearing beyond his years due to sunken eyes and a full beard, Hood had a growing reputation as a hard and reckless fighter who left everything on the field. His adventures also would prove to serve as a measurement of Congress’s involvement with military matters.
CONGRESS had reconvened in Richmond on January 12, 1863, with this third session of the First Congress scheduled to remain in convention until May 1. Many of the old areas of dispute and argument would again rear their heads, with other, new areas of concern added to them. One of the fresher topics was the possibility of foreign intervention—something that Davis had dreamed about since the shots were fired at Sumter. If only England or France would come to the aid of the South, he believed, the war might draw to a speedy close with Southern independence intact. And without foreign monetary support, it seemed the Confederacy would go broke sooner rather than later. “The increasing public debt, the great augmentation in the volume of the currency, with its necessary concomitant of extravagant prices for all articles of consumption” was devastating, said the president. 4 On January 17 Davis furnished the Congress with lengthy arguments for recognition of the Confederacy by Britain, France, Italy, and Russia to increase foreign trade and to help break the blockade.
But the new issues could not displace the old. The question of the Supreme Court had been postponed—again—back in September 1862, and senators now came out with heated vigor to resolve the issue. But the heat did not transform into light. Making no headway, senators argued heatedly over the salaries justices should receive and then adjourned.
Two days later the subject arose again. A much revised bill now included a controversial section proposing that a Confederate Supreme Court could review State Supreme Court decisions, allowing for state courts to employ precedents from United States court decisions. The matter was again tabled. 5
It wouldn’t remain tabled for long. On February 2 Wigfall declared that it was “the greatest misfortune that ever befell the country that a man of [John Marshall’s] imperial genius and unspotted virtue should have been so long connected with the old Supreme Court.” Other senators opposed the court for declaring constitutional the United States Bank, an act that strengthened Federal authority. If the Supreme Court bill should pass, several agreed, “the fatal stab would be given to our new Government.” 6
On and on it went. On February 5 James Phelan of Mississippi shouted that if Clement Clay’s amendment repealing the ability to establish a Supreme Court were adopted, then “the same questions which dissolved the United States would be renewed under this Government.” 7 On March 17 Alabaman William Yancey warned his fellow senators that power of the Supreme Court over state courts “would subvert and destroy the power of the States.” Two days later the Supreme Court bill passed by a fourteen to eight margin and was sent to the House for consideration. 8 However, the bill was revised, and by March 28 another bill was introduced. No action was taken, and the whole affair dropped back into the arena of indefinite delays.
Meanwhile, an even greater shocker rose to the floor of the Senate. On February 5 the Senate heard a proposed amendment to the Confederate Constitution that would allow an aggrieved state to secede from the Confederacy. “It shall do so in peace,” read the proposal, “but shall be entitled to its pro rata share of property and be liable for its pro rata share of public debt to be determined by negotiation.” The idea was referred to the Judicial Committee. Two days later senators failed to recommend the amendment, and the whole thing was dropped as a dangerous idea. 9
ASIDE from arguments about the Confederacy itself, the new session of Congress also entertained much disagreement over the army and its internal policies. From Davis’s point of view, the Senate was becoming increasingly meddlesome about who should be commissioned in a particular grade or given a particular assignment in the field. No one was more so than Edward Sparrow, the Louisiana senator who chaired the Committee on Military Affairs. And yet Davis needed the Senate’s approval for commissions, so he often acquiesced to their demands. 10
As was always the case, many officers in the field felt they were not getting due recognition for services performed, and they often complained in letters to the president or to Congress. Even important politicians who had left Richmond to fight in the field complained heartily: “For five months I have been acting Brigadier,” wrote South
Carolinian Lawrence Keitt to Davis’s nemesis, Louis Wigfall, “and want the commission of one. Genls. Beauregard, Ripley, Jordan, and Gist have recommended me. I now have under me all the guns on Sullivan’s Island.” 11 Even with Wigfall’s support Keitt never would be commissioned a general.
Most senators felt Davis was not providing sufficient information in order to help other politicians work to commission their favorite officers into the army. They were right. From Davis’s point of view, the senators were interfering far beyond their legal rights to confirm appointments by the president, so dragging his heels on providing specific information was wholly justified. On January 30 Sparrow requested that Davis submit a list of all regimental, brigade, and division commanders with commissions in the provisional army both under provisional and permanent governments. Six weeks passed without a response from the White House. By mid-March Sparrow resolved that it “is inexpedient for the Senate to confirm any more generals until a response is obtained from the President on the numbers of regiments, brigades, and divisions in the army.” On March 19, 1863, Davis finally furnished a list of brigadier and major generals, but the tension would continue for months.
Army commanders in the field, meanwhile, asked for more and more slaves to use as common laborers for the army. “I trust some arrangement will be made at a very early date to secure a proper number of negro laborers, who should be promptly relieved at the expiration of the period for which they have been sent,” Beauregard wrote South Carolina governor Milledge Bonham. “As it is, those negroes who come to work for 30 days, have been necessarily detained from 60 & 90 days, because none were sent to take their places in the works. . . . I have been subjected to the daily strenuous applications of owners to have their slaves released from the detail.” 12
Inevitably politicians and generals alike worried about both the possibility of Northern African Americans fighting in the field and the lack of troops in the South, some imagining that freeing and arming slaves might be necessary. But few mentioned such a radical idea publicly—at least yet. More so, the white Southern politicians were worried about their own inconveniences and those of their constituents. 13