Johnston looked to his old friend Louis Wigfall for help, writing him a heartfelt letter in August. “I write [because] my wife, who apprehends that the whole power of the government is preparing to overwhelm me, insists on it,” Johnston admitted. He then gave Wigfall a lengthy treatise on how he could not possibly have conducted the operations in Mississippi any better. 13
Soon thereafter Davis wrote again to Johnston. He now knew that Johnston’s medical director, John M. Johnson, had allowed a newspaper editor to copy some of Johnston’s private correspondence. Davis found the medical director’s explanation “not satisfactory” and wrote to Johnston that “I feel that it would be unjust to you to have on your staff an officer, who copies your official correspondence without your knowledge, and sends it to another who permits its publication.” 14
Davis also continued his fight with the powerful Alabama senator William Yancey. “I have now received your letter of 11th inst.,” the president wrote, “in which you not only omit entirely any answer to my inquiry, but make the very grave charge that in my official action I have been ‘influenced by feelings of personal hostility’ to yourself, and not satisfied with reporting that this charge is based on information received by you, you add that you ‘believe it.’ Repelling this charge as utterly untrue, I again claim the right of inquiring on what information it is based.” 15 It was nearly a carbon copy emotionally of what he had written Yancey months before, and as then, it had virtually no effect. The controversy would smolder for months to come.
The governors also continued to pelt Davis with requests for help, which he most often felt he could not comply with. For example, cantankerous Joe Brown pressed Davis for more troops to help guard Georgia’s railroads. “I regret, however, that the pressing exigencies of the service at other points actually invaded or immediately menaced by the enemy will not permit that a regiment of cavalry should be detached from the armies in the field for the service which you suggest,” the president told him. 16
Davis’s good friend Francis Lubbock, governor of Texas, continued to push the Confederate leader for more of practically everything for the Lone Star State. “I am satisfied your Excellency does not underrate the importance of Texas to the Confederacy,” Lubbock wrote. “We need but arms; with an adequate supply, we will battle manfully, and, I trust, with success. The Confederate Government it is reported, have on hand a large quantity of arms.” 17 Davis, however, could not help.
From South Carolina, Governor Milledge Bonham implored the people of his state to loan more slaves to the state government. “An immediate necessity exists for three thousand laborers,” the governor requested, “for a period not exceeding one month. . . . Let every citizen, without a moment’s delay, send every hand he can spare. . . . A discreet [sic] overseer to every fifty hands should be sent. The hands should bring spades and shovels. . . . The Executive ventures to say the negroes will be properly cared for.” 18 The call was answered by some, but ignored by many. On August 27 Bonham issued a declaration increasing the required furnished labor for the construction of coastal defenses in and around Charleston. Slave owners now were ordered to send “all they can share.” 19 While he was appealing to his own people, Bonham also sent unsatisfied missives to congressmen in Richmond.
Davis was putting out fires across the Confederacy. For example, he felt he had no chance but to turn to Governor Zebulon Vance for support in the case of William Woods Holden, a newspaper editor and would-be politician who was openly attacking the Davis administration in the newspapers, mostly the Raleigh Standard. “This is not the first intimation I have received that Holden is engaged in the treasonable purpose of exciting the people of North Carolina to resistance against their Government,” penned Davis, “and cooperation with the enemy.” Davis asked the governor’s help in stopping these editorials, which “mislead a portion of our own people.” However, Davis would find that Vance could be only so supportive toward the Richmond government, as he had his own suspicions about the primary Confederate leaders. 20
The increasingly pessimistic mood was shared by many Confederate leaders. Their losses were “a terrible revulsion,” wrote Senator Clement Clay of Alabama to Louis Wigfall. “The fall of Vicksburg & Port Hudson, the loss of all of Middle Tenn. & North Ala. & the expulsion of Lee from the enemy’s territory!! Superadded to all this comes my own little griefs, with selfishness . . . my home & parents & most of my kindred in the hands of the enemy.” 21 In Georgia Bob Toombs became so panicked over the Confederacy’s lack of funds that he began a letter-writing campaign to the newspapers, starting with one to the editor of the Augusta Constitutionalist:
The Confederate Government have committed two radical errors in the management of our finances which produced our present calamitous condition by the operation of laws of currency as fixed, certain, and immutable as the laws which govern the planetary system. . . . The first great error was in attempting to carry on a great and expensive war solely on credit—without taxation. . . . [The second great error] was the use of the public credit almost exclusively in the form of currency. The natural result of this policy was plain, inevitable, overwhelming. 22
Privately, Toombs wrote the vice president, Aleck Stephens, despondent. “We are gloomy and in great trouble,” he reported, “North, South, East and West the clouds look dark and threatening. . . . We must fight this thing out, and I shall try to be with the militia of Georgia in the prospective defense of our homes. . . . We shall have to call out the ‘melish.’” 23
The governor of Georgia himself was even more alarmed than usual. “There seems to have settled upon the minds of our people a sort of feeling of despondency,” Joe Brown wrote Stephens, “which is stimulated by the constant croaking of a class of speculators who have made money and are preparing to curry favor with Lincoln if he should overrun the country, with the hope of saving their property. These men put the worst face upon every mishap to our arms, and while they are guilty of no act of positive disloyalty they do all in their power to discourage our people.” 24
Stephens, meanwhile, had a plan of action that seemed to come out of nowhere. Fed up with the war, and angered over the lack of prisoner exchanges, the Confederate vice president hatched a plan to proceed north and talk with the Yankee authorities. Stephens would begin by reestablishing the exchange of prisoners, which had broken down following Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Confederate government’s threats to execute African American troops and their white officers. What Stephens really wanted, however, was to offer peace to the Yankees. Writing Davis, he said, “I am not without hopes that indirectly I could now turn attention to a general adjustment upon such basis as might ultimately be acceptable to both parties and stop the further effusion of blood in a contest so irrational, unchristian, and so inconsistent with all recognized American principles.” 25
Davis accepted the Stephens plan just as the battle began to rage at Gettysburg. “Having accepted your patriotic offer to proceed as a military commissioner under flag of truce to Washington,” Davis wrote, “you will receive herewith your letter of authority to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. . . . War is full enough of unavoidable horrors under all its aspects to justify and even to demand of any Christian rulers who may be unhappily engaged in carrying it on to seek to restrict its calamities and to divest it of all unnecessary severities.” 26 Davis further wrote two identical letters to Abraham Lincoln, one addressed to the “commander in chief” and the other to “the president,” which described the attempt at reconciling a prisoner exchange, and sent Stephens to Washington with them. Incessant rains caused the vice president to travel by steamer. Stephens left Newport News on July 4, and after waiting two days in Washington, the Lincoln government refused to consider the Stephens proposal. The official response from the U.S. government was, “The request is inadmissible. The customary agents and channels are adequate for all needful military communications and conference between the United
States forces and the insurgents.” 27 Stephens was furious that his influence had amounted to nothing, and he returned to Georgia more embittered than ever. There, Stephens’s old friend Joe Brown tried to console the vice president. “I fully agree with you that our matters are being badly managed,” he noted, “and do not know what may be the result if we do not have a change of policy. I am advised by the commissary at Atlanta, Maj. Cummings, privately that the supply of meat is now very short and that we cannot subsist the army through the fall unless we get the cattle out of Florida and lower Ga. faster than we are now doing. I have called the attention of the President to this.” 28
Many other formerly influential politicians felt helpless at what appeared to be an aimless policy that stung badly in the wake of the double defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Lamenting his apparent loss of influence, Robert M. T. Hunter, the president pro tempore of the Senate, wrote Wigfall: “I suppose the point upon which you wish to confer with me is connected with the conduct of the war and if so as you know I am entirely without influence in such matters.” 29
The military situation seemed to be coming to a head: either Confederate armies would need to rebound from the recent disasters quickly or they would be in dire straits. “Our people have not generally realised the magnitude of the struggle in which we are engaged,” Davis lamented to Senator Robert Johnson of Arkansas. “Had Missouri and Tennessee furnished the number of troops which you say they could not supply, if in our possession, our banners would be flying on the upper Missi. And the Ohio.” 30
Bob Toombs had other culprits in mind, as did many in the political world of Richmond. He complained,
The real control of our affairs is narrowing down constantly into the hands of Davis and the old army, and when it gets entirely there it will collapse. They have neither the ability nor the honesty to manage the revolution. Many of our ablest and most reliable col[onel]s who brought troops into the field have been killed by the blunders and jealousies of the old army, and the morale of the army is now pretty much gone. We never had a desertion until we had conscription, for the very good reason that there were thousands outside who wanted to take the places of those inside. . . . Conscription and conscription alone destroyed all that feeling. 31
“I am raising a regiment,” Toombs confided to his fellow Georgian Howell Cobb, “it is only a body guard to protect me when we have all to flee to the mountains. Davis will soon bring us to that point.” 32
Davis, meanwhile, looked to the states to stand up against the Yankee army just as they looked to him for protection. “The enemy is reported in large force threatening our army in East Tenn.,” he wrote Aleck Stephens. “That is the gate of Northern Georgia. We have sent all disposable reinforcements, but require an addition to our army there. . . . If you concur as to the propriety of sending [the militia] up to co-operate with Bragg or Buckner you will oblige me by conferring with Governor Brown on the subject.” 33
Politicians, generals, civilians—all felt that what was needed was a strong commanding general who could run the show. And by this time there was only one candidate, Robert E. Lee. A general-in-chief would stand up to the Yankees, solve the problems that seemed to rise out of a lack of coordination here, there, and everywhere. On this virtually everyone agreed. Everyone except Jefferson Davis.
Chapter 14
Soiled Reputations
AS the summer of 1863 waned, the situation was fluid throughout the South. Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans and his Yankees were pushing into Alabama with their eyes on Chattanooga. Bragg, already under heavy criticism, would need to block him. Knoxville and eastern Tennessee were under duress. Actions in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas threatened to place even more Confederate territory under Federal occupation. While Gettysburg and Vicksburg had fallen, it was becoming clear that the war would go on for a long time. The Confederacy was still in business.
The hot and deadly summer transformed into a cooler autumn, and the western armies positioned for a great clash in the vicinity of Chattanooga. The importance of railroads in the Tennessee city and the geographical nature of the region made Chattanooga crucial to the South. In June the Army of the Cumberland under Rosecrans moved south against Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. The same armies had grappled in the bloody slugfest at Stones River that proved strategically inconclusive at the outset of the year. Bragg fortified the city and entrenched but was forced to move south in September after Rosecrans’s army crossed the Tennessee River and entered Chattanooga.
Bragg massed his forces at Lafayette, Georgia, and engaged portions of it with small, isolated Federal elements. He then marched his men to a position along Chickamauga Creek, a small riverway named in Cherokee dialect for the smallpox outbreak that had occurred along its banks. Chickamauga translated to “river of death.”
By September 18 Bragg tried to force Rosecrans’s hand by placing himself between the Yankees and Chattanooga. The movement precipitated a major battle that would result in an enormous Confederate victory.
On September 19 the battle erupted at Jay’s Mill and spread south. The fields, cabins, and woods in the area witnessed repeated, rolling attacks that washed over the same ground, resulting mostly in temporary gains. The next day the battle was renewed, and again Bragg stabbed toward Chattanooga, inciting engagements along the entire north-south battle line. The struggle excelled with unspectacular results until timing struck just right: Union Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood was ordered to move his division to support another area, creating a quarter-mile-wide gap in the Federal line. Nearly at this moment Lt. Gen. James Longstreet sent six divisions forward, plowing through and sending the Yankees back in startled confusion. It was one of the greatest frontal attacks of the war.
“Now the enemy are in plain view along the road covering our entire front,” James R. Carnahan, a captain in the Eighty-sixth Indiana Infantry, wrote of the attack. “You can see them, as with cap visors drawn well down over their eyes, the gun at the charge, with short, shrill shouts they come, and we see the colors of Longstreet’s corps, flushed with victory, confronting us.” On the Confederate side Capt. William Miller Owen, a staff officer of Brig. Gen. William Preston’s, recorded his impressions: “The men rush over the hastily-constructed breastworks of logs and rails of the foe, with the old time familiar rebel yell, and, wheeling then to the right, the column sweeps the enemy before it, and pushes along the Chattanooga road towards Missionary Ridge in pursuit. It is glorious!” 1
Pushed to a series of hills northwest of the center of the field, the last Union remnants held fast to a region called Horseshoe Ridge, which included Snodgrass Hill and a small cabinlike house owned by George Washington Snodgrass. Only Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas and the remainder of the Federal army held the ground here, earning Thomas the sobriquet “Rock of Chickamauga.” Thomas’s resistance prevented a rout and allowed Rosecrans and the bulk of the Union army to scurry back to Chattanooga.
The battle was a Union disaster—a spectacular, albeit brief, Confederate return to domination. Chickamauga caused panic in Washington, and Lincoln sparked an enormous movement to reinforce Rosecrans’s stunned and mauled army. The new star of the Federal effort, Grant, would arrive to supervise personally the rebuilding of the army, now penned in Chattanooga and depleted of food and supplies.
The reinforcements sent to the Federals in Chattanooga included troops of Maj. Gens. Joseph Hooker and William Tecumseh Sherman, and by October Grant was in town taking charge. Starving and surrounded, the Yankees opened a tenuous “cracker line” of supplies from Bridgeport, Alabama, across a peninsula of land called Moccasin Point alongside the Tennessee River, and into the city. Bragg’s victorious Confederates held the high ground: Lookout Mountain to the south and Missionary Ridge to the east. The river bordered the town on the west and north. Along the Confederate lines, picket duty was tense. Joseph B. Polley, a soldier in Hood’s Texas Brigade, wrote: “All too soon the dreaded and fateful hour arrived; all too soon the whisper order ‘
Forward’ was passed from man to man down the long line, and, like spectral forms in the ghastly moonlight, the Confederate pickets moved slowly out into the open field in their front, every moment expecting to see the flash of a gun and hear or feel its messenger of death.” 2
Bragg’s army was not well supplied and lacked confidence in its commanding general, despite the victory at Chickamauga. Thomas attacked and captured Orchard Knob, a hill midway between the river and Missionary Ridge, on November 23. The following day Hooker’s men assaulted and captured Lookout Mountain, partly aided by a blinding fog that gave the action the name “battle above the clouds,” but mostly aided by the retreat of most of the Confederate troops. On November 25 Bragg concentrated his army along Missionary Ridge. As the bulk of the Federal army fanned into several attack points along the ridge, casualties mounted.
Just as the Union attack seemed desperately stalled, one of the spectacular events of the war occurred. Maj. Gen. Thomas’s men, ordered to proceed from Orchard Knob to the base of Missionary Ridge and capture the rifle pits, proceeded after a pause up the mountain. Waves of blue coated the mountain and slowly captured the Confederate guns high atop its crest. “This, I confess, staggered me,” wrote Maj. James A. Connolly. “‘Charge’ is shouted wildly from hundreds of throats, and with a yell such as that valley never heard before, the three divisions rushed forward. Our men, stirred by some memories, shouted ‘Chickamauga!’ as they scaled the works at the summit.” 3 The Federal high command, watching from Orchard Knob, was stunned.
Bragg had no choice but to retreat into Georgia. Immediately, Federal troops occupied Chattanooga and controlled its railroads and communications. The movement opened up the possibility for Sherman’s invasion of Georgia, the Atlanta campaign, and the March to the Sea that would follow. “The disaster admits of no palliation, and is justly disparaging to me as a commander,” Bragg wrote in a letter to Jefferson Davis. “I trust, however, you may find on full investigation that the fault is not entirely mine.” 4
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