Although he was just twenty-five at war’s end, John Worsham had matured beyond his years, a necessary outcome of the trauma he had lived through. The same could not be said of all the Southern politicians and generals who survived the war. Few wanted to face up to the fact that they had been a cause of the Confederacy’s ruin. “You are represented to have manifested surprise that no citizen of the South had appealed to the Government in behalf of Mr. Davis,” Howell Cobb wrote the Union secretary of state, William H. Seward, soon after the war ceased. Seward himself was recovering still from hideous injuries suffered on the bloody night of murder in Washington the previous April, when President Lincoln had been killed. “You had evidently inferred from this silence on the part of the people of the South that there existed among them—to say the least—a feeling of indifference on the subject,” Cobb continued.
“My object is to disabuse your mind of such erroneous impression,” wrote the man who had served as first provisional president of the Confederacy. He continued:
During the latter portion of the late struggle public opinion in reference to Mr. Davis and his administration was much divided. There were those who fully approved the policy of his administration and as a matter of course gave it their unqualified support. There were others who differed upon many points from his policy who still gave an earnest support to his administration from a conviction that such a course alone promised success to the cause which they had so deeply at heart. There was another class even more opposed to his policy and who believed that success under his lead was impracticable and therefore urged a change of administration. Whilst there existed these differences of opinion there was one point upon which all were agreed, and that was that Mr. Davis was true and faithful to the trust which had been reposed in him. 5
And so began the remaking of the war, the remolding of the words, the impression of deep unity, which continues in the way many view the war to this day.
And this rewriting of history, this refighting battles on paper, this massaging of the political facts, was just taking hold. Within the year, in force by the end of the century, the Confederacy’s politicians would become saints, its generals unsurpassed heroes once again, thanks to the writers of Southern history.
The revisionism began at the top. From the papers of Burton Harrison, Jefferson Davis’s secretary, one finds ink notations—corrections—made by the Confederate president. Davis changed the claim he had been “among the keenest and most sagacious of them all in his endeavour to precipitate secession upon the country” to “in his assertion of the rights of the States under the Constitution and of the right of Secession—although the records of Congress show that he cherished the utmost devotion to the Union and consistently opposed extremists of all parties who were endeavouring to precipitate actual secession.” A uniter, not a divider. In a passage touching on his address in Montgomery as Confederate president, he reworked “prophesying [sic] peace, but threatening that the enemies of the South would be compelled to ‘smell Southern powder, and feel Southern steel’” to “expressing his desire for the maintenance of peaceful relations with the States which remained in the Union—asserted that all that the seceding States desired was ‘to be let alone’—but announced that, if war should be forced upon them, they would make the enemies of the South ‘smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.’” 6
Davis always appreciated how his revolution recalled the American Revolution of his generation’s grandfathers, how that echo somehow ennobled the cause of Confederate independence. Diehard Confederates churned out such verses as “Rebels before / Our fathers of yore / Rebel’s the righteous name / Washington bore / Why, then, be ours the same.” 7
The Confederate president promoted this theme during the war and vigorously stoked it afterward. He also pushed the idea that the Union victory was due to overwhelming odds, that the cleverer and more highly skilled soldiers of the South simply were beaten down in the end by huge numbers of undesirable immigrant troops from the North and by the Union’s endless resources. He downplayed or ignored the strategic and tactical victories of Yankee generals. But perhaps most significantly Davis tried to weave a nostalgic view of how the Confederate troops, generals in the field, and politicians all got along. It was a utopia that the Yankees swooped down upon and spoiled, and according to Davis, the world would have been a better place had it continued without ruin from these wicked Northern aggressors.
Davis’s harmonic world was a dream—one that ignored the bitter squabbles of those who needed to cooperate the most in order for the Confederacy to succeed. The roll call included Aleck Stephens, Robert Hunter, Henry Foote, Robert Rhett, Louis Wigfall, and Bob Toombs, a gallery of men who held old-school principles—state rights and slavery—higher than the existence of their own creation, the Confederacy.
THIS romanticized version of the Confederacy took hold immediately after the war and never let go. Whereas Union military victors had little to prove on paper, Southerners continued to fight the war, invoking numerous “what-ifs” to imagine what could have been, downplaying the role of slavery in going to war, and constructing a new mythology of the Southern soldier. At the war’s outset the popular myth had been, “One Southerner can lick ten Yankees.” That turned out not to be the case. Now a new mythology arose: “The South lost, even though it fought better and with a superior class of soldiers, because of overwhelming Northern manpower and war matériel.”
In the pages of many early Southern histories of the war, the Confederates seem to win practically every battle. The sarcastic question that came later to many observers was, if the South won virtually all the battles, how could it have lost the war?
Americans love myths, and they love imagining what might have been, particularly for underdogs. The popularity of the underdog myth was aided and abetted by the nonresponse from Northern participants, who were much less engaged in recounting the war’s actions. The majority of Yankees felt they had won the war, it had been an enormous unwanted distraction, and they wanted to get on with normal life again.
But Southerners great and small continued to fight on paper the war they had lost in reality. Some did it to salvage their reputations; others simply to bolster their damaged sense of pride amid the wreckage of the New South, now experiencing the early days of a painful Reconstruction. Others twisted the truth of what had happened to build a new sense of pride for their children and grandchildren, so the stigma of having lost the war could be lifted as quickly as possible. In this mode of Southern Reconstruction, the revisionists created a powerful Lost Cause mythology that downplayed the actual reasons for secession and put forth the “overwhelming numbers” argument in all its glory.
Many early books published in the South shortly after the war carried the seeds of these themes, including virtually all the general histories of the war published in the South. But the movement really took hold a few years after Appomattox, in Richmond, with the formation of a new organization dedicated to remembering the war and its dead—the Southern Historical Society.
Founded by a group of ex-Confederate officers in 1869, the Southern Historical Society quickly became the preeminent organization aiming to “set the record straight” with regard to the war history. “No Southern man who reads the very personal and partisan chapters of the ‘Lost Cause,’ or the unjust and unreasonable history of the late war as compiled by Northern writers for the deception of the world and its posterity, can be satisfied,” read an announcement for the society’s founding. (The book referred to here is Richmond newspaper editor Edward Pollard’s The Lost Cause, which attacked the foolishness of many Confederate military decisions as well as Jefferson Davis’s ability as president.)
Soon after its formation the society began publishing a landmark set of journals collectively termed the Southern Historical Society Papers. Containing contributions by ex-officers who included the fiercely unreconstructed Jubal A. Early, Lee’s former field general, the Papers set about to rewrite history. Their
authors attempted to justify secession; promote the theory that overwhelming Union manpower and supplies unjustly defeated a noble Southern band of brothers; suggest within the Confederacy that Virginia and Virginians were the preeminent leaders of the South, the constant battlefield heroes; and—after his death, in 1870—push Robert E. Lee as a new American cult hero. The conclusions put forth by the Virginians were helped to congeal into popular memory by the fact that few other states or cities had organized societies with the ability to muster a wide-ranging publicity campaign as did the Richmond group.
Moreover, most Northern writers were still racist by today’s standards (and would be for a long time to come), and so on all sides of the equation, the moral aspect of the Civil War was downplayed significantly. Few Yankee writers wanted to go on record to support the truth and get into the nitty-gritty details of slavery, and so they abetted the Southern version of events by, in many cases, simply not responding to it.
While the upper class of the Confederate Army, the officers and Virginians, had its Southern Historical Society Papers, common soldiers also had a major outlet where they could publish wholesale fabrications of revisionist thought, though it came along a little later. In 1893 the Nashville newspaperman S. A. Cunningham founded Confederate Veteran, a monthly journal published “in the interest of Confederate veterans and kindred topics.” This title joined The Land We Love, published by the former Confederate general D. H. Hill, as a hodgepodge of battle anecdotes, stories about the South, poetry, reports on veterans’ activities, and apologia for secession.
Gradually, by attrition, Confederate writers discovered their power of persuasion. If you wrote something often enough, eventually a lot of people would believe it.
And this perception still holds on to the American imagination today. Not just in the Southeast, but everywhere in the United States, the romanticized version of the Confederacy is the one people predominantly believe in and hold out as fact. In the South the perception has been fueled not only by bloodlines and the assumed correctness of anything an ancestor ever did, but also by the adoption of these themes into the “official viewpoint” of such heritage groups as the United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, fraternal organizations that still hold many members. How could any member of the SCV possibly believe that the principle Southern politicians held most sacred, state rights, would be the thing that killed it like a cancer from the inside?
Americans believe in dreams. Dreams caused the Civil War, some have said—different dreams of what the future could be among those in the North and South. The dream of the Confederacy started out with an expectation of nobility and ended cloaked in revisionist elitism. Both dreams contain fantastic, almost unbelievable, stories. But the story of what really happened is far more intriguing—and useful. If we are to learn from the history of men, we must be frank about their humanity. Those who led the Confederacy were not gods. They were men, sometimes bold and sometimes weak, sometimes hateful and sometimes grand, sometimes selfish, not always sober. Together they formed an imperfect union, and together they destroyed it.
Postlude
P. G. T. Beauregard beat the odds. The Little Creole, age forty-seven when the war ended, prospered afterward, returning to New Orleans and employing his engineering talents as superintendent of railroad and street railway companies. Along with former Confederate lieutenant general Jubal Early, he profited greatly as a supervisor of the scandal-plagued Louisiana Lottery. Beauregard fought his last battles on paper, swiping at Jefferson Davis, the adherents to Albert Sidney Johnston, and Joe Johnston and defending his record at First Manassas and his claim to leadership at Shiloh. He served his last years as adjutant general of the Louisiana militia and supervisor of public works in New Orleans, where he died in 1893.
Braxton Bragg was never forgiven by many for helping to orchestrate the removal of Joe Johnston from command of the Army of Tennessee. In the end Bragg had been tragically miscast: he had been assigned a range of responsibilities so unsuited to his personality that failure was almost guaranteed. Bragg caught up with President Davis’s party at war’s end, just in time to inform the Confederate leader that hope was lost. Afterward Bragg served as superintendent of the New Orleans waterworks before moving to Alabama and then Texas. He died in Galveston in 1876, after suddenly dropping to the ground while walking down a street.
Samuel Cooper is still the forgotten central figure of the Confederacy, as he was after the war. The New Jersey native who married a Southern bride fled Richmond and, on the southward journey from Danville, was allowed to leave the party to surrender. He immediately gave the Yankee authorities his voluminous records, which constituted much of the official paperwork of the Confederacy, as many other caches had been destroyed in the abandonment of the capital. At age sixty-seven, weak from stress and impoverished, Cooper returned from Richmond to Alexandria, Virginia, to quietly live out his remaining days. The much-maligned “glorified clerk” received financial aid from several fellow officers, including Robert E. Lee. He died during the final month of 1876.
Jefferson Davis saw his mental health decline precipitously, draining further his already feeble body. Blamed by Northerners since before Sumter as chief architect of the rebellion, he was not yet accustomed to being held accountable by the majority of Southerners for the Confederacy’s collapse. Captured at Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865, the fifty-six-year-old spent the next two years in prison at Fort Monroe, Virginia, awaiting a trial for treason that never came. Released into a world that had completely changed, Davis nevertheless continued life as a Confederate, albeit one who simply wrote about the past from a study lined with books in Biloxi, Mississippi. Davis’s famous tome The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government contained more irrational than useful information, and it attacked Joe Johnston and Beauregard as much as it supported friends such as Bragg and Northrop. Hero status at last came to Davis in his final years, when many rational Southerners decided that he had been in a no-win situation and had done a relatively effective job running the war. Davis died in 1889, survived by his wife and two daughters.
Henry S. Foote spent the first few months of postwar life getting over the embarrassment of his abortive, self-created peace mission to the Yankees. On Andrew Johnson’s succession as president, Foote had been ordered by Federal authorities to flee the country or stand trial for treason; he swiftly made tracks for Montreal. Foote finally took the oath of allegiance and was allowed back into the country, settling in Nashville, by 1867. At age sixty-three, the testy politician took up writing, producing two books about the war and his experiences. He then moved to Washington to resume his law practice and write for a newspaper. Ever marked by inconsistency and scathing criticism toward others, Foote attributed the war to a “blundering generation” of sectionalists. He switched parties, becoming a Republican, and subsequently served as superintendent of the U.S. Mint at New Orleans. Returning home in ill health, he died in Nashville, in 1881, “a decrepit old gentleman with a fiery red head.”
John Bell Hood continued to fight the war on paper, penning his bitter volume Advance and Retreat to defend himself against charges of total incompetency after the Franklin and Nashville campaign. At thirty-four he moved to New Orleans, married—but not the girl he had fallen deeply in love with during the war—and became a cotton merchant. As he searched for a publisher willing to distribute his book, Hood—followed by others in his family—was struck by yellow fever during the epidemic of 1878-79. His wife and daughter succumbed to the disease in August 1879; before the month was out, Hood himself died. Advance and Retreat was subsequently published and raised money to help his ten orphaned children.
Robert M. T. Hunter was arrested at war’s end and imprisoned in Fort Pulaski, Georgia, until February 1866. On his release Hunter, fifty-seven, learned that his lands in Virginia had been desecrated by soldiers under Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler. He returned to Virginia to resume a law prac
tice and commenced farming. Hunter resumed his role in state politics and served as vice president of the Southern Historical Society, an office that led to more clashes with Jefferson Davis, this time over their recollections of the war. Conscription, emancipation of slaves, and peace proposals continued to be subjects of heated debate between Davis and Hunter. Hunter eventually was named collector of the Port of Tappahannock, northeast of Richmond on the Rappahannock River, by President Cleveland. He died in 1887.
Joseph E. Johnston surrendered what remained of the Army of Tennessee on April 26 at Bennett Place, North Carolina, and resumed a civilian life. At age fifty-eight, he entered the railroad and express transportation businesses, living in Virginia, Alabama, and Washington, DC. Johnston also served a term as U.S. representative from Virginia. Johnston’s Narrative of Military Operations Directed during the Late War between the States, published in 1874, summarized his arguments with Davis and others and rationalized his actions, hoping to thwart critics. Ironically, Johnston fell ill in the winter of 1891, while standing in the rain acting as an honorary pallbearer at William Tecumseh Sherman’s funeral. Beside the coffin of his old nemesis, Johnston caught cold and—just four weeks later—died.
Robert E. Lee towered over the crumbling reputation of Davis as the postwar years dragged on. Lee contemplated writing his memoirs but had too few papers left to get the project going. Instead, he accepted the presidency of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, and focused on influencing the next generation of Southerners through education. Lee tirelessly raised money for the school, which later would be renamed Washington and Lee University. The general’s health eventually deteriorated, however, as it had started to during the final two years of the war. In October 1870, at age sixty-three, he suffered a stroke and died in Lexington.
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