The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Certainly Davis saw him in that light, increasingly so with the passing months, and never more so than in this early-December amnesty offer. “That despot,” he now called Lincoln, whose “purpose in his message and proclamation was to shut out all hope that he would ever treat with us, on any terms.” Acceptance would amount to unconditional surrender, Davis asserted, and by way of showing what he meant he paraphrased the offer: “If we will break up our government, dissolve the Confederacy, disband our armies, emancipate our slaves, take an oath of allegiance binding ourselves to him and to disloyalty to our states, he proposes to pardon us and not to plunder us of anything more than the property already stolen from us.… In order to render his proposals so insulting as to secure their rejection, he joins to them a promise to support with his army one tenth of the people of any state who will attempt to set up a government over the other nine tenths, thus seeking to sow discord and suspicion among the people of the several states, and to excite them to civil war in furtherance of his ends.”

  Thus Davis reflected a reversed mirror-image of his adversary’s offer, saying: “I do not believe that the vilest wretch would accept such terms.” Without exception southern editors agreed. “We who have committed no offense need no forgiveness,” they protested, quoting Benjamin Franklin’s reply to a British offer of amnesty. “How impudent it is,” the Richmond Sentinel observed of Lincoln, “to come with our brothers’ blood upon his accursed hands, and ask us to accept his forgiveness! But he goes further. He makes his forgiveness dependent on terms.” Congress was more vigorous in its protest. Resolutions were introduced denouncing “the truly characteristic proclamation of amnesty issued by the imbecile and unprincipled usurper who now sits enthroned upon the ruins of Constitutional liberty in Washington City,” while others made it abundantly clear that the people of the Confederacy, through their elected representatives, did “hereby, solemnly and irrevocably, utterly deny, defy, spurn back, and scorn the terms of amnesty offered by Abraham Lincoln in his official proclamation.” All such resolutions were tabled, however, upon the protest by one member that they “would appear to dignify a paper emanating from that wretched and detestable abortion, whose contemptible emptiness and folly will only receive the ridicule of the civilized world.” It was decided, accordingly, that “the true and only treatment which that miserable and contemptible despot, Lincoln, should receive at the hands of the House is silent and unmitigated contempt.”

  Unmitigated this contempt might be, but silent was the one thing it was not. In fact, as various members continued to plumb and scale the various depths and heights of oratory, it grew more strident all the time. Evidently they had been touched where they were sore. And indeed, in its review of Lincoln’s message, the New York World had warned that such would be the case. Violence was a characteristic of the revolutionary impulse, the World declared; “You can no more control it than a flaxen hand can fetter flame”; so that if what the President was really seeking was reconciliation—or even, as Davis claimed, division within the Confederate ranks—he could scarcely have chosen a worse approach. “If Mr Lincoln were a statesman, if he were even a man of ordinary prudence and sagacity, he would see the necessity for touching the peculiar wound of the South with as light a hand as possible.” What the editor had in mind was slavery, and so did the frock-coated gentlemen in Richmond, along with much else which they believed was endangered by this war of arms and propaganda. In the course of their two-month session they gave the matter a great deal of attention, and before it was over they produced a joint resolution, issued broadcast as an “Address of Congress to the People of the Confederate States.” Specifically an attack on the Lincoln administration for its policies and conduct of the war, the resolution was also an exhortation for the southern people to continue their resistance to northern force and blandishments, including the recent amnesty proclamation.

  It is absurd to pretend that a government really desirous of restoring the Union would adopt such measures as the confiscation of private property, the emancipation of slaves, the division of a sovereign state without its consent, and a proclamation that one tenth of the population of a state, and that tenth under military rule, should control the will of the remaining nine tenths. The only relation possible between the two sections under such a policy is that of conqueror and conquered, superior and dependent. Rest assured, fellow citizens, that although restoration may still be used as a war cry by the northern government, it is only to delude and betray. Fanaticism has summoned to its aid cupidity and vengeance, and nothing short of your utter subjugation, the destruction of your state governments, the overthrow of your social and political fabric, your personal and public degradation and ruin, will satisfy the demands of the North.

  About midway through the lengthy document, after charging that the Federals had provoked the war and were “accountable for the blood and havoc and ruin it has caused,” the legislators presented a catalogue of “atrocities too incredible for narration.”

  Instead of a regular war, our resistance to the unholy efforts to crush out our national existence is treated as a rebellion, and the settled international rules between belligerents are ignored. Instead of conducting the war as betwixt two military and political organizations, it is a war against the whole population. Houses are pillaged and burned. Churches are defaced. Towns are ransacked. Clothing of women and infants is stripped from their persons. Jewelry and mementoes of the dead are stolen. Mills and implements of agriculture are destroyed. Private saltworks are broken up. The introduction of medicines is forbidden. Means of subsistence are wantonly wasted to produce beggary. Prisoners are returned with contagious diseases.…

  The list continued, then finally broke off. “We tire of these indignities and enormities. They are too sickening for recital,” the authors confessed, and passed at once to the lesson to be learned from them. “It is better to be conquered by any other nation than by the United States. It is better to be a dependency of any other power than of that.… We cannot afford to take steps backward. Retreat is more dangerous than advance. Behind us are inferiority and degradation. Before us is everything enticing to a patriot.” As for how the war was to be won, the answer was quite simple: by perseverance.

  Moral like physical epidemics have their allotted periods, and must sooner or later be exhausted and disappear. When reason returns, our enemies will probably reflect that a people like ours, who have exhibited such capabilities and extemporized such resources, can never be subdued; that a vast expanse of territory with such a population cannot be governed as an obedient colony. Victory would not be conquest. The inextinguishable quarrel would be transmitted “from bleeding sire to son,” and the struggle would be renewed between generations yet unborn.… There is no just reason for hopelessness or fear. Since the outbreak of the war the South has lost the nominal possession of the Mississippi River and fragments of her territory; but Federal occupation is not conquest. The fires of patriotism still burn unquenchably in the breasts of those who are subject to foreign domination. We have yet in our uninterrupted control a territory which, according to past progress, will require the enemy ten years to overrun.

  In conclusion—though the words came strangely from the lips of men who, despite their nominal membership in a single national party, comprised perhaps the most fractious, factious political assembly in the western world to date—the legislators recommended “unfaltering trust,” on the part of the southern people in their leaders, as the surest guide if they would tread “the path that leads to honor and peace, although it lead through tears and suffering and blood.”

  Let all spirit of faction and past party differences be forgotten in the presence of our cruel foe.… We entreat from all a generous and hearty co-operation with the government in all branches of its administration, and with the agents, civil or military, in the performance of their duties. Moral aid has the “power of the incommunicable,” and, by united efforts, by an all-comprehending and self-sacrificing patriotis
m, we can, with the blessing of God, avert the perils which environ us, and achieve for ourselves and children peace and freedom. Hitherto the Lord has interposed graciously to bring us victory, and in His hand there is present power to prevent this great multitude which come against us from casting us out of the possession which He has given us to inherit.

  Such were the first bitter fruits of Lincoln’s proclamation, offering amnesty to individuals and seeking to establish certain guidelines for the future reconstruction of the South.

  Receiving on December 9 the President’s instructions for him to come to Richmond, Lee supposed a decision had been reached to send him to North Georgia as Bragg’s successor, despite his expressed reluctance to leave the Old Dominion and the army whose fame had grown with his own in the eighteen months since Davis placed him at its head. With Longstreet in East Tennessee, Ewell absent sick, and A. P. Hill as usual in poor health, the summons came at what seemed to him an unfortunate time, particularly since the latter two, even aside from their physical debility, had not fulfilled his expectations in their present subordinate positions. But orders were orders; he left at once. “My heart and thoughts will always be with this army,” he said in a note to Stuart as he boarded at Orange a train that had him in the capital before nightfall.

  He found to his relief, however, that no decision had been made regarding his transfer to the western theater. The President, in conference with his Cabinet on the matter of selecting a new leader for the army temporarily under Hardee, had merely wanted his ranking field commander there to share in the discussion. Lee’s reluctance having been honored to the extent that it had removed him from consideration for the post, the advisers found it difficult to agree on a second choice. Not only were they divided among themselves; Davis withheld approval of every candidate proposed. Some were all for Beauregard, for instance, but the Commander in Chief had even less confidence in the Creole than he had in Joe Johnston, who was being recommended warmly in the press, on the floor of Congress, in letters from friends, and by Seddon. While the Secretary admitted that he had been disappointed by his fellow Virginian’s “absence of enterprise” in the recent Mississippi operations, he believed that “his military sagacity would not fail to recognize the exigencies of the time and position, and so direct all his thoughts and skill to an offensive campaign.” Davis was doubtful. He rather agreed with Benjamin, who protested that during his six-month tenure as Secretary of War he had found in Johnston “tendencies to defensive strategy and a lack of knowledge of the environment.” Others present inclined to the same view. On the evidence, Old Joe’s talent seemed primarily for retreat: so much so, indeed, that if left to his own devices he might be expected to wind up gingerly defending Key West and complaining that he lacked transportation for a withdrawal to Cuba in the event that something threatened one of his flanks. Finally, however, at the close of a full week of discussion, Johnston was favored by a majority of those present, and the minority, though still unreconciled to his appointment, confessed that it had no one else to offer. According to Seddon, “the President, after doubt and with misgiving to the end, chose him … not as with exaltation on this score, but as the best on the whole to be obtained.” He wired him at Meridian that same day, December 16, two weeks after Bragg had been relieved: “You will turn over the immediate command of the Army of Mississippi to Lieutenant General Polk and proceed to Dalton and assume command of the Army of Tennessee.… A letter of instructions will be sent to you at Dalton.”

  Requested to inspect the capital defenses, Lee stayed on for another five days, during which time he was lionized by the public and invited by the House of Representatives to take what was infelicitously called “a seat on the floor.” After the Sunday service at Saint Paul’s he was given a silent ovation as he passed down the aisle, bowing left and right to friends in the congregation, and forty-year-old Mrs Chesnut, who prided herself on her sophistication, confessed in her diary that when the general “bowed low and gave me a smile of recognition, I was ashamed of being so pleased. I blushed like a schoolgirl.” A four-day extension of the visit would have allowed him to spend his first Christmas with his family since two years before the war, but he would not have it so; he was thinking of his army on the Rapidan and the men there who were far from home as this gayest of holidays drew near. For their part, while they envied, they did not resent his good fortune. In point of fact, they doubted that he would take advantage of it. “It will be more in accordance with his peculiar character,” a staff major wrote from Orange to his sweetheart on December 20, “if he leaves for the army just before the great anniversary; he is so very apt to suppress or deny his personal desire when it conflicts with the performance of his duty.” The young officer was right. Lee returned next day, having sacrificed a Richmond Christmas with his wife in order to be with his troops and share in their frugal celebration of what had always been for Southerners a combination of all that was best in the gladdest days of the departing year.

  All was quiet in the camps along the Rapidan, but the cavalry had been kept busy in his absence—and fruitlessly busy, at that—attempting to head off or break up a raid into Southwest Virginia, deep in the army’s rear, by a column of hard-riding horsemen under Averell, who had been given an independent brigade after Hooker relieved him of duty amid the fury of Chancellorsville. Regaining the safety of his own lines on the day Lee returned to Orange, Averell proudly reported that in the past two weeks his troopers had “marched, climbed, slid, and swum 355 miles,” avoided superior combinations of graybacks sent to scatter or capture them, and cut the Tennessee & Virginia Railroad at Salem (just west of a hamlet called Big Lick, which twenty years later would change its name to Roanoke and grow to be a city) where three depots crammed with food and equipment on consignment to the Army of Northern Virginia were set afire. At a cost of 6 men drowned, 5 wounded, and 94 missing, he had captured some 200 of the enemy, 84 of whom he brought back with him, together with about 150 horses. This time he left no sack of coffee for his friend Fitzhugh Lee, who commanded one of the columns that failed to intercept him, but he could say, as he had said before: “Here’s your visit. How do you like it?” Fitz liked it no better now than he had done in March, after Kelly’s Ford. Nor did Stuart, who was presented with further evidence of the decline of the advantage he had enjoyed in the days when his superior riders were mounted on superior, well-fed horses.

  Meanwhile the foot soldiers took it easy, blue and gray alike. Meade’s withdrawal from Lee’s formidable Mine Run front—accomplished with such skill and stealth that his opponent’s resultant attitude resembled that of a greenhorn lured into the Wilderness by pranksters who left him holding the bag on a “snipe hunt”—had ended all infantry operations for the year. On both sides of the river the two armies went into winter quarters, beginning what would be a five-month rest. On the north bank, for Meade despite his crankiness was liberal in such matters, generals, colonels, majors, even captains were able to bring their wives into camp on extended visits. One witness considered their presence greatly beneficial, and not only to their husbands. “Their influence softens and humanizes much that might otherwise be harsh and repulsive,” he declared. “In their company, at least, officers who should be gentlemen do not get drunk.” On the other hand, a high-toned Massachusetts staff man was a good deal less enthusiastic about these army ladies. “Such a set of feminine humans I have not seen often,” he wrote home. “It was Lowell’s factories broken loose and gone wild.” However, except on the off chance that a few orderlies got lucky, all this meant little to the enlisted men, who were obliged to depend on their own resources and limit the count of their blessings to the fact that they were not to be shot at for a while. “The troops burrowed into the earth and built their little shelters,” a Federal brigadier was to recall, “and the officers and men devoted themselves to unlimited festivity, balls, horse races, cockfights, greased pigs and poles, and other games such as only soldiers can devise.”

  For most of
the people of Richmond, women and old men and children, politicians and officeholders of high and low degree, as well as for the maimed and convalescent veterans in private homes and hospitals on the city’s seven hills, this holiday season was scarcely gayer than it was for their friends and kinsmen on the Rapidan with Lee. For some few others, however, owners of plantations down the country, not yet taken over by invaders, provisions had been forwarded for laying out a meal that had at least a resemblance to the feasts of olden times. Christmas dinner at Colonel and Mrs Chesnut’s, for example, included oyster soup, boiled mutton, ham, boned turkey, wild duck and partridges, plum pudding, and four kinds of wine to wash it down with. “There is life in the old land yet!” the diarist exclaimed.

  Among her guests that day was John Bell Hood, the social catch of the town. Taken a few miles south of the field where he lost his leg, he had spent a month in bed on a North Georgia farm and then, because it was feared he might be captured so near the enemy lines, continued his convalescence in Atlanta for another month before coming on to Richmond in late November. With his left arm still in a sling and his right trouser leg hanging empty, his eyes deep-set in a pain-gaunted face above the full blond beard of a Wagnerian hero, the thirty-two-year-old bachelor general had the ladies fluttering around him, his hostess said, “as if it would be a luxury to pull out their handkerchiefs and have a good cry.” Instead, they brought him oranges and peeled and sliced them for him, prompting another guest to remark that “the money value of friendship is easily counted now,” since oranges were selling in the capital markets for five Confederate dollars each. Shortly after Chickamauga, Longstreet had recommended the Kentucky-born Texan’s promotion to lieutenant general “for distinguished conduct and ability in the battle of the 20th instant.” Moreover, although Hood was nearly six years younger than A. P. Hill, the present youngest officer of that rank, there was little doubt that the promotion would be confirmed; for he was now an intimate of the President’s and accompanied him on carriage rides and tours of inspection, in and about the city.