The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian

by Shelby Foote

  Relief in any form would be most welcome, for the strain of frustration these past three years had brought him all too often to the verge of exhaustion and absolute despair. There was, after all, a limit to how many Fredericksburgs and Chancellorsvilles, how many Gettysburgs and Chickamaugas, even how many Olustees and Okolonas a man could survive. Mostly, though, the strain resulted from the difficulty of measuring up to private standards which he defined for a visitor whose petition he turned down, saying: “I desire to so conduct the affairs of this Administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be deep down inside of me.” Public critics he could abide or ignore, even those who called him clod or tyrant, clown or monster—“What’s the harm in letting him have his fling?” he remarked of one of the worst of these; “If he did not pitch into me, he would into some poor fellow he might hurt”—but the critic lodged in his own conscience was not so easily lived with or dismissed. Some men appeared to have little trouble muffling that self-critic: not Lincoln, who saw himself “chained here in this Mecca of office-seekers,” like Prometheus to his rock, a victim of his own darksouled nature. “You flaxen men with broad faces are born with cheer, and don’t know a cloud from a star,” he once told a caller who fit this description; “I am of another temperament.” It sometimes seemed to him, moreover, that each recovery from gloom was made at the cost of future resiliency. “Nothing touches the tired spot,” he had confessed the year before, and lately he had come back to this expression. Returning from a horseback ride that had seemed to lift his spirits, he was urged by a companion to find more time for rest and relaxation. “Rest?” he said. He shook his head, as if the word was unfamiliar. “I don’t know.… I suppose it is good for the body. But the tired part is inside, out of reach.”

  If Grant was the man who could bring this inner weariness some measure of relief, Lincoln was not only willing to call him East to try his hand; he intended to wait no longer, before he did so, than the time required by Congress to pass the necessary legislation.

  Opposing the Federal war of conquest (for, rebellion or revolution, that was what it would have to come to if the North was going to win) the Confederacy was fighting for survival. This had been, and would continue to be, Davis’s principal advantage over his opponent in their respective capacities as leaders of their two nations: that he did not have to persuade his people of the reality of a threat which had been only too apparent ever since the first blue-clad soldier crossed the Potomac, whereas Lincoln was obliged to invoke a danger that was primarily theoretic. In the event that the Union broke in two, democracy might or might not “perish from the earth,” but there could be no doubt at all—even before Sherman created, by way of a preview, his recent “swath of desolation” across Mississippi’s midriff—about what would happen to the South if its bid for independence failed. However, this was only one face of a coin whose down side bore the inscription States Rights. Flip the coin and the advantage passed to Lincoln.

  By suspending habeas corpus, or by ignoring at will such writs as the courts issued, the northern President kept his left hand free to deal as harshly as he pleased with those who sought to stir up trouble in his rear. It was otherwise with Davis. Denied this resource except in such drastic instances as the insurrection two years ago in East Tennessee, he had to meet this kind of trouble with that hand fettered. Often he had claimed this disadvantage as a virtue, referring by contrast to the North as a land where citizens were imprisoned “in utter defiance of all rights guaranteed by the institutions under which they live.” Now though, with the approach of the fourth spring of the war, obstruction and defeatism had swollen to such proportions that conscription could scarcely be enforced or outright traitors prosecuted, so ready were hostile judges to issue writs that kept them beyond the reach of the authorities. Davis was obliged to request of Congress that it permit him to follow procedures he had scorned. “It has been our cherished hope,” he declared in a special message on February 3, “that when the great struggle in which we are engaged was past we might exhibit to the world the proud spectacle of a people … achieving their liberty and independence, after the bloodiest war of modern times, without a single sacrifice of civil right to military necessity. But it can no longer be doubted that the zeal with which the people sprang to arms at the beginning of the contest has, in some parts of the Confederacy, been impaired by the long continuance and magnitude of the struggle.… Discontent, disaffection, and disloyalty are manifested among those who, through the sacrifices of others, have enjoyed quiet and safety at home. Public meetings have been held, in some of which a treasonable design is masked by a pretense of devotion to State sovereignty, and in others is openly avowed.… Secret leagues and associations are being formed. In certain localities, men of no mean position do not hesitate to avow their hostility to our cause and their advocacy of peace on the terms of submission.” All this was painful to admit, even in secret session, but Davis foresaw still greater problems unless the trend was checked. “Disappointment and despondency will displace the buoyant fortitude which animates [our brave soldiers] now. Desertion, already a frightful evil, will become the order of the day.” He knew how sacred to his hearers the writ was, and he assured them that he would not abuse the license he was asking them to grant him. “Loyal citizens will not feel the danger, and the disloyal must be made to fear it. The very existence of extraordinary powers often renders their exercise unnecessary.” In any case, he asserted in conclusion, “to temporize with disloyalty in the midst of war is but to quicken it to the growth of treason. I therefore respectfully recommend that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus be suspended.”

  After twelve days of acrimonious debate—highlighted by an impassioned protest from the Vice President, who sent word from Georgia that if Davis was given the power he sought, “constitutional liberty will go down, never to rise again on this continent”—Congress agreed, though with profound misgivings, to a six-month suspension of the writ. However, the fight did not end there by any means. Stephens and his cohorts merely fell back to prepared positions, ranged in depth along the borders of their several sovereign states, and there continued their resistance under the banner of States Rights. “Georgians, behold your chains!” an Athens newspaper exhorted in an editorial printed alongside the newly passed regulations, which were appropriately framed in mourning borders. “Freemen of a once proud and happy country, contemplate the last act which rivets your bonds and binds you hand and foot, at the mercy of an unlimited military authority.” An Alabama editor demanded the names of those congressmen “who, in secret conclave, obsequiously laid the liberties of this country at the feet of the President,” so that they could be defeated if they had the gall to stand for re-election. Henry Foote, having long since warned that he “would call upon the people to rise, sword in hand, to put down the domestic tyrant who thus sought to invade their rights,” proceeded to do just that. Nor was this defiance limited to words. Under the leadership of such men, Mississippi and Georgia passed flaming resolutions against the act; Louisiana presently did so, too, and North Carolina soon had a law on its books nullifying the action of the central government. Not even these modifications, crippling as they were to the purpose for which the writ had been suspended, allayed the fears of some that the rights of the states were about to be lost in “consolidation.” If such a catastrophe ever came to pass, a Virginian declared, “it would be a kind boon in an overruling Providence to sweep from the earth the soil, along with the people. Better to be a wilderness of waste, than a lasting monument of lost liberty.”

  A wilderness of waste was what was all too likely to result from this nonrecognition of the fact that the South’s whole hope for independence was held up by the bayonets of her soldiers, who in turn required the support of a strong central government if they were to be properly employed—or even, for that matter, clothed and fed—in a ye
ars-long conflict so costly in blood and money, at the stage it now had reached, that its demands could only be met by the enactment and rigid enforcement of laws which did in fact, as those who opposed them charged, involve the surrender of basic “rights” hitherto reserved to the states and the individual. Yet this was the one sacrifice the “impossiblists,” who valued their rights above their chance at national independence, could not make. “Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards,” Stephens had said. “Our liberties, once lost, may be lost forever.” “Why, sir,” a Georgia congressman exclaimed, “this is a war for the Constitution! It is a constitutional war.” It was also, and first, a war for survival; but the ultraconservatives, including the fire-eaters who had done so much to bring it on, had been using the weapon of States Rights too long and with too much success, when they were members of the Union, to discard it now that they had seceded. They simply would rather die than drop that cudgel, even when there was no one to use it on but their own people and nothing to strike at except the solidarity that was their one hope for victory over an adversary whose reserves of men and wealth were practically limitless. It was in this inflexibility that the bill came due for having launched a conservative revolution, and apparently it was necessarily so, even though their anomalous devotion to an untimely creed amounted to an irresistible death-wish. But that was precisely their pride. They had inherited it and they would hand it down, inviolate, to the latest generation; or they would pray God “to sweep from the earth the soil, along with the people.”

  No more than a casual glance at the map sufficed to show the gravity of the military situation they would not relax their civil vigilance to face. Shaded, the Federal gains of the past two years resembled the broad shadow of a bird suspended in flight above the Mississippi Valley, its head hung over Missouri, its tail spread down past New Orleans, and its wings extended from Chesapeake Bay to Texas. What shape the present year would give this shadow was far from clear to those who lived in its penumbra, but they saw clearly enough that the creature who cast it could not be driven back into the land from which it had emerged; at any rate, not to stay there. R. E. Lee, after two expensive attempts to do just that, admitted as much to Davis in early February. “We are not in a condition, and never have been, in my opinion, to invade the enemy’s country with a prospect of permanent benefit,” he wrote, although he added that he hoped, by means of a show of force in East Tennessee or Virginia, to “alarm and embarrass him to some extent, and thus prevent his undertaking anything of magnitude against us.”

  Davis agreed that the South was limited by necessity to the strategic defensive. Indeed, that had been his policy from the start, pursued in the belief that Europe would intervene if the struggle could be protracted. The difference now lay in the object of such protraction. Foreign intervention was obviously never going to come, but he still hoped for intervention of another kind. In the North, a presidential election would be held in November, and he hoped for intervention by a majority of the voters, who then would have their chance to end the bloodshed by replacing Lincoln with a man who stood for peace. Peace, no matter whether it was achieved in the North or the South, in the field or at the polls, meant victory on the terms the Confederate leader had announced at the outset, saying, “All we ask is to be let alone.” In the light of this possibility, the South’s task was to add to the war weariness of the North; which meant, above all, that the enemy was to be allowed no more spirit-lifting triumphs—especially none like Vicksburg or Missionary Ridge, which had set all the church bells ringing beyond the Potomac and the Ohio—and that whatever was lost, under pressure of the odds, must not only be minor in value, but must also be paid for in casualties so heavy that the gain would be clearly disproportionate to the cost, particularly in the judgment of those who would be casting their ballots in November.

  On the face of it—by contrast, that is, with the two preceding years, each of which had included the added burden of launching an invasion that had failed—this did not appear too difficult a task. In the past calendar year, moreover, while the Federal over-all strength was declining from 918,211 to 860,737 men, that of the Confederates increased from 446,622 to 463,181. This was not only the largest number of men the South had had under arms since the war began; it was also nearly 100,000 more than she had had two years ago, on the eve of her greatest triumphs. However, such encouragement as Davis might have derived from a comparison of these New Year’s figures, showing the North-South odds reduced to less than two to one, was short-lived. One month later, Lincoln issued his call for “500,000 more.”

  That was better than ten times the number Lee had on the Rapidan, covering Richmond, or Johnston had around Dalton, covering Atlanta, and since the loss of either of these cities, in addition to being a strategic disaster for the South, would provide the North with a triumph that would be likely to win Lincoln the election, Davis was faced at once with the problem of how to match this call with one of his own. But the hard truth was that nothing like half that many troops—the number required if the current odds were not to be lengthened intolerably for the savage fighting that would open in the spring—could be raised under the present conscription laws, even though these had been strengthened in December by the passage of legislation that modified exemptions, put an end to the hiring of substitutes, and provided for the replacement of able-bodied men, in noncombatant jobs, with veterans who had been incapacitated by wounds or civilians who previously had been passed over for reasons of health. The bottom of the manpower barrel was not only in sight; it had been scraped practically clean to provide the army with every available male within the conscription age-range of eighteen to forty-five. One possibility, unpleasant to contemplate since it would expose the government more than ever to the charge that it was “robbing the cradle and the grave,” would be to extend the range in either or both directions. Another possibility, far more fruitful, was suggested by Pat Cleburne; but it was worse than unpleasant, it was unthinkable. In early January the Irish-born former Helena lawyer prepared and read to his fellow generals in the Army of Tennessee a paper in which he examined the sinking fortunes of the Confederacy and proposed to deal simultaneously with what he conceived to be the two main problems blocking the path to independence: the manpower shortage, which was growing worse with every victory or defeat, and slavery, which he saw as a millstone the nation could no longer afford to carry in its effort to stay afloat on the sea of war. In brief, Cleburne’s proposal was that the South emancipate its Negroes—thus making a virtue of necessity, since in his opinion slavery was doomed anyhow—and enlist them in its armies. This would “change the race from a dreaded weakness to a [source] of strength,” he declared, and added: “We can do this more effectually than the North can now do, for we can give the Negro not only his own freedom, but that of his wife and child, and can secure it to him in his old home.” Moreover, he said, such an action “would remove forever all selfish taint from our cause and place independence above every question of property. The very magnitude of the sacrifice itself, such as no nation has ever voluntarily made before, would appall our enemies … and fill our hearts with a pride and singleness of purpose which would clothe us with new strength in battle.”

  Recovering presently from the shock into which the foreign-born general’s views had thrown them, the corps and division commanders were unanimous in their condemnation of the proposal, which they saw as a threat to everything they held dear. “I will not attempt to describe my feelings on being confronted by a project so startling in its character,” one wrote in confidence to a friend. He labeled the paper a “monstrous proposition … revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor,” and predicted that “if this thing is once openly proposed to the army the total disintegration of that army will follow in a fortnight.” Advised by Johnston and the others to proceed no further with the matter, Cleburne did not insist that the paper be forwarded, but another general conside
red it so “incendiary” in character that he took the trouble to get a copy and send it on to Richmond. There the reaction was much the same, apparently, as the one it had provoked in Dalton. Johnston received, before the month was out, a letter from the Secretary of War, expressing “the earnest conviction of the President that the dissemination or even promulgation of such opinions under the present circumstances of the Confederacy, whether in the army or among the people, can be productive only of discouragement, distraction, and dissension.” The army commander was instructed to see to “the suppression, not only of the memorial itself, but likewise of all discussion and controversy respecting or growing out of it.” Johnston replied that Cleburne, having observed the manner in which it was received, had already “put away his paper,” and that he himself had had “no reason since to suppose that it made any impression.” In point of fact, the suppression Richmond called for was so effective that nothing further was heard of the document for more than thirty years, when it finally turned up among the posthumous papers of a staff officer. One possible effect it had, however, and that was on Cleburne himself, or in any case on his career. Although Seddon had assured Johnston that “no doubt or mistrust is for a moment entertained of the patriotic intents of the gallant author of the memorial,” and though the Arkansan was considered by many to be the best division commander in either army, South or North, he was never assigned any larger duties than those he had at the time he proposed to emancipate the slaves of the South and enlist them in her struggle for independence.