Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  Following repeated two-week transits of the Atlantic by diplomats of all sides, Lincoln decided that his first instinct on how to respond to the unwonted necessity to end the war by compromise was correct. It was by now winter and economic conditions, which had temporarily stabilized, were deteriorating further and causing great public suffering. He chose Senator Davis, Senator Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois Republican (who was first elected as a Democrat), and Senator David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Republican, to approach the Confederate government concerning setting up a convention in the manner suggested by Senator Davis’s resolution.49

  The Confederate response to the contact was to demand an armistice and a lifting of the blockade as a precondition for meeting in such a convention. Lincoln realized that he had no choice in the matter, and the Armistice of Havana was signed on Sunday, February 1, 1863, at the Viceroy’s Palace, effectively ending the war.

  Terms for the convention to conclude the war were worked out and the proceedings opened in Toronto, Canada, on May 1, 1863. There was never any real doubt about its outcome. The Treaty of Toronto granting the Confederate States of America independence and settling the border between the United States and the Confederate States was signed on Monday, August 3, 1863.

  The Reality

  “General Lee at the beginning of this march [into Maryland] was suffering from a painful hurt which to some extent disabled him throughout the Maryland campaign. On the day after the second battle of Manassas [Sunday, August 31, 1862] he was standing near the stone bridge, surrounded by a group of officers, when a squadron of Federal cavalry suddenly appeared on the brow of a neighboring hill. A movement of excitement in the group followed, with the effect of frightening the general’s horse. The animal gave a quick start, and his master, who was standing beside him with his arm in the bridle, was flung violently to the ground with such force as to break some of the bones in his right hand. This disabled him so he was unable to ride during the greater part of the campaign.”50

  Other sources simply say that Lee tripped while reaching for the reins of his horse, and falling, caught himself on his hands.51 Whatever the direct cause, Lee was dismounted, “in obvious intense pain,”52 had both arms in splints and slings, was unable to feed or dress himself, and was unable to write.53 He traveled in an ambulance, dictated his dispatches, and was not on horseback again until the morning of the battle of Antietam, Wednesday, September 17, 1862, and even then he had to be “[h]oisted onto Traveller’s back,” and an orderly held the horse’s reins.54

  During the Civil War, battlefields were ordinarily sufficiently compact that a commanding general could, by moving usually less than a mile in any direction on horseback, see both flanks and the center himself, and make decisions based upon what his own senses of sight and hearing told him, supplemented by reports from subordinates. Being on horseback elevated the officer’s viewpoint, allowing him to see over marching troops and low obstructions, and allowed swift movement from place to place over broken ground. During the Maryland campaign, Lee’s injuries denied him these customary advantages. However, the only major battle he directed during this campaign was the defensive fight at Antietam, where he was again mounted, if not fully mobile. No reports can be found arguing that his temporary infirmity negatively impacted his leadership on that day.

  However, as anyone who has suffered serious injury can attest, an injury saps a person’s energy. More importantly, in the sleep-deprived environment of a military commander on the move, injuries such as Lee suffered would have made what little sleep was available restless, interrupted, and not refreshing. Also, Lee may not have sat still for an orderly to feed him with the regularity necessary to keep up his calorie intake. The net result was most likely a measurable increase in fatigue, accompanying loss of mental acuity, and a tendency toward “tunnel vision,” that is pressing ahead with preconceived plans and intentions instead of taking notice of changes in circumstances and rigorously re-examining plans and actions from a critical perspective. This marginal diminution in Lee’s great capacities arguably played a role in the evolution of the 1862 Maryland campaign.

  Lee’s dispatch to Jefferson Davis, dictated on the morning of September 9, reveals evidence of mild confusion and diminished mental acuity.55 Later that day, he writes to Davis again and has decided to move his army west. Finally, still later on the 9th, he holds a fateful commander’s conference with Stonewall Jackson, later joined by Longstreet, and decides to dispatch Jackson, McLaws, and Walker on a three-pronged expedition against Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry, while moving west himself with the balance of the army to Boonsboro. This decision was reduced to writing in Special Order No. 191.56

  “One unusually grateful Marylander told [General Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’] Jackson that he had the finest horse in the state and would feel deeply blessed if the general would accept the mount as a gift. The animal was a gigantic gray mare, heavy and awkward in comparison with the still-lost Little Sorrel. Jackson somewhat embarrassingly [sic] accepted the horse and tested her that evening. The animal shortly turned out to be a ‘trojan horse’… Saturday morning, September 6, broke pleasant and bright but quickly took a near disastrous turn. Jackson mounted the new horse for the ride to Frederick. The animal did not want to move. Jackson touched her with a spur; at that, the mare reared straight up before losing her balance. Horse and rider fell heavily to the ground. Jackson admitted that he was injured ‘considerably.’ He lay on the ground for a half hour while surgeons made examinations. The general was stunned and bruised. He had acute pain but nothing seemed to be broken. For a few hours, he rode ingloriously in an ambulance.”57

  In fact, Jackson could just as easily have been seriously injured or even killed. From the description of the incident, he may have been concussed, but not seriously.

  Lee’s decision to move west from Frederick and split his forces ultimately into five parts in the face of the Union advance cost him the operational initiative. Arguably, the speed and organization of the Union advance from Washington was such that, even absent McClellan’s lucky find of the “lost orders,” General D.H. Hill’s copy of Special Order No. 191 setting forth Confederate plans for the campaign,58 Lee would have been compelled to fall back toward the Potomac to re-concentrate the dispersed elements of the Army of Northern Virginia. The fate of the Confederate Maryland campaign of 1862 was largely determined by Lee’s decision on the 9th.59 They were on the road to Antietam.

  The battle of Antietam was a Union victory. Lee retreated across the Potomac to Virginia. The victory raised morale across the North and particularly in the Army of the Potomac.60 It halted European discussions of offers of mediation and depressed adherents of the Confederate cause.61 Most critically, the victory provided the platform Lincoln needed in order to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln proclaimed that, unless the rebel states returned to the Union by January 1, 1863, their slaves shall be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”62 This declaration made a compromise solution to the war impossible. From this point on, despite the vigorous political disagreements emancipation stimulated, the war became as much a war for liberation of the slaves as it was a war to restore the Union.

  Finally, the Washington Post, cited in the story above as a source of news for the Confederacy, was not founded until December 6, 1877, by Stilson Hutchins.

  Bibliography

  Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1774–1989 Bicentennial Edition (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1989).

  Blackford, William W., War Years with Jeb Stuart (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1993)

  Cooling, B. Franklin, Monocacy, The Battle that Saved Washington (White Mane Publishing, Shippensburg, PA, 2000)

  Dubin, Michael J., United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: The Official Results of the elections of the 1st through 105th Congresses (McFarland & Co., Jefferson, NC, 1998)

  Grant, Ulysses S., Personal Memoirs of
U.S. Grant (Konecky & Konecky, Old Saybrook, CT, 1999)

  Harsh, Joseph L., Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 1999)

  Klement, Frank L., The Copperheads in the Middle West (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1960)

  Long, A.L., Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, His Military and Personal History, Embracing A Large Amount of Information Hitherto Unpublished (Blue and Gray Press, Seacaucus, NJ, 1983)

  Luvaas, Jay, and Nelson, Harold W., eds., Guide to the Battle of Antietam: The Maryland Campaign of 1862 (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1987)

  McPherson, James M., Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002)

  Robertson, James I. Jr., Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend (Macmillan Publishing, New York, 1997)

  Sandberg, Carl, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. 1 (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1939)

  Sisson, Charles Jasper, ed. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Harper & Row, New York, 1954)

  Notes

  1.

  The immediate impact of the battle of Saratoga (1777) during the American Revolution was to force the surrender of the British army commanded by Maj-Gen John Burgoyne. The intermediate effect was to ruin the British plan to split the northern colonies. The decisive long-term effect was to encourage the French to form an alliance with the struggling United States. That alliance provided the strategic leverage that eventually forced Great Britain to realize that its attempt to suppress American independence was fruitless.

  *2.

  Charles S. Venable, Lee’s 1862 Campaign (Richmond, 1878) p. 35.

  *3.

  Alexander S. Pendleton, With Stonewall to Victory (New York, 1892) p. 102.

  *4.

  Ibid., p. 107.

  5.

  Harsh, Taken at the Flood, p. 129.

  6.

  Ibid., p. 122.

  *7.

  Richard E. Frayser, Message from J.E.B. (Richmond, 1885) p. 15.

  *8.

  U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Records of the Union Army (Washington, D.C., 1880–1901) Ser. I, Vol. XIX/2, p. 211. Since the “Lost Dispatch” is quite short, it is quoted here in its entirety for the reader’s information: “HEADQUARTERS, Rockville, Md., September 8, 1862: 10 p.m. Major General HALLECK, General-in-Chief: After fuil consideration, I have determined to advance the whole force to-morrow; the right wing to Goshen and Cracklinton, holding guard over bridges and other advance points by strong advance guard; the cavalry well out on the right and front; the center near Middlebrook; Franklin to Darnestown, holding the line of the guards by advance guards; Couch to guard, leaving a brigade at Offutt’s Cross-Roads; and Sykes’s division will move to-morrow, according to the information I receive, probably toward Gaithersburg, but wherever the latest information may show the enemy to be in greatest force. GEO. B. McCLELLAN, Major General.”

  *9.

  Venable, Lee’s 1862 Campaign, p. 92.

  10.

  Cooling, Monocacy: The Battle That Saved Washington, p. 112.

  *11.

  U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Records of the Union Army, Ser. I, Vol. XIX/2, pp. 24–7.

  12.

  “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” Richard III, Act V, Scene IV C.J. Sisson, ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, p. 726

  13.

  Kiement, The Copperheads of the Middle West, p. 1.

  14.

  Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997, pp. 193–8.

  *15.

  Clement L. Vallandigham, The Constitution As It Is, The Union As It Was: Ballots for Peace in 1862 (New Haven, 1880) p. 289.

  *16.

  Ibid., p. 290.

  *17.

  Ibid., p. 291.

  *18.

  Ibid., p. 292.

  *19.

  Ibid., p. 293.

  20.

  McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, p. 35.

  21.

  Ibid., p. 36.

  22.

  Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, pp. 405–8.

  23.

  Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. 1, pp. 528–9.

  24.

  Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, p. 159.

  25.

  Ibid., pp. 161–81.

  26.

  At that time, it took an average of two weeks for news from North America to reach Europe or vice versa. News had to travel by ship since the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable had failed after six months’ use in 1859, and it was not to be replaced until 1865.

  27.

  McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, p. 58.

  28.

  Ibid., pp. 59–60.

  29.

  Harsh, Taken at the Flood, pp. 80–109.

  30.

  McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, p. 94.

  31.

  Ibid.

  32.

  Ibid., p. 141.

  *33.

  Viscount Henry John Temple Palmerston, The Treaty of Toronto: Ending the War Between the States (J. Ridgway, London, 1870) p. 48.

  34.

  Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, p. 509.

  *35.

  Abraham Lincoln, Memoirs: Binding Up the Wounds (New York, 1872) p. 97.

  36.

  Legal Tender Act, February 25, 1862.

  *37.

  Lincoln, Memoirs, p. 107.

  *38.

  Jefferson Davis, The Second American Revolution (Richmond, 1874) p. 109.

  *39.

  Ibid., p. 115.

  *40.

  Lincoln, Memoirs, p. 182.

  41.

  Biographical Directory of the United States Congress 1774–1989 Bicentennial Edition, p. 171.

  42.

  Ibid., p. 175.

  43.

  Klement, The Copperheads of the Middle West, p. 29.

  44.

  Ibid., p. 228.

  45.

  Ibid., p. 228.

  *46.

  Vallandigham, pp. 198–205. Note that there were also rejected and undetermined elections, most in Union-occupied areas of Confederate states, as well as special elections. The total number of House seats available for contest was thus not known in November 1862.

  *47.

  Lincoln, Memoirs, p. 204.

  *48.

  Ibid., p. 222.

  *49.

  Ibid., p. 245.

  50.

  Long, Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, p. 206.

  51.

  Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, p. 581.

  52.

  Ibid.

  53.

  Harsh, Taken at the Flood, pp. 65, 71–2, 104.

  54.

  Ibid., p. 383.

  55.

  Ibid., pp. 128–31.

  56.

  Ibid., p. 145.

  57.

  Robertson, Stonewall Jackson, pp. 587–8.

  58.

  Harsh, Taken at the Flood, p. 153.

  59.

  Ibid., p. 167.

  60.

  McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam, pp. 134–5.

  61.

  Ibid., p. 141.

  62.

  Ibid., pp. 138–9.

  5

  “WE WILL WATER OUR HORSES IN THE MISSISSIPPI”

  A.S. Johnston vs. U.S. Grant

  James R. Arnold

  Shiloh Dawn

  The sounds of firing diminished and then stopped altogether. The Confederate high command peered anxiously in the direction of the Union camps and the Tennessee River. From their location at the junction of the Bark Road and the Pittsburg and Corinth Road, they could see nothing but the rear elements of General Polk’s First Corps. Beyond the irregular lines of gray-clad infantry lay nothing but dark woods. General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard spoke: “Genera
l, we have surely lost the element of surprise. We must retire to Corinth immediately.”1

  The 59-year-old commanding general stood leaning toward a campfire sipping coffee. Before he could reply, the sharp rattle of nearby musketry again burst out. Albert Sidney Johnston straightened to his full six-foot, 200-pound, robust height and calmly replied, “The battle has opened, gentlemen; it is too late to change our dispositions.”

  He mounted his magnificent bay, Fire-eater, and said to his staff, “Tonight we will water our horses in the Tennessee River!”2

  It was 6.40 a.m., April 6, 1862. Overhead, a brilliant sun rose above the river mist. Johnston’s aide, Captain W.L. Wickham, turned toward Johnston’s personal physician, “Doctor Yandell, it must be another sun of Austerlitz.”3 Then Wickham and the other staff officers hurried to mount their horses because already Johnston was disappearing into the woods, riding fast toward the sounds of firing.

  Wickham caught up with Johnston on the edge of the Seay Field. Across the field, Arkansas men belonging to Brigadier General Thomas Hindman’s brigade were involved in a difficult struggle with a tenacious regiment of Union troops. The firing intensified. The Confederate ranks wavered. Soldiers broke ranks and began drifting rearward. Johnston spurred Fire-eater into the field to rally the infantry. His voice somehow rose above the din of battle, “Men of Arkansas! They say you boast of your prowess with the Bowie knife. Today you wield a nobler weapon, the bayonet. Employ it well!”4

  The soldiers responded with cheers. One recalled that Johnston’s face was “aflame with a fighting spirit.”5 Inspired by Johnston’s commanding presence, they re-formed and prepared to charge again.

  Young Colonel John Marmaduke was busily aligning his 3d Confederate Regiment when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Marmaduke glanced up to see a well-remembered face from the Old Army days. “My son,” Johnston said, “we must this day conquer or perish!”6 Marmaduke later recalled that he felt nerved “tenfold”.

  Thirty minutes later a courier arrived to report to Johnston that Major General Braxton Bragg’s men were being hotly pressed and needed help. Johnston rode to the nearest unit and ordered it to follow him. Together they moved to the right, in the direction of the heaviest firing. But the soldiers were unable to keep up with their fast-moving leader. Accompanied by a handful of aides, Johnston disappeared into the woods.