by Bruce Catton
In years to come, some Southern patriots would complain that Mr. Davis was too stiff-necked and unyielding to admit that he had made mistakes or to correct mistakes once they took place, but at this time he was humble and thoughtful. To a correspondent in Alabama he wrote, “I fully acknowledge the error of my attempt to defend all the frontier, seaboard and inland,” but he pointed out that the lack of men and munitions had made an offensive policy impossible; “necessity, not choice, has compelled us to occupy strong positions and everywhere to confront the enemy without reserves.” Everyone had supposed the Confederacy stronger than it actually was, and it had not been possible to correct this delusion because “an exact statement of the facts would have exposed our weakness to the enemy.” The thing to do now was to avoid vain recriminations and get down to the task of raising a bigger army and using it aggressively.12
Mr. Davis began by reorganizing his own cabinet. He would keep Mr. Benjamin, whose counsel seemed indispensable, but Mr. Benjamin obviously could not remain in the War Department: Congress and the public were blaming him for the loss of Roanoke Island, and it was clear that the man could not get along with the generals—Joe Johnston was widely quoted as having remarked, at a Richmond dinner table, that the Confederacy could not succeed with Mr. Benjamin as Secretary of War. So Benjamin was made Secretary of State—R. M. T. Hunter had left the cabinet to enter the Senate—and George W. Randolph, a grandson of Thomas Jefferson, a former officer in the United States Navy, and a successful lawyer and politician, went to the War Department. Thomas Bragg, who had grown so deeply discouraged of late, was asked by Mr. Davis to resign as attorney general, and was replaced by Thomas Hill Watts of Alabama, who had supported the Bell-Everett ticket in 1860 but who was generally believed to be a follower of William L. Yancey. Congress confirmed the new appointments, with some grumbling—it did not like Benjamin at all, and a good many Congressmen would have been happy to see Stephen Mallory replaced as head of the Navy Department—and then Congress made its own contribution by passing a bill to provide the Confederate states with an active general-in-chief to run all of the armies. Mr. Davis immediately vetoed this bill, on the ground that it undercut the President’s constitutional powers, but he bent to the wind by calling General Lee to Richmond and giving him, “under the direction of the President,” control of military operations. Final control, of course, would remain with Mr. Davis, and no one who knew the man doubted that he would exercise it, but the move at least brought the South’s best soldier back to the capital. Lee wrote to his wife that he could see neither “advantage or pleasure” in the new assignment, but he accepted uncomplainingly, comforting himself with the belief that it would eventually lead to an active command in the field. Robert Toombs said tartly that the arrangement simply meant that Davis and Lee together would be Secretary of War no matter who nominally held the office.13
Congress had not finished. On March 11 it adopted a bristling resolution “declaring the sense of Congress in regard to reuniting with the United States.” The sense of Congress clearly was that such reunion was out of the question, no matter what defeats might be suffered: “It is the unalterable determination of the people of the Confederate States, in humble reliance upon Almighty God, to suffer all the calamities of the most protracted war, but that they will never, on any terms, politically affiliate with a people who are guilty of the invasion of their soil and the butchery of their citizens.”14 This gesture of defiance was followed not long after by a sweeping enactment which put the waging of the war on an entirely new footing and in effect remodeled the substructure of the whole Confederate government. Congress passed a conscription law, and the Richmond government, founded on the most unwavering faith in states’ rights, suddenly found itself empowered and directed to reach into the sovereign states and compel citizens to enter the Army—a power which even the government at Washington did not then have and did not especially want to have.
Mr. Davis requested this in a special message sent to Congress on March 28. The Constitution, he pointed out, gave Congress the power to raise armies, and what was needed was a better and simpler way of doing it. The Federal advance had aroused among the people a spirit of resistance which “requires rather to be regulated than to be stimulated,” and conscription was the best way to regulate it. After a debate which—considering the nature of the change—was comparatively brief, Congress agreed, and on April 16 it adopted a draft act giving the President the power to call out, for three years or the duration, all white male citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Furthermore, the new law provided that the twelve-months men whose terms were expiring would be drafted too; their terms now were three-year terms, no matter what the original enlistment papers said. There would be no more shifting from one arm of the service to another. The men could elect their own officers, once the drafting and re-enlisting was over, but they would stay where they were, and men not in the Army would be drafted if they did not speedily volunteer. A few days later a supplementary act provided for innumerable exemptions, and in the months ahead its provisions would raise some very difficult problems, but the big step had been taken. The disintegration of the Confederacy’s armies would stop. The nation would no longer try to wage war as a loose assemblage of self-sufficient states.15
Naturally, this provoked certain outcries. Georgia’s Governor Joseph E. Brown, whose manifold duties never kept him too busy to write extensive letters of protest to the President of the Confederacy, complained that the act was subversive of Georgia’s sovereignty and “at war with all the principles for the support of which Georgia entered into this revolution,” and declared that he could have nothing to do with “the enrollment of the conscripts in this state”; nor was he soothed by Mr. Davis’s rejoinder that the cause was lost forever if the central government could do no more than ask the states to send in militia regiments which could be called out only to repel invasion. Alec Stephens, drifting into a shadowland where hard facts had to be adjusted to vaporous doctrine, considered conscription “very bad policy” and complained that it was all the fault of the West Pointers, in whom lay no salvation. “If the Southern volunteer,” said Stephens, oddly, “should ever come to forget that he is a gentleman (and that is what the West Point men say he must do) then it will be merely a struggle between matter and matter, and the biggest and heaviest body will break the other.” Inasmuch as the point of the whole business was the undeniable fact that the weaker body was on the verge of being broken forever because of its weakness, Mr. Davis let this ride; his attitude doubtless stiffened by facts called to his attention by the War Department. During the last thirty days, the Department disclosed, the terms of service of 148 regiments expired. Most of the men in these regiments were not re-enlisting, and most of those who did re-enlist “entered corps which could never be assembled, or, if assembled, could not be prepared for the field in time to meet the invasion actually commenced.”16 The volunteer spirit was not enough. It was time for compulsion.
But Jefferson Davis understood that the draft, by itself, was not enough either. The government could raise large armies, but it must also learn how to use them. Its forces would always be outnumbered, and if they were to win the men who led them must surpass material limitations. In a thoughtful letter to General Johnston, Mr. Davis tried to explain the necessities of the case, writing soberly:
“The military paradox that impossibilities must be rendered possible had never better occasion for its application.”17
5: Contending with Shadows
The terrible pressure of time was upon both Presidents. Mr. Davis was compelled to act by the closing circle of the Federal armed forces; Mr. Lincoln, by the rising momentum of the war itself. Facing the imminent peril of defeat, Mr. Davis tried to reorganize his Army; facing the danger that the war might become altogether unmanageable. Mr. Lincoln sought to reorganize his country’s whole mental attitude. On the evening of March 5, Mr. Lincoln called his cabinet into consultation, and on the next day he
sent a special message to Congress.
In this message the President urged adoption of a joint resolution: “Resolved, that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in its discretion to compensate for the inconveniences public and private produced by such change of system.”
The Northern government was neither making war on slavery nor asserting any power to interfere with slavery in the states. Yet slavery was the indigestible lump, after all, the one thing that had made compromise impossible, and perhaps there still was time to deal with it rationally. Mr. Lincoln believed that if slavery died in the border states it had no real hope for survival anywhere else on the continent, and to kill that hope, he felt, “substantially ends the rebellion.” He clung as well to his primary article of faith: the states which said they were out of the Union were really still in it, and this proposed act of co-operation would apply to them if they chose to accept it. And there was one other point: the tremendous sums being spent to fight the war “would purchase, at fair valuation, all the slaves in any named state.”
In December, Mr. Lincoln had warned that all indispensable means to restore the Union would be used. Now he insisted that the war would continue as long as resistance to reunion continued, and “it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it.” The act of Congress, to be sure, would not by itself accomplish much, but it might initiate a great deal; and so, “in full view of my great responsibility to my God and to my country I earnestly beg the attention of Congress and the people to the subject.”1
The President had assembled some figures. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times he pointed out that the government was spending about $2,000,000 a day to fight the war. To buy and free all of the slaves in all of the border states at a price of $400 per head would cost less than three months more war would cost. If the action shortened the war by three months, then, there would be some sort of gain. He went into more detail in a letter to Senator James McDougall of California, who opposed the plan. Delaware, for instance, contained 1798 slaves; they could be freed for $719,200—less than half of one day’s war costs. In all of the border states put together there were 432,622 slaves; they could be freed for $173,048,000, which was a little bit less than the cost of eighty-seven days of war.
He explained that the thing could be done gradually. “Suppose, for instance,” he wrote to Senator McDougall, “a state devises and adopts a system by which the institution absolutely ceases therein by a named day—say January 1st, 1882. Then, let the sum to be paid to such state by the United States be ascertained by taking from the Census of 1860 the number of slaves within the state, and multiplying that number by four hundred—the United States to pay such sum to the state in twenty annual installments, in six per cent bonds of the United States. The sum thus given, as to time and manner, I think would not be half as onerous, as would be an equal sum, raised now, for the indefinite prossecution of the war; but of this you can judge as well as I.”2
A few days later the President discussed the proposal with a delegation of border state leaders. He insisted that the government did not want “to injure the interests or wound the sensibilities of the slave states.” Still, the government was making war, and to make war it had to put armies in the slave states; and just because they were there these armies made the institution of slavery more acutely troublesome than it had ever been before. Abolitionists complained because the armies did not destroy the institution and slaveholders complained because the armies did not protect it, and altogether there was increasing turmoil, a great comfort to secessionists. He believed that if his resolution were adopted by Congress and accepted by the states, this trouble would cease “and more would be accomplished toward shortening the war than could be hoped from the greatest victory achieved by the Union armies.” Emancipation, he went on, was entirely up to the people of the states affected, and yet it was a national matter also. “Slavery existed, and that, too, as well by the act of the North as of the South,” he explained, “and in any scheme to get rid of it the North as well as the South was morally bound to do its full and equal share.”3
In due time the resolution was passed by both houses of Congress, but no state followed the lead, and the response Lincoln had hoped to get was not forthcoming. The extremists were unmoved. Thaddeus Stevens was openly contemptuous: “I think it is about the most diluted, milk and water, gruel proposition that was ever given to the American nation.” Congressman C. A. Wickliffe of Kentucky, viewing the plan from a position diametrically opposite to Stevens’, cried out in the House: “Let us alone; permit us to do our duty in the pending struggle and we will attend to our domestic institutions.”4 The war was not going to be shortened; the nation was not going to save money or lives, but would have to fight the war to a finish regardless of “all the ruin which may follow it.” As a practical matter, Mr. Lincoln’s attempt had no effect.
Yet it was enormously significant. For the first time the President of the United States had discussed emancipation, not as a lofty abstraction which a happier age might some day embrace, but as an immediate measure aimed at reunion and a shorter war. Disclaiming all intent to use the Federal power to interfere with slavery, he had at the same time reiterated that “all indispensable means” to win the war would be used, and here was the clearest indication that emancipation might soon look indispensable. In effect the President was warning that unless final victory were won quickly, emancipation would be adopted as an essential war measure.
Of all the men in the North the one who most vitally needed to heed this warning was General George B. McClellan.
McClellan was a conservative Democrat who sincerely and openly detested abolition. When he became general-in-chief he wrote to his friend Barlow begging him to “help me dodge the nigger,” declaring: “I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the form of the Govt.—and no other issue. To gain that end we cannot afford to mix up the negro question—it must be incidental & subsidiary. The Presdt. is perfectly honest & is really sound on the nigger question. I will answer for it now that things go right with him.”5 Now there was this writing on the wall, cryptic but still readable: if the Confederacy fell within the next few months, the infinitely complicated, infinitely tragic problem in human sorrows and destinies which McClellan knew as “the nigger question” could still be dodged; or at least the effort to dodge it could continue, which might come to the same thing. But if victory did not come soon the problem would become central to everything the nation did and the time for dodging would end forever.
So far, General McClellan’s winter had been no happier than General Johnston’s. He had been helped into his high place by hard men who believed in hard war, and they wanted immediate action. They wanted it so badly that General McClellan had been in General Scott’s place for no more than a week when Mr. Russell of the London Times made a note about it: “The inactivity of McClellan, which is not understood by the people, has created an undercurrent of unpopularity, to which his enemies are giving every possible strength.” Before December ended, Senator Ben Wade, hardest and most impatient of them all, was complaining that the nation would soon be $600,000,000 in debt with very little to show for it. “All this,” said the senator, “is hanging upon one man who keeps his counsels entirely to himself. If he was an old veteran who had fought a hundred battles, or we knew him as well as Bonaparte or Wellington was known, then we could repose upon him with confidence. But how can this nation abide the secret counsels that one man carries in his head, when we have no evidence that he is the wisest man in the world?”6
A basic trouble of course was that General McClellan refused to take the Republican radicals into his confidence; they were giving every sign of a strong desire to run the war, and the general was keeping them at arm’s length. Yet Ben Wade did speak for the increasing restlessness of a vigorous peopl
e who had gone to war without realizing that wars are not always won quickly. In spite of victories elsewhere this restlessness was growing day by day because of the inactivity of the Army of the Potomac. Until that army moved and won victories of its own McClellan was going to be the target for the deadliest sharpshooters in Washington.
McClellan thus was in an exceedingly strange position. Unless he could win the war quickly it was likely to turn into the last thing he wanted it to be, a war for emancipation; yet at the same time the greatest pressure for speed—a pressure which could break him if he resisted it too long—was coming from the men he despised most, the militant emancipationists. McClellan could best thwart them by doing exactly what they wanted him to do, a point which probably no one except Mr. Lincoln himself was subtle enough to grasp.
Call them emancipationists, radicals, or radical Republicans; all the words apply. They believed firmly in immediate and uncompensated emancipation; they were radicals in that they bluntly favored the revolutionary struggle which Mr. Lincoln wanted to avert; and they were Republicans of an intense partisanship, working night and day to win political advantage for themselves and their party. Their motives were mixed but their goal was clear; they wanted immediate action, and they believed this could come only from generals who felt as they felt. Senator Wade’s recent remarks indicated that they might very soon go on the warpath against General McClellan himself. McClellan seems to have sensed this, and a few days after the senator had spoken Mr. Lincoln tried to reassure the general.
“I hear that the doings of an investigating committee give you some uneasiness,” the President wrote. “You may be entirely relieved on this point. The gentlemen of the Committee were with me an hour and a half last night, and I found them in a perfectly good mood. As their investigating brings them acquainted with the facts, they are rapidly coming to think of the case as all sensible men should.”7