Terrible Swift Sword

by Bruce Catton

  There was no outlet for scornful feelings once Order Number 28 was published. Genteel womanhood could permit itself a certain leeway as long as the invader remained properly chivalrous, but Ben Butler did not go by the book and he had replaced chivalry with a lewd riddle: just how would a woman of the town who was plying her vocation be treated by occupation troops? Lord Palmerston (along with many others) feared that a licentious soldiery would do its dreadful worst; Butler himself argued that she would simply be ignored, her words and gestures disregarded; and no woman of New Orleans ever put the matter to the test. The icy silence of the carefully averted glance came down upon the city. No officers were insulted, and no women were molested, hatred grew deeper and quieter, and Mr. Adams had this letter from the Prime Minister of Great Britain to consider.4

  He consulted Lord Russell, who knew nothing about the case and was himself vexed because the Prime Minister had edged over into the Foreign Minister’s territory. There were conferences and exchanges of additional notes, all very dignified and very secret, and in the end things were smoothed over: Lord Palmerston had not meant to offend either Mr. Adams or the United States. Yet the whole affair had disturbing connotations. Mr. Adams wrote to Secretary Seward that “this unprecedented act of the Prime Minister may not be without great significance.” His Lordship had been “hostile at heart” all along, and “it may be that he seeks this irregular method of precipitating us all into a misunderstanding.” Mr. Adams would be on his guard.5

  He would need to be. Lord Palmerston actually was seeking nothing in particular just then; yet his government was drifting slowly but perceptibly toward the point at which it would recognize the Confederacy, and Mr. Adams was quite right in considering the Prime Minister’s touchiness an evil omen. The real trouble was not what General Butler had done in New Orleans but what General Lee had done in Richmond. Lee had laid his hands on a war that was about to end and had extended it into the indefinite future, and the American minister was compelled to reflect that a long war greatly increased the danger of foreign intervention. It could almost be laid out on a chart. If the line representing the available supply of cotton continued to drop, while the line representing the military outlook of the Confederacy continued to rise, the two would eventually cross—at precisely which moment Britain and France might very well see to it that the Confederate States of America became an independent nation.

  This moment was getting much nearer. With Lee and Bragg swinging north the Confederacy’s military prospects had never looked better; and with textile factories all across Lancashire closing and thousands of workers living on public charity, the cotton industry had never looked worse. Before July ended the London Spectator wrote despairingly about the rising darkness in the Midlands, where “first one town and then another is swallowed up in the gloom of universal pauperism,” and the Saturday Review felt that the cotton famine was the saddest thing that had happened to England in many a year: “In the worst of our calamities there has seldom been so pitiable a sight as the manufacturing districts present at this moment.”6 There were in England more than 2600 cotton mills and nearly half a million textile workers, and by the middle of the summer they were deep in trouble. In September workers were going on the thin diet of parish relief at the rate of 6000 a week, adding to a relief roll which held more than 150,000 names when the month began. By the year’s end half of all the textile hands in England would be entirely out of jobs, and most of the rest would be working half-time. The American Civil War was becoming a matter of dire concern to hundreds of thousands of men and women who had barely heard of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis and did not know Alabama from Michigan.7

  These people were not going to take a dispassionate view of the war. Folk with leisure and means could if they pleased savor the elements of a romantic military drama, or weigh the opposing merits of secession and reunion. The average Englishman who worked for wages was going to interpret this war strictly in terms of its effect on him; and just now it was affecting him most painfully right where he lived. The Liverpool cotton broker who referred to the war as a serious labor disturbance in the Southern states was being perfectly logical.8 To the workers and businessmen of England that was all the war amounted to—unless the people who were actually fighting it should manage to make it mean something transcendent, more important even than the struggle for daily bread and annual profits.

  The people who were doing the fighting could see no farther than anyone else. They could only make out that the war was bigger than they were, bigger than anyone had planned or imagined, and that it was enforcing changes whose final significance was beyond analysis. They could do nothing except get on with the fighting, and as the war increased in size and scope they were more and more compelled to follow the one terrible rule: Do whatever needs to be done to win. This rule was pointing Mr. Lincoln in the direction of emancipation, although he had doubts about his legal right to go there; and it was driving Mr. Davis, who had said that the Confederacy wanted nothing except to be left alone, to mount a full-dress invasion of the North.

  Making this invasion, Mr. Davis wanted everyone to understand the necessity. Early in September he sent instructions to the leaders of the principal armies, Lee and Bragg and Smith. If they reached non-Confederate soil they were to issue proclamations explaining what the invasion meant. The Confederacy (they were to say) was fighting solely for peace, which would come when the United States abandoned its attempt to rule a people who preferred self-government, and the generals were to point out that “we are driven to protect our country by transferring the seat of war to that of an enemy who pursues us with a relentless and apparently aimless hostility.” Southern fields had been laid waste, Southern people had been killed and Southern homes had been desolated, and “the sacred right of self-defense demands that if such a war is to continue its consequences shall fall on those who persist in their refusal to make peace.”9

  The trouble was that the consequences of the war were falling on everybody, including uncomprehending English factory hands 3000 miles away. The sheer weight of the armies was exerting a force of its own; under its pressure the societies which supported those armies were being profoundly transformed. This was hard to bear and hard to understand, especially in Richmond, capital city of a nation which had been created in order to prevent change. Even as he sent his armies north Mr. Davis was receiving letters and hearing complaints which testified to the pressure.

  There was Governor Brown of Georgia, who was writing in heat and at length to insist that the conscription act was illegal. The Confederate constitution, said Governor Brown, was “a league between sovereigns,” and in such a league the central government could draft nobody. Furthermore, conscription was wasteful; the governor believed that the Confederacy had drafted “tens of thousands” of men whom it was unable to arm and who therefore could do no fighting, but whose labor would be most valuable on the farm or in the workshop. Mr. Davis was curt in his reply. He was sure that conscription was legal; and, anyway, “I cannot share the alarm and concern about State rights which you so evidently feel but which to me seem quite unfounded.”10 He passed over the economic argument; and here, as a matter of fact, the governor was on fairly solid ground.

  A little earlier in the year, the Confederate Quartermaster General A. C. Myers reported to the Secretary of War that supplies in his department were totally inadequate to meet the demand and that he was currently unable to fill requisitions to outfit 40,000 men. The reason for this, he said, was clear; the conscription act was pulling workers out of the very factories on which the Army was relying for its supplies, and manufacturers “have been rendered incapable of complying with the contracts made with this department.” Not long after this, Secretary Mallory pointed out that the Navy was having great trouble getting armored warships built because of a dire shortage of skilled mechanics. To an extent, this shortage came because so many mechanics in Southern shops came from the North, and fled the country as soon as the war
began; but of the mechanics who remained, many had been drafted, some shops were closed altogether, and contractors were unable to fill their engagements.11

  The Southern railroads were suffering most of all. Indeed, their whole situation was complicated almost beyond understanding and ultimately beyond remedy.

  When the war began the railroads foresaw outright ruin, not realizing that the war would mean more traffic rather than less, and so they did their best to retrench, encouraging their workers to enlist and reducing their workshop crews to a minimum. By the time they discovered that this was a mistake the conscription act was in force, holding the enlisted workers in the Army; now the roads were deteriorating badly, engines and cars and tracks were going unrepaired, carrying capacity was declining, and both the Army and the national economy were gravely handicapped. In addition, the government had exerted some control over the railroads but had not gone far enough with it; it moved engines and cars from one road to another, as military needs dictated, but made no provision for their return, so that the roads which originally owned the rolling stock lost it forever and could not replace it. (This was a sore point with Governor Brown, the Georgia railroads having been especially hard hit in this way. He objected to a strong central government, but he did want Richmond to reach out and compel people to send back that missing railroad equipment.) As a final factor, when the government arranged for the transport of soldiers and armaments it bargained so sharply that the railroads made little money out of such traffic; now they were widely suspected of preferring to haul goods for civilian account whenever possible. The Federal government’s railroad director, Brigadier General D. C. McCallum, had a better understanding of the matter. He wrote that war demanded lavish expenditure rather than economy, especially where the railroads were concerned, and he summed it up with a remark which reveals one of the truly disturbing characteristics of modern war: “The question to be answered was not ‘How much will it cost?’ but rather, ‘Can it be done at all, at any cost?’ ”12

  It was impossible, apparently, to wage war conservatively; a point especially hard to accept in the Confederacy, which had everything to lose and nothing to gain except what it already had when the war began. The Confederacy was bound to be conservative, lest the mere act of making war destroy the things it was fighting for; furthermore, its resources in dollars and in men were strictly limited, and probable costs had to be reckoned with parsimonious care. Yet caution was not going to win. General Lee had seen that. He had taken hair-raising chances to drive McClellan away from Richmond, and he was taking chances equally startling in his present campaign against Pope, and he had paid, and would continue to pay, in casualties, a much higher price than he could really afford … but he had saved the capital and the cause and he had put the Yankees on the defensive, and if he had done otherwise the war would be over by now, the Southern dream gone forever. Like it or not, the civilian leadership had to behave in the same way.

  A case in point was the plight of Mr. Memminger, the Secretary of the Treasury.

  In every respect he was an ultraconservative man of finance, a most cautious reckoner of probable costs, a born counter of pennies, complete with pursed lips and coldly contemplative eyes: and he had given the Confederacy a fiscal policy which in its essentials was simply a dependence on paper money. This had come about, not because Mr. Memminger had suddenly become flighty but because his hand had been forced by events beyond his control. He later recalled that when he took office the Treasury Department did not even have money enough to buy him a desk; its first purchases abroad were made on his own private draft, and there was not in the entire country one sheet of bank-note paper on which money could be printed. This shortage of paper was soon remedied, and ever so much money was printed with nothing to support it except a general faith that the South would win the war: Mr. Memminger was already being blamed, and Robert Toombs had recently derided him for “attempting to carry on a great and expensive war solely on credit—without taxation.” The complaint was sound but cruel, for Mr. Memminger had little choice.13

  He had had an impossible assignment: to finance an all-out war in a land which contained almost no hard money and had no way to get any more. It was a land whose states, deeply in debt, were already emitting bonds and treasury notes in order to keep afloat; a land which not only detested the mere idea of a central government powerful enough to impose heavy taxes but also believed firmly that the war was going to be short; a land which neither could nor would follow a conservative financial policy. In the spring of 1861 Congress did vote a general property tax to support an issue of $100,000,000 in treasury notes. Since proper tax-gathering machinery did not exist, Congress stipulated that the several states could assume the tax for their citizens, at a ten per cent discount; all but two of the states promptly took advantage of this offer, issuing more treasury notes to make the payments, and the inflationary spiral was under way. Congress authorized more bond issues, and more treasury notes, and Mr. Memminger found himself lord of a realm of paper money, financing a war on credit with nothing solid for the credit to rest on.

  There had not, actually, been anything else he could do. He had adopted a desperate expedient to meet a desperate situation, and although inflation was beginning to get out of control—the increasing flood of paper money was running across an increasing shortage of all of the things money could buy—the country was still able to carry on the war. The problem was that while the financial structure would hold together for the immediate future, a really long war would bring it to collapse and ruin.14

  Early in the year Mr. Davis had called Joseph E. Johnston’s attention to “the military paradox that impossibilities must be rendered possible.” Impossibilities were needed in industry, in transportation, in finance, in the administration of government itself. At the end of July, Mr. Davis was reminded that the states west of the Mississippi were far away, all but isolated and in dire need of help; and the kind of help they needed seemed to call for nothing less than a partial remodeling of the Confederate government.

  The reminder came in a letter from Governor F. R. Lubbock of Texas, who spoke for the governors of Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana as well as for himself. The western states, said Governor Lubbock, needed three things—a general-in-chief, much more money, and a new supply of arms and ammunition. The general-in-chief must be a regular pro-consul, all but independent of direct War Department control, able to organize an army, to lead it in action, to shape strategy and to spend money on equipment; there should also be a special branch of the Treasury Department west of the river to provide the necessary money—western soldiers mostly were not paid at all, and some of them were getting mutinous. From twenty to thirty thousand stand of small arms ought to be forwarded at once. To all of this the President could do little more than reply that he had already sent west the best general he could spare, all the money the Treasury could provide, and all the small arms that were available. He would try to do more. The business of a Treasury branch was certainly illegal and probably impractical, but he would see about it15 … and perhaps, in the end, this impossibility could be made possible along with all of the others.

  It was necessary to do so many things that had not been counted on when the war began. Everything was changing, the changes welcomed by some and deplored by others but inevitable in any case. The editor of DeBow’s Review, listing the new manufacturing plants that were springing up in the deep South, believed that the South would become truly independent, able to make for itself many things previously bought from Yankees, and he rejoiced: “This alone, if our people would look at it aright, would make the war a paying one to us.”

  Not all saw it that way. Another editor noted that if there was a new factory on every stream and in every valley the South would become a different sort of place. It would be overrun with factory workers, who were “sons and daughters of Belial,” and he did not like the prospect. “No wonder,” he mused, “that those who cling with love, which is often the
highest form of reason, to the old framework of our society, shudder at the thought of a Lowell on the Appomattox or a Manchester in the Piedmont region.”16

  6: Scabbard Thrown Away

  The New York correspondent of the London Times wrote late in July that the people of the North were getting tired of the war. Enlistments in the Army were lagging; wages were high and jobs were plentiful, “the first bloom of war excitement is over,” and all of “the rum-shops and lager beer saloons” were buzzing with stories about the horrors of battle and the miseries of campaigning in Southern swamps. Disabled veterans back from the front were to be seen everywhere, mute evidence that soldiering was not always a lark—in sober fact, the war was a little more than anyone had bargained for. The English reporter felt that Northerners were having second thoughts: “They were ready for a short, sharp and decisive conflict. They were not ready for an obstinate struggle, to last for years.”1

  The falling off in enlistments was coming just when the Federal government was making an extra effort to increase the size of the Army. It had recently called for 300,000 volunteers but it was not getting them, and the news from the fighting fronts was so bad that no one was quite sure that 300,000 additional soldiers would be enough even if they did come forward. The one certainty seemed to be that the war would be lost if they did not come.