The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 2: Fredericksburg to Meridian

  Davis had not been as shocked by the proposal as Seddon’s letter seemed to indicate. For one thing, he agreed with the underlying premise that slavery was doomed, no matter who won or lost the war, and had said as much to his wife. What alarmed him was the reaction, the “distraction and dissension,” that would follow the release of what one of its hearers had called “this monstrous proposition.” Knowing, as he did, how much more violent than the generals the politicians would be in their denunciation of such views—particularly the large slaveholders among them, such as Howell Cobb, who said flatly: “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong”—he foresaw that the result would be calamitous in its effect on the fortunes of the Confederacy, which would be so torn internally by any discussion of the issue that, even though the army could be doubled in size by adoption of the plan, there would be nothing left for that army to defend but discord. Even so, Davis did not completely reject the notion. He kept it—much as Lincoln had kept the Emancipation Proclamation—as an ace in the hole, to be played if all else failed.

  Meantime he still was faced with the necessity for matching, at least to some degree, his adversary’s call for more additional troops than there were at present in all the southern armies. Left with the alternative of extending conscription, he moved to do so in a message to Congress suggesting 1) that all industrial exemptions be abolished and 2) that the upper and lower age-range limits be raised and reduced, respectively, to fifty and seventeen. The first of these two suggestions kicked up the greater furor. Newspaper editors, who feared (groundlessly, as it turned out) that they would lose their printers if the law was strengthened to this extent, protested that freedom of the press was threatened. For others, the fear was more general. A Virginia congressman, for example, asserted that such legislation would “clothe the President with the powers of an autocrat” and invest him with “prerogatives before which those of Napoleon sink into insignificance,” while Foote rose up again in his wrath to declare that “Others may vote to extend this man’s power for mischief; I hold in contempt him and his whole tribe of servitors and minions.” There were, however, enough of the “tribe”—or, in any case, enough of Foote’s colleagues of all persuasions who saw the need for keeping the army up to a strength that would enable it to challenge the blue host that would be advancing with the spring—for the proposed measure to be adopted on February 17, the day Congress adjourned. Word went out at once to the conscription agents of the enlargement of the harvest they would be gleaning. No drawing of lots, no “wheels of fortune,” such as were used in the North to select candidates for induetion, were required in the South. From this time forward, it was simply the task of the agents to enroll or exempt every white male in the Confederacy between the ages of seventeen and fifty.

  Davis’s reaction to this granting of his request was mixed. Pleased though he was to have the measure passed, and though he himself had asked for what had been given, he was saddened by the widening of the age-range: not by the raising of the upper limit, which brought it within five years of his own age, but by the reduction of the lower limit, which seemed to him a spending of future hopes. The old and the middle-aged could be spared. The young were another matter. The South would have great need, in the years ahead, of all the talent she could muster—as much, perhaps, if she lost the war, as if she won it—yet there was no telling how much of that talent, still undeveloped at seventeen, would be destroyed and left behind, packed into shallow burial trenches on the fields of battles still unfought. It grieved him that the mill of war, as he remarked, was about to “grind the seed corn of the nation.”

  While the young and the old were thus being gathered in camps of instruction, where they would be converted into material fit for use in chinking what he once had called “our wall of living breasts,” Davis gave his attention to strengthening and replacing the men who would lead them. The appointment in early January of George Davis of North Carolina to succeed Attorney General Watts, who had left Richmond the month before to be inaugurated as governor of Alabama, marked the first change in the Cabinet since Seddon took over the War Department, more than a year ago. Little attention was paid to this, for the post entailed few duties; but the same could not be said of two changes that followed, for they were military, and anything that involved the army was always of consuming interest. Before adjourning, Congress had authorized the President to appoint a sixth full general, thus to allow a freer hand to the commander of the Transmississippi, cut off as he was from either the direction or assistance of the central government. Davis’s prompt award of the promotion to Kirby Smith, for whom of course it had been intended, was applauded by everyone, in or out of the army, except Longstreet, whose name headed the list of lieutenant generals, on which Smith’s had stood second. “A soldier’s honor is his all,” Old Peter afterwards protested, “and of that they would rob him and degrade him in the eyes of his troops.” Piqued at having thus been overleaped—and unhappy as he was anyhow, because of his late repulse at Knoxville and the disaffection that had spread through his corps in its mountainous camps around Greeneville, seventy miles to the east—his first reaction was that “the occasion seemed to demand resignation.” But on second thought he decided that this “would have been unsoldierly conduct. Dispassionate judgment suggested, as the proper rounding of the soldier’s life, to stay and go down with faithful comrades of long and arduous service.”

  Painful though the burning was in Longstreet’s ample bosom, it was no more than a pinpoint gleam compared to the fires of resentment lighted by the announcement, a few days later, of the second military change. On February 22, the second anniversary of his inauguration as head of the permanent government, Davis summoned Lee to the capital for another conference. There were matters of strategy to be discussed, and something else as well. The Virginian’s former post as advisor to the Commander in Chief had been vacant for more than twenty months; now Davis proposed to name Bragg as his successor. This was certain to surprise and dismay a great many people who saw the North Carolinian as the author of most of their present woes, but Davis believed that Bragg’s undeniable shortcomings as a field commander—particularly his tendency to convert drawn battles into defeats by retreating, and victories into stalemates by failing to pursue—were not disqualifications for service in an advisory capacity; whereas his equally undeniable virtues, as an administrator and a strategist—his northward march into Kentucky, for example, undertaken on his own initiative at a time of deepest gloom, had reversed the whole course of the war in the western theater, and he had also proved himself (all too often, some would say) a master in the art of conducting tactical withdrawals—would be of great value to the country. Lee agreed, and the appointment was announced two days later, on February 24: “General Braxton Bragg is assigned to duty at the seat of government, and, under the direction of the President, is charged with the conduct of the military operations in the armies of the Confederacy.”

  Surprise and dismay, private and public, were indeed the reactions to the terrible-tempered general’s elevation, coming as it did only one day short of three months since his rout at Missionary Ridge. “No doubt Bragg can give the President valuable counsel,” a War Department diarist observed, but in his opinion Davis—whom he described as being “naturally a little oppugnamt”—derived “a secret satisfaction in triumphing thus over popular sentiment, which just at this time is much averse to General Bragg.” The sharpest attacks, as might have been expected, were launched by the editors of the Richmond Whig and the Examiner. Both employed irony in their comments, ignoring the advisory nature of Bragg’s assignment by pretending to believe that Davis had given his pet general direct command over Lee and Johnston. “When a man fails in an inferior position,” the Whig declared, “it is natural and charitable to conclude that the failure is due to the inadequacy of the task to his capabilities, and wise to give him a larger sphere for the proper exertion of his abilities.” Pollard of the Examiner struck wi
th a heavier hand, though his pen was no less sharp. “The judicious and opportune appointment of General Bragg to the post of commander-in-chief of the Confederate armies will be appreciated,” he noted wryly, “as an illustration of that strong common sense which forms the basis of the President’s character.” He managed to sustain this tone for half a column, then dropped it in midsentence: “This happy announcement should enliven the confidence and enthusiasm reviving among the people like a bucket of water poured on a newly kindled grate.”

  Davis went his way, as he had done from the beginning. “If we succeed we shall hear nothing of these malcontents,” he had told his wife three years ago in Montgomery. “If we do not, then I shall be held accountable by friends as well as foes. I will do my best.” That was as much his guiding principle now as ever. He believed that Bragg would serve him and the country well in this new assignment, and so far as he was concerned the decision as to whether to use him ended there. “Opposition in any form can only disturb me inasmuch as it may endanger the public welfare,” he had said. For all his aristocratic bearing and his apparent indifference to the barbs flung at him by men like Foote and Pollard, which gave rise to the persistent myth that he was deficient in feeling, he trusted the people far more than he did the politicians and journalists who catered to their weaknesses and fears, and he knew only too well the hardness of their lot in this season of lengthening death lists and spiraling inflation. Ten Confederate dollars would buy a yard of calico or a pound of coffee; bacon was $3.50 a pound, butter $4; eggs were $2 a dozen, chickens $6 a pair. Such prices made for meager living, particularly for city dwellers who had no vegetable gardens to tend or harvest. But even these were fortunate, so far at least as food was concerned, in comparison with the soldiers. The daily ration in the Army of Northern Virginia this winter was four ounces of bacon or salt pork and one pint of unbolted cornmeal, and though a private was free to scrounge what he could in his off hours, including wild onions and dandelion greens, his pay of $ 11 a month would not go far toward the purchase of supplements, even when they were available, which was seldom. Still, there were those who seemed to make out well enough from time to time: as a hungry infantryman, out on a greens hunt, discovered one day when he came upon a group of commissary officers enjoying an al fresco luncheon in the shade of a clump of trees. He approached the fence surrounding the grove, put his head through the palings, and gazed admiringly at the spread of food. “I say, misters,” he called to the diners at last, “did any of you ever hearn tell of the battle of Chance’lorsville?”

  This irrepressibility, which sustained him in adversity, this overriding sense of the ridiculous, uncramped even by the pangs of hunger, was as much a part of what made the Confederate soldier “terrible in battle” as was the high-throated yell he gave when he went into a charge or the derisive glee with which he tended to receive one, anticipating a yield of well-shod corpses. Davis counted heavily on this spirit to insure the survival of the armies and the nation through the harder times he knew would begin when the present “mud truce” ended. He was too much a military realist not to take into account the lengthening odds, but he included the imponderables in his calculations. To have done otherwise would have been to admit defeat before it came; which was not at all his way. “I cultivate hope and patience,” he said, “and trust to the blunders of our enemy and the gallantry of our troops for ultimate success.”

  In the North, as spring drew nearer and some perspective was afforded for a backward look at the season approaching its end, there was the feeling that such minor reverses as Olustee and Okolona, disappointing though they had been at the time, were no true detractions from the significant victories scored at the outset at Rappahannock Bridge and Chattanooga. These were the pattern-setters, the more valid indications of what was to come when winter relaxed its grip and large-scale fighting was resumed. Along with this, there was also the growing belief that the nation had found in Lincoln, despite his occasional military errors, the leader it needed to see it through what remained of its fiery trial. “The President is a man of convictions,” Harper’s Weekly had declared more than a year ago, combining these two impressions. “He has certain profound persuasions and a very clear purpose. He knows what the war sprang from, and upon what ground a permanent peace can be reared. He is cautious, cool, judicial. [While] he knows that great revolutions do not go backward, he is aware that when certain great steps in their prosecution are once taken, there will be loud outcries and apprehension. But the ninth wave touches the point to which the whole sea will presently rise, although the next wave, and the next, should seem to show a falling off.”

  What Harper’s had had in mind at the time was the Emancipation Proclamation, but people rereading this now could see that Missionary Ridge had been just such a ninth wave, lapping far up the military shingle, and though “the next wave, and the next,” had shown a falling off, the tide would soon be at the full. Or anyhow they could believe they saw this, and they reacted accordingly. During the current interim of comparative inaction, the home-front war had taken on what would be known in the following decade as a Chautauqua aspect, a revival of the waning lyceum movement, which combined the qualities of the camp meeting and the county fair, yet added a sophistication those old-time activities had lacked. They assembled in churches, halls, and theaters to enjoy in mass the heady atmosphere of pending victory. Primarily, such gatherings were militant in tone—meaning abolitionist, for the antislavery element had always been the militant wing of the party now in power—with the result that those who attended could feel that they were being strengthened and uplifted at the same time they were being entertained. There was, for example, the Hutchinson family: singers who could electrify an audience with their rendition of Whittier’s “Hymn of Liberty,” sung to the tune of Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott. The thought might be muddled, the rhymes atrocious, but the sweetness of the singers’ voice and the fervor of their delivery gave the words a power that swept the hearers along as part of the broad surge toward that same freedom for which blue-clad soldiers were giving their lives, beyond the roll of the horizon:

  What gives the wheat-field blades of steel?

  What points the rebel cannon?

  What sets the roaring rabble’s heel

  On the old star-spangled pennon?

  What breaks the oath

  Of the men o’ the South?

  What whets the knife

  For the Union’s life?

  Hark to the answer: Slavery!

  Or there was the Boston lecturer Wendell Phillips, who assured a New York audience of its moral superiority over a foe whose only role in life was to block the march of progress. He pictured the young man of the South, “melted in sensuality, whose face was never lighted up by a purpose since his mother looked into his cradle,” and declared that for such men “War is gain. They go out of it, and they sink down.” Whipped, they would return “to barrooms, to corner groceries, to chopping straw and calling it politics. [Laughter.] You might think they would go back to their professions. They never had any. You might think they would go back to the mechanic arts. They don’t know how to open a jackknife. [Great merriment.] There is nowhere for them to go, unless we send them half a million of emancipated blacks to teach them how to plant cotton.” His solution to the problem of how to keep the beaten South from relapsing “into a state of society more cruel than war—whose characteristics are private assassination, burning, stabbing, shooting, poisoning”—lifted the North’s grim efforts to the height of a crusade: “We have not only an army to conquer. We have a state of mind to annihilate.”

  Phillips could always fill a hall, but the star attraction this season, all agreed, was the girl orator Anna E. Dickinson, who had begun her career on the eve of her twentieth birthday, when she lost her job at the mint in her native Philadelphia for accusing McClellan of treason at Ball’s Bluff. Since then, she had come far, until now she was hailed alternately as the Joan of Arc and the Portia
of the Union. Whether she spoke at the Academy of Music in her home city, at New York’s Cooper Union, or at the Music Hall in Boston, the house was certain to be packed with those who came to marvel at the contrast between her virginal appearance—“her features well chiseled, her forehead and upper lip of the Greek proportion, her nostrils thin”—and the “torrent of burning, scathing, lightning eloquence,” which she released in what the same reviewer called “wonderfully lengthened sentences uttered without break or pause.” Hearing Anna was a dramatic experience not easily forgotten, though what you brought away with you was not so much a remembrance of what she had said as it was of the manner in which she had said it: which was how she affected Henry James, apparently, when he came to portray her, more than twenty years later, as Verena Tarrant. Her hatred of Southerners, especially Jefferson Davis, whom she compared to a hyena, was not so all-consuming that none was left for northern Democrats, who were without exception traitors to the cause of human freedom—as, indeed, were all who were not of the most radical persuasion, including such Republicans as Seward, “the Fox of the White House.” She loved applause; it thrilled her, and her style became more forward as her listeners responded; so that her addresses were in a sense a form of intercourse, an exchange of emotions, back and forth across the footlights.