Dixie Betrayed (18 page)

The walls seemed to be closing in. “I packed some valuable books and the sword I wore for many years,” Davis reported to Varina
at month’s end, “together with the pistols used at Monterrey and Buena Vista, and my old dressing case; these articles will
have a value to the boys after time and to you now.”
²⁹
But the Confederacy was far from done. Indeed, it was about to roar.

T
HE
summer of 1862 saw the Confederacy in a precarious position. Alarm was palpable on the streets of Richmond, as McClellan’s
Yankees were spread widely around the city’s outskirts, threatening the capital and the very livelihood of the South. “McClellan
has been quiet for several days,” war clerk John B. Jones wrote his wife in June. “If we do not attack him and beat him soon,
Richmond must be evacuated. He is digging his way to it, and may soon have his siege guns in reach of the city.”
¹
With Confederate military campaigns on multiple fronts in full swing, long, sweltering, dangerous days were now being experienced
by a huge number of troops. The tally of deaths was growing, and the examples of men running away from the army to visit home,
even with the intention of returning, was alarming Southern commanders.

With Joe Johnston wounded and Lee taking over the Army of Northern Virginia, no one was exactly sure how the Confederate forces
would fare. Lee, after all, had been notable in western Virginia early in the war as “Granny Lee,” too timid to attack the
Yankees in force and preoccupied with digging entrenchments, earning him the additional sobriquet “King of Spades.” President
Davis, though, was hopeful regarding his military adviser.

But the president and Varina were worried, too, as sickness had struck their own family. From Raleigh Varina wrote of the
travails of wartime loneliness and longed to be with her husband in Richmond. Preston Johnston sent her frequent news of the
president, in addition to Davis’s own letters. With Richmond in jeopardy, Sidney Johnston dead, and having heard about Joe
Johnston’s wounding, she wrote her husband, “Why are our best friends killed?” The Davises’ young son William was intermittently
sick with boils and cholera, and most of the medications tried for him did no good. “My heart sunk within me at the news of
the suffering of my angel baby,” wrote the president. “Your telegram of 12th gives assurance of the subsidence of disease.
But the look of pain and exhaustion, the gentle complaint, ‘I am tired’ which has for so many years oppressed me, seems to
have been revived.”
²

Around Richmond McClellan moved most of his force south of the Chickahominy River and, characteristically, waited. The weather
was poor, and several weeks passed before any significant action came. Then, on June 25, the armies began a series of battles
that collectively came to be called the Seven Days. On June 25 occurred the battle of Oak Grove. A more significant action,
the battle of Mechanicsville, was fought along Beaver Dam Creek the following day. Lee’s sound plan to force the Yankees from
their trenches by flanking movements went awry when Stonewall Jackson arrived late for his attack and Brig. Gen. A. P. Hill
attacked without orders. The following day Lee and his subordinates attempted to regroup. Robert Stiles, a young soldier in
the Richmond Howitzers, was present when Lee met Jackson. He wrote:

The two generals greeted each other warmly, but wasted no time upon the greeting. They stood facing each other, some thirty
feet from where I lay, Lee’s left side and back toward me, Jackson’s right and front. Jackson began talking in a jerky, impetuous
way, meanwhile drawing a diagram on the ground with the toe of his right boot. He traced two sides of a triangle with promptness
and decision; then starting at the end of the second line began to draw a third projected toward the first. This third line
he traced slowly and with hesitation, alternately looking up at Lee’s face and down at his diagram, meanwhile talking earnestly;
and when at last the third line crossed the first and the triangle was complete, he raised his foot and stamped it down with
emphasis, saying “We’ve got him.”
³

The generals believed they knew how to defeat the Yankees by striking them before they could establish a solid defensive line.
The bloody battle fought on June 27 was termed Gaines’s Mill. Lee planned to envelop Union Brig. Gen. Fitz John Porter’s right,
but again, Jackson was slow.
Nevertheless, a massed Confederate assault late in the afternoon turned the battle into a Confederate victory. So close to
the zone of war, Davis could not keep away. On June 26 he commenced a tour of the battlefields, and he actually slept a number
of days out under the stars with the troops. At Oak Grove Davis approached so close to the front lines that Lee had to ask
him to leave, which he eventually did. Shortly thereafter Davis toured the troops and their encampments along the Chickahominy
River and encouraged the men to fight on stubbornly. He was shaken by the terrible wounding of a friend, Brig. Gen. Richard
Griffith, whom he saw carried away on a litter to die. Elsewhere the president came under fire and—again after Lee’s prodding—he
left a house that was later struck by artillery shells.

On June 28, as McClellan began a retreat to the James River, the more minor battle of Garnett’s and Golding’s Farms took place.
Jackson struck the Federal army from the north at the White Oak Swamp on June 30. And finally, on July 1, Lee’s army attempted
a frontal attack at Malvern Hill to crush the retreating Federals, but his men were hammered by well-placed Union cannon that
fired with devastating effect—sometimes even to Union soldiers. As Thomas L. Livermore, a New Hampshire soldier, described
it,

Shells flew all around us, and the wonder was that more were not hurt. I turned my head to the left and saw the battery and
the gunners, springing to their work amid the smoke. I saw one pull the string, saw the flash of the piece, heard the roar,
and the whiz of the shell, heard it burst, heard the humming of the fragments, and wondered if I was to be hit, and quicker
than a flash something stung my leg on the calf, and I limped out of the ranks, a wounded man.
⁴

Despite the success at Malvern Hill, it was by now clear that McClellan’s Peninsular campaign was a strategic failure. By
July 3 he had withdrawn the Army of the Potomac to Harrison’s Landing and awaited a northward movement. It was over.

Other wheels were turning, however. In mid-July, Lee dispatched Jackson northward to Gordonsville to threaten the advance
of Maj. Gen. John Pope, whose Army of Virginia occupied the Shenandoah Valley. This established the basis for the Second Manassas
campaign, also called Second Bull Run.

Jackson hit Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks at Cedar Mountain on August 9 in an affair significantly mismanaged on both
sides. Subsequently, both armies moved northward, and by late August, Jackson interposed himself between Pope’s army and Washington.
“His sun-burned cap was lifted from his brow, and he was gazing toward the west, where the splendid August sun was about to
kiss the distant crest of the Blue Ridge, which stretched far away, bathed in azure and gold,” wrote Jackson’s staff officer
Robert L. Dabney of his celebrated commander. “And his blue eye, beaming with martial pride, returned the rays of the evening
with almost equal brightness. . . . His face beaming with delight, [he] said, ‘Who could not conquer, with such troops as
these?’”
⁵
The opposing Federal commander heard no such praise from his fellow soldiers. Pope’s competence had been brought into question
a number of times, and a common feeling of distrust had developed. “I don’t care for John Pope one pinch of owl dung,” Union
Brig. Gen. Samuel D. Sturgis wrote on August 23.
⁶
He was far from alone in his sentiments.

Pope’s seventy-five thousand faced about fifty-five thousand men commanded by Lee as the armies converged on the old battleground
of Manassas. By August 27 Jackson had concentrated his forces at Manassas Junction, capturing a vast array of Union supply
trains. Confederate Maj. Gen. James Longstreet approached from the west. Two days later Federal troops occupied the old battleground
at Henry House Hill, as well as the towns of Centreville and Haymarket and lay scattered southward toward Brentsville. Deciding
the moment had come, Pope attacked Jackson from both east and west. The Federal attacks westward were poorly coordinated,
piecemeal affairs. Vicious fighting erupted at Groveton and along an unfinished railroad that passed by the base of Jackson’s
position at Stony Ridge. “I can see him now,” wrote Edward McCrady of the Confederate Brig. Gen. Maxcy Gregg at Groveton,
“as with his drawn sword, that old Revolutionary scimitar we all knew so well, he walked up and down the line, and hear him
as he appealed to us to stand by him and die there. ‘Let us die here, my men, let us die here.’ And I do not think that I
exaggerate when I say that our little band responded to his appeal, and were ready to die, at bay, there if necessary.”
⁷

On August 30, the battle’s second day, a massive attack by Longstreet on the southern end of the Union line transformed the
battle into a great Confederate victory. Jackson struck at Pope’s northern flank, and the Federal army fell back. Pope withdrew
toward Centreville, but a rear-guard action ensued on September 1 at Chantilly. There, the Confederate divisions of Maj. Gen.
Dick Ewell (who had lost his leg at Groveton on August 28) and Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill struck Federal forces commanded by Maj.
Gen. Philip Kearny and Brig. Gen. Isaac I. Stevens. The Confederates were turned back, but both Union commanders were killed.
Charles F. Walcott, a captain in the Twenty-first Massachusetts Infantry, described Kearny’s death:

The General, entirely alone, apparently in uncontrollable rage at our disregard of his peremptory orders to advance, forced
his horse through the deep, sticky mud of the cornfield past the left of the regiment, passing within a few feet of where
I was standing. I watched him moving in the murky twilight through the corn, and, when less than twenty yards away, saw his
horse suddenly rear and turn, and half-a-dozen muskets flash around him: so died the intrepid soldier, Gen. Philip Kearny!
⁸

In the east Robert E. Lee was beginning his ascent to greatness and fame by beating back the Yankees from Richmond. In the
west Gen. Braxton Bragg was rising to great notoriety by outflanking Union forces in Tennessee. Significantly alarmed about
Charleston, Davis sent Bragg to investigate the situation and then a week later dispatched his old friend Samuel Cooper there
also to find out what was going on.
⁹

The problem of Charleston’s defense festered. The city was nominally under the supervision of Maj. Gen. John C. Pemberton.
According to Francis Pickens, Pemberton was “confused and uncertain about everything.”
¹⁰
Against nearly everyone else, Davis vigorously defended Pemberton. Late in August Pickens complained again about Pemberton.
“[Pemberton] had no idea of defending the city [following orders to do so],” wrote Pickens, who implored Davis to remove him.
The president stood by his old friend, however.
¹¹

Along the Mississippi River, combined action resumed on August 5 with an attack on Baton Rouge by Confederate infantry. Yankees
had occupied the city on May 12, before commencing operations toward Vicksburg. After their failure in Vicksburg, the Union
troops had retreated to Baton Rouge by July 26. During this period some changes took place among the Confederate commanders.
After being commissioned a full general in April, Bragg, who held President Davis’s favor, was assigned to replace P. G. T.
Beauregard as commander of the Army of Mississippi, assuming charge on August 15. “The great changes of command and commanders
here has well nigh overburdened me,” Bragg wrote his wife on July 22, “but I hope yet to mark the enemy before I break down.”
¹²

For his part Beauregard was once again furious. “If the country be satisfied to have me laid on the shelf by a man who is
either demented or a traitor to his high trust—well, let it be so,” he confided to his friend and staff officer Thomas Jordan.
Beauregard went on:

I require rest & will endeavor meanwhile by study and reflection to fit myself better for the darkest hours of our trial,
which, I foresee, are yet to come. . . . My consolation is, that the difference between “that individual” and myself is—that,
if he were to die to day, the whole country would rejoice at it, whereas, I believe, if the same thing were to happen to me,
they would regret it.
¹³

The fate of Vicksburg was a terrific worry back in Richmond. The fortified bastion on the Mississippi River meant control
of the lower part of the waterway. If lost to the Yankees, the result would be disastrous. Yet with so much action in the
east, there seemed to be little Davis could do to bolster his support for the garrison there. Corinth, Mississippi, where
Beauregard had retreated following the battle of Shiloh, was under a slow, tedious advance by Union Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck.
¹⁴
“If Miss. troops lying in camp when not retreating under Beauregard, were at home,” mused Davis, “they would probably keep
a section of the river free for our use and closed against Yankee transports.”
¹⁵
Writing the state’s governor Davis confessed, “My efforts to provide for the military wants of your section have been sadly
frustrated.”
¹⁶

Davis continued to urge governors to provide soldiers and allow his government to assign them for duty and made vague promises
about helping the states resist attacks by Federal troops. “With respect to conscripts, the law of Congress does not allow
new Regts. to be formed from their number,” the president wrote Governor Thomas Moore of Louisiana. “I trust that the new
Commandg. Genl., with your assistance, and the co-operation of the patriotic citizens of Louisiana will be able to keep the
enemy in check . . . until we shall be able to drive the invader altogether from the soil.”
¹⁷
But such words were of little comfort to recipient or sender.