Dixie Betrayed (19 page)

A more explosive situation was brewing in Arkansas, where Governor Henry Rector wanted to pull his state away from the Confederacy
altogether. “Arkansas lost, abandoned, subjugated, is not Arkansas as she entered the confederate government,” Rector declared
in a proclamation. “Nor will she remain a confederate State, desolated as a wilderness.” Rector threatened to build “a new
ark and launch it on new waters, seeking a haven somewhere, of equality, safety, and rest.”
¹⁸
Responding to Rector’s proclamation, Francis Lubbock of Texas wrote the president, reassuring him as best he could that support
would come from the Deep South. “This is no time for bickerings, heart-burnings, and divisions among a people struggling for
existence as a free Government,” wrote Lubbock.
¹⁹
True, but false, too.

Davis, worried over the independence of governors and what they might try, continued his run-ins on paper with the most cantankerous
of them all, Joe Brown of Georgia. Brown wrote his friend Aleck Stephens, still in Georgia:

I deeply regret that the President, whom I have regarded as a lead State Rights man, should have given in his adhesion to
the doctrines of unlimited congressional powers. I am satisfied however that my position is the position of the old State
Rights leaders from the days of 1798 till the present time, and I am willing to stand or fall by these doctrines. I entered
into this revolution to contribute my humble mite to sustain the rights of the states and prevent the consolidation of the
Government, and I am still a rebel till this object is accomplished, no matter who may be in power.
²⁰

As Stephens lay in bed, away from his post in Richmond, he not only reflected on letters from his partners in opposition to
Davis, but he also had time to write out a list of his “negroes, with their values.” He listed thirty-one names, starting
with “Harry” and ending with “Melissa, a child,” and placed their collective value at $12,950. (A year later he calculated
their total value at $32,150. For some, at least for a time, the war seemed to be profitable.) While the Confederate vice
president was not willing to help his government in Richmond, he was able to tally his estate.
²¹
It was an unencouraging sign.

Even the friendliest of Deep South governors had their apparent demands, or at least concerns, to share with the president.
“The isolated condition of the States West of the Miss. River, since the fall of New Orleans, and the virtual possession of
that River by the enemy rendered it proper that the several executives of those States should confer together freely and fully
as to their wants and necessities, and the best means for their protection and defense,” Lubbock and his colleagues from Arkansas,
Missouri, and Louisiana informed Davis. “We should have a Commanding General, having territorial jurisdiction over all the
States West of the Mississippi River. . . . We must have money for the support of the Army. . . . We must have arms, and also
ammunition . . . [and] the General sent should be eminently gifted with administrative ability.”
²²

At Chattanooga Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith was preparing an invasion of Kentucky that hoped to retake much of the territory
captured and occupied by Federal troops. The Confederate plan called for Bragg to concentrate at the rail center of Chattanooga
while Kirby Smith would move against the Union forces controlling the Cumberland Gap to open a thoroughfare into central Kentucky.
The two Confederate armies would then unite to destroy the army of Union Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, which had been moving
toward Chattanooga, and push him from Tennessee. Because of its complexity, it was an audacious plan strategically, but one
that might work if the timing were handled perfectly and if preliminary events favored the South.

Smaller-scale operations were a part of the Confederate effort. Col. John Hunt Morgan was assigned the task of trapping Union
Brig. Gen. George W. Morgan, who was presently at Cumberland Gap. Beginning a forced march from Sparta, Tennessee, John Morgan’s
raiders attempted to cut the Louisville & Nashville Railroad and attack Gallatin on August 12, northeast of Nashville. There,
they skirmished with a Union garrison and destroyed an eight-hundred-foot-long railroad bridge over the Cumberland River as
well as a railroad tunnel between Gallatin and Bowling Green. The commander of the Federal force, Col. William P. Boone, had
left camp to visit his wife, who was lying ill in a hotel in town. On leaving the hotel Boone was surrounded and captured.
John Morgan’s men infiltrated the town so quietly that most of the pickets and guards were asleep and surprised as well. The
result was, in the words of Union Capt. Walworth Jenkins, “a shameful and complete surprise within two hours after Colonel
Boone had left his guards ‘on the alert and doing their duty,’ and the surrender of the whole camp, on guard, and at the tunnel
and bridges without a shot being fired for the defense of their position, the reputation of their State, or the honor of their
country.”
²³

T
HESE
actions in the western theater, especially in the critically important border state of Kentucky, were fought against the
politically volatile backdrop of coming emancipation. On July 17 President Lincoln had signed the Second Confiscation Act,
after considerable debate in Congress. The act stated that slaves held by those in rebellion against the government of the
United States would be set free after coming into regions of Federal control or occupation. Vigorously supported by radical
Republicans, and seen as not going far enough by many abolitionists, the act was highly controversial in the North. It called
for the confiscation of slaves as property, suggested that other types of property also could be seized, and allowed the government
both to employ freed slaves in various tasks as well as to establish a provision for colonization somewhere outside the United
States (an idea that had been batted around in Congress as a solution to the slave dilemma for several decades). Although
Lincoln was not satisfied with all parts of the act, and many elements were never enforced (as is the case with many complex
laws), he had signed it. It signaled another step toward transforming the character of the war, and it upset nearly everyone
in one way or another.

“We think you are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the
emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act,” implored the powerful, radical, eccentric editor Horace Greeley in an
open letter to Lincoln. The letter, titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” was published in the
New York Tribune
on August 20. “We think you are unduly influenced by the councils,” continued Greeley, “the representations, the menaces
of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. . . . The Rebels from the first have been eager to confiscate,
imprison, scourge, and kill; we have fought wolves with the devices of sheep.”
²⁴
In response to this public stab at his policy, Lincoln sent a reply to the editor and his paper two days later. “My paramount
object in this struggle
is
to save the Union,” Lincoln wrote, “and is
not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
all
the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. . . . I intend
no modification of my oft-expressed
personal
wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.”
²⁵
Greeley printed the text of Lincoln’s letter on August 25.

While Lincoln was stepping into considerably more controversial waters as chief executive, Secretary of State William H. Seward
wrote off concerns about the violent war spilling over into politics. “Assassination is not an American practice or habit,”
he told John Bigelow, the U.S. consul in Paris, on July 15, “and one so vicious and so desperate cannot be engrafted into
our political system.”
²⁶

M
EANWHILE,
the Lincoln administration continued to experiment with command structure, as it had throughout the first part of the war.
Having given up on the timid George McClellan in March, Lincoln next appointed a “War Board” to run the army consisting of
his bureau chiefs, along with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. When this arrangement proved too cumbersome, with too many cooks
in the kitchen, Lincoln found a western general whom he lacked faith in on the battlefield but who might serve as an excellent
glorified clerk—Henry Halleck. In July he brought Halleck to Washington and reinstated a conventional general in chief role
for him.

In the South there were no such neat solutions. Yankee armies still held close to the Confederate capital, and Navy Secretary
Stephen R. Mallory confided to his diary, “I feel that if my life would gain this victory [before Richmond] it should be instantly
offered; nay, I would seize and glory in, the chance of sacrificing it for so great a result.” He also began to sour on the
prospects for the Confederacy. “England . . . may be here fitted by the annihilation of our cotton producing power,” he wrote.
“Her efforts to raise this staple in India, Egypt & Africa indicate her determination to look elsewhere than to us for it.”
Mallory also reflected on his lack of confidence in Jefferson Davis. “The Presdt. does not consult his cabinet either as to
plans or arrangements of campaigns, or the appointments of military men to office.”
²⁷

While Mallory lacked confidence in Davis, others lacked confidence in Mallory. Blaming him for the inaction of Confederate
forces on the water and the failure to raise any kind of naval force that could respectably take on the Yankees, Congress
took action. It appointed a Joint Select Committee in the House to investigate the Navy Department and Mallory. The second
session of the First Regular Congress of the Confederacy was just getting under way, called to open on August 18. It would
be the most contentious yet.

A
S
autumn 1862 approached, the whole country watched and waited with eager anticipation. Richmonders felt a degree of calm they
had not known in some time. The Union invasion of the previous spring had melted away, and now Lee was on the attack. A sense
of security flowed back into the city as politicians gathered once again to join another session of Congress on Capitol Hill.

The session commenced on August 18, with the chambers on the first and second floors of the Capitol Building again packed
with light, debate, cigar smoke, and numerous politicians. From day one the issue of state rights versus a strong national
government had plagued the fledgling Confederacy, but never more squarely than during this period.

On the first day of sessions, Jefferson Davis delivered a jubilant message to Congress reminding them of the administration’s
success the previous spring. “The vast army which threatened the capitol of the Confederacy has been defeated,” Davis reported,
as if they hadn’t heard. “Rapine and wanton destruction of private property, war upon non-combatants, murder of captives,
bloody threats to avenge the death of an invading soldiery by the slaughter of unarmed civilians, orders of banishment against
peaceful farmers engaged in the cultivation of the soil, are some of the means used by our ruthless invaders to enforce the
submission of a free people to foreign sway.”
¹
At the same time, the president reminded Congress of his standing relative to the states—at least as he saw it. “You can
best devise the means for establishing that entire cooperation of the State and central governments which is essential to
the well-being of both at all times, but which is now indispensable to their very existence.”
²
The president desperately wanted Congress to take responsibility for getting the states to cooperate.

One of the issues the national government and states of the Confederacy were still clashing over was military appointments.
Davis wanted, among other things, the power to eliminate from the service officers he saw as incompetent. He wrote:

In the election and appointment of officers for the Provisional Army, it was to be anticipated that mistakes would be made,
and incompetent officers of all grades introduced into the service. In the absence of experience, and with no reliable guide
for selection, executive appointments as well as elections, have been sometimes unfortunate. The good of the service, the
interests of the country, require that some means be devised for withdrawing the commissions of officers who are incompetent
for the duties required of their position, and I trust you will find means of relieving the Army of such officers by some
mode more prompt and less wounding to their sensibility than the judgment of a court martial.
³

Boards of inquiry and boards of retirement were suggested.
In early September arguments erupted in the Senate over whether generals should be nominated based on their previous rank
(seniority) or by merit demonstrated on the battlefield. Many similar questions arose. Should brigadier generals be appointed
with regard to state representation proportional to their numbers of troops?
⁴
Further, President Davis asked for a clarification on the matter of renominations. Should the president have the exclusive
right to nominate generals?
⁵
In the Senate on September 27, a dustup flared over the perception that the president had appointed too many generals from
Virginia, relative to other states. Senators from virtually all the other states felt this was the case and were envious of
the supposed unfair elevation of Virginia. The Senate resolved to regulate the appointment and nomination of brigadier generals
in the future and decided that nominations should be made with reference to the numbers of troops in service from that state,
giving preference to the state having the least number of brigadier generals in proportion to their troops. The Military Affairs
Committee then hit their fellow senators with a dose of reality, reporting the president had the exclusive right of nomination
but the Senate had the exclusive right of confirmation, and therefore, it may not also control or regulate appointments or
nominations. Predictably, debate continued.
⁶