Dixie Betrayed (2 page)

A South Carolinian by birth and among the most rabid of fire-eating secessionists, Wigfall was one of the supremely influential
and vocal Southern politicians of his day. He was a powerful-looking man, according to one English journalist, with a face
that “was not one to be forgotten, a straight, broad brow, from which the hair rose up like the vegetation on a riverbank,
beetling black eyebrows—a mouth coarse and firm, yet full of power, a square jaw—a thick, argumentative nose . . . these [features]
were relieved by eyes of wonderful depth and light, such as I never saw before but in the head of a wild beast.”
⁵
Wigfall had a peculiar blend of power and forceful oratory, even though he was a frequent drunk. His family traced its roots
in America back to the 1680s, and he was not about to be told what to do by latecomers, by frontiersmen who were less American.

Wigfall’s role as rear guard of the emerging South was a part he had been practicing for all his life. Elected to the U.S.
Senate in 1859, he told his fellow senators the following year that Southerners would never accept a “black” Republican as
president and let his Northern colleagues know that if Southerners failed to capture Boston, then “before you get into Texas,
you may shoot me.”
⁶
Actively spying for the Confederacy on the streets of Washington and emboldened by drinks from various Capitol Hill bars,
Wigfall angrily taunted his Northern colleagues with the prospect of Southern independence. He seriously considered kidnapping
James Buchanan so Southerner John Breckinridge, the vice president, could succeed him as the chief magistrate. Fellow Texan
Sam Houston called Wigfall “a little demented either from hard drink, or from the troubles of a bad conscience.”
⁷

On March 7 Wigfall proclaimed: “The only question is whether we shall have a decent, peaceable, quiet funeral after the Protestant
form, or whether we shall have an Irish wake at the grave? This Union is dead; it has got to be buried. . . . The seven states
that have withdrawn from this Union are surely never coming back.”
⁸
The next day he flatly told his colleagues, “We have dissolved the union; mend it if you can; cement it with blood.”
⁹
Wigfall was then expelled from the United States Senate, instantly becoming a celebrity.

A month after his expulsion, prior to the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, Wigfall rowed out to the Federal fort in
a small skiff and asked about its surrender. He was considerably drunk. Subsequently branded a hero by the Southern press,
Wigfall ingratiated himself with the newly elected provisional president of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis, while
serving as the chief magistrate’s aide.

But the relationship between the Texan and the Confederate president would change dramatically, and it would affect how the
Confederacy fought the war. Moreover, it was not unique. Key Confederate officials turned on Davis and, indeed, on the Confederacy,
when the administration needed them most. The story of the betrayal of the Confederacy is rife with arguments, selfishness,
reckless behavior, drunkenness, and the peculiar mind-set of a whole generation of privileged autocrats who had learned, for
many years, to put state rights above all else.

Mind you—the Confederacy’s internal troubles were not born in a vacuum. The Union had its own complex set of political, military,
and social squabbles that unleashed all types of problems for the Lincoln government throughout the war. It would be silly
to think that the Confederacy’s family arguments were unique or to ascribe the Confederacy’s loss of the war entirely to them.
But, in the case of the Confederacy, the political and military arguments that echoed throughout Richmond’s streets and onto
the battlefields made Confederate military success—and independence—far more difficult than it might have been, maybe even
impossible. State rights wounded the United States but destroyed the Confederacy.

D
AVIS
and the Confederate Congress fought over a wide variety of issues all through the war—from debates over state and federal
rights, to suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, to military appointments, to conscripting troops, to emancipation and
the arming of slaves to fight, to peace proposals. This was a political nation that could agree on hardly anything. And many
of the debates spilled out onto the battlefield through commanders such as Robert E. Lee, Joe Johnston, G. T. Beauregard,
John Bell Hood, and others. Grudges, friendships, prewar spats, and stubbornness all played into campaigns of letter writing
and personal appearances intended to influence the political spectrum of the South. The story of these relationships begins
with the inability to compromise. And it all started with the likes of Louis T. Wigfall.

Wigfall symbolized a huge problem for the Confederacy: his background—and that of many Southerners—would not permit domination
by any central government, be it the United States or Jefferson Davis. Many observed this, including William Howard Russell
of the
London Times.
One May morning in Montgomery, Russell awakened Wigfall in his hotel room, hoping to discover the secret cause of the Confederate
revolution. Groggily, Wigfall ran his hands through his long black hair as he exclaimed to the Brit what seemed perfectly
obvious to a Confederate patrician but might need to be explained to a queen. “We are a peculiar people, sir!” Wigfall began.
“You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us. . . . We have no cities—we don’t want them. We have no literature—we
don’t need any yet. . . . As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase
all we want.”
¹⁰

Wigfall was a product of his generation in time and space, as were other intellectuals of the Southern cause. They were deeply
conservative, privileged, and among the first families of their respective states. They often married each other’s cousins,
so many became interrelated. They lived among farming or plantation lands. Many were slave owners or had slave owners in their
families. They were wealthy, having received large inheritances and having been given significant “pocket monies,” even as
youths. They were considerable spenders. For the middle period of his life, for example, Wigfall was solvent for only weeks
at a time.

The cream of Southern secessionists consisted of socially prominent aristocrats, most of whom were lawyers (like Wigfall)
or judges. They drank and smoked cigars and gambled and fought and had affairs. They were well educated, despite spotty behavioral
records marked with episodes of arrogance; Wigfall, for one, was described in school as “a nightmare to faculty slumbers”
and acquired a reputation for insurgency.
¹¹
These men were dominated by a sense of honor and slight. Over one period of five months, Wigfall was in a fistfight, two
duels, three near-duels, and one shooting—leaving one dead and two, himself included, wounded. They felt they could get away
with anything. They held slavery as the summum bonum, the height of morality. And they were willing to follow causes to the
neglect of both family and fortune—the greatest cause, the one they had been indoctrinated with all their lives, being state
rights.

As a result the Confederacy was in trouble right out of the gate. But for a long time, only a relatively small group realized
that. Confederate nationalism was doomed. The situation grew worse as resources dwindled and all parties pushed their conflicting
agendas, nearly none of which could be granted. Squabbles spread all across the war front. Congress argued with the president.
The vice president argued with the president. Governors argued with the president. Generals argued with the president. Military
bureau chiefs in Richmond argued with generals and with the president. The press bitterly criticized the president. The Southern
government became a mess at all levels, and with a cast of thousands of players, resolution seemed unlikely.

And yet the Confederacy found itself wrapped in a strange paradox. For all its practical troubles, the Southern nation was
able to create and sustain a deep passion for the
dream
of a Confederate nation. This passion for an independent South burned so brightly in the hearts and minds of Rebels that
it outlived the protonation, in fact, and still has a hold on the descendants of Confederate soldiers—in some cases more strongly
than it did on postwar Confederates themselves. The persistent belief that the South should have won the war grew out of this
postwar love affair, and many Southern writers continued to fight the war with ink on paper in the decades following Appomattox.
The myth building of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, and the persistent suspicion of federal governments that is part
of the human condition, gave birth to and nurtured this dream. The David versus Goliath syndrome, the American fascination
with the underdog, the anomaly, captured the fascination of many Southerners.

But more importantly this passion came from the influence of Confederate propagandists who, with noble cause at heart, tried
their best to help Jefferson Davis and the young Confederate nation thwart their betrayers. It was a struggle that would turn
ugly and play itself out both in the hallways and chambers of the Richmond government and on the battlefields spread across
America. It was a struggle in the midst of a national crisis.

M
ONDAY
, February 18, 1861, began with a bright, blazing sun rising into a clear, blue sky far above the rooftops and cupolas of
Montgomery, Alabama. A vibrant city of 8,843, Alabama’s capital was proudly transforming into the center of the whole South.
It would be a noble experiment in nation building.

Although its population was modest, Montgomery was accustomed to a flurry of activity from the earliest days on the Alabama
frontier. Located in the central part of the state, with Birmingham to the north and Mobile to the south, Montgomery hosted
steamboat traffic on the Alabama River and frequent trains on the Montgomery and West Point Railroad. The city’s jewel was
the neoclassical State House, finished like a great Southern marble cake, with six Corinthian columns and a rust-colored dome
that gave it a magnificence above any other buildings in the region.

On the cool morning of the Confederacy’s birth, all was bustling within the city. “Montgomery has become a focal point of
interest for the whole nation,” penned a visiting reporter for the
New York Herald.
¹
It was something of an understatement. From the Capitol Building down to the river, along the city’s principal business streets,
gas lamps were extinguished one by one as dawn captured the sky above. The residents of fine homes in residential neighborhoods
awoke and prepared for the big day, dressing in their best finery to catch a glimpse of the South’s new leader.

They were not alone: throngs of visitors clogged the three principal hotels. Others stayed wherever they could, many boarding
in private houses, hoping to secure employment in some capacity in this new venture called the Southern Confederacy. Interspersed
among the whites in the fancy neighborhoods were African Americans, many acting as house servants. Of the 4,502 African Americans
in Montgomery, about 100 were free. They lived in basic cottages that lined the city’s outer limits.

The chief revolutionary, president-elect Jefferson Davis, had made an exhausting trip from his Brierfield plantation in Mississippi
to attend his inaugural ceremony. Already the Confederate leader felt the pressure of his post; his fatigued frame held a
plain, homespun suit, and his voice was so strained by making speeches along his journey that the words he uttered were too
soft and flayed for many to hear.

Long before the Confederacy was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, Jefferson Finis Davis had a celebrated, successful career as a
soldier and politician. Davis’s parents, Samuel and Jane, were farmers and innkeepers who had succeeded in Georgia after the
American Revolution but soon moved to Christian County, Kentucky, where they cleared a two-hundred-acre farm with the aid
of several children and two slaves. By the time Jefferson came along, on June 3, 1808, he was the tenth child, born in a cabin
on the farm when his mother was forty-eight. To signify the postscript to their family, Jane and Samuel added the middle name,
alerting those who didn’t suspect already that Jefferson would be the last Davis child. Eight months later, and fewer than
one hundred miles away, another baby would arrive on the Kentucky frontier and be named Abraham Lincoln.

After adding horses and slaves to the clan and in search of better land, Samuel Davis moved the family again in 1810, this
time to Louisiana, and a year later, to the southwestern corner of the Mississippi Territory, which would achieve statehood
in 1817. There, Jefferson Davis would grow through his adolescent years and become a man, following the course of many youths,
rebelling against school despite his bright mind and success. He entered college at Transylvania University, in Lexington,
Kentucky, in the heart of the bluegrass region, where he resolidified ties to his native state. His studies went well at Transylvania
until June 1824, when he learned his father had died. This shock rattled Davis badly. His melancholy worsened when Jefferson
discovered that his father’s financial success had reversed itself over his last few years. Jefferson’s oldest brother, Joseph,
now became a father figure. To further Jefferson’s education his older brother secured an appointment for him to the United
States Military Academy at West Point through the help of the great political champion of the South, John C. Calhoun. (Calhoun,
celebrated U.S. senator from South Carolina, was revered as the author of the most sacred principle of Southern politics:
that secession, if desired, could be justified within the bounds of the Constitution.) Jefferson traveled to the Point and
commenced his schooling in the autumn of 1824.