Dixie Betrayed (20 page)

In the Senate James Phelan of Mississippi asked, “Can Congress demand military service of a State Officer?” He believed that
by constitutional power, “Congress has the right to go into the States and take the militia as individuals. . . . We trust
that Congress will not abuse these powers, as we trust the States, who have the power to raise armies, if in their opinion
they think themselves in danger of invasion, will not raise those armies and plunge the Confederacy into war.”
⁷

A few days later Thomas Semmes of Louisiana asked, “If the Confederate government can take state officers, what is stopping
them from conscripting governors and legislators as well as justices of the peace?” Williamson Oldham of Texas said that if
Semmes were right, then “every person, male and female, could be forced into the Confederate army.” His fellow Texan Louis
Wigfall said that if Congress had the right to call out the militia, as it does, then ‘“it also has the right to define who
the militia are. . . . And I do not believe that Congress will ever be guilty of declaring that a woman shall be a militia
man.
”
⁸
Had there not been a war on, it might all have been comical.

O
N
August 18 the president sent a message to the Senate asking for a more comprehensive conscription act that would cover men
of ages thirty-five to forty-five. The same day the Senate received the president’s message, South Carolina congressman William
Porcher Miles, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, offered a bill extending conscription to white males between eighteen
and forty-five. He also offered a bill suggesting that all black soldiers taken in arms against the Confederacy—and all white
officers leading them—should be hanged at capture or turned over to the state in which they are captured to be dealt with
as the states saw fit.
⁹

Porcher Miles was an unusual character, a one-time teacher of mathematics at the College of Charleston who was born in rural
South Carolina on Independence Day in 1822. In a brief autobiography Miles noted, “I believe I am the
eighth generation
born upon the soil of Carolina which may account for my intense Southern sentiments.”
¹⁰
Following a stint as a hospital worker during the yellow fever epidemic of 1855, Miles ran for mayor of Charleston and won.
He then ran for Congress and won a seat in the House in Washington, serving until 1860, when he resigned along with the other
South Carolina politicians. He had served as a member of Beauregard’s delegation to arrange for the surrender of Fort Sumter
as the war broke out, and now he was emerging as a powerful politician. A solid-looking man with a neat hairstyle, sincere
eyes, and a beard and mustache that fitted neatly above his trim suits, he also had served as chairman of the committee that
approved the Confederate flag and wielded great influence as head of the Military Affairs Committee.

Over the summer of 1862, Porcher Miles’s standing, and sway, would grow week by week. At times he supported the administration,
but overall, his strident state rights stance pushed against it. He had allies. Four days after the House first confronted
conscription, the cantankerous Henry S. Foote of Tennessee, Davis’s old nemesis, took the floor. He warned against extending
the act and argued over the impression that the First Conscription Act had passed by a large margin; in fact many in Congress
had voted for it with regret, and the president said that he signed it into law with reluctance. Foote called the law unconstitutional.
“If agents of the Confederate Government had the right to go into any State and take therefrom the men belonging to that State,”
screeched Foote, “how was States Rights and State sovereignty to be maintained?” Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi said that
he thought Mississippians would support conscription. In a huff Foote countered that he knew the people of Mississippi, read
the newspapers, and—by God—they “were states rights people.” Otho Singleton of Mississippi said he “saw nothing new” in Foote’s
speech and that “it was a useless waste of time” to discuss the act. “Mississippi would rally to a man” over conscription,
said Singleton. The question was carried over into secret session.
¹¹

The next day the debate exploded once again. Nearly immediately Foote began arguing with Augustus Kenan of Georgia, who staunchly
defended Joe Brown’s raising of troops in Georgia. Caleb Herbert of Texas then declared that if it became necessary to violate
the Constitution to win the war, he would favor “raising the ‘lone star’ flag that had twice been raised before.” Porcher
Miles asked if conscription were not extended, then how would the Confederacy fill up the army’s ranks, “many of which are
reduced to mere skeletons”? Burgess Gaither of North Carolina said the present laws, if correctly executed, would fill up
the regiments. This was absurd, but the argument was not based on logistics but political logic. Nearly every step taken by
a representative was taken with the thought of their own state foremost in mind—and most states by now were feeling an increasing
separation from the Richmond government.
¹²

If some in Congress did not support supplying the army with more white troops, then they could contemplate forcing slaves
to serve the army in support roles. On August 26 in the House, Thomas Foster of Alabama offered a resolution to call up all
male slaves between ages twenty and thirty to be used as teamsters, cooks, and nurses in hospitals or laborers and mechanics
in railroads, workshops, furnaces, foundries, and factories of the Confederate States. Congress would secure the owners of
the property “a just and reasonable compensation for the labor of said negroes,” said Foster. The measure was adopted.
¹³

The day after the resolution was adopted, the Senate took up the conscription debate. Some senators were particularly worried
about the administration empowering enrolling officers to seize conscripts. Louis T. Wigfall claimed that because of the passage
of the conscription bill, every white male in the land was, ipso facto, a soldier, “and when now found traveling about, the
assumption was fair that he was a deserter.” Still, if a provost marshal did catch someone who was shirking duty, Wigfall
stated, “it would do them no harm to be subjected to a little drill, and if they should happen to kill one of the enemies
of their country, so much the better.” The amendment passed.
¹⁴

Conscription continued to arouse emotion throughout the autumn. On September 1 in the House, Porcher Miles reported on a bill
that would allow the president to increase the size of the army by calling for those between thirty-five and forty-five years
old to serve for three years.
¹⁵
Two days later in the Senate, William Yancey of Alabama attempted to circumvent the president by offering his own version
of a conscription act that would have allowed new military companies to form with troops that had not yet been mustered into
service—something the president opposed.
¹⁶

On September 3 the debate reignited in the House. Samuel Miller of Virginia believed that “some thought conscription doubtful
constitutionally, and many viewed it as a breach of good faith towards the soldiers who had contracted to serve for a certain
period.” But he now thought the majority of the country supported it. John Crockett of Kentucky originally argued that conscription
was unconstitutional and that he could not vote for the bill. But now he could. Fear of the Yankees taking over Kentucky won
him over. Still, he was “opposed to leaving the exercise of a power on which the fate of the country might depend, to the
sole discretion of the President.”
¹⁷
Milledge Bonham of South Carolina stated that the governors should call quotas for troops and organize them in certain states
rather than giving that power to the president. He criticized the president and secretary of war for not acting sooner and
disagreed with them that there was no immediate need for troops. “Our armies are victorious everywhere, and we have time to
fill up our forces in the constitutional mode,” he fantastically suggested.

Finally, on September 17, 1862—the day a battle raged far away along a little Maryland creek called the Antietam and a month
after the conscription debate had begun—the House passed a new conscription bill. Miles led the vote for it; Bonham and Foote
fought against it. The bill passed forty-nine to thirty-nine.
¹⁸
On September 27 the Second Conscription Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of fifty-four to twenty-nine, requiring service
of all able men ages eighteen to forty-five. Implementation was delayed until July 15, 1863. The first such Union army conscription
would also take place in the summer of 1863, sparking brief riots in New York by those who opposed such compulsory service.
On both sides of the war, citizens at home would begin to feel that their governments were infringing on their free will and
personal liberties.

C
ONSCRIPTION
was not the only tiger this contentious Congress had by the tail during the summer and autumn of 1862. Continuing its investigation
of the navy secretary, the House resolved on August 27 that it “lacked confidence” in Stephen Mallory. After some discussion
a motion to table the resolution was passed forty-seven to forty-one; nevertheless, Foote then introduced a resolution to
form a committee to investigate the affairs of the Navy Department. For some members of Congress, their own feelings about
Mallory mattered little; they smelled blood in the water and adored the opportunity to attack Davis, albeit via his navy secretary.
After further debate the House adjourned, but not before Hines Holt of Georgia and George Jones of Tennessee said that if
members did not stop condemning government officials and set about doing the work of government, then history would remember
the Confederate Congress as “the most inefficient branch of Government existing in this revolution.”
¹⁹

Congress also had it out for Gen. Braxton Bragg, who, like Mallory, was a close friend of the president’s. “You have the misfortune
of being regarded as my personal friend,” Davis wrote Bragg, “and are pursued therefore with malignant censure by men regardless
of truth and whose want of principle to guide their conduct renders them incapable of conceiving that you are trusted because
of your known fitness for command, and not because of friendly regard. Revolutions develop the high qualities of the good
and the great, but they cannot change the nature of the vicious and the selfish.”
²⁰

Bragg incurred the ire of the entire Georgia cabal by invoking martial law over Atlanta. “I have viewed this proceeding as
I have others of our military authorities of late with painful apprehensiveness for the future,” Governor Joe Brown wrote
Aleck Stephens, still ailing at Liberty Hall. “It seems military men are assuming the whole powers of the government to themselves
and setting at defiance constitutions, laws, state rights, state sovereignty, and every other principle of civil liberty,
and that our people engrossed in the struggle with the enemy are disposed to submit to these bold usurpations tending to military
despotism without murmur, much less resistance.”
²¹

Then came another storm over Bragg, this time in the Senate. The contentious, egotistical South Carolinian James Orr inquired
whether General Bragg had had any citizens “executed . . . without trial, the number thus executed, and the crimes or offences
imputed to them.”
²²
Senators angrily requested clarification from Jefferson Davis. Orr claimed he had heard “from officers in the army of this
tyrant” that executions of three citizens had taken place. Others objected to what they saw as hearsay and slander. “The names
assassin and General Bragg should never be linked together, and driven into the public ear,” said James Phelan of Mississippi.
“There is a common law in the army,” said Louis Wigfall, “by which a Lieutenant even may shoot down a soldier, when, during
battle, he is deserting or creating disorder.” Robert M. T. Hunter said that Bragg should be present if he were to be brought
into an inquiry, though he believed the Senate actually lacked the power to insist on the removal of a general officer. “Citizens
may be shot down in this city and the Senate take no notice of the circumstances,” added Wigfall.
²³

The next day the arguments raged on. Orr continued to ask for a resolution seeking information from Jefferson Davis over Bragg’s
alleged executions. In one case, Orr said, the soldier had been ordered not to shoot his gun and had fired at a chicken, instead
hitting a black man. The soldier was summarily executed. The execution occurred not because of shooting the man, however,
but because the army was in retreat and silence was mandated. He had violated an order to not make noise. “The guns of the
sixteen men ordered to perform the execution,” said Orr, “made more noise than the one gun fired at the chicken.”
²⁴

Bragg was a target largely because his campaign in Kentucky was failing. On October 8 he had fought the Yankees at Perryville
but had since fallen back and was retreating from the state. By late October Bragg’s army had arrived at Cumberland Gap, planning
to move back toward Knoxville and Chattanooga. A week later Bragg met with the president, hoping to mend his standing, as
recorded by Preston Johnston. “I think Bragg in Ky. a signal failure,” he penned on October 27. “He is here, & in conference
with the President.”
²⁵

Not only could Congress interfere with decisions about military commanders they did not like, Davis found, but they could
interfere to attempt to help officers Davis
didn’t
like. On September 13 a large number of congressmen signed and sent a letter to the president asking him to restore G. T.
Beauregard to command of the Army of the West, taking him out of Charleston. They reflected great confidence in Beauregard
and urged the president to move him into command out west, especially in the wake of Henry, Donelson, and Shiloh. The document
was carried to Davis by Edward Sparrow and Thomas Semmes and signed by them and many others, including Miles, Bonham, Wigfall,
and Foote. It was one more thing for the wartime president to deal with.
²⁶