Dixie Betrayed (23 page)

Such terrible losses hung heavily over both sides. In Washington Lincoln had removed Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside from command
of the Army of the Potomac following the disaster at Fredericksburg and a pointless, muddy march, but he had no ideal replacement
in mind. In desperation Lincoln turned to Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, a brash, forty-eight-year-old, hard-drinking egotist. Lincoln
wrote Hooker, “I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government
needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. . . . Beware of rashness,
but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.”
³
The great eastern Union army had a new chief.

Between January 10 and 11, Yankees under Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand and Acting Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter attacked the
Confederate stronghold, Fort Hindman, at Arkansas Post, Arkansas. There, on the Arkansas River, some thirty-two thousand men
together with three ironclads and six gunboats assaulted the fort, which was garrisoned by three brigades commanded by Brig.
Gen. Thomas J. Churchill and Col. John W. Dunnington. The action demonstrated the value of river gunboats in shelling a position,
as Porter’s naval forces contributed substantially to the fort’s capitulation following a murderous bombardment. The result
was a surrender of more than five thousand Confederates, a major loss to the South.

In the east little of note occurred until March 17, when a cavalry battle erupted at Kelly’s Ford, Virginia. Three weeks before
the battle, Confederate Brig. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee’s cavalry had stunned a series of Federal outposts, capturing 150 prisoners.
Lee left a note for a Federal division commander, his old friend Brig. Gen. William Woods Averell, asking him to “return the
favor and bring some coffee.” Averell arrived at Kelly’s Ford on the Rappahannock before sunrise, and the battle was joined
at about noon. Both mounted and dismounted, the troopers fought all afternoon, the Yankees repulsing Lee’s attacks. The battle
ended inconclusively except that Union cavalry had withstood their legendary opponents with great skill.

During recent battles in the last several months of fighting and maneuvering, several Confederate leaders had begun to stand
out. They were not the army’s top leaders, but they were important young generals who were making their presence felt strongly.
Following his heroic actions in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, at the battle of Second Manassas, at Antietam, and
at Fredericksburg, Stonewall Jackson had become the most celebrated of the bunch. On the cusp of his thirty-ninth birthday,
Jackson was now a lieutenant general and commanded the second army corps of the Army of Northern Virginia. He engendered a
great fighting spirit in the South that would grow as the weeks rolled on.

Jackson’s brother-in-law, Daniel Harvey Hill, was a cantankerous South Carolina native who had been a professor of mathematics
and commandant of the Military College of Charlotte in North Carolina before the war. Two years senior to Jackson, D. H. Hill
began the war as a colonel of North Carolina troops before being commissioned a brigadier general and moving around to a voluminous
number of assignments in part because of his argumentative persona. Now a major general and veteran of leading troops at Antietam,
Hill had quit the army on January 1 in a huff but was quickly talked into withdrawing his resignation. Hill would continue
to bounce around the army over the coming weeks, serving as something of a barometer of the relationships between army officers
and the War Department and the importance given to various theaters of the war. Plagued by poor relations with the War Department,
he drew their least glamorous assignments.

And then there was John Bell Hood. The Kentucky native, just thirty-two years old, had served on the Texas frontier before
commanding Texas infantry for the Confederacy. Wounded on the peninsula at Gaines’s Mill, Hood subsequently led troops at
Second Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg and was commissioned a major general late in 1862. Young, yet appearing beyond
his years due to sunken eyes and a full beard, Hood had a growing reputation as a hard and reckless fighter who left everything
on the field. His adventures also would prove to serve as a measurement of Congress’s involvement with military matters.

C
ONGRESS
had reconvened in Richmond on January 12, 1863, with this third session of the First Congress scheduled to remain in convention
until May 1. Many of the old areas of dispute and argument would again rear their heads, with other, new areas of concern
added to them. One of the fresher topics was the possibility of foreign intervention—something that Davis had dreamed about
since the shots were fired at Sumter. If only England or France would come to the aid of the South, he believed, the war might
draw to a speedy close with Southern independence intact. And without foreign monetary support, it seemed the Confederacy
would go broke sooner rather than later. “The increasing public debt, the great augmentation in the volume of the currency,
with its necessary concomitant of extravagant prices for all articles of consumption” was devastating, said the president.
⁴
On January 17 Davis furnished the Congress with lengthy arguments for recognition of the Confederacy by Britain, France,
Italy, and Russia to increase foreign trade and to help break the blockade.

But the new issues could not displace the old. The question of the Supreme Court had been postponed—again—back in September
1862, and senators now came out with heated vigor to resolve the issue. But the heat did not transform into light. Making
no headway, senators argued heatedly over the salaries justices should receive and then adjourned.

Two days later the subject arose again. A much revised bill now included a controversial section proposing that a Confederate
Supreme Court could review State Supreme Court decisions, allowing for state courts to employ precedents from United States
court decisions. The matter was again tabled.
⁵

It wouldn’t remain tabled for long. On February 2 Wigfall declared that it was “the greatest misfortune that ever befell the
country that a man of [John Marshall’s] imperial genius and unspotted virtue should have been so long connected with the old
Supreme Court.” Other senators opposed the court for declaring constitutional the United States Bank, an act that strengthened
Federal authority. If the Supreme Court bill should pass, several agreed, “the fatal stab would be given to our new Government.”
⁶

On and on it went. On February 5 James Phelan of Mississippi shouted that if Clement Clay’s amendment repealing the ability
to establish a Supreme Court were adopted, then “the same questions which dissolved the United States would be renewed under
this Government.”
⁷
On March 17 Alabaman William Yancey warned his fellow senators that power of the Supreme Court over state courts “would subvert
and destroy the power of the States.” Two days later the Supreme Court bill passed by a fourteen to eight margin and was sent
to the House for consideration.
⁸
However, the bill was revised, and by March 28 another bill was introduced. No action was taken, and the whole affair dropped
back into the arena of indefinite delays.

Meanwhile, an even greater shocker rose to the floor of the Senate. On February 5 the Senate heard a proposed amendment to
the Confederate Constitution that would allow an aggrieved state to secede from the Confederacy. “It shall do so in peace,”
read the proposal, “but shall be entitled to its
pro rata
share of property and be liable for its
pro rata
share of public debt to be determined by negotiation.” The idea was referred to the Judicial Committee. Two days later senators
failed to recommend the amendment, and the whole thing was dropped as a dangerous idea.
⁹

A
SIDE
from arguments about the Confederacy itself, the new session of Congress also entertained much disagreement over the army
and its internal policies. From Davis’s point of view, the Senate was becoming increasingly meddlesome about who should be
commissioned in a particular grade or given a particular assignment in the field. No one was more so than Edward Sparrow,
the Louisiana senator who chaired the Committee on Military Affairs. And yet Davis needed the Senate’s approval for commissions,
so he often acquiesced to their demands.
¹⁰

As was always the case, many officers in the field felt they were not getting due recognition for services performed, and
they often complained in letters to the president or to Congress. Even important politicians who had left Richmond to fight
in the field complained heartily: “For five months I have been acting Brigadier,” wrote South Carolinian Lawrence Keitt to
Davis’s nemesis, Louis Wigfall, “and want the commission of one. Genls. Beauregard, Ripley, Jordan, and Gist have recommended
me. I now have under me all the guns on Sullivan’s Island.”
¹¹
Even with Wigfall’s support Keitt never would be commissioned a general.

Most senators felt Davis was not providing sufficient information in order to help other politicians work to commission their
favorite officers into the army. They were right. From Davis’s point of view, the senators were interfering far beyond their
legal rights to confirm appointments by the president, so dragging his heels on providing specific information was wholly
justified. On January 30 Sparrow requested that Davis submit a list of all regimental, brigade, and division commanders with
commissions in the provisional army both under provisional and permanent governments. Six weeks passed without a response
from the White House. By mid-March Sparrow resolved that it “is inexpedient for the Senate to confirm any more generals until
a response is obtained from the President on the numbers of regiments, brigades, and divisions in the army.” On March 19,
1863, Davis finally furnished a list of brigadier and major generals, but the tension would continue for months.

Army commanders in the field, meanwhile, asked for more and more slaves to use as common laborers for the army. “I trust some
arrangement will be made at a very early date to secure a proper number of negro laborers, who should be promptly relieved
at the expiration of the period for which they have been sent,” Beauregard wrote South Carolina governor Milledge Bonham.
“As it is, those negroes who come to work for 30 days, have been necessarily detained from 60 & 90 days, because none were
sent to take their places in the works. . . . I have been subjected to the daily strenuous applications of owners to have
their slaves released from the detail.”
¹²

Inevitably politicians and generals alike worried about both the possibility of Northern African Americans fighting in the
field and the lack of troops in the South, some imagining that freeing and arming slaves might be necessary. But few mentioned
such a radical idea publicly—at least yet. More so, the white Southern politicians were worried about their own inconveniences
and those of their constituents.
¹³

Black Americans were not the only group being oppressed—although they obviously had the worst situation. In the House on January
14, the matter of enlisting Marylanders who resided in the Confederacy, and particularly those of Jewish heritage, arose.
George Vest of Missouri suggested that displaced Marylanders living in the Confederacy should be compelled to serve in the
military. He yelled out that Richmond held plenty of “roughs,” “shoulder-hitters,” and “blood tubs” who stood on the street
corners in fine clothes, always ready to break out in the strain of “Maryland, My Maryland” but unwilling to strike a blow
for the Confederacy. This drew considerable laughter. Henry Foote turned the question of “foreigners” within the Confederacy
to Jews, who he said had “deluged” the Confederacy and controlled “nine-tenths of the trade in each city.” If the present
trend continued, Foote announced, “the end of the war would probably find nearly all the property of the Confederacy in the
hands of Jewish shylocks.”
¹⁴

The most prominent shots fired across the bow of the Confederate White House, however, were saved for matters of military
operations—chiefly those felt to be failures. Congress seemed hell-bent on destroying the reputation of Braxton Bragg, whom
they squarely blamed for the outcome of the battle of Stones River, also known as Murfreesboro, fought December 31, 1862,
through January 2, 1863, in Tennessee. Despite Bragg’s and Davis’s declarations of glory associated with the fight, the Confederate
retreat from the field engendered great debate and anger on the House and Senate floors.

At the end of February, in the House, discussion arose a day after Bragg had been given a vote of thanks by Congress, a prestigious
recognition, for the Murfreesboro campaign. Henry Foote rose to clarify some newspaper reporting of the events. He did not
“commend General Bragg’s skill in commanding armies,” as the papers reported. Foote had “never regarded him as capable of
commanding a large army in the field.” He had only voted for the resolution because of the recommendation of Joe Johnston,
he explained, out of respect for the latter.
¹⁵
Three Kentucky congressmen—Robert Breckinridge, James Chrisman, and Willis Machen—said they would now change their votes
against Bragg if possible.

With Bragg’s reputation falling, Johnston felt his growing, and he tried to direct his good friend to set things straight
for him in Richmond. “I am told that the president & secretary of war think that they have given me the highest military position
in the Confederacy,” Johnston wrote Wigfall, “that I have full military power in all this western country. . . . If they do
so regard it ought not our highest military officer to occupy it? It seems so to me. That principle would bring Lee here.
I might then, with great propriety, be replaced in my old command.” He then complained about how far apart the troops of Pemberton
and Bragg were and how impractical it would be to coordinate their efforts together. “Now you, who are a military man, can
understand this case, which Mr. Seddon apparently can not. I want you to convince him. . . . If the government cannot be convinced
of the correctness of my views, it seems to me that the assignment of Lee to this command, & of me to my old army, would be
a good & pleasant solution.”
¹⁶
It was all further evidence of the undercurrent of ego that ran through the Confederate effort.