Dixie Betrayed (28 page)

Davis was putting out fires across the Confederacy. For example, he felt he had no chance but to turn to Governor Zebulon
Vance for support in the case of William Woods Holden, a newspaper editor and would-be politician who was openly attacking
the Davis administration in the newspapers, mostly the
Raleigh Standard.
“This is not the first intimation I have received that Holden is engaged in the treasonable purpose of exciting the people
of North Carolina to resistance against their Government,” penned Davis, “and cooperation with the enemy.” Davis asked the
governor’s help in stopping these editorials, which “mislead a portion of our own people.” However, Davis would find that
Vance could be only so supportive toward the Richmond government, as he had his own suspicions about the primary Confederate
leaders.
²⁰

The increasingly pessimistic mood was shared by many Confederate leaders. Their losses were “a terrible revulsion,” wrote
Senator Clement Clay of Alabama to Louis Wigfall. “The fall of Vicksburg & Port Hudson, the loss of all of Middle Tenn. &
North Ala. & the expulsion of Lee from the enemy’s territory!! Superadded to all this comes my own little griefs, with selfishness
. . . my home & parents & most of my kindred in the hands of the enemy.”
²¹
In Georgia Bob Toombs became so panicked over the Confederacy’s lack of funds that he began a letter-writing campaign to
the newspapers, starting with one to the editor of the
Augusta Constitutionalist:

The Confederate Government have committed two radical errors in the management of our finances which produced our present
calamitous condition by the operation of laws of currency as fixed, certain, and immutable as the laws which govern the planetary
system. . . . The first great error was in attempting to carry on a great and expensive war solely on credit—without taxation.
. . . [The second great error] was the use of the public credit almost exclusively in the form of currency. The natural result
of this policy was plain, inevitable, overwhelming.
²²

Privately, Toombs wrote the vice president, Aleck Stephens, despondent. “We are gloomy and in great trouble,” he reported,
“North, South, East and West the clouds look dark and threatening. . . . We must fight this thing out, and I shall try to
be with the militia of Georgia in the prospective defense of our homes. . . . We shall have to call out the ‘melish.’”
²³

The governor of Georgia himself was even more alarmed than usual. “There seems to have settled upon the minds of our people
a sort of feeling of despondency,” Joe Brown wrote Stephens, “which is stimulated by the constant croaking of a class of speculators
who have made money and are preparing to curry favor with Lincoln if he should overrun the country, with the hope of saving
their property. These men put the worst face upon every mishap to our arms, and while they are guilty of no act of positive
disloyalty they do all in their power to discourage our people.”
²⁴

Stephens, meanwhile, had a plan of action that seemed to come out of nowhere. Fed up with the war, and angered over the lack
of prisoner exchanges, the Confederate vice president hatched a plan to proceed north and talk with the Yankee authorities.
Stephens would begin by reestablishing the exchange of prisoners, which had broken down following Lincoln’s issuance of the
Emancipation Proclamation and the Confederate government’s threats to execute African American troops and their white officers.
What Stephens really wanted, however, was to offer peace to the Yankees. Writing Davis, he said, “I am not without hopes that
indirectly
I could now turn attention to a general adjustment upon such basis as might ultimately be acceptable to both parties and
stop the further effusion of blood in a contest so irrational, unchristian, and so inconsistent with all recognized American
principles.”
²⁵

Davis accepted the Stephens plan just as the battle began to rage at Gettysburg. “Having accepted your patriotic offer to
proceed as a military commissioner under flag of truce to Washington,” Davis wrote, “you will receive herewith your letter
of authority to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. . . . War is full enough of unavoidable
horrors under all its aspects to justify and even to demand of any Christian rulers who may be unhappily engaged in carrying
it on to seek to restrict its calamities and to divest it of all unnecessary severities.”
²⁶
Davis further wrote two identical letters to Abraham Lincoln, one addressed to the “commander in chief” and the other to
“the president,” which described the attempt at reconciling a prisoner exchange, and sent Stephens to Washington with them.
Incessant rains caused the vice president to travel by steamer. Stephens left Newport News on July 4, and after waiting two
days in Washington, the Lincoln government refused to consider the Stephens proposal. The official response from the U.S.
government was, “The request is inadmissible. The customary agents and channels are adequate for all needful military communications
and conference between the United States forces and the insurgents.”
²⁷
Stephens was furious that his influence had amounted to nothing, and he returned to Georgia more embittered than ever. There,
Stephens’s old friend Joe Brown tried to console the vice president. “I fully agree with you that our matters are being badly
managed,” he noted, “and do not know what may be the result if we do not have a change of policy. I am advised by the commissary
at Atlanta, Maj. Cummings, privately that the supply of meat is now very short and that we cannot subsist the army through
the fall unless we get the cattle out of Florida and lower Ga. faster than we are now doing. I have called the attention of
the President to this.”
²⁸

Many other formerly influential politicians felt helpless at what appeared to be an aimless policy that stung badly in the
wake of the double defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Lamenting his apparent loss of influence, Robert M. T. Hunter, the
president pro tempore of the Senate, wrote Wigfall: “I suppose the point upon which you wish to confer with me is connected
with the conduct of the war and if so as
you know
I am entirely without influence in such matters.”
²⁹

The military situation seemed to be coming to a head: either Confederate armies would need to rebound from the recent disasters
quickly or they would be in dire straits. “Our people have not generally realised the magnitude of the struggle in which we
are engaged,” Davis lamented to Senator Robert Johnson of Arkansas. “Had Missouri and Tennessee furnished the number of troops
which you say they could not supply, if in our possession, our banners would be flying on the upper Missi. And the Ohio.”
³⁰

Bob Toombs had other culprits in mind, as did many in the political world of Richmond. He complained,

The real control of our affairs is narrowing down constantly into the hands of Davis and the old army, and when it gets entirely
there it will collapse. They have neither the ability nor the honesty to manage the revolution. Many of our ablest and most
reliable col[onel]s who brought troops into the field have been killed by the blunders and jealousies of the old army, and
the morale of the army is now pretty much gone. We never had a desertion until we had conscription, for the very good reason
that there were thousands outside who wanted to take the places of those inside. . . . Conscription and conscription alone
destroyed all that feeling.
³¹

“I am raising a regiment,” Toombs confided to his fellow Georgian Howell Cobb, “it is only a body guard to protect me when
we have all to flee to the mountains. Davis will soon bring us to that point.”
³²

Davis, meanwhile, looked to the states to stand up against the Yankee army just as they looked to him for protection. “The
enemy is reported in large force threatening our army in East Tenn.,” he wrote Aleck Stephens. “That is the gate of Northern
Georgia. We have sent all disposable reinforcements, but require an addition to our army there. . . . If you concur as to
the propriety of sending [the militia] up to co-operate with Bragg or Buckner you will oblige me by conferring with Governor
Brown on the subject.”
³³

Politicians, generals, civilians—all felt that what was needed was a strong commanding general who could run the show. And
by this time there was only one candidate, Robert E. Lee. A general-in-chief would stand up to the Yankees, solve the problems
that seemed to rise out of a lack of coordination here, there, and everywhere. On this virtually everyone agreed. Everyone
except Jefferson Davis.

A
S
the summer of 1863 waned, the situation was fluid throughout the South. Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans and his Yankees were
pushing into Alabama with their eyes on Chattanooga. Bragg, already under heavy criticism, would need to block him. Knoxville
and eastern Tennessee were under duress. Actions in Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas threatened to place even more Confederate
territory under Federal occupation. While Gettysburg and Vicksburg had fallen, it was becoming clear that the war would go
on for a long time. The Confederacy was still in business.

The hot and deadly summer transformed into a cooler autumn, and the western armies positioned for a great clash in the vicinity
of Chattanooga. The importance of railroads in the Tennessee city and the geographical nature of the region made Chattanooga
crucial to the South. In June the Army of the Cumberland under Rosecrans moved south against Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Army of
Tennessee. The same armies had grappled in the bloody slugfest at Stones River that proved strategically inconclusive at the
outset of the year. Bragg fortified the city and entrenched but was forced to move south in September after Rosecrans’s army
crossed the Tennessee River and entered Chattanooga.

Bragg massed his forces at Lafayette, Georgia, and engaged portions of it with small, isolated Federal elements. He then marched
his men to a position along Chickamauga Creek, a small riverway named in Cherokee dialect for the smallpox outbreak that had
occurred along its banks. Chickamauga translated to “river of death.”

By September 18 Bragg tried to force Rosecrans’s hand by placing himself between the Yankees and Chattanooga. The movement
precipitated a major battle that would result in an enormous Confederate victory.

On September 19 the battle erupted at Jay’s Mill and spread south. The fields, cabins, and woods in the area witnessed repeated,
rolling attacks that washed over the same ground, resulting mostly in temporary gains. The next day the battle was renewed,
and again Bragg stabbed toward Chattanooga, inciting engagements along the entire north-south battle line. The struggle excelled
with unspectacular results until timing struck just right: Union Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Wood was ordered to move his division
to support another area, creating a quarter-mile-wide gap in the Federal line. Nearly at this moment Lt. Gen. James Longstreet
sent six divisions forward, plowing through and sending the Yankees back in startled confusion. It was one of the greatest
frontal attacks of the war.

“Now the enemy are in plain view along the road covering our entire front,” James R. Carnahan, a captain in the Eighty-sixth
Indiana Infantry, wrote of the attack. “You can see them, as with cap visors drawn well down over their eyes, the gun at the
charge, with short, shrill shouts they come, and we see the colors of Longstreet’s corps, flushed with victory, confronting
us.” On the Confederate side Capt. William Miller Owen, a staff officer of Brig. Gen. William Preston’s, recorded his impressions:
“The men rush over the hastily-constructed breastworks of logs and rails of the foe, with the old time familiar rebel yell,
and, wheeling then to the right, the column sweeps the enemy before it, and pushes along the Chattanooga road towards Missionary
Ridge in pursuit. It is glorious!”
¹

Pushed to a series of hills northwest of the center of the field, the last Union remnants held fast to a region called Horseshoe
Ridge, which included Snodgrass Hill and a small cabinlike house owned by George Washington Snodgrass. Only Maj. Gen. George
H. Thomas and the remainder of the Federal army held the ground here, earning Thomas the sobriquet “Rock of Chickamauga.”
Thomas’s resistance prevented a rout and allowed Rosecrans and the bulk of the Union army to scurry back to Chattanooga.

The battle was a Union disaster—a spectacular, albeit brief, Confederate return to domination. Chickamauga caused panic in
Washington, and Lincoln sparked an enormous movement to reinforce Rosecrans’s stunned and mauled army. The new star of the
Federal effort, Grant, would arrive to supervise personally the rebuilding of the army, now penned in Chattanooga and depleted
of food and supplies.

The reinforcements sent to the Federals in Chattanooga included troops of Maj. Gens. Joseph Hooker and William Tecumseh Sherman,
and by October Grant was in town taking charge. Starving and surrounded, the Yankees opened a tenuous “cracker line” of supplies
from Bridgeport, Alabama, across a peninsula of land called Moccasin Point alongside the Tennessee River, and into the city.
Bragg’s victorious Confederates held the high ground: Lookout Mountain to the south and Missionary Ridge to the east. The
river bordered the town on the west and north. Along the Confederate lines, picket duty was tense. Joseph B. Polley, a soldier
in Hood’s Texas Brigade, wrote: “All too soon the dreaded and fateful hour arrived; all too soon the whisper order ‘Forward’
was passed from man to man down the long line, and, like spectral forms in the ghastly moonlight, the Confederate pickets
moved slowly out into the open field in their front, every moment expecting to see the flash of a gun and hear or feel its
messenger of death.”
²