Dixie Betrayed (32 page)

There was some cooperation. Congress passed the Third Conscription Act on February 17, which made white men aged seventeen
to fifty eligible for service. Now nearly every man would have to report. But while relations between Davis and Congress would
work out regarding conscription—most congressmen at this point felt no alternative was left—stormy times lay ahead on the
issue of habeas corpus. Davis felt he was losing control. In February, in a mood bordering on paranoia, he had written to
Congress of “discontent, disaffection, and disloyalty . . . treasonable design . . . plots to release prisoners . . . conspirators
. . . spies . . . deserters . . . Having thus presented some of the threatening evils that exist, it remains to suggest a
remedy. And in my judgment, that is only to be found in the suspension of the privilege of the Writ of Habeus [
sic
] Corpus.”
¹²

Other powerful forces continued to work against suspending the writ, however, including Davis’s own vice president. From his
bed in Georgia, Stephens wrote:

I am now comparatively comfortable—free from violent pain and able to sit up. I have great interest in what’s doing in Congress
and shall go on just as soon as I feel able. The thing I would say to your great apprehension is beginning to be felt amongst
the public here that Congress will pass an act suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus and putting the country under martial
law. Such an act would in my judgment be exceedingly [unconstitutional], and I trust if it should pass it will never achieve
the executive approval.
¹³

Davis continued to work for congressional support on the issue in whatever way he could. He declared,

While brigade after brigade of our brave soldiers who have endured the trials of the camp and battlefield are testifying their
spirit and patriotism by voluntary reenlistment for the war, discontent, disaffection, and disloyalty are manifested among
those who, through the sacrifices of others, have enjoyed quiet and safety at home. . . . On one occasion, when a party of
officers were laying a torpedo in the James River, persons on shore were detected communicating with the enemy, and were known
to pilot them to a convenient point for observing the nature of the service in which the party were engaged. They were arrested
and were discharged on habeas corpus, because, although there was moral certainty of their guilt, it could not be proved by
competent testimony. . . . In my judgment [a remedy] is to be found only in the suspension of the privilege of the writ of
habeas corpus. It is a sharp remedy, but a necessary one. It is a remedy plainly contemplated by the Constitution.
¹⁴

The assumption was clearly that a true patriot would go along with the administration’s position.

Too many others disagreed, however, and the issue remained at a standstill. Lawrence Keitt flatly stated,

The act reproaching the Habeas Corpus, I believed, when I read it, to be unconstitutional. For the past year, Congress has
been acting under the idea of “Independence now—Liberty hereafter”—If the two are not reconcilable now, they will not be reconciled
in the future. Our whole system of government has been gradually passing into a new phase—common abroad—but not known to us
in the past—all powers are fast trending to the Executive control. . . . I confess the shameful wish on the part of the Confederate
government to overlook, and slight even, the States, bodes not well for the future.
¹⁵

While nothing happened with habeas corpus, another, even more explosive issue was arising. A significant discussion had erupted
on the floor of the House on February 1 regarding the use of African American troops in the Confederate army, which to some
implied the possibility of a form of emancipation. Joe Johnston wrote to his friend Wigfall, from a position north of Atlanta,

I propose to substitute slaves for all soldiers employed out of the ranks on detached service, extra duties, as cooks, engineer
labourers, pioneers, or on any kind of work. Such details for this little army amount to more than 10,000 men. Negroes would
serve for such purposes better than soldiers. The impressment of negroes has been practiced ever since the war commenced,
but we have never been able to keep the impressed negroes with an army near the enemy. They desert & their owners, if they
do not investigate, do not prevent it. If you can devise & pass a law to enable us to hold slaves or other negroes with armies,
this one can, in a few weeks, be increased by the number given above.
¹⁶

Congress agreed on the following terms regarding free African Americans used as soldiers: not using free blacks while using
poor whites as soldiers is discriminatory; black soldiers should be used for menial tasks only since those who could read
and write might desert to the enemy; blacks make good laborers but poor soldiers; “free negroes . . . are inimical to our
cause”; up to twenty thousand African Americans, aged between eighteen and fifty, should be employed for labor on fortifications,
government workshops, hospitals, mess tents, etc.; the pay of slaves should go to their masters; and should too few slaves
volunteer or be furnished by their masters, they should be impressed.

In the House Porcher Miles brought up the act, which would increase the army by adding slaves and free blacks to labor in
it. All black males between eighteen and fifty would be required to serve. Erasmus Gardenhire of Tennessee asked that if the
bill passed, “would it not recognize Lincoln’s right to conscribe our negroes?” Porcher Miles said, “We have a right to do
what we please with our slaves, and Lincoln has no control over them.” Henry Foote said that a difficulty might exist relative
to prisoner exchange. “Suppose some of them are taken prisoner,” he asked. “What would be done with them?” Miles reported
the committee had not considered that.
¹⁷

A few days later in the Senate, a bill was introduced to place free blacks in the military; it was then referred to committee.
By order of the Senate leadership, the committee was discharged from considering the bill on February 5, 1864. Meanwhile,
in the House, Miles again reported that he believed the act to employ slaves and free blacks would increase the army by forty
thousand men. John Baldwin of Virginia wanted to exempt any free blacks engaged in food production, particularly in the Shenandoah
Valley. Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi objected, saying that free blacks “are a blot upon our escutcheon, and pernicious
to our slave population. . . . [Baldwin] says to the free negro, you shall not bear the burdens of this war—while [the white
citizen] must take his place in the army.”
¹⁸
After further argument and slight massaging of the language, the bill was passed. Whether African American soldiers would
serve in the Confederacy, however—whether they would be armed and whether slaves would be emancipated in compensation—was
a thorny topic to be held for another day.Like so many policy and military decisions the South needed to make, it was deferred.

A
S
always President Davis found another source of pain and interference, as he saw it, at least. North Carolina seemed to be
coming apart at the seams. Wrote Governor Zeb Vance,

The final plunge which I have been dreading and avoiding, that is to separate me from a large number of my political friends,
is about to be made. It is now a fixed policy of W. Holden and others to call a convention in May to take N.C. back to the
United States, and the agitation has already begun. Resolutions advocating this course were prepared here a few days ago in
the
Standard
office and sent to Johnson County to be presented at a public meeting next week. If I should go down before the current I
shall perish . . . at bay, destroying many a foe.
¹⁹

Anti-Richmond sentiment had been growing in the Tar Heel State, fueled by state rights philosophy and a feeling that the war
had worsened lives rather than improved them.

In response the president warned Vance and his allies against seeking a peace movement away from the military victory of the
Confederacy. “Peace [without liberty and independence] is now impossible,” wrote Davis. “This struggle must continue until
the enemy is beaten out of his vain confidence in our subjugation. Then and not till then will it be possible to treat of
peace.”
²⁰
Vance sought the counsel of his fellow governor Joe Brown in Georgia as well. “While there is no considerable discontent
at the action of the Confederate authority in this state,” Brown responded, “and a sincere desire for peace, there is not
a great deal of disloyalty, and no despotism manifested to take any course by separate state action to correct the errors
or abuses by the Confederate government, at so critical a period in our struggle.” Brown agreed with Vance that the government
had done too little to build up Northern groups who were “hostile to the Lincoln policy.”
²¹

Davis and Vance then entered into an argumentative correspondence, with Vance asserting that Davis excluded anti-secessionists
from the important offices of the government and from army promotions. Vance suggested that “the great body of our people
have been
suspected
by their Government, perhaps because of the reluctance with which they gave up the old Union.” Vance also complained about
conscription, which had been “ruthless,” “unrelenting,” and only “exceeded in the severity of its execution by the impressment
of property frequently entrusted to men unprincipled, dishonest, and filled to overflowing with all the petty meanness of
small minds, dressed in a little brief authority.” In response Davis wrote Vance: “I warned you of the error of warming
traitors
into active life by ill-timed deference or timid concession, instead of meeting their insidious attempts to deceive the people,
by tearing the mask from the faces of the conspirators.”
²²
With that, the governor of North Carolina and the leader of the Confederacy let their relationship cool to an icy near-nonexistence.

Brown, meanwhile, was experiencing increasing paranoia. “I would be obliged if you would mark all your letters private across
the seal of the envelope,” he wrote his friend Aleck Stephens, “as I often have to leave my mails to be opened by secretaries
and prefer that your letters should always be handed to me unopened.”
²³
Brown didn’t want even his own staff to see the thoughts he harbored toward Davis.

Little Aleck wasted no time in informing his friend that authorities in Richmond were growing tired of his lack of cooperation
and wanted to find a way to get rid of him and install a pro-administration governor in the state. “I thank you for your suggestions
and for advising me of the prospect of a war to be waged against me at Richmond,” the governor wrote Aleck Stephens. “I regret
that such may be the intention of those in authority. If it must come I shall try to be prepared to meet it.”
²⁴

Davis, aware that North Carolina and Georgia were now attempting to block his policies, if not splinter the Confederacy, heard
whispers of hope in the Northern states from his political friends. “There exists in the North West and North a secret political
organization,” penned J. W. Tucker, a Mississippi newspaper editor, “having a Lodge in St. Louis, with one thousand members.”
The principles of the group included: preservation of state rights, opposition to Republicanism, recognition of the Southern
Confederacy, the formation of a “North West Republic,” and making open war against the “perverted government” of the United
States.
²⁵
But hoping for assistance from distant cousins when his brothers-in-arms were increasingly against him seemed like foolish
behavior on Davis’s part. And the rhetoric of his fellow Confederates was more and more barbed and sharpened. Wrote Bob Toombs,
“I am greatly delighted at the vote on Linton’s resolutions concerning the suspension of
habeas corpus
. . . . I shall certainly give Mr. Davis an early opportunity to make me a victim by advising resistance, resistance to the
death, to his law.”
²⁶

While this splintering of the South has been ignored or downplayed by many Southern historians, subversive, secret societies
in the North have received quite a lot of press. Called “dark lanterns” in the 1850s, underground political groups gained
momentum as the war grew unpopular among some citizens when casualties mounted after 1863. Such antiadministration groups
as the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Order of American Knights, and the Sons of Liberty attempted to thwart the goals
of the Lincoln administration and bring about a swift peace movement. The most vocal inciter of this type was the radical
Ohio politician Clement Vallandigham, whom Lincoln exiled to the South to quell his rabble-rousing speeches. But the influence
of secret societies in the North has been overblown. In the end, as historian Frank Klement has meticulously documented, these
societies never amounted to much more than paper-based organizations with vague goals and “little ability to carry them out.”

A far more skilled orator, the old “father of secession,” Robert Barnwell Rhett, commented on the Davis administration and
its military policies in a letter to Louis Wigfall:

During the war, I cannot advise you to propose in Congress an alteration of the Constitution in any particular; for it is
impossible in the condition of the country, to get a hearing, or in the second place to get any efficient cooperation. The
greater part of the People are in the army, where a rigid despotism prevails; and men used to it, cannot feel, in the face
of the dangers and excitement which surrounds them the insolence of Constitutional provisions to protect liberty, or to correct
inadequacies in the Constitution. . . . We will win our liberties and independence, I believe; but it will be in spite of
the most terrible incompetency . . . in our Executive, which has ever afflicted a noble people.
²⁷