Dixie Betrayed (36 page)

The answer was: badly, as Davis and his fellow backbiters were soon to learn.

A
S
Grant and Meade continued in their struggle against Lee at Petersburg, and Sherman pushed more deeply into Georgia, a third
operation began in the Union grand strategy of simultaneous movements. In August Maj. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan initiated a
campaign to clear the Shenandoah Valley of Confederate troops. He would face Jubal Early, who had threatened Washington so
successfully the month before. On September 19 the two forces clashed at Winchester, where Sheridan decisively won and forced
Early southward to Fishers Hill. Despite the victory a letter written on this day underscores the uncertainty all parties
had about the course of the war and the chances for politics to play a critical role. “The State election of Indiana occurs
on the 11th of October,” Abraham Lincoln wrote Sherman. “And the loss of it, to the friends of the Government would go far
toward losing the whole Union cause. . . . Anything you can safely do to let her soldiers, or any part of them, go home and
vote at the State election will be greatly in point.”
¹

In the western theater Confederate major general Sterling Price launched a raid across Missouri that had little concrete strategic
objective. The idea was to recover the state for the Confederacy, but the realism of such a goal had faded many months before.
Nonetheless, Price captured Lexington on September 17-20 and proceeded to attack Fort Davidson, near the distinctive mountain
dubbed Pilot Knob, on September 26-27. “Price arrived before Pilot Knob in the afternoon of September 26th,” wrote Wiley Britton
of the Sixth Kansas Cavalry (U.S.A.), “and skirmished until night with detachments of Federal cavalry. . . . Price opened
the attack on [Fort Davidson] at daylight on the 27th, and kept it up all day with great resolution.”
²
The campaign was fruitless, however, as Price retreated and then made a circuitous journey through Indian Territory to escape
Federal forces. In all this he had done little more than increase the well-being of undertakers.

Meanwhile the situation in the valley between Sheridan and Early accelerated. “To-morrow I will continue the destruction of
wheat, forage, etc., down to Fisher’s Hill,” Sheridan wrote Grant from Woodstock, west of Front Royal, on October 7. “When
this is completed the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have little in it for man or beast.”
³
He subsequently decisively beat the Confederate force at Tom’s Brook, a few miles north of Woodstock, on October 9. Four
days later Early made a show of force at Strasburg, forcing Sheridan to recall troops to Middletown, north of Tom’s Brook.
Having been in Washington for a conference, on October 19 Sheridan returned and approached his army along the Valley Turnpike
from Winchester to Cedar Creek. The battle of Cedar Creek, fought in the fields near Middletown, seemed a rout of the Federals.
Sheridan’s presence, however, sparked his men into regrouping and counterattacking, and the resulting Union victory would
spell the end of Confederate resistance in the valley.

Throughout this autumn season the growing legions of prisoners held in both Northern and Southern prisons suffered like never
before. “Our quarters were so crowded that none of us had more space to himself than he actually occupied, usually a strip
of the bare, hard floor, about six feet by two,” wrote Abner Small, a Federal soldier formerly of the Sixteenth Maine Infantry
imprisoned in Danville, Virginia. “We lay in long rows, two rows of men with their heads to the side walls and two with their
heads together along the center of the room.” The scant rations given prisoners led to fantastic rates of death and disease.
“A prisoner eating this [spare] diet will crave any kind of fresh meat,” wrote Marcus Toney, a Confederate imprisoned at Elmira,
New York. “Marching through the camp one day was a prisoner in a barrel shirt, with placard, ‘I eat a dog’; another one bearing
a barrel, with placard, ‘Dog Eater.’ . . . It appeared these prisoners had captured a lapdog owned by the baker who came into
camp daily to bake bread.” The methods to which partisans were resorting to win the war, to free the prisoners, to end the
sufferings, and to promote their cause were myriad. On November 25, for example, a band of Confederate agents attempted to
burn New York City. The conspirators attacked various hotels and well-known galleries (such as P. T. Barnum’s) with incendiary
devices, but the fires were controlled, and the whole plan fizzled. “The bottles of Greek fire having been wrapped in paper
were put in our coat pockets,” wrote John W. Headley, one of the Confederate agents. He continued:

Each man took ten bottles. . . . I reached the Astor House . . . after lighting the gas jet I hung the bedclothes loosely
on the headboard and piled the chairs, drawers of the bureau and washstand on the bed. Then stuffed some newspapers about
among the mass and poured a bottle of turpentine over it all. . . . I opened a bottle carefully and quickly and spilled it
on the pile of rubbish. It blazed up instantly and the whole bed seemed to be in flames, before I could get out.
⁴

That the Confederate managed but to set his own bed ablaze was a symbol few in the Confederate leadership seem to have noticed.

A
LTHOUGH
progress around the Petersburg trenches was slow, Sherman in mid-November embarked on a march from Atlanta to Savannah, abandoning
his base and along the way destroying railroads and much of military value to the Confederacy. He was virtually unopposed.
“At three o’clock the watch-fires are burning dimly, and, but for the occasional neighing of horses, all is so silent that
it is difficult to imagine that twenty thousand men are within a radius of a few miles,” wrote George Ward Nichols, one of
Sherman’s staff officers. “The ripple of the brook can be distinctly heard as it breaks over the pebbles, or winds petulantly
about the gnarled roots. The wind sweeping gently through the tall pines overhead only serves to lull to deeper repose the
slumbering soldier, who is in his tent dreaming of his far-off Northern home.”
⁵

In the South all knew that a major movement was coming. “That Sherman intends to move with this large army upon some point
in Georgia I have no doubt,” wrote Howell Cobb, “but where it will be is not yet so certain though my opinion is that Macon
is the point.”
⁶
Rather than opposing Sherman, Hood believed that by turning northward and threatening lines of supply and communication in
Tennessee (as well as endangering Union-held Nashville), he could draw Sherman away from the Deep South. He couldn’t have
been more wrong. Hood’s Tennessee campaign began ingloriously for the Confederates and turned into full-fledged disaster.
Hood marched northward from Florence, Alabama, and first encountered Union troops in force near Columbia, Tennessee, with
Yankees north of the Duck River on November 27 and Confederates south of it. By midafternoon on November 29, the battle of
Spring Hill occurred, with piecemeal and confused attacks mismanaged by Hood.

Hood attacked frontally at Franklin, recklessly exposing his troops to an entrenched position that inflicted murderous casualties
to his army. (His ignorance of just how reckless these actions were was summed up in a letter he wrote on the 29th: “I expect
to die more proud of my defense of Atlanta & my Tenn. campaign than all my career as a soldier.”)
⁷
The flashpoint of the battle was the Fountain Branch Carter House and a nearby gin mill, around which intense barrages ignited
throughout the late afternoon. Hood’s frontal attacks cost the army men it could not afford to lose, as he amassed more than
six thousand casualties, including six general officers either dead or mortally wounded. Four of these generals were carried
to a nearby mansion, where they were laid out on the porch—Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, beloved as one of the greatest Confederate
generals in the west, and Brig. Gens. John Adams, Otho F. Strahl, and Hiram B. Granbury. Two other Confederate brigadier generals,
John C. Carter and the unsubtly named States Rights Gist, died fighting at Franklin.

If Hood had bruised his Army of Tennessee into incoherence at Franklin, he ruined it permanently two weeks later at Nashville.
As he advanced from Franklin, Federal officers in Nashville prepared to fight a decisive battle with all the resources they
had. “Every horse and mare that could be used was taken,” wrote Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson. “All street-car and livery stable
horses, and private carriage- and saddle-horses, were seized. Even Andrew Johnson, the vice-president-elect, was forced to
give up his pair. A circus then at Nashville lost everything except its ponies; even the old white trick horse was taken but
it was alleged that the young and handsome equestrienne, who claimed him, succeeded in convincing my adjutant general that
the horse was unfit for cavalry service.”
⁸
On December 15 Hood’s approach brought on an attack by Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas over a broad front south of the city. The
initial battle was a lopsided victory for Union forces, and it continued through part of the next day before the remains of
Hood’s army fled south.

Anything but obsessed by Hood, Sherman and his sixty-two thousand men were, at this moment, approaching Savannah on his revolutionary
March to the Sea. On December 20 he occupied the city and sent Lincoln the message that he could offer Savannah as his Christmas
present. A new legend was developing. “General Sherman is the most American looking man I ever saw,” wrote John Chipman Gray,
a Federal staff officer, on December 14, “tall and lank, not very erect, with hair like a thatch, which he rubs up with his
hands, a rusty beard trimmed close, a wrinkled face, sharp, prominent, red nose, small, bright eyes, coarse red hands; black
felt hat slouched over the eyes.”
⁹
The final diamonds of the Confederacy were crumbling away, and time was running out rapidly now.

With the Yankees closing in from seemingly every quarter, John H. Winder, still charged with the Union prisoners, let out
a cry for help from Columbia, South Carolina. “It is advisable to remove the prisoners from Florence,” he pointed out to G.
T. Beauregard. “If so, how am I to arrange for Guard. I now have South Carolina reserves. Cannot carry them into Georgia.”
¹⁰
Yet again an insistence on state rights, carried to the extreme, left the Confederate military effort little more than an
unravelling patchwork.

The military situation was fast becoming untenable.

I
N
Richmond, meanwhile, the second session of the Second Congress of the Confederate States of America began on November 7.
On the opening day Jefferson Davis sent a long message to Congress covering many urgent points that needed to be faced. In
many ways it was a last attempt for a turnaround and cooperation on a variety of issues that, the president felt, would sink
the Confederacy if left unresolved.

“The exemption from military duty now accorded by law to all persons engaged in certain specified pursuits is shown by experience
to be unwise, nor is it believed to be defensible in theory,” he lectured. “A general militia law is needful in the interest
of the public defense,” he added. “The employment of slaves for service with the Army as teamsters or cooks, or in the way
of work upon the fortifications, or in the Government workshops, or in hospitals or other similar duties, was authorized by
the act of the 17th of February last, and provision was made for their impressment to a number not exceeding 20,000, if it
should be found impracticable to obtain them by contract with the owners.”

Continued the president, “Viewed merely as property, and therefore as the subject of impressment, the service or labor of
the slave has been frequently claimed for short periods in the construction of defensive works. The slave, however, bears
another relation to the State—that of a person.”

This last thought must have struck some of the lawmakers like a clap of thunder. The president then wondered aloud if emancipation
should be offered to slaves for faithful military service, and he guessed that, if given, they would not leave their local
areas after the war. “A double motive for a zealous discharge of duty would thus be offered to those employed by the Government—their
freedom and the gratification of the local attachment which is so marked a characteristic of the negro, and forms so powerful
an incentive in his action,” the president proposed.
¹¹
This was a conclusion so blindfolded and naive as to be idiotic—morally and politically. Although the president stopped short
of suggesting slaves be armed, emancipation for military service—aiding the soldiers in the field and use for manual labor,
etc.—was now on the table, confusing many and infuriating others. And yet the whole debate was cloaked in such a supreme air
of desperation that many politicians knew something drastic had to be done or the war would be lost.

In the House the topic dominated the day. Members of Congress reported on a conference of governors that had taken place in
mid-October in which the chief executives of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi had
concluded “under proper regulation, to appropriate such part of [the slaves] to the public service as may be required,” not
prohibiting their use as soldiers. They speculated, however, that “no exigency now exists nor is likely to occur in the military
affairs of the Confederacy . . . which demands that negroes shall be used as soldiers.”
¹²
The following day Henry S. Foote resolved that arming slaves would be inexpedient, but that they should be used extensively
as laborers.

In the House, resolutions were introduced to give the president the opportunity to clarify his opposition to the emancipation
of slaves under any conditions. If the public and the European powers got the impression that the government had the power
to emancipate slaves, after all, it would be in no better a position than Abraham Lincoln and the United States government.
¹³