Dixie Betrayed (42 page)

Americans believe in dreams. Dreams caused the Civil War, some have said—different dreams of what the future could be among
those in the North and South. The dream of the Confederacy started out with an expectation of nobility and ended cloaked in
revisionist elitism. Both dreams contain fantastic, almost unbelievable, stories. But the story of what really happened is
far more intriguing—and useful. If we are to learn from the history of men, we must be frank about their humanity. Those who
led the Confederacy were not gods. They were men, sometimes bold and sometimes weak, sometimes hateful and sometimes grand,
sometimes selfish, not always sober. Together they formed an imperfect union, and together they destroyed it.

P. G. T. Beauregard
beat the odds. The Little Creole, age forty-seven when the war ended, prospered afterward, returning to New Orleans and employing
his engineering talents as superintendent of railroad and street railway companies. Along with former Confederate lieutenant
general Jubal Early, he profited greatly as a supervisor of the scandal-plagued Louisiana Lottery. Beauregard fought his last
battles on paper, swiping at Jefferson Davis, the adherents to Albert Sidney Johnston, and Joe Johnston and defending his
record at First Manassas and his claim to leadership at Shiloh. He served his last years as adjutant general of the Louisiana
militia and supervisor of public works in New Orleans, where he died in 1893.

Braxton Bragg
was never forgiven by many for helping to orchestrate the removal of Joe Johnston from command of the Army of Tennessee.
In the end Bragg had been tragically miscast: he had been assigned a range of responsibilities so unsuited to his personality
that failure was almost guaranteed. Bragg caught up with President Davis’s party at war’s end, just in time to inform the
Confederate leader that hope was lost. Afterward Bragg served as superintendent of the New Orleans waterworks before moving
to Alabama and then Texas. He died in Galveston in 1876, after suddenly dropping to the ground while walking down a street.

Samuel Cooper
is still the forgotten central figure of the Confederacy, as he was after the war. The New Jersey native who married a Southern
bride fled Richmond and, on the southward journey from Danville, was allowed to leave the party to surrender. He immediately
gave the Yankee authorities his voluminous records, which constituted much of the official paperwork of the Confederacy, as
many other caches had been destroyed in the abandonment of the capital. At age sixty-seven, weak from stress and impoverished,
Cooper returned from Richmond to Alexandria, Virginia, to quietly live out his remaining days. The much-maligned “glorified
clerk” received financial aid from several fellow officers, including Robert E. Lee. He died during the final month of 1876.

Jefferson Davis
saw his mental health decline precipitously, draining further his already feeble body. Blamed by Northerners since before
Sumter as chief architect of the rebellion, he was not yet accustomed to being held accountable by the majority of Southerners
for the Confederacy’s collapse. Captured at Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865, the fifty-six-year-old spent the next two
years in prison at Fort Monroe, Virginia, awaiting a trial for treason that never came. Released into a world that had completely
changed, Davis nevertheless continued life as a Confederate, albeit one who simply wrote about the past from a study lined
with books in Biloxi, Mississippi. Davis’s famous tome
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
contained more irrational than useful information, and it attacked Joe Johnston and Beauregard as much as it supported friends
such as Bragg and Northrop. Hero status at last came to Davis in his final years, when many rational Southerners decided that
he had been in a no-win situation and had done a relatively effective job running the war. Davis died in 1889, survived by
his wife and two daughters.

Henry S. Foote
spent the first few months of postwar life getting over the embarrassment of his abortive, self-created peace mission to
the Yankees. On Andrew Johnson’s succession as president, Foote had been ordered by Federal authorities to flee the country
or stand trial for treason; he swiftly made tracks for Montreal. Foote finally took the oath of allegiance and was allowed
back into the country, settling in Nashville, by 1867. At age sixty-three, the testy politician took up writing, producing
two books about the war and his experiences. He then moved to Washington to resume his law practice and write for a newspaper.
Ever marked by inconsistency and scathing criticism toward others, Foote attributed the war to a “blundering generation” of
sectionalists. He switched parties, becoming a Republican, and subsequently served as superintendent of the U.S. Mint at New
Orleans. Returning home in ill health, he died in Nashville, in 1881, “a decrepit old gentleman with a fiery red head.”

John Bell Hood
continued to fight the war on paper, penning his bitter volume
Advance and Retreat
to defend himself against charges of total incompetency after the Franklin and Nashville campaign. At thirty-four he moved
to New Orleans, married—but not the girl he had fallen deeply in love with during the war—and became a cotton merchant. As
he searched for a publisher willing to distribute his book, Hood—followed by others in his family—was struck by yellow fever
during the epidemic of 1878-79. His wife and daughter succumbed to the disease in August 1879; before the month was out, Hood
himself died.
Advance and Retreat
was subsequently published and raised money to help his ten orphaned children.

Robert M. T. Hunter
was arrested at war’s end and imprisoned in Fort Pulaski, Georgia, until February 1866. On his release Hunter, fifty-seven,
learned that his lands in Virginia had been desecrated by soldiers under Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler. He returned to Virginia
to resume a law practice and commenced farming. Hunter resumed his role in state politics and served as vice president of
the Southern Historical Society, an office that led to more clashes with Jefferson Davis, this time over their recollections
of the war. Conscription, emancipation of slaves, and peace proposals continued to be subjects of heated debate between Davis
and Hunter. Hunter eventually was named collector of the Port of Tappahannock, northeast of Richmond on the Rappahannock River,
by President Cleveland. He died in 1887.

Joseph E. Johnston
surrendered what remained of the Army of Tennessee on April 26 at Bennett Place, North Carolina, and resumed a civilian life.
At age fifty-eight, he entered the railroad and express transportation businesses, living in Virginia, Alabama, and Washington,
DC. Johnston also served a term as U.S. representative from Virginia. Johnston’s
Narrative of Military Operations Directed during the Late War between the States,
published in 1874, summarized his arguments with Davis and others and rationalized his actions, hoping to thwart critics.
Ironically, Johnston fell ill in the winter of 1891, while standing in the rain acting as an honorary pallbearer at William
Tecumseh Sherman’s funeral. Beside the coffin of his old nemesis, Johnston caught cold and—just four weeks later—died.

Robert E. Lee
towered over the crumbling reputation of Davis as the postwar years dragged on. Lee contemplated writing his memoirs but
had too few papers left to get the project going. Instead, he accepted the presidency of Washington College in Lexington,
Virginia, and focused on influencing the next generation of Southerners through education. Lee tirelessly raised money for
the school, which later would be renamed Washington and Lee University. The general’s health eventually deteriorated, however,
as it had started to during the final two years of the war. In October 1870, at age sixty-three, he suffered a stroke and
died in Lexington.

William Porcher Miles
enjoyed a life of relative luxury after marrying into plantation money in 1863. At war’s end he began life as a Virginia
country gentleman in Nelson County. In 1880 Miles became president of the University of South Carolina. Two years later he
took over his father-in-law’s Louisiana sugar plantation and grew even richer. His health failed by 1899, when he died at
age seventy-six, at his Louisiana estate.

Lucius B. Northrop,
stung by the constant criticism of his performance and finally pushed from office as commissary general, was captured by
the Yankees in June 1865. A pseudogeneral whose commission had never been confirmed, Northrop’s career had crashed and burned.
At age fifty-three he spent four months in prison several blocks from his old office, charged with deliberately starving Yankee
prisoners. Released in October 1865 he took up farming near Charlottesville, Virginia. Bitter toward a cast of fellow officers,
including Robert E. Lee, he stewed over the past and what might have been. In 1890 a stroke limited his physical movement;
four years later he died in Maryland, his last home.

Robert Barnwell Rhett
never lived down his reputation as the ultimate fire-eater, the self-proclaimed “father of secession.” Rhett’s angry wartime
editorials in the
Charleston Mercury
had scorched the Confederate president. At war’s end, at age sixty-four, Rhett fumed over the outcome, writing an unpublished
history of his actions against Davis that was finally put into print in 2000 as
A Fire-Eater Remembers.
He eventually moved to Louisiana, where he died in 1876.

Alexander H. Stephens,
despite his chronic ill health, lived for nearly twenty years after the war. Disgusted by the mixed motives and complete
lack of success of the Hampton Roads Conference, Stephens returned home to await his fate. On May 11, 1865, he was arrested.
He spent five months in Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, where he kept a detailed diary before being released. Stephens attempted
a return to the U.S. Senate, winning election but eventually barred from taking his seat. Over two years he wrote the ponderous
and incredibly dull
A Constitutional View of the War between the States,
a two-volume legal harangue, and in 1873, he reentered politics. Elected from Georgia as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives,
Stephens served in that capacity until 1882, when he was elected governor of Georgia. He died in 1883, at age seventy-one,
after just three months in office.

Robert A. Toombs
fled to Cuba and then Paris immediately after the Confederacy’s demise, staying in Europe and then in Canada until 1867.
Ultimately returning to the town of Washington, Georgia, he reestablished his law practice at age fifty-seven and reentered
Georgia politics. A completely unreconstructed Rebel, Toombs pulled everything he could to thwart Federal authority in the
New South. His health deteriorated for a number of years, until he finally died, in 1885.

Louis T. Wigfall
blamed Davis for the Confederacy’s defeat after the war even more than he had during the contest. After April 1865 he fled
to England, where he attempted to incite Great Britain against United States policy. He returned to Maryland in 1872 and moved
back to Texas two years later. That same year he died, at age fifty-seven, unheralded in his time but with few equals in his
passion for the Southern Nation.

John H. Winder
never made it past the war. When he died of a heart attack in Florence, South Carolina, on February 7, 1865, he was wanted
by the Union for his authority over the horribly mismanaged Confederate prison camps. Southerners had never learned to like
him, either, because of his limiting controls over the citizens of Richmond. It was said that it was “fortunate” for Winder
that he died before the Union captured him, or else he might have suffered a fate even worse than death.

John H. Worsham
outlived all the elder politicians who controlled his fate in the great war of 1861-65. The young man used his friendship
with Richmond’s mayor, Joseph Mayo, to become toll keeper at Mayo’s Bridge in Richmond soon after he recovered from his wound.
He later established a partnership in a tobacco firm, giving him the means to marry Mary Bell Pilcher, in 1871. He then entered
the milling business, dabbled in the canal boat business, and subsequently became a bookkeeper, serving his son’s printing
company for the remainder of his life. Worsham’s family included four children and six grandchildren. He remained active in
Confederate historical activities, proud both of his part in the war and of what America had become in the Gilded Age. His
deep blue eyes often displayed a “twinkle,” and he was known around Richmond as a soft-spoken old-timer, a veteran of the
war who talked sparingly but was always listened to when he had something to say. In his old age Worsham suffered a fall and
contracted pneumonia; he died at age eighty-one, on September 19, 1920, on the fifty-sixth anniversary of his wounding at
the battle of Winchester. The South had lost a good man.

Presidents

Howell Cobb II, Feb. 4, 1861-Feb. 17, 1862 (Provisional Congress)

Jefferson Davis, Feb. 18, 1861-Feb. 17, 1862 (Provisional)

Jefferson Davis, Feb. 22, 1862-surrendered May 10, 1865

Vice Presidents

Alexander H. Stephens, Feb. 9, 1861-Feb. 17, 1862 (Provisional)

Alexander H. Stephens, Feb. 22, 1862-arrested May 11, 1865

Secretaries of State

Robert A. Toombs, Feb. 21, 1861-resigned Jul. 24, 1861 (Provisional)

Robert M. T. Hunter, July 25, 1861-Feb. 17, 1862 (Provisional)

William M. Browne, Mar. 7, 1862-Mar. 18, 1862 (ad interim)

Judah P. Benjamin, Mar. 18, 1862-May 10, 1865

Secretaries of the Treasury