Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (68 page)

This did not entirely eliminate the howls of the state sovereignty loyalists against the “Aristocratic and demanding Horse leeches of the Confederate Service.” R. M. T. Hunter, once one of Davis’s cabinet members and now a senator from Virginia, turned on the Confederate president, and even Davis’s own vice president, Alexander Stephens, became a bitter critic of Davis’s national policies. But the critical factor exerting downward pressure on confidence in Davis’s government was its strategic failures. The tightening of the blockade and the gradual collapse of the Confederacy’s own internal transportation system spelled increasing want and dislocation for Southern society. Governor John Milton of Florida had 13,000 destitute families on the public dole by 1864, in a state that had only cast 14,000 votes (and therefore had about as many white households) in the 1860 election. Although Davis and the governors urged cotton planters to switch to planting grains and cereals for the war, much of what they might grow had no way to reach vital Confederate markets.
⁹¹

The shortages, combined with the unreliability of Memminger’s unceasing flood of unbacked bonds and notes, drove prices on goods to astronomical levels. In Richmond, John B. Jones, a War Department clerk, found that “a dollar in gold sold for $18 Confederate money” on November 21, 1863, while “a genteel suit of clothes cannot be had for less than $700” and “a pair of boots, $200—if good.” Two weeks later, after Bragg had been driven off Missionary Ridge, one gold dollar was fetching twenty-eight Confederate ones. On a combined family income of $7,200 in 1864, Jones was forced to buy “flour at $300 a barrel; meal, $50 per bushel; and even fresh fish at $5 per pound.” By the end of the year, Richmond hospital steward Luther Swank found flour going at $400 a barrel, sweet potatoes at $40 a bushel, and butter at $11 a pound. In the Treasury Department, Jones confided to his diary, “some of the clerks would shoot Mr. Memminger cheerfully.”
⁹²

As the price for creating an independent Confederate nation rose higher and higher, more and more Southern hearts grew faint with war-weariness, and more and more began to kick against the goads. George Pickett, occupying his time with garrison duties on the Rappahannock, warned that while “a greater portion of our loyal men, the chivalry and high-toned gentlemen of the country, have volunteered, and are far from their homes,” there remained “a strong element among those who are left either to be non-combatants or to fall back under the old flag. … We have to fear them most” who “have refused to volunteer, while the proprietors of the country are actually in the field… and would join the enemy should an occasion occur.” William W. Holden, the editor of the Raleigh
Standard
, began editorializing for a negotiated peace in 1863, only to have soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, stopping in Raleigh on September 9, 1863, on the their way to reinforce Braxton Bragg in the West, destroy his press. Undaunted, Holden resumed publication of the
Standard
and in 1864 ran for governor of North Carolina against Zebulon Vance on the un-spoken promise to take North Carolina out of the war or out of the Confederacy.

In the Carolinas and northern Alabama, secret anti-war movements with names such as the Order of the Heroes of America (in western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia), the Peace and Constitutional Society (in the hill country of Arkansas), and the Peace Society (in northern Alabama) sprang into existence. The yeomen of the piney woods of Alabama had been reluctant secessionists to start with, and by the spring of 1862 Unionists in Winston County were raising recruits for the
Union
army. Overall, at least 100,000 Southerners ended up enlisting to fight against the Confederacy.
⁹³

Those who weren’t actually volunteering to fight the Confederates were concealing Confederate army deserters; before the end of the war, Winston County had sheltered between 8,000 and 10,000 deserters. “The Conscript law… has filled the mountains with disaffected desperadoes of the worst character, who joining with the deserters from our Army form very formidable bands of outlaws,” complained North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, and one of Vance’s advisers warned him that he might as well leave them alone, since “the deserters are more numerous & better armed and drilled than the Militia is, consequently there is more danger of their banding themselves together for armed resistance.”
⁹⁴
Some Southern counties simply deserted the Confederacy en masse: in western Virginia, the nonslaveholding mountain counties created their own new state, Kanawha, in August 1861—effectively seceding from secession—and in 1863 they were formally admitted to the Union as the state of West Virginia.

The Confederate government was not slow to retaliate. An elaborate internal passport system was created, starting in 1861 and becoming general throughout the Confederacy by 1864. In early 1863, Confederate troops swept down on Unionists in Shelton Laurel, in rural Madison County, and shot thirteen of them after being told by a senior officer, “I want no reports from you about your course at Laurel,” nor “to be troubled with any prisoners.” In Arkansas, Confederate general Thomas Hindman authorized the destruction of “all the cotton” on the Arkansas River and “its tributaries or the country beyond” and to arrest “as Traitors to the confederacy all persons resisting the execution of this order.” Nine resisters were shot, “Hindman himself witnessing the execution.”
⁹⁵
In the spring of 1864, George Pickett captured twenty-two North Carolinians who had been members of the state militia but then deserted to join Union forces along the occupied Carolina coast. Pickett refused to treat them as Union prisoners of war. Instead, he court-martialed them and hanged them all, over the protests of their Union commandant, Major General John Peck. After each hanging, Pickett allowed the bodies to be stripped of clothing and shoes by his own men, and as the prisoners were sent one by one to the gallows, Pickett leered, “God damn you, I reckon you will hardly ever go back there again, you damned rascals; I’ll have you shot, and all other damned rascals who desert.” That April, Confederate cavalry under Col. Robert Lowry rode through Jones County, Mississippi, which had a reputation for Unionism, hanging ten men for “armed resistance.”
⁹⁶

The ebbing of the Confederacy’s military and financial fortunes did little to endear the Davis administration to the Confederate voter, and the Confederacy’s congressional elections in the fall of 1863 showed a significant drop in confidence in Davis’s policies. The number of anti-administration representatives in the Confederate House rose from 26 to 41 out of a total of 106, while in the Confederate Senate, Davis clung on to a thin majority of 14 pro-administration members out of 26. None of the new members from North Carolina had voted for secession two years before, and one of the Alabama representatives was so plainly in favor of an immediate peace that the Congress voted to expel him. Alexander Stephens, who had become so alienated from Davis that he spent most of his vice presidency at home in Georgia, issued a public letter on September 22, 1864, calling for “a peaceful adjustment of our present difficulties and strife through the medium of a
convention of the States… It would be an appeal on both sides from the sword to reason and justice.”
⁹⁷

Yet Davis beat back every attempt to unseat his administration. A bill to limit the tenure of cabinet officers to two years died on Davis’s desk, and his congressional backers kept turning the trick for him on crucial votes. Despite the desertions and draft resistance, the Confederacy managed to mobilize more than three-quarters of its available military manpower. In fact, far from being intimidated by his administration’s losses at the polls, Davis had still more demands to make of Congress in name of Confederate nationhood. When the last session of the First Confederate Congress arrived in Richmond on December 7, 1863, Davis immediately urged new taxes and fresh additions to the conscription laws that allowed the government to reach into the civilian labor pool to reassign and reallocate workers. Two months later, he also obtained a new and expanded suspension of habeas corpus, a supervisory monopoly over all blockade-running enterprises, and on February 17, 1864, a compulsory funding bill that would compel Confederate citizens to pay their taxes either in specie or in government bonds. Once again, the centralizing authority of the Richmond government had overridden the localism and individualism that three years before had been the very cause of southern secession. “Will you please to inform me,” demanded North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, “what remains of the boasted
sovereignty
of the States?”
⁹⁸

None of these measures, however, could stanch the ebbing of the Confederacy’s territory and armies, and so on November 7, 1864, when the second (and last) session of the Second Congress met, Davis finally decided to trade in the last symbol of the old South in a bid to save the new Confederacy. He asked Congress to allow the Confederate government to purchase 40,000 slaves, enlist them as soldiers in the Confederate army, and emancipate them upon completion of their enlistment as a reward for service. “Should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”
⁹⁹

Actually, the proposal to arm the slaves and offer them the carrot of emancipation to guarantee good service had not originated with Davis. Richard Ewell, the scapegoat of Gettysburg, had suggested this to Jefferson Davis after First Bull Run in 1861, even volunteering to “command a brigade of Negroes,” and Davis continued to get advice from desperate citizens to dismiss “all squeameshness about employing negroes in civilized warfare.” The idea was formally introduced on January 24, 1864, by Patrick Cleburne, the Army of Tennessee’s Irish-born corps commander. Significantly, Cleburne was not a slave owner himself and had little interest in slavery. His principal rationale was the preservation of Confederate independence: “As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—give up the negro slave rather than be a slave himself.”
¹⁰⁰

This was asking much more of Southerners, in the name of the Confederacy, than Cleburne realized; he was, in fact, asking them to surrender the cornerstone of white racism in order to preserve their nation, and that was more than Davis felt he could safely ask. All copies of Cleburne’s written proposal were destroyed, by Davis’s order. But ten months later Davis felt he no longer had room for choice, and so in November 1864 Davis introduced his proposal for arming the slaves to the Confederate Congress. This time, even Davis’s closest political allies stopped short. Howell Cobb, who thought he was fighting the war to preserve slavery and not some elusive Confederate nationalism, warned Davis, “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” North Carolina newspapers bitterly attacked the proposal as “farcical”—“all this was done
for the preservation and perpetuation of slavery
,” and if “sober men… are ready to enquire if the South is willing to abolish slavery as a condition of carrying on the war, why may it not be done, as a condition of
ending the war
?” North Carolina’s soldiers were even more terse in their dismissal of the plan. “I did not volunteer to fight for a free negroes country,” J. F. Maides wrote home. “I do not think I love my country well enough to fight with black soldiers.” Without slavery, Virginia governor William Smith exclaimed, the South “would no longer have a motive to continue the struggle.”
¹⁰¹

The continuing collapse of the Confederate field armies eventually frightened even the most diehard slaveholders in Congress, and when General Lee added his endorsement to a bill introduced into the Confederate Congress by Mississippian Ethelbert Barksdale in February 1865, the opposition crumbled. On March 8, with a margin of only one vote in the Senate, the Congress voted to authorize
the recruitment of black soldiers. Seventeen days later, the first black Confederate companies began drilling in Richmond.
¹⁰²

Would African Americans have fought to save the Confederate nation? They just might have, since southern blacks demonstrated repeatedly throughout the war a healthy skepticism of all white intentions and promises, in blue or in gray, and were prepared to grasp for liberty without regard to who offered it. A skeptical Georgia slave told Union major George Ward Nichols that it was all well and good that the Union armies had come to bring him freedom, “but, massa, you’se’ll go way tomorrow, and anudder white man’ll come.” Nichols could only nod in agreement: “He had never known any thing but persecutions and injury from the white man” and saw no reason to put more trust in one class of white people than another. “Freedom and liberty is the word with the Collered people,” wrote a free black Louisianan; if fighting for the Confederacy “makes us free we are happy to hear it.”
¹⁰³
In the event, it was really too late for anyone to find out. Less than a month after the Confederate Congress authorized black enlistment, the war was over and the prospect of black Confederates was left to drift off into the realm of might-have-been.

Yet this is not to say that the idea of creating a Confederate nation was a foreordained failure. Southerners may have lost faith in the Confederate government’s success in waging war but not in the fundamental notions of Confederate nationalism, and especially not white racial supremacy. The move to recruit black soldiers may have rocked some Southerners, but not all of them, and belated as its appearance was, it testified to the degree to which Davis and like-minded Southerners had managed to move the Confederacy toward thinking of itself as a nation whose collective survival was more important than the preservation of its individual parts. Southerners assured themselves to the very end that God was with the Confederacy, and labored to incorporate Confederate nationalism into novels, plays, music, and even spelling books. And whatever disenchantment Southerners experienced with the Davis administration, they converted Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia into near deities in whom they never lost confidence. What the Confederacy demonstrated was this truth, that it was easier to create a nation than it was to create a nation-state.