Terrible Swift Sword (12 page)

CHAPTER
TWO

A Vast Future Also

1.
Magazine of Discord

Along the border
all
the fires were burning, producing a heat that made the war expand and an evil
light that made the expansion visible. In the two capitals, posted so close
together at the eastern end of the border country, the heat and light had
strange effects. The men of government had to move slowly, for they were trying
to organize and direct chaos itself; yet there was upon them a growing
necessity to move quickly, to act even as they sought to prepare the means of
action, to assert mastery over this war before it imposed its own monstrous
rules.

The
impulse which had forced the soldiers to fight at Bull Run before they were
ready to fight had by no means spent its force, and it seemed clear that simply
to drift could be ruinous. Whether one stood for the North, for the South, or
for some vanished middle ground that once had room for both, the situation as
it existed was intolerable. Every man had to look to the future, and no matter
what he hoped to see there he had to work desperately to bring it into
existence. It was a time when every American was impatient.

Among
the impatient were these two excellent professional soldiers, Generals Joseph
E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, who commanded the Confederacy's armed
forces in northern Virginia. Between them these two had won at Bull Run, had
found themselves unable to pursue the routed Federals when that battle ended,
and for weeks thereafter had held their army in camp north and east of
Centreville with outposts thrown forward so far that on bright days the vedettes
could look across the Potomac and see the unfinished dome of the United States
Capitol in Washington. They were dissimilar types, and they lived these days in
a state of courtly,

unostentatious rivalry—Johnston first in
command, Beauregard second, the ranking somewhat fogged by Beauregard's
glittering reputation and his native inability to understand that he had an
immediate superior. Early in August Beauregard had proposed that they move
forward, attack the Federal outposts, and see if they could not provoke the
Yankees into fighting a battle in the open, outside of the Washington lines.
¹
Johnston, cautious by nature and conscious that his army was very little
stronger than it had been at the time of Bull Run, rejected the idea; but as
fall came the two men agreed that it was time to strike a blow instead of
waiting passively to see what the enemy might do, and at the end of September
they sat in conference with Jefferson Davis at Johnston's Fairfax Courthouse
headquarters to project a decisive offensive. With them was the third man in
their army's hierarchy, Gustavus W. Smith, a Kentucky-born West Pointer who
until recently had been commissioner of streets in New York City, now a
Confederate major general.

All four men could see one thing readily
enough: the Federal Army in front of Washington was growing faster than their
own was growing, and if there ever was to be a Confederate offensive it had
better take place quickly. Johnston remarked that "decisive action before
the winter was important to us," and none of the others disagreed; the
question was how such action could be made possible.
²
The soldiers
believed that their army ought to be strongly reinforced, and they proposed in
substance that Davis raise it to a strength of 60,000 men—nearly double its present
size—by arming new recruits and by bringing in troops from every point in the
deep South that was not actually under attack. With such an army, they argued,
they could cross the Potomac, bring on a battle northwest of Washington, and
win a victory that would virtually establish Southern independence. They
believed that the Virginia theater was all-important. Smith spoke for the trio
when he declared, "Success here at this time saves everything—defeat here
loses all." No one, said Smith, questioned "the disastrous results of
remaining inactive throughout the winter."
³

This was true enough; and yet the
generals were asking for the impossible. There were plenty of recruits to be
had, but the weapons for them simply were not at hand. The War Department had
placed contracts for the manufacture of weapons but Southern manufacturing
facilities were wholly inadequate and so far the results had been negligible.
Arms contracts had also been placed overseas, but very few arms had actually
arrived; the procurement program was poorly managed, and also the derided
Federal blockade was beginning to be somewhat effective. Mr. Davis, who was
conscious of the deficiency, remarked sadly, long afterward: "The simple
fact was, the country had gone to war without counting the cost." It was
quite true, as the Richmond
Examiner
was
insisting, that "the idea of waiting for blows instead of inflicting them
is altogether unsuited to the genius of our people," but blows could not
be inflicted without guns; for the moment the genius of the people was sadly
crippled.
⁴

There
were, to be sure, numbers of troops at various points in the South who were not
at the moment menaced by advancing Federals, and the generals felt justified
in demanding that the Confederacy concentrate its available strength at the
point of greatest danger. But the kind of concentration they wanted was, at the
moment, a political impossibility. The Confederacy was still as much an
association of independent and equal states as it was a nation, and the governors
who insisted (with the full support of their constituencies) that proper
garrisons be maintained in places which were not then under attack, but which
conceivably would be as soon as the Yankees bestirred themselves vigorously,
had to be heeded. Mr. Davis had to exercise his authority within the limits of
a system under which the wishes of the separate states were all but sacrosanct.
He had written recently to Virginia's Governor John Letcher that he would
adhere to "my fixed determination not to have conflict with the Governors
of the States and in all things to seek for that cordial cooperation with them
which alone can enable us to succeed in our present struggle,"
⁵
and although in the years ahead he would be violently wrenched away from this
program he could not at this particular stage of the war follow any other.

This fact was crippling to the
Confederacy, but it was unavoidable. The Southern people might in truth be all
fire and ardor, but they were bound by the rigid limits of the theorem on which
they had seceded. The same law of state sovereignty which had kept Washington
from touching the institution of slavery now kept Richmond from defending the
institution effectively; and although Mr. Davis saw what lay ahead he was tied
by what lay behind. So his conference with the generals ended with gloomy
agreement that nothing in particular could be done. The army at Fairfax
Courthouse would remain inert, waiting for the blockade runners to bring the
essential weapons over the sea from England, waiting for the South's own rural
mills and blacksmith shops to meet their contracts, waiting for the restless
thousands of recruits to be armed and equipped for combat—waiting, as well, for
the enemy to strike a blow and for demonstration of the fact that the Federal
power could arm even more men and that the odds against the South would
constantly grow longer. The cost, as Mr. Davis remarked, had not been counted,
and the longer payment was deferred the worse the final settlement was going
to be.

Reality as seen in
Richmond, in other words, was not quite like the roseate visions that had
inspired the founding fathers at Montgomery half a year earlier; and indeed
some of the original Montgomery crowd were drifting away now, unable or
unwilling to go on with the roles Montgomery had given them. Blustery Robert
Toombs was no longer Secretary of State. He had resigned in July, at odds with
Jefferson Davis, disgusted with the outside world for its refusal to recognize
his foreign ministry, perhaps disgusted with the war itself for its failure to
make more prominent use of Robert Toombs; the real trouble probably being that
the cabinet just did not offer scope for his turbulent energies. Perhaps the
army could use him. The army would soon find out, for Toombs had taken a
brigadier's commission and was in command of a brigade of Georgia troops in
Johnston's army; a soldier in spite of his own lack of military experience and
his outspoken contempt for West Point, its teachings and its graduates. He was
replaced in the cabinet by the distinguished Virginian, Robert M. T. Hunter,
one-time member of the United States Senate, a conservative suspected of being
willing to consider overtures regarding peace.
⁸

Toombs
was not the only man who found Army service preferable to a cabinet post. Leroy
Pope Walker had been neither happy nor effective as head of the War Department.
Frail, a poor administrator and a man who knew very little of military affairs,
he had been a natural target for every complaint arising from the inaction of
Southern armies and the nonappearance of the munitions of war, and although he
had perhaps done just about as well as anyone had a right to expect he was
under mounting criticism. He resigned in mid-September, solaced with a pleasant
letter from Mr. Davis and an appointment as brigadier general, and went to the
Gulf Coast for duty. In looking for a successor, Mr. Davis apparently
considered the appointment of Robert E. Lee, and gave some thought as well to
his friend Leonidas Polk; but awarded the post at last, first on an
"acting" basis and then definitely, to Judah P. Benjamin, who had
been his attorney general and who, before secession, had been United States
Senator from Louisiana.
⁷
Benjamin was suave, subtle, intelligent,
deviously brilliant, and in the end Mr. Davis considered him indispensable; but
to be Confederate Secretary of War called for just the qualities which Benjamin
lacked—blunt frankness in counsel, and an instinct for being disarmingly candid
with the electorate. Frankness and candor were needed on the issue that had
driven Walker from the cabinet—the fact that the new nation was not yet armed
for vigorous offensive warfare. Instead, the administration tried to shield
the country from an unpleasant truth and put itself in the position of
justifying inaction as a chosen policy. It at least seemed to argue that it was
fighting a purely defensive war in which it would defend every acre of Southern
soil but would commit no aggression and attempt no invasions, and in this
thesis lay the seeds of a crippling estrangement between government and the
people.

The
estrangement was not yet visible. On November 6, indeed, there was a stirring
demonstration of wholesome unanimity. Going to the polls to name a regular
constitutional government to replace the provisional regime set up at Montgomery,
the people of the Confederacy unhesitatingly named Jefferson Davis for a
six-year term and designated Alexander Stephens as Vice-President.
⁸
There had been no opposition, no campaigning, no dissenting voices, and no
contest. As far as an election could say so, all was harmony.

Yet there was dissent. General
Beauregard had a grievance, and so did Joe Johnston, and Vice-President
Stephens and his friends were beginning to realize that they also had grievances.
The reasons for these grievances were dissimilar and inadequate, not to say
ridiculous, signifying perhaps little more than the fact that both professional
soldiers and professional politicians can be very hard to get along with. But
their existence was a bad omen. This government was new and small, and it
might not have room for the inner turbulences which are characteristic of
American administrations.

Beauregard's
case seemed to reflect little more than Napoleonic vanity on the loose. It had
begun more or less harmlessly, with Beauregard publicly criticizing Confederate
commissary arrangements, drawing a mild and even-tempered rebuke from the
President, and subsiding gracefully enough. Then Beauregard submitted a report
on the Bull Run campaign, making it appear that interference at Richmond had
kept him from executing a grand offensive design which could have captured
Washington; and a summary of this document unfortunately appeared in the press
before the report itself reached the President. Davis composed another rebuke,
much less even-tempered than the first, began to assemble evidence to show that
it was not he who had kept Confederate soldiers from winning the war, and
suggested that Beauregard's report "seemed to be an attempt to exalt yourself
at my expense." Beauregard countered, on November 3, by sending a letter
to the editor of the Richmond
Whig
—an
astounding epistle, which was headed "Centreville, Virginia,—within
hearing of the Enemy's guns," and which blandly remarked that "my
attention has been called to the unfortunate controversy" arising out of
his Bull Run report for which the President had just reprimanded him. The
letter then went on to remark: "If certain minds cannot understand the
difference between
patriotism,
the
highest civic virtue, and
office
seeking,
the lowest civic
occupation, I pity them from the bottom of my heart." In case anyone had
missed the point, Beauregard added that he was not and never would be a
candidate for any office; once independence was won, he just wanted to retire
to private life.
⁹

Beauregard's grievance grew from nothing
much more solid than a simple inability to get along with the President who had
appointed him. So, as a matter of fact, did Johnston's grievance, although it
came out in a different way. Johnston, who seemed to be so courtly and
self-effacing, unexpectedly displayed an abiding concern over rank, which
unhinged him almost as badly as Beauregard had been unhinged by the realization
that his fame had to be shared and controlled. On August 31 the Confederate
Congress confirmed the appointments of the men Mr. Davis had nominated as full
generals—

Samuel Cooper, the Adjutant and
Inspector General of the army; Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E.
Johnston, and P. G. T. Beauregard. These nominations stipulated that the
appointments would be effective as of different dates, and under military law
the commission of earliest date outranked the others. Reading this list and the
accompanying dates, Joseph E. Johnston discovered to his horror that the date
of his commission made him junior to Cooper, Sidney Johnston, and Lee. Of the
five generals, he ranked fourth.
¹⁰

According to Joe Johnston, this was
insulting and illegal. Confederate law said that generals of identical commissions
would have relative rank according to rank held in the Old Army—the United
States Army, that is, from which one and all had resigned. In that army Joseph
E. Johnston had been Quartermaster General, with brigadier's rank, and none of
the other four had ranked higher than colonel. Therefore, said the aggrieved
general, he was entitled to top rank in the Confederate Army: if he did not
get it, both justice and he personally would be outraged. (The controversy
actually was over the relative merits of staff and line commissions. The determining
factor, in Mr. Davis's opinion, was the command an officer had held in the
line. As a pre-war brigadier, Johnston of course had had a staff appointment.)