Terrible Swift Sword (19 page)

The
same thought had occurred to President Davis. So far, what had been done had
been makeshift. Incomplete returns showed that the Confederacy now had 209,000
men under arms, present for
duty;
258,000
for an "aggregate present," which was how the War Department
tabulated things when it counted all of the extras. This was an extremely good
showing, to be sure; but the Yankees had more than twice that many, and the
sobering thing about the Confederate total was that a good half of the
soldiers had signed up for twelve-month terms and would be going home in the
springtime, when the Yankee hordes would be advancing. It was true that 1861
had brought dazzling victories, but the landscape nevertheless had been
darkening. Missouri and western Virginia had been lost, most of the Carolina
coast was gone, much of Kentucky was held by the Federals and Tennessee itself
was in grave danger. Washington was preparing new amphibious expeditions—one
of them, according to indications, aimed at New Orleans, largest city in the
South —and the blockade undeniably was beginning to bind. Arms were short, and
so was money, and a government of sharply limited powers, resting on a
jealously guarded concept of states' rights, might easily find the whole
situation hard to control. A friend of the President wrote in his diary:
"I have not seen the President apparently so gloomy."
²

As
always, Mr. Davis showed a cheerful face to the public. Late in November he
assured Congress that what had been done so far "has checked the wicked
invasion which greed of gain and the unhallowed lust of power brought upon our
soil"; the Confederate States "are relatively much stronger now than
when the struggle commenced," and although privations lay ahead the
people could be sustained by "the strength that is given by a conscious
sense, not only of the magnitude but of the righteousness of our cause."
⁸
Yet the President had a special vantage point, from which he could see much
which he could not talk about in public; only to his intimates could he discuss
the picture in detail.

During the summer the President and his
family had moved into the Brockenbrough mansion, on Clay Street at 12th, a
tall, pillared dwelling known thenceforward as the White House of the
Confederacy. Here, one evening early in December, there was a formal dinner, and
after it was over Mr. Davis and a few friends adjourned to a retreat which the
President called his "snuggery"—a book-lined room where, relaxing in
easy chairs, the men could accept Presidential cigars and could listen to frank
talk. In this quiet, pleasant hideaway, Mr. Davis revealed his worries.

The biggest concern
was the volunteer army. Not only were many enlistments about to expire; even
this early it was obvious that a good many regiments—including, Mr. Davis confessed,
some from his own state of Mississippi—would refuse to remain in service.
Governors and generals could be blamed, here: governors, because some of them
would not co-operate with Richmond on troop recruitment and maintenance, and
generals because so few of them were able to handle volunteer soldiers.
(Attorney General Thomas Bragg, one of the men present at this little meeting,
proudly noted that his brother, Braxton Bragg, was named by Mr. Davis as the
only army commander who knew how to manage volunteers and retain their love and
respect—a judgment which would call for revision before the war was over.)

Missouri and Kentucky offered problems,
too. In Missouri, Price and McCulloch were on most evil terms, Price anxious to
fight, McCulloch anxious to retreat; it seemed to Mr. Davis that he ought to
send an outsider in to take top command, but if that happened Price's whole
army would probably disband, in which case the theory that Missouri had
recently entered the Confederacy would remain a thin theory and nothing more.
Kentucky's situation was baffling. The legislature was firmly Unionist, and
Governor Magoffin, who earlier had sounded like a secessionist, apparently was
under the legislature's influence now, or under the influence of the Union
generals; in either case he was hardly a man the Confederacy could count on.
Secessionist Kentuckians wanted to wrench at least a part of Kentucky loose
from its old moorings and bring it into the Confederacy—an attractive idea, but
most irregular, since it was the precise counterpart of the illegal game the
Yankees were playing in western Virginia. Something of the sort probably would
have to be done, however, because the Kentuckians "are in a state of
revolution."

Finally, there was the problem of money.
Secretary of the Treasury was earnest Christopher Memminger, a careful lawyer
who had served in the South Carolina legislature and whose fiscal horizon until
recently had been bounded by routine Charleston philanthropies and the
peacetime budget of a small and thrifty state; responsible now for balancing
apparently limitless expenditures, like an inverted pyramid, on narrowly
restricted means. He said that the Confederate treasury could carry on through
April, but he did not know what would

happen after that; somehow, the cost of
fighting the war must be reduced. Both Mr. Davis and Secretary of War Judah
Benjamin immediately assured him that this was out of the question. . . .
Gold was being hoarded, there was a flood of paper money, and Mr. Bragg
gloomily wrote: "By and by the crash will come, do what we may. It is to
be hoped the war will end first—we could then recover after no great
while."
⁴

. . . The money question was unnerving,
and yet it was a source of grim comfort, in a certain sense, because it did at
least seem to impose a limit on a business which was getting more and more out
of hand. On both sides there were sober men of affairs who believed that the
war must end before long simply because it was moving beyond its financial base.
Not long after Mr. Bragg saw the inevitability of trouble, Charles Francis
Adams, surveying the aftermath of the Mason-Slidell trouble, wrote to his son
about "the crushing nature of our expenditure, which must stop this war if
something effective does not follow soon."
⁵
It was still
possible, at the end of 1861, to believe that if all else failed war might
flicker out because it had grown too expensive. . . .

The
trouble was not so much the money problem, nor even the manpower problem, as it
was the extent of the power which Mr. Davis's government had or could assert.
Men could be made to enter the Army, or to stay in once they had entered;
spending could be made to go far beyond the point where business prudence would
set a limit; worthless pieces of paper could be made to serve (for a time, at
least, and at a certain cost) as valid tools of exchange—
if
the government
which controlled such matters insisted that these things be done. One man who
was thinking along these fines was Robert E. Lee, who not long after the White
House meeting wrote to Governor Letcher of Virginia to express concern about
the problem of re-enlistment of the twelve-month men in the spring.

"I tremble to think of the
different conditions our armies will present to those of the enemy at the
opening of the next campaign," said General Lee. "On the plains of
Manassas, for instance, the enemy will resume operations, after a year's
preparation and a winter of repose, fresh, vigorous, and completely organized,
while we shall be in the confusion and excitement of reorganizing ours. The
disbanding and reorganizing an army in time of peace is attended with loss and
expense. What must it be in time of active service, in the presence of an
enemy prepared to strike? I have thought that General McClellan is waiting to
take the advantage which that opportunity will give him. What then is to stand
between him and Richmond?"

Like the impatient Republican radicals in
Washington, Lee felt that the Army of the Potomac was being held in its camps beyond
its time; unlike the radicals, he thought that the army's commander must have
some sensible reason for his inaction. . . . Returning to the Confederacy's
difficulty, Lee remarked that he knew of no way to hold the short-term
regiments in service "except by the passage of a law for drafting them
'for the war' unless they volunteer for that period." Then he went on to
state the feeling of the dedicated soldier and patriot, to put into simple
words the incredible paradox which made revolutionists out of profound
conservatives:

"The great object of the
Confederate states is to bring the war to a successful issue. Every
consideration should yield to that; for without it we can hope to enjoy nothing
that we possess, and nothing that we do possess will be worth anything without
it."
⁶

In
these words General Lee demanded and defined all-out war. Victory was all that
mattered, and no price for it could be too high. No matter what changes war
brought they would be accepted: in all-out war they have to be accepted; fixing
their gaze upon victory itself, men became unable to see more than a millimeter
beyond it, thereby putting themselves at the mercy of the implacable future.
Three years from this fall the Confederate officer who ran the Bureau of
Conscription—an agency which would come into being because of the truth voiced
by General Lee—tried to describe the kind of war the Confederacy had been
fighting. It had become, he said, one of those wars "in which the whole
population and the whole production of a country (the soldiers and the subsistence
of armies) are to be put on a war footing, where every institution is to be
made auxiliary to war, where every citizen and every industry is to have for
the time but one attribute—that of contributing to the public defense."
⁷

The
pressure was felt by both Presidents, by the man in Washington as well as by
the man in Richmond. Two thirds of a year had passed since they had said the
words which set the guns firing around Fort Sumter; so far, neither man had
finished the task of preparing to fight the war which had then begun; yet each
man was beginning to see that this war might presently become something that
had not been bargained for in the springtime. Mr. Davis was being compelled to
think about what the war was going to do; Mr. Lincoln, in equal perplexity, was
being compelled to think of what the war was going to mean. Each man was
beginning to see things that had not been visible in April.

On December 3, Mr.
Lincoln was obliged to send his regular message to the Congress. He began
almost as if there were no war at all, pointing out that the land had been
blessed with good health and abundant harvests; he discussed certain vacancies
on the Supreme Court, suggested changes in the Federal judicial system,
proposed that the nation's industrial interests be represented at an exhibition
which was to be held in London, and told how territorial organization was progressing
in Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada. Then, at last, he got down to it.

'The war continues," said Mr.
Lincoln. "In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the
insurrection, I have been anxious and most careful that the inevitable conflict
for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless
revolutionary struggle. I have therefore, in every case, thought it proper to
keep the integrity of the Union prominent as the primary object of the contest
on our part, leaving all questions which are not of vital military importance
to the more deliberate action of the legislature." Everything that needed
to be done to save the Union would of course be done, but "radical and
extreme measures" would be avoided, if possible. For the time being the
President would stand on the policy previously announced: the war was being
fought for reunion and would not be waged so as to interfere with any domestic
institution.

Yet
the business was infernally complicated, with ominous overtones. In Richmond it
was beginning to be seen that a Confederacy militantly dedicated to states'
rights might have to ignore its basic doctrine and embrace the very centralism
it was fighting to avoid, if it wished to live; and in Washington the domestic
institution which was not to be touched was being touched every time the war
itself was touched. The war which was not being fought to end slavery was
somehow
about
slavery;
or, at the very least, slavery lay underneath everything, ready to be turned up
whenever the plowshare cut through the thin sheltering crust. This meant that
the remorseless revolutionary struggle which Mr. Lincoln was so anxious to
avoid lay likewise just beneath the surface. How could it be avoided?

So far, the President had done his best.
General Fremont had proclaimed freedom for the slaves in Missouri and had been
quickly overruled; was, by this time, altogether on the sidelines, a general
without a command, removed by Presidential order just after Scott himself had
resigned, replaced (after a brief interval) by the General Halleck whom Scott
had groomed as his own replacement. Not long after that, Secretary of War
Cameron inserted in his annual report a flat statement that the government had
the right to turn slaves into soldiers and would exercise that right whenever
it needed to do so; Lincoln made him recall the report and remove the offending
statement, substituting for it a platitudinous paragraph about the
government's obligation to protect slaves who had been abandoned by their
masters, as in the area around Beaufort, South Carolina.
⁸
The
radical and extreme measures which were forever being proposed had not yet been
adopted.

Yet these were expedients.
Like President Davis, President Lincoln had to realize that what had been done
so far was makeshift. The hard reality was that if the Federal government
waged war to destroy a government based on slavery it could not, by any
imaginable maneuver, keep the war from revolving about the fundamental concept
of human freedom. This concept is dangerous; it takes fire, like phosphorus,
whenever it is exposed to the air, and the war was exposing it to the winds of
heaven. No disclaimer could hide the fact that a class which lived by the
slavery of one group of people, on the acquiescence of another group which
enjoyed personal freedom, had taken up arms to maintain its privileges. Here
was the inescapable dilemma, and President Lincoln had to look at it.

He
brooded on the fact, as he continued with his message to Congress.

This
"insurrection," he said, was fundamentally a war on "the first
principle of popular government—the rights of the people." (As the
ineffable Ben Butler had pointed out, slaves somehow were people, and if they
were people they had rights, from which it followed that the rights of those
who were more widely recognized as people were also involved.) Somewhere, said
Mr. Lincoln, far down in the struggle, there might be at stake the whole idea
of a classless society in which the ordinary man was truly independent, free to
rise as far as his talents and industry would take him. This ordinary man owned
his own labor and he relied on it, and labor (said Mr. Lincoln, following this
elusive idea) was superior to capital; it came first, and its rights deserved
"much the higher consideration." A few men, owning much capital,
either hired or bought men to labor for them, but they were in a minority. Most
men—most men even in the slave states— neither worked for others nor had others
working for them. They worked for themselves, on farms or in little shops,
"taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital
on the one hand or of hired laborers or slaves on the other." Their position
was not fixed. The world was open to them, and this independence was, just
possibly, what finally was at stake in this war. So Mr. Lincoln had a word of
warning for the free white Americans who thought that their blessings were
from everlasting to everlasting: "Let them beware of surrendering a
political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will
surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to
fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be
lost."

It
could not be seen very clearly, and the words which could express the things so
dimly seen had to be groped for: but here in fact was the remorseless
revolutionary struggle, stated as clearly as might be by a man who felt the immense
values that were involved. And Mr. Lincoln closed by saying: "The struggle
of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also."
⁹

Yet the future was hidden in a blinding
mist. Both Richmond and Washington were reaching out for the future with
uncertain hands, unable to see what they groped for, unable to know that the
very act of reaching was going to create unending change. In his sketch of an
ideal America where most people neither owned nor were owned, Mr. Lincoln was
describing the country he knew, the magically lighted, subtly fading land of
small farms and village industries, simple, uncomplicated, transitory, the
breeding ground for the homeliest and loveliest of virtues. Far ahead, beyond
the vision of any living man, lay Pittsburgh and Detroit, Gary and Los Angeles,
the industrialized American empire with all of its greatness and infinite
complications, a society in which no man could ever again be an island,
something which Mr. Lincoln could neither foresee nor prevent: something
endurable only if the loss of the kind of independence the President was
talking about could be accompanied by the everlasting acquisition of a moral
and political freedom broad enough to preserve somehow the concept of a
society in which the unattached individual was the man who really mattered.

Mr.
Lincoln could no more see how this would come out of the war than Mr. Davis
could see that before the war ended he himself would be calling on his
government to embrace the very thing his government had gone to war to prevent—
emancipation. Each President was trying to project the present into the
future, and each man was compelled to do things which would send the present
back into the abandoned past. Perhaps each man was haunted by a dim awareness that
this might be so.

For
each President had to listen to a categorical imperative: "Get on with
the war." This could not be escaped. This made each man a prisoner. The
time of preparation was over, and now the war itself, with its imperious
demands on all Americans, was about to take charge.

The
Attorney General of the United States, the same Edward Bates who had contested
with Mr. Lincoln for the Republican presidential nomination early in the
summer of 1860, closed this year's entries in his diary on December 31 by
lamenting the slowness of Federal military movements. Enormous efforts, Mr.
Bates believed, were being made, and great battles undoubtedly were about to
take place, yet there seemed to be no central direction; Mr. Bates recalled
that he had recently warned Mr. Lincoln that it was time for the President to
take effective control.