The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (11 page)

Walker’s first task was to create a national army large and strong enough to deter a war or if necessary fight one with the United States. Each Southern state had militia organizations in service, and some, such as South Carolina, had been diligent about securing arms and equipment for their state troops. Early in 1861 the Confederate Congress authorized the creation of a provisional army of 100,000 men. To get these troops Walker asked state governors to raise regiments and then transfer the units to the national army. The War Office provided generals and staff officers and, in theory at least, could employ the troops and their officers in any way it pleased once they mustered into the provisional army.

As Walker began to make requisitions, he had to deal with a flood of soldiers and would-be soldiers. He had to arm, equip, and billet his nascent army and move men and equipment to the probable fronts of a war most people hoped would never occur. Before long, no doubt, Walker wondered why he had ever wanted to be secretary of war.
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Some governors, such as Perry of Florida, were most cooperative about meeting Walker’s troop requisitions; others were less helpful. Brown of Georgia all but inundated the War Office with questions, objections, and reasons for delay and noncompliance and then complained that Walker would not answer his letters.
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Despite myriad difficulties, Walker was able to assemble some sort of army by the time the Sumter crisis came to a head in mid-April 1861. Excluding 5,000 South Carolina militia stationed in Charleston, the Confederacy boasted an army of approximately 62,000 men. Many of these troops existed only on paper, “in transit” to and from their places of muster or “held in readiness” in their home states. Nevertheless troops were already manning the former United States installations which the Confederate states had seized and then, in response to a request from Congress in Montgomery, ceded to the Southern government. The Confederates had troops patrolling the Rio Grande and the Indian frontier in Texas and manning the approaches to New Orleans and Mobile. Eight thousand Southerners had reported to General Braxton Bragg at Pensacola; there the United States still held Fort Pickens, an island fortress like Sumter, and thus controlled the entrance to Pensacola Harbor. General Pierre G. T. Beauregard was in command of the South Carolinians at Charleston, and Confederates were in position at Fort Pulaski guarding Savannah. On the Mississippi River, Confederates were surveying locations to protect against any advance downstream by the United States.

War had not begun, so there was no obligation to do more than deploy troops. Indeed, no one quite knew what these troops would do if war did break out, and Walker made no claims to being a grand strategist. He talked about capturing Washington but in fact arranged his troops in an essentially defensive posture and prepared most carefully to defend against water-borne invasion. The extensive inland frontier was of less immediate concern for the simple reason that no one could predict with certainty where that frontier would be. Until the upper South made up its mind about the Confederacy, there was little the War Office could do about massing troops on land frontiers which were in a state of flux.
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To support the growing army, the Confederacy had erected skeletal organizations of supply and service. On the same day that he signed the act creating the War Department, the President, taking advantage of the ambiguity of the Confederacy’s status vis-à-vis the United States, sent Captain Raphael Semmes, late of the United States Navy, into the North to purchase weapons, ammunition, and machinery with which to make more. Later the War Office dispatched Artillery Captain Caleb Huse to Europe on a similar mission.

These agents enjoyed some success, but the hard fact was that the Confederacy had an immediate shortage of arms and ammunition.
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Accordingly, as he divided and delivered arms contributed by the states, the new chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, began planning to manufacture his supplies in the South. The Pennsylvania-born Gorgas had spent twenty years in the “old army,” becoming an expert on ordnance. He resigned his United States commission and went South for several reasons: his wife was a Southerner, his Southern friends were resigning, and the Union seemed to have little appreciation of his talent and experience. While Gorgas organized, Secretary Walker had to turn down volunteers who could not furnish their own weapons, and squabble with recalcitrant governors for control of such items as knapsacks and saltpeter.

Davis placed two old friends, Lieutenant Colonels Abraham C. Myers and Lucius B. Northrup in charge of quartermaster and commissary respectively, but by mid-April these officials had done little more than prepare estimates of how much their operations would cost.
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Aided by a honeymoon period of patriotic enthusiasm, Walker’s office produced an army during its first two months of life.

For secretary of the navy, Davis at first favored Congressman John Perkins of Louisiana but nominated Stephen R. Mallory of Florida, apparently without regard for any political consideration other than that of including a Floridian in his cabinet. Mallory had not been an ardent secessionist, and he had reputedly been responsible for a deal with United States President Buchanan by which Florida promised not to attack Fort Pickens and Buchanan promised not to reinforce the fort. Jackson Morton and James B. Owens had political memories long enough to hold up Mallory’s confirmation for a week. As it happened, Mallory was the only one of Davis’ cabinet appointees whose confirmation Congress delayed. Too, Mallory did not enjoy a good social reputation with the women of the Confederate inner circle. According to Mary Chesnut, the Secretary not only associated with women of questionable virtue; he was also given to relating his adventures to any and everyone whenever he had had a glass or two of wine. In spite of all this, Mallory became a good secretary of the navy. He had been chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Naval Affairs and knew about ships and the men who served them. Moreover, Mallory had an innovative mind, and the Confederate Navy required more than conventional wisdom.
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By late April 1861, the Southern Navy could claim but two uncompleted ships in its fleet.

Secretary Mallory managed to serve at the same post throughout the life of the Confederacy; only one other cabinet member, Postmaster General John H. Reagan, did the same. Born in Tennessee, Reagan had spent much of his youth wandering from place to place and from job to job. Finally he settled in Texas, where he became a district judge and by 1861 a congressman. Traditionally in American politics, the postmaster general is a political appointee whose talent or lack of talent has nothing to do with his appointment. The Confederate President named Reagan because he liked him, because he needed a Texan, and because the Texans liked Reagan.
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Well aware of the problems inherent in the constitutional provision which required the Post Office to become self-sufficient within two years, Reagan approached his difficult task with vigor and made the Southern mails move about as rapidly and efficiently as circumstances permitted.

During his first two months in office he did two wise things. First, he announced that his department would not assume responsibility for mail service until June 1, 1861; until that date the old service continued. Southern postmasters continued selling United States postage stamps and sending their receipts to Washington. Even though this expedient proved awkward when the Confederacy and the United States went to war with each other, the grace period allowed Reagan to organize his department and plan its operation. Second, Reagan called a convention of important Southern railroad officials and presented them with a coordinated plan for mail routes and rate schedules. The railroad men proved cooperative, not only with Reagan, but also with Secretary of War Walker, who asked low rates and high priority for rail shipments of troops and supplies. Even though Reagan’s post office had yet to deliver its first piece of mail in the spring of 1861, it had made a good beginning.
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The Confederacy owed its existence as much to William Lowndes Yancey as to any other man. Yet the Alabama fire-eater posed the same kind of problem to Davis that Rhett did; both were root-and-branch radicals whose talents and tempers well suited the destruction of the old Union but ill became the construction of a new Confederacy. The South Carolinians at Montgomery had solved the problem of Rhett by rejecting his leadership; Yancey was another matter. Moderate Alabamians feared his doctrinaire influence but feared also his political power in the state and throughout the South. Ultimately Davis decided to offer Yancey a choice between the post of attorney general and a diplomatic mission to Europe. Both Davis and Yancey could save face, and the fiery Alabamian would be safely out of the way in a minor cabinet office or out of the country altogether. Yancey was miffed but accepted the European mission instead of the attorney generalship. The President then offered the minor job to a man who became a major figure in administration, Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana.
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The President knew Benjamin as a colleague in the United States Senate, but the two were hardly friends. Once, over a presumed slur, Benjamin had gone so far as to demand an apology or “satisfaction” from Davis; the Mississippian had chosen to make a courtly apology before the Senate, and the matter ended. Benjamin had been born of Jewish-English parents on the island of Saint Croix in 1811; he moved to Charleston with his parents and at age fourteen entered Yale. During his junior year, he left Yale suddenly; rumors of undefined misconduct followed him. At age eighteen he settled in New Orleans to seek his fortune and there began an eventually successful law practice. The ambitious young Jew married a Roman Catholic creole belle who shortly thereafter moved to Paris. Benjamin maintained his estranged wife and the fiction of his marriage while he turned his considerable energy to his personal advancement. He became a successful sugar planter and embraced the good life of a Southern gentleman with the zeal of a convert. Then in 1852 he entered Louisiana politics as a Whig and won election to the United States Senate. Benjamin did not become a Democrat until the late 1850s or a secessionist until even later. Short and round, with a dark, full beard, he was unimpressive until he opened his mouth; then urbanity, charm, and intellect displayed itself in full measure. Stephen Vincent Benét portrayed Benjamin as “the dapper Jew,/Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure,/Able, well-hated, face alive with life,/Looked round the council-chamber with the slight/Perpetual smile he held before himself/Continually like a silk-ribbed fan./Behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind/Weighed Gentiles in an old balance.” A contemporary admirer said of him, “Hebrew in blood, English in tenacity of grasp and purpose, Mr. Benjamin was French in taste.”
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Although Congress had created a Department of Justice—the first in the American experience—for the Attorney General to command, once that department was in operation Benjamin had little to do. He wrote opinions on legal questions asked by other government officers and in the course of this activity acquired a great deal of knowledge about the men and mechanics of the administration. He also became Davis’ “greeter,” charged with meeting and charming those people too important to be ignored but not important enough to intrude for long upon the President’s busy schedule. During the first months, Benjamin became more valuable than his title, and his relationship with the President began to ripen into friendship and mutual trust.
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Secretary of state had always been the premier cabinet post in American-style governments. When Barnwell declined the job, Davis turned to the man he had originally considered for the Treasury, Robert Toombs of Georgia.
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The Georgian was a large man in several ways. Physically he was tall, heavy, and strong. With friends he was generous and genial in the extreme, with those he judged enemies, devastating. A personification of the hearty “hell of a fellow,” Toombs scorned moderation in everything from rhetoric to wine. He had talent and brains, but he never seemed to know what he would do with them at any given moment. Beneath his braggadocio and bombast lay a profound conservatism, the most consistent trait of an inconsistent man. Toombs had begun his political life a Whig, and although he gravitated toward the Democrats in the late 1850s, he was still essentially a Southern Whig in 1861. He was an important man, and the President believed he had acknowledged that importance by asking him to be secretary of state. But Toombs had wanted to be president, and his ego was only partially salved by the gesture.
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The Confederacy’s message to the world beyond its borders was fairly simple: the Southern nation
de facto
existed and had every right to exist. To the United States the Southerners offered a
fait accompli
and a determination to resist reunion by force as long as necessary. To Europe they added the lure of “King Cotton” as well —“white gold” in exchange for recognition and normal trade relations.

By the time Congress consented to Toomb’s appointment, that body had already begun his diplomatic work for him. On February 13,1861, it resolved to send commissioners to Washington to secure recognition for the Confederacy and settle the problems of public debts and property. On the same day Congress also resolved to assume on behalf of the general government all responsibility for “questions and difficulties” with the United States over forts, arsenais, and the like. On February 25, President Davis nominated A. B. Roman, Martin J. Crawford, and John Forsyth to go to Washington as representatives of the Confederacy. The commissioners communicated with the new Republican Secretary of State William H. Seward through intermediaries, particularly Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell of Alabama. Campbell told the Confederates that Seward had promised the evacuation of Sumter and no reinforcement for Fort Pickens. Yet Seward took no official notice of the Southerners’ presence, and the United States made no move to evacuate Fort Sumter. As late as April 7, Campbell reassured the commissioners that Seward’s intentions were pacific. The Lincoln government kept the commissioners in suspense as to their status and in ignorance as to the intentions of the United States regarding the forts.
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