The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (32 page)

D
URING the early months of 1863 the war gods seemed to smile upon the embryo Southern nation. On the first day of the new year a Confederate land force led by John B. Magruder combined with a fleet of small boats armored with cotton bales, called “cottonclads” to recapture Galveston, Texas.
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During February a small Southern fleet on the Mississippi managed to damage and capture the Union
Indianola,
and for a time the Confederates regained control of the river below Vicksburg.
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In April a long-awaited Federal assault on Charleston proved abortive, thanks to the preparations of garrison commander P. G. T. Beauregard.
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These actions, Southerners hoped, might portend coming successes in the major field campaigns of 1863.

President Davis and his generals anticipated activity on three main fronts in 1863. Ever since the previous December the enemy had threatened Vicksburg and John C. Pemberton’s army. Generals U. S. Grant and William T. Sherman and Admiral David D. Porter had exhausted time, energy, and lives attempting to take this last major Southern strong point on the Mississippi from the north and west. Finally, in late March, Grant determined to move his army south of Vicksburg, cross the river, cut Pemberton’s supply lines from Jackson, and advance on the city from the East. By mid-April Grant’s intentions were clear to the Confederates, but Pemberton did not believe his army was strong enough to attack Grant and hold Vicksburg simultaneously.
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At Chattanooga, meanwhile, Braxton Bragg’s army confronted an enemy invasion force under William S. Rosecrans. Neither general seemed anxious to renew the combat which had concluded the previous campaigning season at Murfreesboro on the Stones River, and the war front in middle Tennessee was dormant until much later in the year.
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On the eastern front Robert E. Lee awaited the spring campaigns from his lines at Fredericksburg. Across the Rappahannock, Union General Joseph Hooker prepared a grand stroke by which he hoped to destroy Lee’s army and seize Richmond.

Although Grant’s army was already in motion, the first threat in 1863 to Confederate military vitals came from Hooker. While Lee watched and waited, a large force of Federal cavalry broke through to the Confederate rear and began tearing up railroad tracks and disrupting communications between Richmond and the front. Then Hooker’s army crossed the Rappahannock west of Fredericksburg and marched down the southern bank toward Lee’s flank. At last Lee reacted. Leaving a small covering force commanded by Jubal A. Early at Fredericksburg, he marched with the bulk of his army to meet Hooker’s columns.

The two armies collided at a crossroads called Chancellorsville on May 1. Hooker brought up reinforcements until he outnumbered Lee almost two to one, but the densely wooded terrain reduced the effect of numbers, and, more important, the Confederates discovered the Federal right flank unsecured. Stonewall Jackson and Lee plotted Hooker’s annihilation on the evening of May 1, and at about six o’clock in the afternoon on May 2, after a long flank march, Jackson’s entire corps fell upon the exposed Union right. Although critically outnumbered, Lee and Jackson had their enemies in a vise; Jackson knew he must maintain his momentum, and so he planned to continue his assault by moonlight. In the course of reorganizing his troop units and reconnoitering the enemy’s defenses, however, he was wounded by his own men as he rode through the darkened woods. Next day J. E. B. Stuart assumed temporary command of Jackson’s corps and managed to regain contact with Lee’s portion of the Southern army. Hooker, acknowledging defeat, withdrew in good order back across the Rappahannock. Chancellorsville had been a brilliant battle for the Army of Northern Virginia. But a battle of annihilation it was not. And the battle cost the Confederacy the life of one of its boldest captains. Jackson died on May 10.
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In terms of military leadership the loss of Jackson was incalculable. Yet in death the grim Presbyterian offered the new nation a national martyr; the response was immediate and intense, not only within the South, but in Europe as well. In Richmond the news abruptly brought normal government and business activity to a halt at mid-morning on May 11. A crowd estimated as the largest ever assembled in the crowded city followed the fallen hero’s coffin from the railroad station to the governor’s mansion on Capitol Square. The next day a funeral procession escorted the coffin through the streets of the capitol and then returned to place the body in state at the capitol. Finally, on May 13, Jackson’s body began the journey to Lexington for more ceremony at its interment. Alive, Jackson was an eccentric genius, part Southern Calvinist and part killer. Dead, this Cromwell reincarnate took first place in the pantheon of heroes in a nation of cavaliers.
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Victory at Chancellorsville allowed Lee some respite to reorganize the Army of Northern Virginia and come to terms with Jackson’s loss. Hooker seemed content for the time being to lick his wounds north of the Rappahannock. Meanwhile, however, the threat to Vicksburg developed and demanded full attention in Richmond. On May 14, the day after Jackson’s body left the Confederate capital, Grant’s army occupied Jackson, Mississippi. The Federals’ next move was obvious: if unmolested, Grant would move west from Jackson to Vicksburg along the railroad and lay siege to Pemberton’s army in the river stronghold. The Confederate response was equally obvious—on paper at least. Joseph E. Johnston, in command of the western theater, must exert his authority, draw troops from his less-threatened commands, and attack Grant’s army in concert with Pemberton. These things Jefferson Davis hoped Johnston would do. In his concern for Vicksburg, Davis tried to help; he ordered Johnston to assume personal command in Mississippi and dispatched a flurry of letters and telegrams containing advice and orders to Pemberton, Mississippi Governor J. J. Pettus, Bragg, and others. “Do not abandon Vicksburg for a single day,” Davis counseled Pemberton. Johnston, who never grasped the nature and authority of his command, interpreted the President’s well-meant assistance as meddling and violation of the chain of command. Pemberton felt trapped not only by Grant’s army but between his commander and his commander-in-chief. Accordingly, Johnston and Pemberton failed to unite their forces and attack Grant at Jackson, and after an unsuccessful stand at Champion’s Hill on May 16, Pemberton withdrew into Vicksburg. Johnston ordered Pemberton to save his army and abandon the city, but Pemberton would not or could not comply. With Vicksburg under siege and Pemberton’s army inside, Johnston began collecting reinforcements with which to attempt to break Grant’s hold.
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In Richmond the President and Secretary of War Seddon resisted grand strategems suggested by James Longstreet and Beauregard. Independently the two generals proposed to relieve Vicksburg by concentrating all available troops in Tennessee, overwhelming Rosecrans, and marching, Beauregard to the Mississippi and Longstreet to the Ohio.
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Although Johnston was none too sanguine about his prospects, Davis and Seddon believed he could defeat Grant—if only because the circumstance demanded it. On June 15, Johnston telegraphed, “I consider saving Vicksburg hopeless.” Seddon responded on June 16, “Your telegram grieves and alarms us. Vicksburg must not be lost, at least without a struggle. The interest and honor of the Confederacy forbid it. I rely on you still to avert the loss. If better resource does not offer, you must hazard attack. It may be made in concert with the garrison, if practicable, but otherwise without. By day or night, as you think best.”
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Beyond giving Johnston encouragement and carte blanche to fight and fail if nothing else, Davis, Seddon, and the rest of Confederate officialdom in Richmond could do little more than hope.

Meanwhile Lee and Davis had decided to take the offensive in the east. As he had done the previous fall, Lee drove his army west of his enemy, crossed the Potomac upstream, and sent widely dispersed columns into Maryland. This time the Confederates continued into Pennsylvania and posed a distinct threat to Washington and Baltimore. The invasion of Pennsylvania would not draw off troops from Vicksburg, but should Vicksburg fall, its loss would be small indeed compared to a major victory before Washington. Lee had no illusions about besieging the enemy capital immediately. He and Davis hoped to draw Hooker into another Chancellorsville; this time the ultimate prize would be Washington instead of Richmond, and this time perhaps the Southerners could achieve a battle of annihilation and at the same time a diplomatic coup.
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Once in Pennsylvania, Lee expanded his thinking about the campaign and urged that Davis collect all available troops from the Carolinas, place Beauregard in command, and order an assault on Washington from the south. The idea might have had a decisive effect upon what began as a limited offensive, but Davis believed it too complicated and too risky. Thus the President and the rest of the Confederacy contented themselves with waiting and hoping for favorable results from the campaigns already in motion.
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Men of the Army of Northern Virginia were not the only foreign visitors to Pennsylvania in 1863. A number of professional soldiers from Europe accompanied Lee’s army during the campaign, to observe for themselves the war Americans were fighting. Arthur James Lyon Fremantle of the Coldstream Guard, Captain Fitzgerald Ross of the Austrian Hussars, and Captain Justus Scheibert of the Prussian army all recorded impressions of their travels with the Southern army that June.
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European civilians, too, had begun to visit the Confederacy in larger numbers to satisfy their curiosity about the Confederacy and the progress of the war.

One civilian visitor from France was Charles Girard, who afterward wrote a memoir of his travels. Girard was much impressed by what he saw; his narrative was more propaganda than anything else, but Girard caught one essential truth. “My guiding thought,” he wrote, “… has been to give the reader a general sketch of the organization of this Government, and to show him that it is no longer a trial Government, which seated now at Richmond, but really a normal Government, the expression of popular will.”

Emperor Napoleon III shared more of Girard’s feelings about the Confederacy than the French traveler probably realized at the time, and during the late spring of 1863 he came as close as he ever would to translating his sympathies into actions. While Napoleon was fretting anew about his nation’s need for cotton, intriguing to make the most of his Mexican conquest, and digesting reports of the Southern victory at Chancellorsville, in England John A. Roebuck announced his intention to place before Parliament a resolution supporting immediate Anglo-French recognition of the Confederacy. The Palmerston government let it be known that it opposed the project and justified its opposition on the ground that Napoleon had lost all enthusiasm for recognition. Such was not the case, though, and on June 18 the Emperor told Confederate diplomat John Slidell that he would “make a direct proposition to England for joint recognition.” Even though the French cabinet cooled his ardor somewhat, the Emperor repeated his assurance of cooperation to Roebuck and his colleague John A. Lindsay in an unofficial conversation a few days later. Thus Roebuck confidently prepared to introduce his resolution on June 30, and Europe became an active front, along with Pennsylvania and Vicksburg, in the Confederate war.
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During June of 1863 the tide of Confederate independence and nationhood probably reached its flood. Hindsight, of course, reveals that deluge followed quickly after. But at the time Southerners had a right to be optimistic, or at least hopeful, that their revolution would prevail, or at least endure. In the minds of its citizens the Confederacy was more a nation in June of 1863 than ever before or after. Thus it is appropriate to examine Southern nationality at this point and to explore the social and cultural experience of the Confederate South.

Two years of war had transformed Southern political and economic institutions and the Southern people. The Confederate experience influenced the ways in which Southerners thought and felt about themselves, related socially to each other, and expressed their relationship to God both personally and corporately. War and Confederate nationalism also conditioned Southerners’ creative energies in music, art, literature, and learning. And significantly the transforming aspects of the Confederate experience did not affect only white Southerners. The black experience during wartime underwent subtle but profound metamorphosis, and slavery in the Confederate South was an unsettled institution. The end product of these Confederate alterations of ante-bellum norms was a distinctive national life behind the battle lines. Conditioned by war and revolution, that national life differed dramatically from what came before and after.
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In terms of their corporate self-concept, most Confederates still believed themselves to be heirs of the American Revolutionary tradition of 1776. When inaugurated on Washington’s birthday in 1862, President Davis explained, “We hope to perpetuate the principles of our revolutionary fathers.”
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In 1863, Davis was still telling his fellow countrymen, “you assumed to yourselves the right, as your fathers had done before you, to declare yourselves independent.”
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In May of 1863 Congress finally settled upon a design for the Great Seal of the Confederate States. Appropriately the dominant feature of the design was an equestrian portrait of George Washington. Confederate postage stamps also bore likenesses of Washington and Thomas Jefferson along with those of Davis and John C. Calhoun. In the face of military reverses the Richmond
Examiner,
perhaps the most popular newspaper in the Confederacy, counseled its readers to recall their other revolutionary war:

The British ran over every high road of this country; penetrated every neighborhood, plundered every city and town to the Gulf—but lost the game. Their successors in tyranny will lose like them, unless the descendants of those who lived in the ‘times that tried men’s souls’ have infamously degenerated.
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