The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (38 page)

The Confederates attacked early on the morning of the twentieth. The assaults were uncoordinated, and Rosecrans was able to concentrate his army to meet them, but just at the moment when Long-street’s veterans swept forward at 11:30, a Union division commander misinterpreted his confused orders from Rosecrans and withdrew his troops from the Federal front. Longstreet’s Confederates poured through the gap, and Union resistance seemed about to crumble. Rosecrans was convinced he had been beaten, and he led the hasty retreat to Chattanooga himself. Bragg, however, did not press his advantage. He failed to maintain the momentum of his advance by committing reserve troops to the critical part of the battlefield. As a result the Southern assaults faltered before the determined stand made by George H. Thomas’ Union corps. With justice Bragg claimed victory at Chickamauga, but Bragg had won a battle when he might have won an entire campaign.
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The Union army re-formed at Chattanooga, and Bragg chose to lay siege to the city. The Confederates fortified the high ground on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, which dominated the city. Then Bragg sent Joseph Wheeler’s cavalry on a raid to sever Union supply lines. Wheeler’s efforts and rain, which made bad roads worse, took a significant toll, and Rosecrans’ army was in pitiful shape by mid-October. Again, though, Bragg did not press his advantage. On the contrary he detached Longstreet’s corps and sent it to attack Knoxville. Longstreet conducted a campaign at Knoxville similar to the one Bragg was conducting at Chattanooga. Both Confederate commanders informed Richmond that they had their enemy at bay, but neither general attempted a
coup de grâce.

While Bragg and his Army of Tennessee were content and confident, their enemies were active. Washington made Grant commander of a western theater from the mountains to the Mississippi, an imitation of Johnston’s charge from Richmond almost a year earlier. Perhaps because Grant learned from Johnston’s experience, but more likely because Grant was a more aggressive general, the Union theater command fulfilled most of the hopes which Davis had had for his version of the concept. Grant replaced Rosecrans with Thomas and came to Chattanooga himself to oversee the continuation of the campaign. Too, the Washington War Office dispatched Hooker’s corps from Meade’s army to counter Richmond’s transfer of Longstreet’s corps, and two more corps commanded by Sherman began a transit from Vicksburg to reinforce the Chattanooga position still further. As reinforcements swelled the enemy force, Thomas was able to open newer and shorter supply routes into the “besieged” city.

Unaccountably Bragg failed to appreciate the significance of the activity going on beneath him during October and November. His position, he believed, was impregnable, and winter would soon end the campaigning season of 1863. Thus the Southern army watched and waited for the most part while the enemy gathered strength.
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On November 24 the Federals struck. Hooker and three divisions seized the low ground between Lookout Mountain and the Tennessee see River and threatened to isolate the Southerners on Lookout Mountain from those on Missionary Ridge. Sherman attacked the northern end of the Confederate position on the ridge line at Tunnel Hill. Bragg responded by withdrawing his troops from Lookout Mountain and concentrating on the Missionary Ridge line. He still had reason to be confident that the Federals’ attack would result in their wholesale slaughter.

Next day, November 25, Grant ordered Hooker and Sherman to assult the Confederate flanks. Thomas’ troops were supposed to try to take the first of three ranks of rifle pits in the center of Bragg’s line. Hooker was slow, and Patrick Cleburne’s Confederates thwarted Sherman’s attack. In the center, however, Thomas’ Federals accomplished what Pickett’s charge failed to achieve at Gettysburg; they broke through the middle of the entrenched Confederates on Missionary Ridge. Once in possession of the first line of rifle pits, the Federals renewed their charge and in less than an hour carried the top of the ridge. Whether they acted out of courage or out of fear for their exposed position at the base of the ridge was immaterial; Bragg’s line was broken.

Bragg’s army also broke. The troops, for the first and only significant time in the life of the Army of Tennessee, fled in panic down the back side of Missionary Ridge. Only nightfall, confusion in the ranks of the enemy, and a rear guard action fought mainly by Cleburne’s division, saved Bragg’s army from annihilation, The campaign for Chattanooga had ended in disaster. Bragg took his shattered command into winter quarters at Dalton, Georgia, and blamed his debacle on drunken officers, cowardly soldiers—everyone save himself. Bragg’s subordinates responded naturally to failures in leadership. His officers divided into hostile camps, and his men deserted in alarming numbers. By the end of the year, one of the Confederacy’s two major field armies seemed to be on the verge of disintegration.
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The Confederacy’s other major field army, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, spent the second half of the 1863 campaigning season in northern Virginia. Lee was anxious to atone for Gettysburg, and Meade was equally anxious to atone for his own failure to follow up the great battle by destroying the Southern army. Nevertheless the campaigns of late 1863 in the east were inconclusive.

In mid-September Meade’s army advanced on Lee’s position at Culpeper Court House. Then, just as the two armies were about to join battle, Meade lost two corps sent to reinforce Rosecrans after Chickamauga. It then became Lee’s turn to advance as Meade withdrew to Centreville. Lee’s attempt to flank Meade and interpose the Army of Northern Virginia between Meade and Washington came to grief at Bristoe Station on October 14. So in November Lee took his army back across the Rappahannock and prepared to go into winter quarters.

Meade, however, tried one last time to flank the Confederates and defeat Lee. The Federals crossed the Rapidan River in strength and attempted to do what Hooker had tried to do, very near to where he had tried to do it. About ten miles west of Chancellorsville the Army of the Potomac found the Confederates in a strong defensive position along Mine Run, a creek which flows north into the Rapidan. What Lee hoped to do was hold Meade’s attacking units in check with the aid of trenches and Hill’s corps. Then Ewell’s corps would emulate Jackson’s action at Chancellorsville by striking the enemy’s exposed southern flank. Meade unwittingly foiled the scheme. Believing the Confederate position too strong for a frontal assault, the Union general withdrew back across the Rapidan. Thus when Ewell’s troops surged forward on December 2, they found only trees in their way. At this point both armies went into winter quarters and accepted stalemate on the Rapidan.
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In terms of lines and symbols on maps, the Confederacy was not much worse off when the military campaigns of 1863 ended than it had been before they began. On the Virginia front Lee and Meade were just about where Lee and Burnside had been a year earlier. In the “near west” Chattanooga was lost, but the battle front had moved less than ninety miles during the year—from Murfreesboro to Chattanooga, five days march in 365 days. Farther west, Vicksburg too was gone, but the enemy could never hope to interdict absolutely passage across the Mississippi.

The trans-Mississippi region was still in flux, but then it had ever been in flux. At least by the end of 1863 the Southern War Office had imposed unity of command out there, in the person of Edmund Kirby Smith. Davis and Seddon had selected Smith the previous spring and let him know that he was all but independent within his enlarged department. When Vicksburg fell Smith’s responsibilities grew still more, but although he complained a lot, he was establishing himself as the Confederacy incarnate west of the river.
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Lines and symbols on maps, however, were not flesh and blood. Southerners still could find reason to be sanguine; but from Jefferson Davis on down the South’s status pyramid, Confederates realized all too well that the Southern nation was sick. Indices were available with which to chart the Confederacy’s failing health, and the nation’s vital signs did not offer a happy long-range prognosis. The Army of Northern Virginia had realized its vincibility during 1863. The Army of Tennessee under Bragg was a shattered shell. In the early months of 1863 many Southerners had had confidence in victory and independence before the year was out. By December the same Southerners were hoping to stave off defeat.
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Moreover the Southerners now realized that they would have to stave off defeat by themselves. Failure to secure French mediation–/intervention in July of 1863 only began the final decline in the Confederacy’s quasi relations with the European powers. In a fit of pique and despair Benjamin, in August, ordered Mason in London to conclude his efforts and abandon the pretended mission. Then in October Benjamin expelled British consuls from the Confederacy, claiming that they were harboring British-born draft evaders.
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Benjamin also recalled DeLeon from his propaganda duties in France. DeLeon had had the misfortune of seeing one of his letters to Davis, in which he complained of Slidell and French journalists, intercepted and published in New York newspapers.
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Congress completed the Confederacy’s diplomatic retrenchment in December when the Senate refused to confirm L. Q. C. Lamar’s projected mission to Russia.
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Obviously, if the Confederacy sought entry into the family of nations, the South would have to gain it alone by right of conquest and endurance, but perhaps this had always been the case.

Military and diplomatic circumstances were reflected in the Confederacy’s marketplaces. A gold dollar, which had cost three dollars in Confederate paper in January 1863, cost eighteen to twenty dollars by December. Secretary of the Treasury Memminger estimated in December that more than $700 million worth of notes were circulating in an economy capable of absorbing $200 million.
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Too, as the Union blockade tightened and the South’s capacity to produce and transport consumer goods declined, scarcity increased on the home front.
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Finally, there had been failures in the South’s war production which became in turn cause and effect of further failure. The loss of the copper mines at Ducktown, Tennessee, was a good case in point. The mines were lost to the Confederacy as a result of the Chattanooga campaign. Copper was essential to the manufacture of friction primers which in turn were essential to the operation of small arms and artillery. Theoretically, at least, without copper Confederate soldiers would be unable to fire their weapons at all. The blockade removed the possibility of importing sufficient quantities of copper after the loss of the Ducktown supply. The Nitre and Mining Bureau made up the shortage by impressing copper coils from North Carolina stills—an expedient hardly calculated to raise morale in North Carolina.
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As Southern armies became less able to defend Southern territory, the Confederacy lost the resources of that territory and so the armies became weaker still. And as civilian morale drooped with each defeat, resultant sacrifices seemed all the more intolerable.

During the fall of 1863 Confederate citizens were able to express their frustration politically in the Congressional elections. Not surprisingly the returns reflected a decline in national morale and less than confidence in the Davis administration’s ability to manage the war, foreign relations, and the South’s political economy. Because Confederate politics lacked the relative consistency and order of party structure, no one knew precisely to what degree the administration’s strength eroded at the polls in 1863. There were other ambiguities as well. Opposition to Davis and his government did not necessarily go with defeatism, although sometimes it did. Candidates who stood for election and against the administration usually went to great pains to prove their patriotism. They simply argued that they would find alternative means for achieving the common end of independence. Adding to the obscurity was the fact that much or most of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee were under the control of the enemy. Thus elections in those states did not exactly reflect the will of Confederate voters, only Confederates in exile. However calculated, though, the returns from the Congressional elections in 1863 did indicate failing confidence in the Davis administration.

Off-year elections in American politics have more often than not injured incumbent administrations, but Davis’ was a war government in peril, and the President hardly needed troubles with domestic politics. Troubles he had, though, when the Confederacy’s Second Congress convened in May, 1864. The number of openly antiadministration members rose in the House from twenty-six to forty-one, out of 106 districts, and in the Senate from eleven to twelve, out of twenty-six members. These numbers were imprecise in that they identified only open antagonists as antiadministration, and they reflected only a fraction of the difficulty Davis had making his programs palatable to the Second Congress. Nevertheless Davis prevailed and, however much chastened, his administration remained in control of the Confederate destiny.
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The President—and indeed just about every other Confederate—realized that the South’s national destiny required some fundamental decisions to be made quickly and correctly. Something had to be done about matters no less vital than the economy of the country, the strategy of the war, and renewed resources with which to fight the war. Those most responsible were the administration, the military, and the Congress.

The Commander-in-Chief dealt with the most immediate problem first: Bragg and his army. It was clear, even to Bragg and to his friend Davis, that Bragg could no longer command the Army of Tennessee. Accordingly Bragg offered his resignation, and on November 30 the President accepted it. For two weeks Davis pondered a replacement. He discussed with Lee the possibility of sending him west. Lee was hardly eager to leave his familiar command in familiar territory, but he was willing to go and believed for a while that Davis planned to send him. Davis also considered Beauregard, but finally he chose Johnston on December 16. The choice was revealing. It showed the degree of the President’s magnanimity toward a general with whom he had quarreled often and bitterly since 1861 but in whom he still had confidence. More important, the selection of Johnston over Beauregard was a rejection of Beauregard’s strategic ideas in favor of Johnston’s, which were more in accord with the President’s. Beauregard had long contended that the west, not the east, was the crucial front in the war. Thus Beauregard periodically proposed a grand concentration in the west at the expense of a holding action in Virginia. Davis favored a division of labor and energy and believed at worst that Virginia was untenable with fewer troops and resources and at best that victorious campaigns were possible on both fronts. Johnston, by accepting command of the Army of Tennessee, in effect accepted Davis’ strategic concept, and in reality he had already acted out a rejection of grand concentration in the west during his tenure as theater commander in 1863.
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