The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (43 page)

More and more, however, through enemy action and through the disaffection of the Southern people, the Confederacy fragmented. Increasingly Richmond became a kind of city-state polis, isolated even from portions of the Southland not yet in enemy hands. The trans-Mississippi had for some time been outside Richmond’s direct sphere of influence. Edmund Kirby Smith all but administered the region civilly and militarily as Roman provincial governor. The loss of Chattanooga and Atlanta further fragmented the South, not only from a military perspective, but also from the standpoint of governmental administration. Then when Sherman marched to the sea and began to move northward through South Carolina, the Confederacy contracted still further. Senators and congressmen without constituencies met in Richmond and lived as exiles from their homes. The government survived in an unreal isolation from the nation it supposedly served.
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Congress held two sessions during the Confederacy’s final months of life. In the midst of crisis, however, the solons often wrangled over petty matters and seemed powerless to consider remedies for their nation’s crisis. Texas Senator Wigfall, for example, bent much of his energies to the task of humbling President Davis. Wigfall and his opposition thwarted Davis for the sake of thwarting him, and their finest hour came on January 31, 1865, when they finally overrode a Presidential veto. The bill was almost inconsequential—it permitted newspapers to send their editions to soldiers free of charge—but Wigfall had had his triumph.

Representative Henry S. Foote from Tennessee decided during the last session of Congress to make his own separate peace with the enemy. Foote set out for Washington but suffered the ignominy of capture and return. Then Congress suffered the ignominy of censuring one of its members for attempting to flee to the enemy.
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The President’s cabinet was not much more stable than the Congress. Memminger left the Treasury Office in July 1864, to be replaced by another South Carolinian, George Trenholm. The new secretary advocated ever more stringent taxes and used his background and connections in the import-export firm of Frazier and Trenholm to open negotiations for a foreign loan. Nevertheless Trenholm faced an impossible task, and his efforts were no more successful than Memminger’s had been.
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Late in January 1865, War Secretary Seddon resigned under pressure. Foote had accused Seddon of war profiteering on sales of grain to the government; the charges were false, but the episode did not bolster Seddon’s reputation. Since Bragg had come to Richmond, Seddon’s influence with Davis had declined apace, and Seddon, too, from his vantage point in the War Office, was fully aware of the desperate straits in which the Confederacy found itself. The final straw in Seddon’s resolve snapped when a delegation from the Virginia General Assembly requested Davis to ask his entire cabinet to resign in an effort to restore some of the nation’s morale. Seddon chose to make an issue of the request and view the no-confidence action on the part of his own state’s legislature as a personal affront.
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On February 6, 1865, Davis nominated John C. Breckinridge to replace Seddon. Breckinridge came to the War Office from field command. When from the inside he discovered the sad state of the department, the armies, and the government, the new secretary of war began to advocate peace. Breckinridge presided faithfully over his department until the end; his own advice, though, was immediate surrender.

With Wigfall in the lead, Congress now sought to save the country by trying to limit the President’s prerogative; part of this tactic involved attacks upon Davis’ advisors. In the face of the pressure, cabinet members slipped into deeper despondency. Judah Benjamin offered to resign if Davis believed the resignation would improve the administration’s political posture; Davis did not, so Benjamin, too, remained to the end.
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Even before the fall of 1864, it was apparent to most Southerners that the Confederacy was fatally ill. The navy was merely a token force. Hood had wasted an army which had little or no chance of victory anyway. Neither Johnston nor anyone else believed he could impede Sherman’s advance through the Carolinas. Lee’s army persisted but grew weaker as the enemy grew stronger. Sherman and Sheridan had laid waste some of the South’s finest farmland and imposed submission wherever their armies marched. Civilian morale and support for the nation was collapsing irrevocably, and the government was unable to govern most of the area over which it still claimed sovereignty. In this crisis Congress turned its wrath, not upon the enemy, but upon the Davis administration. The President himself remained steadfast; but as the cabinet, Congress, army, navy, and country crumbled, the Confederacy was clearly half dead.

Yet, even though they were engaged in campaigns which hindsight reveals lost the war, Confederate soldiers still distinguished themselves during that final season of combat. Although many succumbed to defeatism and deserted, many more remained dutifully at their posts, and those who did remain quite often carried on the war with courage and even with some success.

In the trans-Mississippi, for example, the Confederates foiled the major Federal campaign in the region in 1864. In March Union General Nathaniel Banks had attempted to press a massive amphibious force up the Red River into northern Louisiana. Southern troops under the command of Richard Taylor defeated Bank’s army at the battles of Sabine Crossroads and Pleasant Hill on April 8 and 9 and drove them into headlong retreat. Even so, Taylor was not satisfied and complained that had departmental commander Smith been willing to concentrate his forces, the victory would have become an annihilation.
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Johnston’s withdrawal in North Georgia, Lee’s battles in the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania Court House, and Beauregard’s defense of Petersburg were further examples of skill and resourcefulness. More such examples came from the record of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry, which won some of its greatest victories during the Confederacy’s darkest hours. Forrest and his troopers fought and raided with spirit and success throughout this period of general gloom and in so doing tied down Union forces many times their size attempting to trap “that devil Forrest.” At Johnsonville, Tennessee, on November 4, for example, Forrest’s naval-cavalry (they had a captured gunboat in tow) shelled a Federal supply depot on the Tennessee River and destroyed an estimated $6.7 million worth of war materiel en route to Thomas’ army at Nashville. Although the troopers had to abandon their gunboat, Forrest led them away unscathed to join Hood’s army for the ill-fated Tennessee campaign.
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In the east, John Mosby’s rangers continued their partisan tactics in northern Virginia. On October 14, even as Sheridan was preparing to subdue “Mosby’s Confederacy,” the Southern irregulars swooped down upon a United States mail train at Duffield Station near Harpers Ferry. Mosby and his men destroyed the train and relieved the Union paymasters aboard of $168,000 in greenbacks. Through the fall and winter Mosby’s band continued to be a thorn in the side of the invading army.
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In Lee’s army, too, the final months had their moments of glory. The Confederates not only held out against an enemy with twice their numbers; as late as March 25, 1865, they were able to mount an attack which for a few hours cleared the enemy trench line for a space of three-quarters of a mile. And even as Lee’s cavalry grew smaller in numbers and weaker in quality horseflesh, Wade Hampton’s troopers, on September 16, 1864, conducted the “great beefsteak raid.” The Southerners attacked a well-defended Union camp and drove 2,500 cattle back into Confederate lines to help feed their comrades.
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At Fort Fisher, which guarded the entrance to the Cape Fear River and the port of Wilmington, five hundred Confederates beat off a massive Federal assault force composed of sixty ships and a field army in late December 1864. When the Federals finally did capture the fort on January 15, 1865, one Virginian planter-doctor remarked that the fall of Wilmington would be “of signal benefit.” Blockade running, Dr. Benjamin Fleet believed, had drained too much gold from the Confederacy. “When all our seaport towns are taken,” he asserted, “I presume the war will have begun in real earnest.”
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The Army of Tennessee under Johnston even won a final victory against Sherman. At Bentonville, North Carolina, in late March 1865, these Confederates, in their last major battle, were able to break the enemy line and stop most of Sherman’s army in its tracks for three days.
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If removed from the context of ultimate defeat, these actions might rank among the finest hours of Southern arms. Though the Confederacy was losing the war during 1864 and 1865, Southern commanders were still resourceful, and Southern soldiers still won victories. And on the home front, as well as on the battlefield, the Confederacy threw off sparks of life to the end. Amid disintegration and declining morale, Confederates still attempted to cope with their fate and to respond positively to the deepening crisis. Behind the ever-contracting battle lines the Southern nation was half alive.

When Jefferson Davis opened the final session of the Confederate Congress on November 7, 1864, his message contained much that the members expected to hear. He made the best of the military situation and asked for more troops. As anticipated, he asked for revisions in the tax law and remedies to the inflationary spiral in Confederate money. Yet to his Congress the President offered one program which took it by complete surprise and with good reason. Davis proposed nothing less radical than a limited form of emancipation for Southern blacks.
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The President prefaced his proposal with the observation that congressional authorization to employ slaves in noncombatant military services had been less successful than anticipated. Rather than tinker with the act to try to improve it, Davis now suggested “a radical modification in the theory of law.” The President pointed out that slaves “viewed merely as property” were and had been subject to impressment for short periods of labor in the construction of field fortifications. Then he went to the core of his argument: “The slave,” he said, “bears another relation to the State—that of a person.” What the Confederacy now needed, Davis contended, was the service of the slave as person. The military duties, although noncombatant, required instruction and extended terms of service. Because of the hazards involved those duties also demanded “loyalty and zeal.” Thus, the President concluded, “the relation of person predominates … and it would seem proper to acquire for the public service the entire property in the slave, and to pay therefor due compensation rather than to impress his labor for short terms.”

If the government bought these slaves, how should it own them? “Should he the slave be retained in servitude, or should his emancipation be held out to him as a reward for faithful service, or should it be granted at once on the promise of such service?” The President favored what he described as the middle ground. “The policy of engaging to liberate the negro on his discharge after service faithfully rendered seems to me preferable to that of granting immediate manumission, or that of retaining him in servitude.”
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Davis asked therefore that Congress authorize the government to purchase 40,000 slaves under the terms he outlined. In effect he was requesting, not only a military work force, but also permission to embark upon a program of compensated emancipation. For the moment the President shrank from asking for authorization to employ blacks as soldiers, but he did not rule out that possibility. “Until our white population shall prove insufficient for the armies we require and can afford to keep in the field, to employ as a soldier the negro … would scarcely be deemed wise or advantageous…. But should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”
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However practical and expedient Davis’ suggestions sounded, they threatened to undermine the remaining remnant of the antebellum Southern ideology. Already the Confederate experience had compelled Southerners to compromise and discard much of their cherished way of life. Now the President asked for a sizable chip of what many Southerners regarded as the cornerstone of their national culture. Davis wanted Confederate Southerners to compromise and perhaps eventually sacrifice their peculiar institution for the sake of national survival. The President’s request was the opening round of a national debate within the Confederacy on the proposition of emancipation versus independence. The debate was destined to continue until the Confederacy was no more. Thus while dying, the Southern nation persisted in trying to define its national life.
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Davis’ request to Congress was not exactly a trial balloon dispatched to test the sentiment of the country. Already the issue of arming and emancipating Southern slaves had received considerable publicity. In September 1864, Northern newspapers had published a captured letter from Louisiana Governor Henry W. Allen in which Allen stated, “The time has come for us to put into the army every able-bodied negro man as a soldier.”
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A month later the powerful Richmond
Enquirer
called in strident terms for the use of black troops. “We believe,” the editor explained, “that the negroes, identified with us by interest, and fighting for their freedorn here, would be faithful and reliable soldiers.”
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In the days which followed, the Lynchburg
Virginian
and the Mobile
Register
endorsed the
Enquirer’s
proposal. That same month governors of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi met in Augusta and adopted a resolution calling for a “change of policy” regarding the use of slaves in the “public service.” These indications of public opinion and some negative response—most notably from the Charleston
Mercury
and William W. Holden’s
North Carolina Standard
—served as prologue to Davis’ action when Congress convened.
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