The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (130 page)

To Lee, too, went sustaining letters expressive of the President’s confidence after the late reverse in Pennsylvania. “I have felt more than ever before the want of your advice during the recent period of disaster,” Davis wrote in late July, closing “with prayers for your health, safety and happiness,” and in early August, after assuring the general that he could “rely upon our earnest exertions to meet your wants,” he offered the opinion that the Virginian might do well to withdraw his army closer to Richmond and thus encourage the enemy to attack him in a position that could be reinforced more readily; but he made it clear that now as always he was leaving the final decision to the commander in the field, who might prefer to defend the line of the Rappahannock, as he had done so successfully twice before. In closing, Davis spoke again of how sorely Lee had been missed throughout the fourteen months since he had left his post as presidential adviser: “I will not disturb your mind by reciting my troubles about distant operations. You were required in the field and I deprived myself of the support you gave me here. I need your counsel, but must strive to meet the requirements of the hour without distracting your attention at a time when it should be concentrated on the field before you.… As ever, truly your friend, Jeffn Davis.”

No such letter went to Joe Johnston, though the correspondence between the Chief Executive and this other top-ranking Virginian was a good deal more voluminous. When a friend remarked, one day amid these troubles, that Vicksburg had fallen “apparently from want of provisions,” Davis replied scathingly: “Yes, from want of provisions inside, and a general outside who wouldn’t fight.” First his anger and then his scorn had been aroused by efforts on the part of Johnston and his friends to free the general of all responsibility for the loss not only of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, but even of Jackson, their claim being based on a renewal of the complaint that he had not been allowed enough authority to permit decisive action. Davis replied on July 15 with a fifteen-page letter in which he reviewed the entire case, order by order, dispatch by dispatch, showing that Johnston had been given unlimited authority to act as he thought best, and he concluded in summation: “In no manner, by no act, by no language, either of myself or of the Secretary of War, has your authority … been withdrawn, restricted, or modified.” Johnston’s response was a request that he be relieved of all responsibility for the disaster that seemed to be shaping up for Bragg, and Davis was prompt to comply. On July 22 the Department of Tennessee was removed from the Virginian’s control. However, the apparent effect of this was to afford the general and his staff more time for self-justification.
There now began to appear, in various anti-Administration journals throughout the South, excerpts from a 5000-word “letter” written by Dr D. W. Yandell, Johnston’s medical director, ostensibly to a fellow physician in Alabama. Secret dispatches and official orders were quoted, certain evidence that the writer had had access to the generar’s private files, and Johnston was praised extravagantly at the expense of Pemberton and the Commander in Chief, who were charged with indecision and lack of foresight. On August 1 Davis sent a copy of this “article-letter,” which was being passed around in Richmond, directly to Johnston with a covering note that combined irony and contempt: “It is needless to say that you are not considered capable of giving countenance to such efforts at laudation of yourself and detraction of others, and the paper is sent to you with the confidence that you will take the proper action in the premises.” The effect, of course, was to widen the rift between the two leaders, whose rupture was soon complete. An acquaintance observed that from this time forward Johnston’s “hatred of Jeff Davis became a religion with him.” Davis, on the other hand, was content to restrict himself to slighting references such as those he had made while the latest of the Virginian’s “retrograde adjustments” was still in progress. “General Johnston is retreating on the east side of Pearl River,” he informed Lee on the second anniversary of Manassas, “and I can only learn from him of such vague purposes as were unfolded when he held his army before Richmond.” A week later the veil lifted a bit, but only to descend again. “General Johnston, after evacuating Jackson, retreated to the east, to the pine woods of Mississippi,” Davis wrote Lee on July 28, “and if he has any other plan than that of watching the enemy, it has not been communicated.”

Meanwhile Johnston, having advised the War Department of his intention “to hold as much of the country as I can and to retire farther only when compelled to do so,” was enjoying a brief vacation in Mobile with his wife, who told a friend in early August that she had found her husband looking well and in “tolerable spirits, as cheerful as if Jeff was throwing rose leaves at him, instead of nettles and thorns.”

“Misfortune often develops secret foes,” Davis had said in a letter written earlier that week to Lee, “and of tener still makes men complain. It is comfortable to hold someone responsible for one’s discomfort.” Lee could testify to the truth of this, having seen it demonstrated first on his return from western Virginia, back in the rainy fall of ’61, and now again on his return from Pennsylvania, when some of the same irate critics took him to task for blunders in the field. But the President had something else to say, of which Lee, concerned almost exclusively with army matters throughout the past year, was perhaps much less aware. Convinced that “this war can only be successfully prosecuted while we have the cordial support of the people,” Davis had been pained
to observe what he set down next: “In various quarters there are mutterings of discontent, and threats of alienation are said to exist, with preparation for organized opposition.… If a victim would secure the success of our cause,” he added in closing, “I would freely offer myself.”

This last was scarcely necessary, however, since a good many influential men had already singled him out for that distinction. In Charleston, for instance, the Robert Barnwell Rhetts, Senior and Junior, stepped up their attacks against him in the columns of their
Mercury
, and the father was in Columbia even now, suggesting as a member of the South Carolina convention, still in session, that Davis be impeached. There was considerable disagreement as to whether his sins were mainly ones of omission or commission, but his critics agreed that, whichever they were, he had them to a ruinous extent. Old Edmund Ruffin, Virginia’s secession leader who had gone down to Sumter to fire the first shot of the war, referred contemptuously nowadays to “our tender conscienced and imbecile President,” while James L. Alcorn, a fellow Mississippian of doubtful loyalty to the Confederacy, pulled out all the stops in calling him a “miserable, stupid, one-eyed, dyspeptic, arrogant tyrant.” Two of his more vehement opponents, W. L. Yancey and seventy-year-old Sam Houston, were removed from the political scene by death before the end of July—the former as a result of a kidney ailment, though some editors hostile to Davis claimed the Alabamian died of a broken heart and acute regret at having presented “the man and the hour” to the inaugural crowd thirty months ago in Montgomery—but plenty of others remained: Robert Toombs, for example, whose wounded pride continued to fester down in Georgia. “Toombs is ready for another revolution,” a diarist observed, “and curses freely everything Confederate from the President down to a horse boy.” North Carolina’s Governor Zebulon Vance, who had fought against secession as a Unionist and then against the Yankees as an officer of the line, was equally ready to take on the Richmond government as a champion of States Rights. “I can see but little good, but a vast tide of inflowing evil from these inordinate stretches of military powers which are fast disgracing us equally with our northern enemies,” he told his constituents, and he was so zealous in his concern for their comfort and welfare that he was said to have in his warehouses, on the chance they might be needed some day, more uniforms than were on the backs of the ragged soldiers in Lee’s army, to which he himself had belonged until he resigned and came home to campaign for the election he had won last fall.

How a nation which at the outset had been practically without industrial facilities for warfare, which had lost more than half its harbors and had the remaining few blockaded, which was penetrated from the landward side by large and well-organized columns of invasion, and which was outnumbered worse than five to one in available manpower
for its armies, could hope to survive unless its people were united in diehard resistance Vance did not say. His concern at that particular time had been the suspension of habeas corpus during a crisis, and apparently his concern stopped there, whatever concomitant problems loomed alongside it or lurked in the background. Other leaders had other concerns as exclusive. Georgia’s Joe E. Brown—“Joseph the Governor of all the Georgias,” a home-state editor dubbed him; another said that he suffered from delusions in which he was “alternately the State of Georgia and the President of the Confederate States”—saw conscription as the great evil to be feared and fought. “The people of Georgia will refuse to yield their sovereignty to usurpation,” he had notified Davis in October, and since then he had done much to prove he meant it, beginning with an executive order forbidding the taking or shipment of firearms from the state. Under his guidance the legislature elected Herschel V. Johnson, Stephen Douglas’s 1860 running mate, to the Confederate senate on a program of opposition to the central government. Its members cheered wildly an address Johnson delivered before his departure, protesting the concentration of power in Richmond, and were joined in their applause by a fellow Georgian in whose hands a good part of that power had supposedly been placed: Vice President Alexander Stephens. There was nothing unusual in his presence at Milledgeville on this occasion, for he had early become disenchanted with the republic he had helped to establish and now he spent more time at home in nearby Crawfordville than he did at his duties in the national capital. Nor was there anything unusual, by now, in his indorsement of a speech against the Administration of which he was nominally a part. Like his friend Toombs, he was “ready for another revolution” whose cause would be the same as the First and Second, staged respectively in 1776 and 1861: both of which, as Stephens saw it, had since been betrayed. What he feared most, whether it was dressed in red or blue or gray, was what he later termed “the Demon of Centralism, Absolutism. Despotism!” That was the true enemy, and with it there could be no compromise whatever. “Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterward,” he declared. “Our liberties, once lost, may be lost forever.”

Such opinions, voiced by such leaders—“impossiblists,” they would be called one day—made waverers of many among their listeners who had been steadfast up to then, and defeatists of those who were wavering already. Moreover, their influence ranged well beyond the halls and stumps from which they spoke, for their words were broadcast far and wide by newspapers whose editors shared their views. The Rhetts and Edward Pollard of the
Examiner
, who referred to Davis as “a literary dyspeptic [with] more ink than blood in his veins, an intriguer busy with private enmities,” were only three among the many, including the editors and owners of the Lynchburg
Virginian
, the Atlanta
Southern Confederacy
, the Macon
Telegraph
and
Intelligencer
, the Columbus
Sun
, and the Savannah
Republican
. Georgians were thus predominant, but the most blatant in his approach to downright treason was William Holden of the Raleigh
Standard
. Unsuppressed (for the Confederate government never censored so much as a line in a single paper throughout the war) Holden continued to rail against the Administration and all it stood for, uninterrupted except for one day in September when a brigade from Lee’s army, passing through the North Carolina capital, indignantly wrecked the office of the
Standard
. Holden resumed publication without delay; but meanwhile, the soldiers having departed, a crowd of his admirers marched in retaliation on the plant of the rival
State Journal
, a Davis-loyal paper just up the street, and destroyed its type, presses, and machinery. Despite a presidential warning that those who sowed “the seeds of discontent and distrust” were preparing a “harvest of slaughter and defeat,” hostile editors not only continued their attacks on the government, but also carried in their news columns the identification of military units in their areas, plans of yet unfought battles and campaigns, the arrival and departure times of blockade-runners, descriptions and locations of vital factories and munition works, all in such detail, a diarist remarked, that the North had no need for spies; “Our newspapers tell every word there is to be told, by friend or foe.” Helpful though all this was to the enemy, the worst effect on the nation’s chances for survival lay in the undermining of the public’s confidence in eventual victory. Profoundly shaken by the double defeat of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the people looked to their leaders for reassurance. From some they got it, while from others all they got was “I told you so”—as indeed they had, with a stridency that increased with every setback. All too often, as a result, enthusiasm was replaced by apathy. “They got us into it; let them get us out,” men were saying nowadays, and by “them” they meant the authorities in Richmond.

In point of fact, if the public’s faith in its government’s paper money was a fair reflection of its attitude in general, the decline of confidence had begun much earlier. For the first two years of the war—that is, through April of the present year—the dollar had fallen gradually, if steadily, to a ratio of about four to one in gold. This was not too bad; the Federal greenback had fallen to about three to one in the same period. However, in the next four months, while Union money not only held steady but even rose a bit, Confederate notes declined nearly twice as much in value as they had done in the course of the past two years. In May, despite the splendid victory at Chancellorsville, the dollar fell from 4.15 to 5.50, the worst monthly drop to date. In June, moreover, with Lee on the march in Pennsylvania to offset Grant’s progress in Mississippi, it took an even greater drop, from 5.50 to 7. In July, with Vicksburg lost and Lee in retreat, it tumbled to 9, and by
the end of August, with the full impact of the two defeats being felt by all the people, one gold dollar was worth an even dozen paper dollars. To some extent, though the figures themselves could not be argued with, their effect could be discounted; men—some men; particularly money men—were known to be more touchy about their pocketbooks than they were about their lives, withholding the former while risking the latter for a cause. Davis, for one, could maintain that the shrinking of the dollar, even though the damage was to a large extent self-inflicted, was only one more among the hardships to be endured if independence was to be achieved. “Our people have proven their gallantry and patriotic zeal,” he had written Lee; “their fortitude is now to be tested. May God endow them with all the virtue which is needed to save a suffering country and maintain a just cause.”