The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (160 page)

G. W. Smith, recovered from the collapse he had suffered when Johnston’s fall left him in charge of the confused and confusing field of Seven Pines, had been serving as commander of the Richmond defenses ever since Lee and his army departed to deal with Pope, back in August. Now Davis found a further use for the former New York Street Commissioner by assigning him to serve as head of the War Department during the three-day interim, which he himself spent in search of a permanent—if the word could be used properly in reference to a position which, so far, had been so impermanent—replacement for Randolph, who retired at once to private life and subsequently “refugeed” in Europe with his family.

Once more the Old Dominion had been left without a representative among the President’s chief advisers, and once more Davis solved the problem, this time by appointing James A. Seddon to be Secretary of War. A Richmond lawyer who had served two terms as U.S. Congressman from the district, a former occupant of the present Confederate White House, and a descendant of James River grandees, Seddon ranked about as high in the complicated Virginia caste system as even Randolph did, with the result that his selection was a source of considerable satisfaction to those who had become accustomed to looking down their noses at what they called “the middle-class atmosphere” of official Richmond. Moreover, he had a reputation as a scholar and a philosopher, though what service this would be to him in his new position was unknown; he had had no previous military experience whatever. Nor was his appearance reassuring. “Gaunt and emaciated,” one observer called him, “with long straggling hair, mingled gray and black.” He was forty-seven, but looked much older, perhaps because of chronic neuralgia, which racked him nearly as badly as it racked Davis. He looked, in fact, according to the same diarist, “like a dead man galvanized into muscular animation. His eyes are sunken and his features have the hue of a man who has been in his grave a full month.”

At any rate, whatever his lack of the kind of training which would have cautioned him to guard his flanks and rear, it soon became apparent that he did not intend to expose himself to attack from above, as his predecessor had done. Johnston went to him on November 22, the new Secretary’s first full day in office, and renewed his suggestion that troops be ordered east from the Transmississippi. Seddon listened sympathetically. But when Johnston received his orders two days later, assigning him to the region lying between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Mississippi River, he was surprised to find that they contained no reference to troops not already within those limits. “The suggestion was not adopted or noticed,” he afterwards recorded dryly.

Davis had a higher opinion of Johnston’s abilities at this stage than the Virginian probably suspected. “I wish he were able to take the field,” the President had told Mrs Davis during the general’s convalescence. “Despite the critics, who know military affairs by instinct, he is a good soldier, never brags of what he did do, and could at this time render most valuable service.” In no way, indeed, could the Commander in Chief have demonstrated this confidence more fully than by assigning him, as soon as he was fairly up and about, to what was called “plenary command” of the heartland of the Confederacy, an area embracing all of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, together with parts of North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, including the main regional supply base at Atlanta. Moreover, he placed on him no restrictions within that geographical expanse, either as to his movements or the location of his headquarters, which he was instructed to establish “at Chattanooga, or such other place as in his judgment will best secure facilities for ready communication with the troops within the limits of his command, and will repair in person to any part of said command wherever his presence may, for the time, be necessary or desirable.”

These instructions embodied a new concept of the function of departmental command, which in turn had been prompted by the example of R. E. Lee in his conduct of the defense of his native state. Lee’s achievements here in Virginia, before as well as after he had been given field command, were in a large part the result of a successful coördination of the efforts of separate forces, either through simultaneous actions at divergent points—as when Jackson took the offensive in the Valley, threatening Washington to play on Lincoln’s fears, while Johnston delayed McClellan’s advance up the Peninsula—or through rapid concentration against a common point, as when all available forces were brought together for the attack which opened the Seven Days and accomplished the deliverance of Richmond. Subsequent repetition of this strategy, with a similar coördination of effort, had brought about the “suppression” of Pope and opened the way for invasion of the North, removing the war to that extent beyond the Confederate border.
Now it was Davis’ hope that such methods, which had won for southern arms the admiration of the world and for Lee a place among history’s great captains, would result in similar achievements in the West and give to the commander there a seat alongside Lee in Valhalla.

Choice of Johnston for the post was prompted by more than the fact that he was entitled to it by rank. Not only did Davis consider him a “good soldier” who could “render most valuable service,” but the Virginian had also been asked for already by two of the three generals who would be his chief subordinates. During their recent visits to the capital, Bragg and Kirby Smith had both expressed an eagerness to have him over them, and doubtless Pemberton would be equally delighted to have the benefit of his advice, along with whatever reinforcements would become available in times of crisis as a result of the shuttle service the new theater commander was expected to establish between his several departments. How well he would do—whether he was potentially another Lee, and whether Bragg and Pemberton would serve him as well as Longstreet and Jackson had served the eastern commander—remained to be seen. So far, however, the resemblance had been anything but striking. His first reaction, expressed in a letter sent to the Adjutant General on the day he received the appointment, was a protest that his forces were “greatly inferior in number to those of the enemy opposed to them, while in the Trans-Mississippi Department our army is very much larger than that of the United States.” He also complained of the presence of the Tennessee River, “a formidable obstacle” which divided his two main armies, and found it highly irregular that his department commanders—by an arrangement which Davis had designed “to avoid delay”—would be in direct correspondence with the War Department. This combination of drawbacks and irregularities, discerned by him before he even left Richmond, had already led him to suspect what he later stated flatly: “that my command was a nominal one merely, and useless.”

Depressed by these several misgivings, he began at once to make arrangements for his journey west, and five days later he was off, accompanied by his wife and a new staff. In the interim, however, he found time to attend a farewell breakfast given in his honor and also in the hope that it would effect a reconciliation between two of his political friends, Senators Foote and Yancey, who had quarreled despite the common bond of their detestation of Davis. Under the healing influence of their admiration for Johnston, along with that of a bountiful meal accompanied by champagne, the two statesmen forgot their differences. Presently Yancey called for fresh glasses and proposed a toast. “Gentlemen, let us drink to the only man who can save the Confederacy. General Joseph E. Johnston!” All applauded, drank their wine, and took their seats: whereupon the guest of honor rose, glass in hand, and responded. “Mr Yancey,” he said firmly, “the man you describe is now
in the field—in the person of General Robert E. Lee. I will drink to his health.” Not to be outdone, the silver-tongued Yancey rose and countered: “I can only reply to you, sir, as the Speaker of the House of Burgesses did to General Washington: ‘Your modesty is only equaled by your valor.’ ” Again the celebrants applauded and drank the balding general’s health. But he remained taciturn and preoccupied, as if his mind was already engaged by the frets he knew awaited him in the West.

In the course of the five-day trip to Chattanooga, delayed by no less than three railroad accidents, Johnston was much wearied, despite the ministrations of his wife and the cheers from station platforms along the way. Early on the morning of December 4 he got there. After resting briefly, he issued an order formally accepting his new responsibilities, although his gloom was unrelieved. “Nobody ever assumed a command under more unfavorable circumstances,” he wrote to a friend in Richmond that same day.

Johnston’s gloom, though it was not shared by the people in general, East or West—nor, for that matter, by those who cheered him from station platforms as he traveled from one to the other—was nonetheless reflected in the value of their dollar. After holding at 1.5 through August, it fell in October to 2, in November to 2.9, and by December it had dropped to 3. Statistics were dreary at best, however, except perhaps for those who dealt in money as a commodity. It was in terms of what the stuff would buy, shoved coin by coin across a counter or laid down bill by badly printed bill, that the meaning of such quotations really struck home. Now with winter hard upon the upper South, coal was $9 a handcartload and wood $16 a cord. Bacon was 75¢ a pound, sugar five cents higher. Butter was $1.25 and coffee twice that. To the despair of Richmond housewives, laundry soap was 75¢ a cake, flour $16 a barrel, and potatoes $6 a bushel.

For those of an analytical turn of mind, accustomed to looking behind effects for causes, it was more or less clear that the cause behind this particular close-to-home effect was the failure of the Confederacy’s one concerted effort at invasion, East and West. Yet even here their reaction contained a good deal more of pride than of regret. “It was to be expected,” Davis had told them, back at the outset, “…  that [this war] would expose our people to sacrifices and cost them much, both of money and blood.… It was, perhaps, in the ordination of Providence that we were to be taught the value of our liberties by the price we pay for them.” In the light of this, Bragg’s thousand-mile hegira through Kentucky and Lee’s bloody defense of the Sharpsburg ridge became for their countrymen, not occasions for despair, but instances for the promotion of the growth of national pride and the evocation of applause
from those who watched from afar. “Whatever may be the fate of the new nationality,” the London
Times
was saying, “in its subsequent claims to the respect of mankind it will assuredly begin its career with a reputation for genius and valour which the most famous nations might envy.”

Such public praise was welcome, as were certain private remarks from that same quarter. Thomas Carlyle, for example—though he pleased neither side with a reference to the American war as the burning out of a dirty chimney, a conflagration which could be regarded only with satisfaction by neighbors too long plagued by soot—amused and gladdened Southerners by subsequently professing his impatience with people who were “cutting each other’s throats, because one half of them prefer hiring their servants for life, and the other by the hour.” Most gratifying of all, however, were the observations colorfully expressed in the course of a banquet speech made at Newcastle, October 7, by Chancellor of the Exchequer William E. Gladstone. Professing the kindliest feeling toward the people of the North—“They are our kin. They were … our customers, and we hope they will be our customers again”—he denied that the British government had “any interest in the disruption of the Union.” But he also declared, with particular emphasis: “There is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army. They are making, it appears, a navy. And they have made what is more than either; they have made a nation.” This was greeted with applause and cheers. “Hear, hear!” the diners cried. When they subsided, Gladstone added: “We may anticipate with certainty the success of the Southern States so far as regards their separation from the North.”

Coming as it did from the third-ranking member of the Cabinet, the statement was assumed to reflect the views of the Government: which it did, except that Palmerston and Russell considered it precipitate and unpropitious: which it was, the Prime Minister having recently advised the Foreign Secretary that he thought it best to “wait awhile and see what may follow” Lee’s retreat from Maryland. What had followed was the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, and though this document was greeted with sneers on the one hand and confusion on the other, it too provided an occasion for more waiting. Gladstone’s outburst caused an immediate drop in the price of cotton, which apparently would soon be plentiful as a result of the lifting of the blockade, as well as an increase of activity by Members of Parliament sympathetic to the North. On October 22, two weeks after the Newcastle speech, Palmerston wrote Russell: “We must continue to be mere lookers-on till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.”

On that same day, the French Emperor granted Slidell an audience at St Cloud during which he let the Confederate minister understand that he considered the time ripe for joint mediation by France,
England, and Russia. “My own preference is for a proposition of an armistice of six months,” he said. “This would put a stop to the effusion of blood, and hostilities would probably never be resumed. We can urge it on the high grounds of humanity and the interest of the whole civilized world. If it be refused by the North, it will afford good reason for recognition, and perhaps for more active intervention.” Eight days later, as good as his word—and with his eye still fixed on the promised hundred thousand bales of cotton—he addressed, through his Minister of Foreign Affairs, a dispatch to his ambassadors at St Petersburg and London, proposing that the three governments “exert their influence at Washington, as well as with the Confederates, to obtain an armistice.” Russia’s answer was emphatic: “In our opinion, what ought specially to be avoided [is] the appearance of any pressure whatsoever of a nature to wound public opinion in the United States and to excite susceptibilities very easily aroused at the bare idea of foreign intervention.” England’s was scarcely less so, Russell declining for the reason “that there is no ground at the present moment to hope that the Federal government would accept the proposal suggested, and a refusal from Washington at the present time would prevent any speedy renewal of the offer.”