The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (15 page)

R
OBERT Mercer Taliaferro Hunter, Virginian, went to Montgomery to take the Confederate government back with him to Virginia. And when Hunter set his mind to a thing, he usually succeeded.

During his youth Hunter’s classmates at the University of Virginia had dubbed him “Run Mad Tom,” after his initials, but since that time his name had inspired little or no frivolity. A native of the tidewater, Hunter had been congressman and senator: from Virginia, and by the time of the secession crisis, he was one of the most influential men in American politics. Hunter followed John C. Calhoun politically from Whig to Democratic Party and intellectually even after the South Carolinian’s death. In 1843, Hunter was chief among those who sought Calhoun’s election to the presidency; in 1860 Hunter himself was a candidate. Although he had no outstanding mental or physical gifts, Hunter was “sound,” and he was an expert political mechanic.

Hunter resigned his seat in the United States Senate in March of 1861 and accepted the secession convention’s appointment to represent Virginia in the Confederate Congress. From the beginning his ruling passion was moving the capital from Montgomery to Richmond. The idea was not original with him, but he was the man most likely to carry it through.
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On May 1, in the Confederate Congress, Walter Brooks of Mississippi introduced a bill to move the capital, and a few days earlier Vice-President Stephens, in Richmond to contract an alliance with Virginia, had broached the same topic. The Virginia state secession convention had already voted to leave the Union but had made secession contingent upon voter ratification in a referendum to be held May 17. Davis had no intention of winning Virginia and then watching helplessly as Federal troops overran his prize; the Confederacy wanted Virginia before May 17. Thus Davis dispatched Stephens on April 19 and three days later sent thirteen regiments to Virginia from among those mustering in the deep South. Stephens proposed to the secession convention a “temporary military alliance” between Virginia and the Confederacy. Of course such an arrangement would make the referendum meaningless, but on this occasion Stephens was willing to rise above legalism. As he concluded his appeal to the convention for early action, the Vice-President pointed out the advantage of centralized military command at Montgomery or, he added, “it [the command] may be at Richmond. For, while I have no authority to speak on that subject, I feel at perfect liberty to say that it is quite within the range of probability that, if such an alliance is made, the seat of our government will within a few weeks, be moved to this place.” Stephens and commissioners from the Virginia convention drew up an alliance the next day, and on April 27 the convention issued a formal invitation to the Confederate government to move to Richmond.
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On the strength of the alliance agreement that Stephens made with the Virginia convention, Congress admitted Virginia to the Confederacy on May 7. Three days later Hunter took his seat at the
Enquirer,
May 3, 1861. head of the Virginia congressional delegation and immediately began his campaign to move from Montgomery. It was successful. On May 11, Congress resolved by vote of 5 to 3 (Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina) to hold its next session in Richmond. Then the wrangling began. President Davis returned the resolution with the observation that not only Congress but the entire government ought to move—or at least be in the same place. Accordingly Congress voted to move the seat of government
in toto.
Meanwhile each time Hunter walked past the marble works in Montgomery on his way to the capitol he was reportedly “in agony.” The sight of tombstones triggered fear that he would sicken and die in Alabama, never to see Virginia again.
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Many factors motivated the decision to move the capital. For some congressmen the poor quality of accommodations at the Exchange Hotel and the voracious appetites of Montgomery’s mosquitoes were decisive considerations; for others the dearth of office space for governmental activities was a prime concern. The political consequences of Virginia’s secession were also involved. In 1861, Virginia was too large, rich, and powerful to ignore, and what better way of celebrating the Old Dominion’s adherence to the new nation than to move the national capital to its state capital. No less important were Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works, the only facility in the Confederacy capable of manufacturing large machinery and heavy weapons. Richmond was, for a time at least, absolutely essential regardless of where the capital was. Perhaps the most often heard reason for transferring the seat of government was the proximity of Virginia to Washington and thus to Union armies. If Davis’ administration was to be a war government, then why not move it near the front so that the Commander-in-Chief might better command?
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Hindsight has inspired serious second thoughts about the wisdom of this move. Locating the government near the front lines might indeed have helped the Davis administration direct the war, at least in the East. But Richmond’s proximity to Washington worked the other way round as well. Once the Confederacy committed itself to an essentially defensive war, the capital, because of its location, was vulnerable to enemy attack. And from a strategic standpoint, locating the government in Virginia limited the interest and enthusiasm of that government for operations west of the Appalachians. Finally, given the endemic limitations of transportation and communications, situating the capital on the geographical fringe of the new nation diluted the government’s power and influence in the vast Southern hinterland.
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Still, on the balance the move from Montgomery to Richmond was no blunder. Because of its industrial importance to the Confederacy, Richmond needed protecting, especially in 1861 and 1862. If the Davis government sometimes seemed to wear blinders that restricted its vision to the war’s eastern theater (a debatable point), that was a sin of administration, not location. Moreover, from the vantage of hindsight, it would appear that the North’s preoccupation with “on to Richmond” hindered the Union war effort more than it threatened the Confederacy. Because Richmond was so close and because they equated Richmond’s capture with the collapse of the Confederacy, the Federals devoted massive amounts of time, manpower, and materiel to the project. The taking of Richmond promised quick victory; indeed when the city finally fell, the Confederacy followed. But the illusion of quick victory at Richmond cost the United States resources that might have been better spent elsewhere. For three years Richmond was a magnet that lured Federal armies onto killing grounds and sidetracked the Union war effort into frustration. Only during the war’s final ten months did Richmond become a military millstone around the Confederacy’s neck, and by that time the attrition of war had nearly exhausted resistance everywhere.
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When Congress adjourned on May 21, the Confederates were still thinking first thoughts about Richmond. In 1861 Richmond was an old town and a young city rolled into one. Located at the falls of the James River, Richmond had long been a typical ante-bellum Southern city: a center of transportation and trade between the countryside and the larger world. Like other Southern cities, Richmond was a political center, too, and the Virginia state capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, dominated the city’s panorama.

Unlike other Southern cities, however, Richmond had become by 1861 a center of manufacturing and industry. Its flour mills and tobacco factories processed local agricultural products, and its thriving iron industry was the largest in the South, with more than 1,500 workers (900 at the Tredegar Works) fashioning products worth $2 million in 1860. Railroads and port facilities, too, had changed Richmond’s trading-post economy into major commercial enterprise.

Still, Richmond was Southern. Men of industry and capital might dominate the city’s marketplaces, but planters and their wives still ruled Richmond’s drawing rooms.

Whiggish politics had long characterized the city, and Richmond’s voters gave the Constitutional Union ticket a two-to-one majority in 1860. Yet the city also had one of the most influential Democratic dailies in the United States, the Richmond
Enquirer,
justly called the “Democratic Bible.” Industrial slaves and an un-Southern percentage of German and Irish immigrants were among Richmond’s 37,910 inhabitants, but they posed no real problem for the urban aristocrats who ruled the city. The city’s “Negro Ordinance” placed the municipal authorities in the role of surrogate masters to keep black people, both free and bonded, in place. And immigrant labor was important to Richmond’s industrial growth. In 1861, at least, magnolias and mills coexisted in Richmond.
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The Confederacy came suddenly to Richmond. First the city became an armed camp—the rendezvous point, training camp, and supply base of Southern volunteer soldiers. Then, on May 29, Jefferson Davis led the governmental immigration. Davis’ journey by train from Montgomery to Richmond was triumphal; at every stop along the route Southerners came to the station to cheer the new President and his traveling companions, Louis T. Wigfall of Texas and Secretary of State Robert Toombs, in “one continuous ovation.” Richmond was the crescendo; cannon roared in salute as Davis rode through large crowds to his temporary quarters in the Spotswood Hotel. The President arrived in his capital in the morning; by late afternoon he was in the saddle inspecting troops.
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Approximately 1,000 government employees, from president and cabinet members to clerks, made the trip from Montgomery to Richmond. Eventually some 70,000 civil servants worked for the Confederate government. Because the Southern nation was new, opportunities for the loaves and fishes of patronage were unprecedented. So the would-be great joined the great and near great in Richmond, and the new capital became more crowded and frenzied than Montgomery had been.
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To command the armies which trained in Richmond and elsewhere, Davis could rely upon former United States officers who felt sufficiently Southern to resign their commissions and offer their swords to the Confederacy as Lee had done. The Confederate high command was overwhelmingly composed of Southerners and men who possessed training and experience in the “old army.”

The rank-and-file Southern soldiers who flocked to Richmond lent a carnival atmosphere to the capital that partially obscured political machinations. The dress rehearsal for war that lasted for more than three months after the Sumter confrontation was a mixture of preparation and picnic for Confederate volunteers. Perhaps no military unit caught the spirit of the time as well as the New Orleans Zouaves. Recruited from the jails of New Orleans, the men of this regiment wore Turkish-style uniforms with red caps, bright bluejackets, baggy red trousers, white leggings, and black boots. They arrived in Richmond on June 7. From the hour of their coming the city’s chicken population declined, and for the Zouaves, even better than robbing hen houses was eating sumptuously in a Richmond restaurant and charging the meal to the Confederate government. War was a game for some of the new soldiers, and although few played it as conspicuously as the Zouaves, most of the Southern volunteers made the best of it. Though some Richmond burgers resented the presence of their defenders, most Richmonders, In-deed most Southerners, looked upon the impending war as a romantic adventure. The concentration and drilling of troops culminated, not yet in battles, but in parades and parties instead.
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Jefferson Davis, of course, realized that his administration would have to preside over more than politics and dress parades. Probably sooner than later the Southern nation would have to fight for its life. Many people in Montgomery had said that there would be no war; now many in Richmond proclaimed that one pitched battle would convince the United States that the Southerners were serious and thus insure Confederate independence. Davis and most of those around him were not so sanguine, and even if they were, the government had to confront at least the possibility of a full-scale war.
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Neither Davis as commander-in-chief nor the Confederate War Office nor the Southern corps of general officers ever wrote down a specific war plan. The best statement of Confederate strategy was Davis’ plea during his post-Sumter address to Congress on April 20: “All we want is to be let alone.” The Confederacy was a people acting out nationhood; as long as the Southern nation existed the Confederates were winning the war. Like the rebels of 1776, Southerners could win by not losing. Accordingly the Davis administration looked to George Washington for strategic inspiration. By eighteenth-century standards, Washington had had an inferior army and had lost on most of those occasions when he risked battle. But Washington had won the war. He had done so by keeping his army intact and trading space and time for opportunities to strike decisive blows. Washington, like Davis, had hoped for a foreign alliance, and French troops and ships had been decisive in 1781. Yet, like Washington, Davis was determined to fight alone, if necessary, as long as it took to discourage his enemies and compel them to sue for peace.
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However much Davis and his generals revered Washington’s example, they were not so blind to the reality of nineteenth-century warfare as to believe that their struggle would duplicate precisely that of their grandfathers nearly a century earlier. Between Washington and the Confederates stood Napoleon and his object lessons in mass armies, strategic terrain, and battles of annihilation. And between the Napoleonic era and 1861 there had been considerable advances in military technology. The challenge that confronted Davis was no less than that of reconciling the heritage of Washington, Napoleon’s maxims, and the industrial revolution. Davis and his generals perceived this challenge subconsciously, but they did perceive it, because the South responded logically and consistently, if not victoriously. Above all, Confederate military strategy and performance bore out Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz’s dictum that a nation’s warfare is an extension of its national character.
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