The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (36 page)

1
See John B. Magruder account in Benjamin La Bree (ed.),
The Confederate Soldier in the Civil War, 1861–1865
(Louisville, Ky., 1897), pp. 408–411.

2
James M. Merrill,
Battle Flags South: The Story of the Civil War Navies on Western Waters
(Rutherford, Vt., 1970), pp. 239–256; H. Allen Gosnell,
Guns on the Western Waters
(Baton Rouge, La., 1949), pp. 177–203; John D. Milligan,
Gunboats Down the Mississippi
(Annapolis, Md., 1965), pp. 121–130.

3
T. Harry Williams,
P.G.T. Beauregard: Napoleon in Gray
(Baton Rouge, La., 1955), pp. 174–180.

4
On Vicksburg see especially Peter F. Walker,
Vicksburg: A People at War, 1860–1865
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1960); Archer Jones,
Confederate Strategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg
(Baton Rouge, La., 1961), pp. 173–206; and Thomas L. Connelly,
Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865
(Baton Rouge, La., 1971), pp. 93–111.

5
Connelly,
Autumn of Glory,
pp. 93–111.

6
The standard works on Chancellorsville are John Bigelow,
The Campaign of Chancellorsville: A Strategic and Tactical Study
(New Haven, Conn., 1910); and Edward J. Stackpole,
Chancellorsville: Lee’s Greatest Battle
(Harrisburg, Pa., 1958).

7
Frank E. Vandiver,
Mighty Stonewall
(New York, 1957), pp. 455–494; Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital
(Austin, Tex., 1971), pp. 123–125.

8
Walker,
Vicksburg,
pp. 157–166; Jones,
Confederate Strategy,
pp. 207–240.

9
Jones, Confederate Strategy, 206–210.

10
Varina Howell Davis,
Jefferson Davis: A Memoir by His Wife,
2 vols. (New York, 1890), II, 422–423.

11
See Douglas S. Freeman,
Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command,
3 vols. (New York, 1942–1944), I, XV-XXVII; Archer Jones, “The Gettysburg Decision Reassessed,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,
LXXVI (1968), 64–66; and Èdwin B. Coddington,
The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command
(New York, 1968), pp. 3–25.

12
Lee to Davis, June 22, 1863. Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (eds.),
The Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee
(New York, 1961), pp. 527–528.

13
Lee Walter Lord (ed.),
The Fremantle Diary
(New York, 1960); Fitzgerald Ross,
Cities and Camps of the Confederate States,
ed. by Richard Barksdale Harwell (Urbana, 111., 1958); and Justus Scheibert,
Seven Months in the Rebel States during the North American
War, 1863,
trans, by Joseph C. Hayes, ed. by William Stanley Hoole (Tuscaloosa,Ala., 1958).

14
Charles A. Girard,
A Visit to the Confederate States of America in 1863: Memoir Addressed to His Majesty Napoleon III
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1962), p. 62; Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer,
The United States and France, Civil War Diplomacy
(Philadelphia, 1970), pp. 398-426; D. P. Crook,
The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861-1865
(New York, 1974), pp. 309-314, 332-339.

15
See Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1971), pp. 100-118.

16
“Inaugural Address” in Dunbar Rowland
(ed.), Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches,
10 vols. (Jackson, Miss., 1923), V, 198.

17
“Speech of Jefferson Davis in Richmond,”
ibid.,
V, 391.

18
Richmond
Examiner,
July 28, 1863.

19
William L. Barney, Flawed Victory: A New Perspective on the Civil War (New York, 1975), pp. 81–120.

20
George Fitzhugh, “The Revolutions of'76 and ‘61 Contrasted,”
Southern Literary Messenger,
XXXVII (1863), 718, 722. See also Eugene D. Genovese,
The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation
(New York, 1969), p. 118 tf. for a dissection of Fitzhugh’s thought.

21
James D. Richardson (ed.),
A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy,
2 vols. (Nashville, Tenn., 1906), I, 414, 332, 277.

22
See William R. Taylor,
Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character
(New York, 1961), pp. 312–320, for a summary statement of this self-image.

23
Vandiver
(Mighty Stonewall,
p. 494) makes a similar point. Quoting Jackson’s dying words, “Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees,” Vandiver asks, “Which river did he think of then—was it the Potomac or was it the Jordan?"

24
Thomas, Confederacy as Revolutionary Experience, pp. 113–114.

25
See Anne Firor Scott,
The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930
(Chicago, 1970), for an extended analysis of this role.

26
The best works on the general topic of women in the Confederacy are Mary Elizabeth Massey’s
Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War
(New York, 1966); and Bell I. Wiley’s
Confederate Women
(Westport, Conn., 1975).

27
Mary Boykin Chesnut’s
Diary from Dixie,
ed. by Ben Ames Williams (Boston, 1949), well chronicles the machinations of female politicians. Testimony to the fact of female soldiers is in the
Southern Literary Messenger
XXXVII (1863), 575. Belle Boyd wrote her own story in
Belle Boyd: In Camp and Prison
(London, 1865).

28
See Thomas, Confederacy as Revolutionary Experience, pp. 105–107; and Scott, Southern Lady, pp. 81–102.

29
Mary F. Brooks to husband, September 3, 1862, cited in Katherine M.Jones,
Heroines of Dixie
(New York, 1955), p. 172.

30
One of the best examples of these circumstances is described in the diary of Sally Lyons Taliaferro (Mrs. William B.) of “Dunham Massie” near Gloucester, Virginia. Original diary, Swem Library, College of William and Mary; typescript, Virginia State Library, Richmond.

31
Mrs. Roger A. Pryor,
Reminiscences of Peace and War
(New York, 1904), pp. 251–252.

32
Judith W. McGuire,
Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War
(New York, 1867), pp. 244–251.

33
The transfer of the “treasury ladies” effected in 1864 at the suggestion of Braxton Bragg caused a stir among some Confederates. The Richmond
Examiner
chided Bragg and Memminger, pointing out that the women were neither ducks who migrated nor soldiers. “Steady, then, Mr. Memminger. A little more brains, Captain Bragg.” Richmond
Examiner,
April 25, 1864.

34
Some of these women became casualties of the war through industrial accidents, the most notable of which occurred in March of 1863 at the ordnance laboratory on Brown’s Island near Richmond. Sixty-nine workers, most of them women, were injured in an explosion accidentally set off by young Mary Ryan when she rapped an explosive device on her work bench. (Richmond
Whig,
March 14, 16, 1863).

35
See especially Bell I. Wiley (ed.), A Southern Woman’s Story: Life in Confederate Richmond by Phoebe Yates Pember… (Jackson, Tonn., 1959) and Richard B. Harwell (ed.), Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (Baton Rouge, La., 1960).

36
Scott,
Southern Lady,
p. 102.

37
The best summary of Confederate cultural history is Clement Eaton,
The Waning of the Old South Civilization, 1860–1880
(Athens, Ga., 1968), pp. 79–109. See also Richard Barksdale Harwell,
The Brief Candle: The Confederate Theatre
(Worcester, Mass., 1971).

38
About the war period on both sides of Mason and Dixon’s line, Edmund Wilson wrote, “The period of the American Civil War was not one in which belles lettres flourished, but it did produce a remarkable literature which mostly consists of speeches and pamphlets, private letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journalistic reports.” (
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
[New York, 1966], ix. See also Daniel Aaron,
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War
(New York, 1973). An introduction, even better than Wilson's, to this genre of Confederate literature is Douglas S. Freeman's South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writings of Confederate History (New York, 1939).

39
See Richard Barksdale Harwell, “John Esten Cooke, Civil War Correspondent,” fournal of Southern History, XIX (1953), 501-516.

40
Watterson wrote for the Chattanooga Rebel, and Daniel edited the Richmond Examiner.

41
See Robert M. Meyers (ed.),
The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War
(New Haven, Conn., 1972); and Daniel E. Huger Smith, Alice R. Huger Smith, and Arney R. Childs (eds.), The Mason Smith Family Letters, 1860-1868 (Columbia, S.C., 1950) especially pp. 96-139.

42
See Chesnut,
Diary;
Wiley (ed.),
Southern Women’s Story;
and Betsy Fleet and John D. P. Fuller (eds.),
Green Mount, A Virginia Plantation Family during the Civil War: Being the Journal of Benjamin Robert Fleet and Letters of His Family
(Lexington, Ky., 1962). Perhaps the best single example of both the vitality and urbanity of the South’s “literature of immediacy” came in response to an item in the Selma, Alabama,
Sentinel.
Jn. Haralson, an agent for the Nitre and Mining Bureau, placed an official request in the
Sentinel
asking the ladies of Selma to save the contents of their chamber pots. Haralson proposed to collect the chamber lye and use it to manufacture nitre. One of Haralson’s friends, Thomas B. Wetmore, composed a poetic response to the indelicate request. The ribald rhyme concluded:

Haralson responded, in part:

Haralson’s and Wetmore’s exchange was, of course, not great or lasting literature. It was, though, testament to the literate vibrancy of the Confederate mind; and the poems, edited by Ralph Draughon, appeared as a “Ribald Classic” in a recent issue of
Playboy
magazine (October 1973).

43
See Archie P. McDonald, “Jedediah Hotchkiss: Confederate Map Maker,”
Military Engineer,
L (1968) 121–123; and Archie P. McDonald (ed.),
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer
(Dallas, 1973).

44
On the
Hunley
and other Confederate submarines see Milton F. Perry,
Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare.
(Baton Rouge, La., 1966).

45
See Frank E. Vandiver, “Makeshifts of Confederate Ordnance,
“Journal of Southern History
XVII (1951), 180–193.

46
This does not discount the role of the redeemers in the New South, who, as C. Vann Woodward points out, were not necessarily part of the old aristocracy (
Origins of the New South. 1877–1913
(Baton Rouge, La., 1961), pp. 1–22). However, as William B. Hesseltine observes, “the men who led the Confederacy were still the leaders of the Southern people” after Appomattox. And “of 656 prominent Confederates who lived long enough to make postwar readjustments, only 71 failed to recover a substantial portion of the position and prestige they had enjoyed at the Confederacy’s peak. The forgotten 71 left no records which inquisitive historians of a later day could evaluate.” William B. Hesseltine,
Confederate Leaders in the New South
(Baton Rouge, La., 1950), p. 16. Jon L. Wakelyn’s conclusions in
Biographical Dictionary of the Confederacy
(Westport, Conn., 1976) differ from Hesseltine’s somewhat (“the great man of the Confederacy did not lead the New South.”) Yet the continuity of aristocratic class interests seems secure.

47
See Thomas, Confederacy as Revolutionary Experience, pp. 107–113.

48
Freeman, Lee’s Lieutenants, II, XIV-XV.

49
Congress authorized officer elections in the winter of 1861–1862 to stimulate reenlistment and to compensate for arbitrary extension of service.

50
Hesseltine,
Confederate Leaders in the New South,
pp.4–5.

51
The literature of disaffection and disloyalty is large. For example see Georgia L. Tatum,
Disloyalty in the Confederacy
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1934); Harold M. Hyman, “Deceit in Dixie,”
Civil War History,
III (1957), 65–82; Stephen E. Ambrose, “Yeoman Discontent in the Confederacy,”
Civil War History,
VIII (1962), 259–268; Ella Lonn,
Desertion during the Civil War
(Washington, D.C., 1928); and Albert B. Moore,
Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy
(New York, 1824).

52
See Thomas, Confederacy as Revolutionary Experience, pp. 100–102.

53
Richmond,
Sentinel,
October 12, 1863.

54
Ibid
., October 23, 1863.

55
Richmond
Examiner,
August 5, 1864.

56
See James H. Brewer, The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861–1865 (Durham, N.C., 1969).

57
The best summary of the dimensions of this development is Clarence L. Möhr, “Southern Blacks in the Civil War: A Century of Historiography,”
Journal of Negro History L1X
(1974), 177–195. Mohr’s yet unpublished Ph. D. dissertation (University of Georgia), “Georgia Blacks During Secession and Civil War, 1859–1865,” is a masterful contribution to that historiography.