Those who weren’t actually volunteering to fight the Confederates were concealing Confederate army deserters; before the end of the war, Winston County had sheltered between 8,000 and 10,000 deserters. “The Conscript law… has filled the mountains with disaffected desperadoes of the worst character, who joining with the deserters from our Army form very formidable bands of outlaws,” complained North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, and one of Vance’s advisers warned him that he might as well leave them alone, since “the deserters are more numerous & better armed and drilled than the Militia is, consequently there is more danger of their banding themselves together for armed resistance.”94 Some Southern counties simply deserted the Confederacy en masse: in western Virginia, the nonslaveholding mountain counties created their own new state, Kanawha, in August 1861—effectively seceding from secession—and in 1863 they were formally admitted to the Union as the state of West Virginia.
The Confederate government was not slow to retaliate. An elaborate internal passport system was created, starting in 1861 and becoming general throughout the Confederacy by 1864. In early 1863, Confederate troops swept down on Unionists in Shelton Laurel, in rural Madison County, and shot thirteen of them after being told by a senior officer, “I want no reports from you about your course at Laurel,” nor “to be troubled with any prisoners.” In Arkansas, Confederate general Thomas Hindman authorized the destruction of “all the cotton” on the Arkansas River and “its tributaries or the country beyond” and to arrest “as Traitors to the confederacy all persons resisting the execution of this order.” Nine resisters were shot, “Hindman himself witnessing the execution.”95 In the spring of 1864, George Pickett captured twenty-two North Carolinians who had been members of the state militia but then deserted to join Union forces along the occupied Carolina coast. Pickett refused to treat them as Union prisoners of war. Instead, he court-martialed them and hanged them all, over the protests of their Union commandant, Major General John Peck. After each hanging, Pickett allowed the bodies to be stripped of clothing and shoes by his own men, and as the prisoners were sent one by one to the gallows, Pickett leered, “God damn you, I reckon you will hardly ever go back there again, you damned rascals; I’ll have you shot, and all other damned rascals who desert.” That April, Confederate cavalry under Col. Robert Lowry rode through Jones County, Mississippi, which had a reputation for Unionism, hanging ten men for “armed resistance.”96
The ebbing of the Confederacy’s military and financial fortunes did little to endear the Davis administration to the Confederate voter, and the Confederacy’s congressional elections in the fall of 1863 showed a significant drop in confidence in Davis’s policies. The number of anti-administration representatives in the Confederate House rose from 26 to 41 out of a total of 106, while in the Confederate Senate, Davis clung on to a thin majority of 14 pro-administration members out of 26. None of the new members from North Carolina had voted for secession two years before, and one of the Alabama representatives was so plainly in favor of an immediate peace that the Congress voted to expel him. Alexander Stephens, who had become so alienated from Davis that he spent most of his vice presidency at home in Georgia, issued a public letter on September 22, 1864, calling for “a peaceful adjustment of our present difficulties and strife through the medium of a convention of the States… It would be an appeal on both sides from the sword to reason and justice.”97
Yet Davis beat back every attempt to unseat his administration. A bill to limit the tenure of cabinet officers to two years died on Davis’s desk, and his congressional backers kept turning the trick for him on crucial votes. Despite the desertions and draft resistance, the Confederacy managed to mobilize more than three-quarters of its available military manpower. In fact, far from being intimidated by his administration’s losses at the polls, Davis had still more demands to make of Congress in name of Confederate nationhood. When the last session of the First Confederate Congress arrived in Richmond on December 7, 1863, Davis immediately urged new taxes and fresh additions to the conscription laws that allowed the government to reach into the civilian labor pool to reassign and reallocate workers. Two months later, he also obtained a new and expanded suspension of habeas corpus, a supervisory monopoly over all blockade-running enterprises, and on February 17, 1864, a compulsory funding bill that would compel Confederate citizens to pay their taxes either in specie or in government bonds. Once again, the centralizing authority of the Richmond government had overridden the localism and individualism that three years before had been the very cause of southern secession. “Will you please to inform me,” demanded North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, “what remains of the boasted sovereignty of the States?”98
None of these measures, however, could stanch the ebbing of the Confederacy’s territory and armies, and so on November 7, 1864, when the second (and last) session of the Second Congress met, Davis finally decided to trade in the last symbol of the old South in a bid to save the new Confederacy. He asked Congress to allow the Confederate government to purchase 40,000 slaves, enlist them as soldiers in the Confederate army, and emancipate them upon completion of their enlistment as a reward for service. “Should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”99
Actually, the proposal to arm the slaves and offer them the carrot of emancipation to guarantee good service had not originated with Davis. Richard Ewell, the scapegoat of Gettysburg, had suggested this to Jefferson Davis after First Bull Run in 1861, even volunteering to “command a brigade of Negroes,” and Davis continued to get advice from desperate citizens to dismiss “all squeameshness about employing negroes in civilized warfare.” The idea was formally introduced on January 24, 1864, by Patrick Cleburne, the Army of Tennessee’s Irish-born corps commander. Significantly, Cleburne was not a slave owner himself and had little interest in slavery. His principal rationale was the preservation of Confederate independence: “As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—give up the negro slave rather than be a slave himself.”100
This was asking much more of Southerners, in the name of the Confederacy, than Cleburne realized; he was, in fact, asking them to surrender the cornerstone of white racism in order to preserve their nation, and that was more than Davis felt he could safely ask. All copies of Cleburne’s written proposal were destroyed, by Davis’s order. But ten months later Davis felt he no longer had room for choice, and so in November 1864 Davis introduced his proposal for arming the slaves to the Confederate Congress. This time, even Davis’s closest political allies stopped short. Howell Cobb, who thought he was fighting the war to preserve slavery and not some elusive Confederate nationalism, warned Davis, “The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” North Carolina newspapers bitterly attacked the proposal as “farcical”—“all this was done for the preservation and perpetuation of slavery,” and if “sober men… are ready to enquire if the South is willing to abolish slavery as a condition of carrying on the war, why may it not be done, as a condition of ending the war?” North Carolina’s soldiers were even more terse in their dismissal of the plan. “I did not volunteer to fight for a free negroes country,” J. F. Maides wrote home. “I do not think I love my country well enough to fight with black soldiers.” Without slavery, Virginia governor William Smith exclaimed, the South “would no longer have a motive to continue the struggle.”101
The continuing collapse of the Confederate field armies eventually frightened even the most diehard slaveholders in Congress, and when General Lee added his endorsement to a bill introduced into the Confederate Congress by Mississippian Ethelbert Barksdale in February 1865, the opposition crumbled. On March 8, with a margin of only one vote in the Senate, the Congress voted to authorize the recruitment of black soldiers. Sevent
een days later, the first black Confederate companies began drilling in Richmond.102
Would African Americans have fought to save the Confederate nation? They just might have, since southern blacks demonstrated repeatedly throughout the war a healthy skepticism of all white intentions and promises, in blue or in gray, and were prepared to grasp for liberty without regard to who offered it. A skeptical Georgia slave told Union major George Ward Nichols that it was all well and good that the Union armies had come to bring him freedom, “but, massa, you’se’ll go way tomorrow, and anudder white man’ll come.” Nichols could only nod in agreement: “He had never known any thing but persecutions and injury from the white man” and saw no reason to put more trust in one class of white people than another. “Freedom and liberty is the word with the Collered people,” wrote a free black Louisianan; if fighting for the Confederacy “makes us free we are happy to hear it.”103 In the event, it was really too late for anyone to find out. Less than a month after the Confederate Congress authorized black enlistment, the war was over and the prospect of black Confederates was left to drift off into the realm of might-have-been.
Yet this is not to say that the idea of creating a Confederate nation was a foreordained failure. Southerners may have lost faith in the Confederate government’s success in waging war but not in the fundamental notions of Confederate nationalism, and especially not white racial supremacy. The move to recruit black soldiers may have rocked some Southerners, but not all of them, and belated as its appearance was, it testified to the degree to which Davis and like-minded Southerners had managed to move the Confederacy toward thinking of itself as a nation whose collective survival was more important than the preservation of its individual parts. Southerners assured themselves to the very end that God was with the Confederacy, and labored to incorporate Confederate nationalism into novels, plays, music, and even spelling books. And whatever disenchantment Southerners experienced with the Davis administration, they converted Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia into near deities in whom they never lost confidence. What the Confederacy demonstrated was this truth, that it was easier to create a nation than it was to create a nation-state.
The Confederate nation-state did not survive the Civil War, but the Southerners who died in its battles, and the four years of fire that it sustained in the teeth of the North’s industrial and military might, are a warning not to underestimate how close they came to succeeding. The Confederacy’s internal fractures were not more serious than the ones other governments have lived with, nor was a nation that glamorized a Romantic aristocracy an impossibility; what made it ultimately unsustainable was the constant military pounding to which it was subjected. The Confederacy might have survived its fractures; culturally speaking, it actually did, as postwar Southerners went about converting the basic elements of Confederate nationalism—race, class, and sectional politics—into the badges of a peculiar people. What the Confederate government could not survive was the defeat of its armies in battle.104
What Jefferson Davis needed was time—time bought by military victory, time to persuade slaveholders and nonslaveholders that each served the other’s best interests, time to make the kind of mistakes in finance and domestic policy that all politicians must make when they attempt to invent a regime on untried blueprints. But time was not on the side of the Confederacy, and the hands pushing the clock were attached to soldiers in blue.
CHAPTER NINE
WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
Willard Glazier was a lithe, sharp-witted nineteen-year-old when he enlisted in the 2nd New York Cavalry in 1861. Starting out as an ordinary private, he soon climbed the ladder of promotion, and at the end of August 1863 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant for Company M of the 2nd New York. That was where his promotions ended. In a skirmish at New Baltimore, Virginia, on October 19, 1863, Glazier’s horse was shot from under him, and he was captured by Confederate cavalry.1
Just as neither North nor South had been prepared to wage war, neither had been prepared to deal with one of the major encumbrances of war, the keeping of enemy prisoners. Both governments quickly constructed elaborate exchange systems to get enemy prisoners off their hands and to retrieve their own soldiers. But the exchange systems were cumbersome, the personnel needed for running the system were sorely needed elsewhere, and more often than not the improvised prisoner camps degenerated into slow-moving pools of maltreatment, humiliation, hunger, and death. Glazier got a taste of this early on, when the Virginia militia who shoved him along the road from New Baltimore to Warrenton neatly stripped him of his watch and his overcoat, then dumped him into Libby Prison, a converted tobacco warehouse that had become Richmond’s principal holding pen for Union officers. There Glazier languished until May 1864, when Libby Prison was closed down and the inmates piled onto trains that would take them further South. Glazier then bounced from one prison camp to another in Georgia and South Carolina until he was finally delivered to a camp near Columbia in November. There Glazier and a friend slipped into a column of paroled prisoners who were leaving the camp and made off into the woods.
Then began the most curious part of Glazier’s adventures. Without food, weapons, or even decent clothing, Glazier and his friend somehow had to find their way to Union lines from deep within rebel territory, and they had not the faintest idea of how to do it. Nevertheless, Glazier had some unsuspected allies, fashioned for him by the war and emancipation, and he recognized those allies as soon as they came down the road he was standing on. Those allies were, of course, black slaves, for in spite of the conventional wisdom up to 1863, the slaves had known all along that the war and the Yankees meant freedom, and now Willard Glazier was about to have a similar epiphany on that Carolina road. The slaves walked by him, eyeing Glazier and his friend suspiciously. “I reckon deys Yankees,” remarked one. “Golly, I hope to God dey is,” replied another. Glazier took his chance. “We are Yankees and have just escaped from Columbia,” he pleaded. “Can’t you do something for us?” The slaves stopped and laughed. “Ob course,” they replied eagerly, and one added, “I’ll do all I can for you, marster.”2
So Willard Glazier, Federal officer and prisoner of the Confederacy, became the ward of the most powerless class of people in the American republic. With black slaves as his providers and guides, Glazier and his friend were passed surreptitiously from one plantation to another. Eventually Glazier and his friend met up with two other bands of fugitive Yankee prisoners, and all them were moved by night with slave guides and sheltered by day in huts and barns. One slave family found and repaired a boat to get them across the Savannah River; another slave resoled Glazier’s worn-out shoes. Twenty miles north of Savannah, on December 15, Glazier blundered into Confederate pickets and was recaptured. Four days later he slipped away again and found his way once more to “the hut of a negro.” Occasionally he was even able to beg a meal from a hard-eyed white farmer’s wife who held no love for Confederate conscription agents and tax gatherers. A free black family near Cherokee Hill, Georgia, found him a guide named March Dasher, another free black who at last guided Glazier to Federal lines in northern Georgia on December 23, 1864.3
As a white male and an officer, Glazier was the embodiment of a social order in which white men held power and ruled over submissive white women and black slaves. But the chance of war had inverted those relationships: Willard Glazier found himself powerless and completely dependent on the leadership and goodwill of black slaves and farm women. That same chance determined Willard Glazier’s story over and over again throughout the war years, for the Civil War imposed on American society as much social disruption as it did physical destruction. Within that disruption, for one brief and bloody historical moment, an entirely new way of ordering race and gender within a republican society became possible.
BY THEIR OWN STRONG ARMS
After more than a century, nothing disenchants the romantic image of the Civil War as a crusade for freedom and against slavery more than the real
ization that white Northerners were less than enthusiastic about the Emancipation Proclamation, although emancipation helped fend off the possibility of outside intervention in the war and provided nearly two hundred thousand extra soldiers and sailors to help win it. Even among Northerners who genuinely believed that slavery was an evil, emancipation was celebrated largely for the way it redeemed the reputation of a white republic and not as a down payment on the way to civil equality to African Americans. Emancipation cured the problem of slavery, but emancipated African Americans were a problem to be dealt with in quite another way.
Even Abraham Lincoln appeared to many blacks to have signed the Emancipation Proclamation with one finger crossed behind his back, and it was clear that many Northerners (Lincoln included) believed that the next step for freedmen after emancipation was colonization to Central America or the American Southwest, or repatriation to Africa. “The African race here is a foreign and feeble element,” explained Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Henry Seward—a view that was echoed by the secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase, who reluctantly agreed that “the separation of the races” was unavoidable and that African Americans should seek “happier homes in other lands,” and by the Republican Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, who stated the problem of the free black with unbecoming precision: colonization was “the most beneficent yet projected for the amelioration of the African, and at the same time the relief of the people of the country from the evils of a black population in their midst.”4
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