All this, in its record-setting time, took place at the hands of the thirty-eight delegates who had repaired for their work to Montgomery, Alabama, still a barren-looking new city, which, although a state capital, was situated on the bluffs of the Alabama River and marked by a handsome Greek-revival capitol building. The town of forty years’ duration thus far offered only two hotels of any size, the Montgomery and the Exchange House.
At this new news center, the famous British journalist William Howard Russell of the Times of London found slave pens and slave auctions quite active. The visiting Englishman, whose own government had banned slavery throughout the British Empire in 1834, compared hapless Montgomery to some woebegone town in central Russia. Not too complimentary of what today is one of the most striking assemblages of government structures in the world.
Who, meanwhile, were the men (indeed, all the delegates were white and male) who devised convention, constitution, congress, executive branch, and, in such short time, electoral machinery designed to give the new republic a chief executive?
Said Alexander Stephens afterward: “They were men of substance as well as of solid character—men of education, of reading, or refinement, and well versed in the principles of government.” Stephens and others wrote that the secret deliberations—press and public were barred—were orderly, calm, even dignified in tone. They were also brief, with little fire-eating oratory. But still secret; no public access allowed, although some people did object.
Still another reason for all the haste, aside from presenting the hated Lincoln with an already existing government, was for the new government to be in place before the more wild-eyed rebels could let their guns loose on stubborn Major Robert Anderson and his Federal troops quartered at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Furthermore, future allies among the wavering border states and the onlooking outside world must be convinced, posthaste, as to the legitimacy of the new American Revolution, the new Montgomery declaration of independence from tyranny, the grave manifestation of states’ rights.
By February 9, then, all were ready to move a step farther and elect a president and a vice president. In the politicking that went on the night of February 8 and all day February 9, the name of a moderate from Mississippi gradually rose to the fore as more extreme candidates were cast aside (along with a few favorite sons offering no compelling appeal overall). That man, no raging secessionist himself, a West Point graduate, a Mexican War veteran, a son-in-law at one time to the late President Zachary Taylor, a former U.S. senator and secretary of war under a thoroughly “Yankee” president (Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire)—that man was at his Mississippi plantation, called Brierfield, peacefully pruning rosebushes with his wife, Varina, when the word came on the Sunday morning after the Saturday evening session in Montgomery officially nominated and elected him president.
So it was that a still fairly young United States of America was presented with a mirror image of itself, small in leadership numbers, weak in resources, but vast in territory. So alike were the two nations that even their day-to-day, more mundane, laws would be the same, since the delegates assembled in Montgomery had made no bones about this aspect, either. All laws of the Federal Union, they had decided, would be the laws of the Confederacy as well, except, of course, when they were in conflict with the new Confederate Constitution.
Eerily, we might say how, so many years later, the incoming presidents of the two nations had both been born in Kentucky, a border state that itself would be torn asunder and see its people play mirror-opposite roles in the war to come. Moreover, Abe Lincoln and his counterpart from the South, Jefferson Davis, both left their homes on the same day, Monday, February 11, 1861, to travel to their respective capitals for their inaugurations as president.
Who the South Was
IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, THE SOUTH THAT FORMED THE CONFEDERACY WAS A FAR cry from the aristocratic Southland that provided one U.S. president after another following the Revolutionary War. During the Revolutionary period itself, the South produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, James Monroe, George Wythe, and a host of other striking leaders. It was the old Southland, too, that gave the New World its model legislative body—the Virginia Assembly—and that provided the Supreme Court its first historical “superstar,” John Marshall.
Consider, too, that the same region produced the author of the Declaration of Independence and led in the framing of the U.S. Constitution. And yet you could say it failed in its statesmanship during the Civil War.
The fact is the Southland that produced the Confederacy was not the same Southland that had contributed so much to the nation earlier. It was in 1861 a region with a shifted center of gravity; it was now a land of rugged, rough-andtumble frontier types and nouveau riche rather than aristocratic gentry, as noted by Burton J. Hendrick in his 1939 work, Statesmen of the Lost Cause.
Its leaders, wrote Hendrick, also bore little resemblance to the traditional Southern aristocrats. “Really, the Confederate States of America rose in a region as recently frontier in character as the West that produced Abraham Lincoln. Of the seven states that formed the Montgomery government, only two—South Carolina and Georgia—existed before 1787.”
Indeed, four of the Confederacy states—Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—plus a good part of Mississippi, were Spanish-owned and Spanish-ruled at the time of the Union’s birth in the eighteenth century. Conspicuously absent at the Confederacy’s formation in the mid-nineteenth century (but joining in later) was that font of early American leadership, Virginia, to say nothing of Tennessee and North Carolina.
The fact is, argued Hendrick with persuasive merit, traditional “Southern aristocrats” were hard to find in the Confederacy’s ranks of civic leadership. Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were born in log cabins a mere 120 miles away from one another in Kentucky. Davis and his fellow leaders of the first Confederate states “hardly resembled” the leaders produced in the tobacco lands of old Virginia and the Carolinas. The Confederacy of 1861 was a South moved westward, “a land of newly acquired wealth, not particularly well-mannered or cultured, but pushing, self-assertive and arrogant.”
It wasn’t even all-Southern, “for the hordes that had rushed into the cotton El Dorado of the Southwest were composed not only of quick fortune-hunting sons of Dixie, but of adventurers from the North and New England.” Here were the breeders of the new South’s civilian leadership. “Merely to catalogue the most important of these [Confederate] chieftains shows how the insurgent South, in its social and economic aspects, differed from the land of Washington and Jefferson.”
Not only had President Davis been swaddled in a log cabin like his counterpart Lincoln, but Vice President Alexander Stephens had been a “corn dropper” on his father’s “slaveless farm and [a] chore boy in tasks usually assigned to Negroes.” Further, “The Secretary of State…was the son of the keeper of a dried fish shop in London. The Secretary of the Treasury, born in Germany, spent his childhood in a Charleston orphanage. The Secretary of the Navy, son of a Connecticut Yankee, started life as assistant to his widowed mother in running a sailors’ boarding house in Key West, Florida. The Postmaster General, son of a tanner, had for a time engaged in an occupation that made any man an outcast in the South—that of plantation overseer.” And so on.
That they were some what more plebeian in background than their Revolutionary forebears becomes obvious under such examination. But if the South failed to produce great civil leaders, what about the military side of things?
Here it cannot be denied that the South excelled in the commanders it found. And look, noted Hendrick again, where they came from—the superstars at any rate. “Of the five Confederate generals who won worldwide fame—Lee, Jackson, Stuart, Joseph E. Johnston, Longstreet—four most suggestively were from Virginia; Longstreet came from Georgia, also a state of the Old South. That is to say, the leaders who gave the Confederacy prestige were mostly Virginians of superior breed, while the c
otton belt was the region that provided the politicians who failed.”
Whether of “superior breed” or not, however, in the end those distinctly superior military men couldn’t do the trick, either. New or old, the South that went to war against the North in 1861 simply didn’t have the resources to prevail.
Fate Makes a Choice
IT WAS A PRETTY LITTLE SPEECH, AND A SENSIBLE ONE…BUT WITH WAR AFOOT, every man’s fate was all atangle. The place was Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, future site of the notorious Federal prison. The principals were two U.S. Army officers: Lieutenants James B. McPherson and Edward Porter Alexander. The time was antebellum by just days, since it was in the fateful April of 1861.
Young Alexander, a West Point graduate and native of Georgia, had learned of his home state’s secession from the Union, and he was determined to do the same: resign and join the newly formed Confederacy. He had orders to transfer back east from his posting with the Army Corps of Engineers in Washington State, and his thought was to boat homeward with wife, Bettie, via the Panama Isthmus before taking the ultimate step. Arriving at San Francisco, however, he found two complications. Their ship for Panama already had left, and he had new orders directing him to McPherson’s small command on Alcatraz Island.
The fresh orders meant that Alexander must resign on the spot and find some way to convey himself and his wife across the continent on their own. Looking back, it seems incongruous, but Alexander evidently felt no hesitation in explaining his predicament to fellow Union officer McPherson, even though Alexander very shortly could be (and indeed would be) at war against the Federals, McPherson among them. The two young men obviously liked one another and had no problem in discussing Alexander’s request to submit his resignation to McPherson for forwarding to higher command. Alexander would take a leave of absence to travel on home to Georgia and be in place when the acceptance came through the chain of command. All so very proper!
McPherson promptly agreed to place no impediment in Alexander’s way if he must go. He, in fact, would do all in his power to facilitate Alexander’s plans. But, he pleaded, don’t go. “Those urgent orders to stop you here [at Alcatraz] are meant to say that, if you are willing to keep out of the war on either side, you can do so.”
It was a real siren song: Don’t go. Stay and avoid fighting against your own people. Stay, McPherson said, and spend the war on the West Coast on fortification duty. The pending war would be no ninety-day affair, as some were predicting, but would be fought to the bitter end. “If you go, as an educated soldier, you will be put in the front rank. Only God knows what may happen to you individually, but for your cause, there can be but one result. It must be lost.”
And why so?
Your whole population is only about eight millions, while the North has twenty millions. Of your eight millions, three millions are slaves who may become an element of danger. You have no army, no navy, no treasury and practically none of the manufactures and machine shops necessary for the support of armies and for war on a large scale. You are but scattered agricultural communities, and you will be cut off from the rest of the world by blockade. Your cause must end in defeat, and the individual risks to you must be great.
McPherson was correct in every particular, and to his baleful outlook for Southern fortune he added the postscript that Alexander could stay safely on the West Coast, advancing rapidly in rank while senior officers went east and were consumed by the war; he could make wise investments from a knowledge of local land values to be gained as an Army engineer in the San Francisco Bay area. In four years’ time, he would be a rich man. “Briefly, remaining here you have every opportunity for professional reputation, for promotion and for wealth. Going home, you have every personal risk to run, and in a cause foredoomed to failure.”
Alexander was impressed by his comrade’s earnest warning. Indeed, “it made me realize, as I had never done before, the gravity of the decision which I had to make.”
Even so, the young Georgian was unswayed. When all was said and done, his choice came down to one thought: “I must go with my people.” And his people were those of Georgia, not the United States.
He conceded that McPherson’s dire warnings would probably prove true but explained that his people believed their cause was liberty, and that was that. “If I don’t come and bear my part, they will believe me to be a coward. And I shall not know whether I am or not. I have just got to go and stand my chances.”
As fate would have it, future Confederate general Alexander would provide great service to his Army. He introduced wigwag signaling to the Confederate cause, was the Confederacy’s first aerial balloonist for reconnaissance purposes, and, most important, emerged from the Civil War as one of its leading artillerists.
His signals warning of a Union flank attack at First Bull Run (First Manassas) contributed to the Southern victory there, and his artillery was instrumental in turning back Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg. On an anecdotal note, it was one of his guns that sent a brick caroming off the head of “Fighting Joe” Hooker at Chancellorsville, after which the stunned Hooker remained uncharacteristically timid and ineffective in his command position and was relieved by Lincoln shortly before the Battle of Gettysburg. Alexander’s artillery also served admirably at Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and during the siege of Petersburg. He was with Robert E. Lee at the surrender at Appomattox (which he advised against). After the war, he became a railroad president and author of a widely hailed memoir of his Civil War days. In short, he emerged a Southern hero, a ranking figure of the Civil War…his reputation far greater than any he would have built by remaining safe and out of the way on the West Coast as his would-be mentor McPherson had urged.
As for McPherson, also outstanding and widely admired, fate was not so kind. Also reaching the rank of general, McPherson served through U. S. Grant’s Tennessee campaign of 1862, in the siege of Vicksburg, and in William Tecumseh Sherman’s Atlanta campaign of 1864 until cut down and killed by desultory Confederate gunfire outside Atlanta.
They say that his commander, Sherman, cried when he heard of McPherson’s death.
Alexander never saw his fellow West Pointer again after their parting at San Francisco in early 1861. “Our sad parting,” Alexander called it in his post–Civil War Military Memoirs of a Confederate.
Racing to War
THE EVENTS AFTER SOUTH CAROLINA’S SECESSION VOTE ON DECEMBER 20, 1860, came in sporadic bursts. Fort Sumter was not always the focus, although it is true that on December 27 South Carolina seized nearby Federal facilities Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. South Carolina sent a delegation to Washington with the demand, delivered before New Year’s, that Federal troops leave Charleston and its environs. To this President James Buchanan, surprisingly stern in this instance, said no; Fort Sumter would defend “against all hostile attacks, from whatever quarter.” By New Year’s Day, South Carolina had also taken over the Federal arsenal at Charleston.
Fast-forward from there:
January 3, 1861, Georgia seizes Fort Pulaski at Savannah.
January 9, Mississippi secedes, and South Carolina fires upon the Fort Sumter relief ship Star of the West.
January 10 , Florida secedes.
January 11, Alabama secedes.
January 19, Georgia secedes.
January 26, Louisiana secedes.
January 29, Kansas becomes a state—slave-free.
February 4, A provisional Confederate government takes shape in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Virginia-sponsored Peace Convention meets in Washington.
February 9, Jefferson Davis selected as Confederate president.
February 13, Electoral College count: Lincoln officially designated as the new U.S. president.
February 18 , Jefferson Davis inaugurated as president of the CSA, and the stirring tune “Dixie” breaks out in Montgomery.
February 23, Lincoln secretly trains into Washington to foil any rumored assassination plots. Texas secedes.
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nbsp; February 26, Federals abandon Camp Colorado, Texas.
February 27, Jefferson Davis names three would-be peace commissioners to negotiate with Washington. The Peace Convention in the capital city sends its recommendations to Congress after much internal argument—no salvation for the Nation here.
February 28, North Carolina says no to secession and stays in the Union… for a while.
March 1, Military control of the Charleston area officially passes from state control to that of the Confederate government. President Davis names Brigadier General Pierre G. T. Beauregard commander.
March 2, The Confederacy welcomes its first convert, Texas. Texas seizes the Federal revenue cutter Henry Dodge at Galveston.
March 3, On this Sunday in Washington, a busy Abe Lincoln hosts his Cabinet appointees at dinner and visits the Senate. In Charleston, Beauregard takes command of his troops.
March 4, Lincoln is inaugurated as sixteenth president. In a time of unprecedented crisis, the nation has a new president, a new administration from the Cabinet on down, and a political party—Republican—that is new to the seat of power. How will it all end?
Better Angels Invoked
AT HIS INAUGURATION ON A CLOUDY BUT MILD MARCH 4, LINCOLN DOFFED HIS black silk hat prior to delivering his inaugural address and…hesitated. Where to put it? Two men reached for it. One was a young reporter named Henry Watterson, who in just a few weeks would be a Confederate soldier and later a journalist for Southern newspapers often on the run from Mr. Abe Lincoln’s Yankee troops. The other reaching for the hat, and more successfully at that, was the senator from Illinois, Lincoln’s own rival and debating opponent of considerable fame, Mr. Stephen Douglas. Douglas, a Democrat, had been defeated by Lincoln in the presidential race of 1860 (although, it is true, the rebellious Southern Democrats had been represented in the same contest by Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky).
Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories Page 4
