Embattled Rebel
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Lee thought so too. His reading of Northern newspapers had convinced him that “the rising peace party of the North,” as he described the Copperheads, offered the Confederacy a “means of dividing and weakening our enemies.” It was true, Lee acknowledged in a letter to Davis on June 10 as the army started north, that the Copperheads professed to favor reunion as the object of the peace negotiations they were urging, while the Confederate goal in any such parley would be independence. But it would do no harm, Lee advised Davis, to play along with such reunion sentiment to weaken Northern support for the war, which “after all is what we are interested in bringing about. When peace is proposed to us it will be time enough to discuss its terms, and it is not the part of prudence to spurn the proposition in advance, merely because those who made it believe, or affect to believe, that it will result in bringing us back to the Union.”30
Lee concluded his letter with a broad hint that Davis “will best know how to give effect” to these views. Davis did indeed think he knew a way to offer the olive branch of a victorious peace at the same time that Lee’s sword was striking Northern vitals. Not long after he received Lee’s letter, Davis also read one from Vice President Alexander H. Stephens suggesting a mission to Washington under a flag of truce to meet with his congressional colleague and friend from an earlier time, Abraham Lincoln. The ostensible purpose would be a negotiation to renew the cartel for prisoner-of-war exchanges, which had broken down because of the Confederate threat to execute the officers and reenslave the men of black Union regiments. But Stephens suggested that if Lincoln agreed to receive him, he could also propose “a general adjustment” to end the war on the basis of a Northern agreement to recognize the “Sovereignty of [a state] to determine its own destiny.” Davis immediately summoned Stephens from Georgia to undertake the mission by joining Lee in Pennsylvania and looking for an opening to proceed to Washington.31
Stephens had not previously known about Lee’s invasion. He protested that the Union government would never receive him while an enemy army was on Northern soil. On the contrary, said Davis; that was precisely the time to negotiate from a position of strength that would force concessions from the Lincoln administration. The cabinet backed Davis, so Stephens reluctantly agreed to go. It was too late to catch up with Lee in Pennsylvania, so Stephens headed down the James River under a flag of truce to Union lines at Fort Monroe, where he arrived on July 2 and had word sent to Lincoln requesting a pass to come to Washington.32
While this effort was being planned, Lee tried to pry as many troops out of the Carolinas as he could to strengthen his invasion force. Davis did order three brigades from North Carolina to join Lee. But he denied the general’s request for a large number of Beauregard’s troops from South Carolina, plus Beauregard himself, to come to Virginia as a diversionary threat to occupy Union forces that would otherwise confront Lee in Pennsylvania. Davis had already sent two of Beauregard’s brigades to Johnston in Mississippi, and renewed Federal operations against Charleston made it impossible to strip its defenses any more. Lee also urged that some of the troops defending Richmond be added to his invasion force. But threatening movements against the capital by the small Union army on the peninsula forced Davis regretfully to refuse this request. “It has been an effort with me,” the president told Lee, “to answer the clamor to have troops [already sent] stopped or recalled to protect the city.”33
Whether any of these requested reinforcements would have enabled Lee to win the Battle of Gettysburg is impossible to say. After three days of repeated attacks that cost the Army of Northern Virginia at least twenty-four thousand casualties, the Confederates began their nightmare retreat from Gettysburg in a drenching rainstorm on July 4 at almost the same hour that Pemberton surrendered thirty thousand men to Grant at Vicksburg. Alexander Stephens’s message asking for a pass to see Lincoln in Washington also arrived in the U.S. capital on July 4. Having just learned the news from Gettysburg, Lincoln replied curtly that Stephens’s request was “inadmissible.”34
The defeat at Gettysburg did not impair Davis’s confidence in Lee—in sharp contrast with his loss of what little faith he had left in Johnston. In late July Davis wrote to Lee, “I have felt more than ever the want of your advice during the recent period of disaster.” Louis Wigfall reported that Davis was “almost frantic with rage if the slightest doubt was expressed as to [Lee’s] capacity and conduct. . . . He was at the same time denouncing Johnston in the most violent . . . manner & attributing the fall of Vicksburg to him and him alone.”35
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: Confederate dead gathered for burial at the edge of the Rose Woods, July 5, 1863
Some newspapers, especially the Charleston Mercury, did express more than slight doubts about Lee’s capacity and conduct in the Gettysburg campaign. Perhaps stung by this criticism, and experiencing health problems, Lee offered his resignation in a letter to Davis on August 8. “I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire,” wrote the general. “How can I fulfill the expectations of others?” Without naming anyone, Lee stated that “a younger and abler man than myself can readily be attained” for the command. “My dear friend,” Davis replied. “There has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant,” so he could empathize with Lee’s feelings. But “to ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or one who would possess more of the confidence of the army, or of the reflecting men in the country is to demand an impossibility. . . . Our country could not bear to lose you.”36
Yet another defeat on the Fourth of July added to the Southern cup of woe. Unaware of the surrender at Vicksburg, the Confederate commander in Arkansas, Theophilus Holmes, ordered an attack that day on the Union garrison at Helena as a diversion to aid Pemberton. The defenders easily repelled the assault, inflicting six times as many casualties on the attackers as they suffered themselves. This victory opened Arkansas to a Union offensive that captured Little Rock on September 10.
The situation in Arkansas had been a headache for Davis ever since he had promoted his West Point classmate Holmes to lieutenant general and appointed him commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department in 1862. Davis had a higher regard for Holmes’s abilities than almost anyone else in the Confederacy—including Holmes himself. Complaints from Arkansas political leaders and Confederate Missourians about the general’s incompetence scarcely dented Davis’s confidence in him. One Missourian denounced the president as someone “who stubbornly refuses to hear or regard the universal voice of the people.” Davis did go so far as to replace Holmes with Edmund Kirby Smith as commander of the Trans-Mississippi Department in February 1863. But he kept Holmes in place as head of the subdistrict of Arkansas. “I have an abiding faith that under the blessing of Providence, you will yet convince all fair minded men, as well of your zeal and ability, as of your integrity and patriotism,” Davis told Holmes.37 But Davis convinced no one, and he finally yielded to Kirby Smith’s recommendation in March 1864 that Maj. Gen. Sterling Price replace Holmes.
Edmund Kirby Smith
After the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the Union navy patrolled the whole length of the Mississippi River. Gunboats effectively sealed off the two parts of the Confederacy from each other. Communications between Richmond and General Kirby Smith took weeks via a roundabout route by blockade runner through Galveston or even Matamoros, Mexico, or by smuggling across the Mississippi at night. Kirby Smith became the head of a semi-independent fiefdom with quasi-dictatorial powers. He maintained good relations with the governors of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas (the latter two in temporary state capitals because Baton Rouge and Little Rock were occupied by the enemy). He established mines, factories, shipyards, and other facilities to supply and carry out military operations separate from those in the rest of the Confederacy, financed by cotton exports through Matamoros. “As far as the constitution permits,
” Davis told Kirby Smith, “full authority has been given to you to administer to the wants of Your Dept., civil as well as military.”38 In effect, Kirby Smith rather than Davis became commander in chief of the Trans-Mississippi theater. For the next two years “Kirby Smith’s Confederacy” fought its own war pretty much independently of what was happening elsewhere.39
• • •
DESPITE ALL HIS OTHER PROBLEMS IN 1863, DAVIS’S BIGGEST command headache remained Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee. For almost five months after the Battle of Murfreesboro, this army and General William S. Rosecrans’s Union Army of the Cumberland had licked their wounds and confronted each other twenty miles apart. Neither army undertook any major initiatives except cavalry raids on each other’s communications. Bragg held a strong defensive position behind four gaps in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. In the last week of June 1863, Rosecrans, after much prodding by Lincoln, finally began an offensive. Feinting toward the western gaps, he moved so swiftly through the others that the Confederates were flanked or knocked aside almost before they knew what had hit them. A Union brigade of mounted infantry armed with Spencer repeating rifles penetrated deeply behind the Confederate position and threatened to cut Bragg’s rail lifeline, forcing him to retreat all the way to Chattanooga by July 3. In little more than a week, the Confederacy lost control of Middle Tennessee—the same week that climaxed with the Battle of Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicksburg.
Bragg was unwell during this lightning campaign, and several of his principal subordinates performed poorly—especially Leonidas Polk and William Hardee. The same two renewed the backroom intrigues against Bragg that had long plagued this dysfunctional army.40 The infighting could not have come at a worse time. The Confederate grip on Chattanooga appeared endangered. The city had great strategic importance. It was located at the junction of the Confederacy’s two east-west railroads and formed the gateway to the war industries of Georgia. Having already split the Confederacy in two with the capture of Vicksburg, Northern armies could split it almost in three by a penetration into Georgia via Chattanooga. In mid-August Rosecrans began a new advance with the intention of doing just that.
Davis was fully alive to the significance of this threat. He instructed Johnston to send nine thousand troops to Bragg from his idle army in Mississippi. On August 24 the president summoned Lee to Richmond for extended consultations. The front in Virginia was quiet, and Davis asked Lee if he would be willing to go to Chattanooga and take command of the Army of Tennessee. Lee demurred; Davis did not press the issue. Longstreet proposed that he take two divisions of his corps to reinforce Bragg. Lee initially opposed this plan as well. In a reprise of his argument before the invasion of Pennsylvania, he suggested that an offensive against the Federals in Virginia would relieve the pressure on Bragg. Davis leaned toward approval, but then changed his mind. Instead, he secured Lee’s reluctant acceptance of the detachment of Longstreet. On September 7 Lee returned to his headquarters and set that process in motion.41
Events in Tennessee moved so quickly that it appeared Longstreet would not get there in time. Rosecrans feinted a crossing of the Tennessee River above Chattanooga but instead went across at several places below the city. As his troops moved through mountain passes toward the railroad that connected Chattanooga and Atlanta, Bragg evacuated Chattanooga on September 9. But then the Confederate general reached into his bag of tricks. He sent fake deserters into Union lines with planted stories of Confederate demoralization and headlong retreat. Rosecrans swallowed the bait. He sent each of his three corps through separate mountain gaps beyond supporting distance of one another to cut off the supposed retreat. Bragg intended to trap fragments of the enemy’s separated forces and defeat them in detail. So corrosive were the relationships among Bragg and several of his corps and division commanders, however, that the effort broke down. Three times from September 10 to 13 Bragg ordered various subordinates to attack an isolated enemy corps or division; three times they found reasons to disobey Bragg’s distrusted orders. Belatedly recognizing the danger, Rosecrans consolidated his army, and Bragg’s “golden opportunity” to defeat the enemy in detail was gone.42
With the arrival of Longstreet’s divisions beginning on September 18, the Confederates would have a rare numerical superiority over the Federals. Crossing Chickamauga Creek a dozen miles south of Chattanooga, Bragg launched an attack on September 19 in an attempt to cut the enemy off from their base in the city. The results that day were indecisive. Longstreet arrived that night with the rest of his troops. Bragg gave him command of the army’s left wing and Polk the right. He ordered Polk to attack at dawn, leading with Lt. Gen. D. H. Hill’s corps. Longstreet’s wing was to go forward once Polk’s assault was in full stride. Dawn came, but no attack. As the hours ticked by, it became clear that the army’s command system had again foundered. Polk and Hill seemed to act with little urgency; only Bragg’s personal supervision got the attack started—four hours late. Because of a mixup in orders on the Union side, however, Longstreet’s advance encountered a gap in the enemy line and broke through, sending one-third of Rosecrans’s army—including Rosecrans himself—fleeing to the rear. Only the determined stand by the remainder, under Maj. Gen. George Thomas, prevented a complete Union collapse. That night the Federals pulled back to Chattanooga.
Despite the bungling, Bragg had won what appeared to be a remarkable victory. The news elated Richmond. The War Department clerk John B. Jones wrote in his diary that “the effects of this great victory will be electrical. The whole South will be filled again with patriotic fervor, and in the North there will be a corresponding depression. . . . Surely the Government of the United States must now see the impossibility of subjugating the Southern people, spread over such a vast extent of territory.”43
This optimism turned out to be wishful thinking. The Army of the Cumberland still held Chattanooga. The Battle of Chickamauga had cost the Confederates heavy casualties, so instead of renewing the attack Bragg settled down for a siege, hoping to starve the Yankees out. Instead of caving in, however, the United States government redoubled its efforts. Washington sent twenty thousand men from the Army of the Potomac to reinforce Rosecrans. It also sent Grant to Chattanooga. He replaced the discomfited Rosecrans with George Thomas, opened a new supply line, and summoned Sherman to Chattanooga with four more divisions. The Federals were clearly preparing a counteroffensive to reverse the results of Chickamauga and drive the Confederates deep into Georgia.
While these preparations went forward, renewed internecine warfare racked the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps. Bragg demanded an explanation from Polk for the delay in his attack on September 20. Before replying, Polk met with Hill and Longstreet and concluded that Bragg should be removed from command. Polk wrote to Davis that Bragg must go. He even had the effrontery, in view of his own culpability, to claim that Bragg had the enemy “twice at his mercy, and has allowed it to escape both times.”44
Meanwhile, Polk responded to Bragg’s request for an explanation of his tardy attack by shifting the blame to D. H. Hill. Bragg considered this reply specious, and suspended Polk from command of his corps. He explained to Davis that although Polk was “gallant and patriotic,” he was “luxurious in his habits, rises late, moves slowly, and always conceives his plans the best—He has proved an injury to us on every field where I have been associated with him.” Davis telegraphed Bragg deprecating his action against Polk. The president was torn between his sympathy for Bragg and his long friendship with Polk, which caused Davis to estimate the latter’s military acumen too highly. He resolved his conflicting feelings by telling Bragg that Polk should be restored to his post in order to avoid “a controversy which could not heal the injury sustained” and “would entail further evil. . . . The opposition to you both in the army and out of it has been a public calamity in so far as it impairs your capacity for usefulness.”45
Before Bragg received this letter, ten gene
rals and a colonel in the Army of Tennessee, including corps commanders Longstreet, Hill, and Simon B. Buckner, signed a petition to Davis calling for Bragg’s removal. “Whatever may have been accomplished heretofore, it is certain that the fruits of the victory of Chickamauga have now exceeded our grasp,” the petition stated. Bragg’s personality “totally unfits him” for command. If he remained, the signers “can render you no assurance of the success which your Excellency may reasonably expect.”46
James Longstreet
Before he saw this petition, Davis had concluded that he must make the long trip to Tennessee to deal personally with the imbroglio. He stopped first in Atlanta to meet with Polk. The general asked for a court of inquiry, which he believed would exonerate him. Davis wanted no such exhibition of the army’s dirty laundry. He decided to transfer Polk to Mississippi to serve with the remnant of Johnston’s army. Davis then visited Bragg’s headquarters at Marietta, Georgia. Bragg offered to resign—may even have urged Davis to accept his resignation to resolve the discord. But Davis rejected this idea. The logical replacement for Bragg would have been Beauregard or Johnston. Davis wanted no part of either. Instead, he hoped that he could persuade the malcontents to put aside their prejudices and act together for the good of the cause.