Embattled Rebel

by James M. McPherson

  Davis held a meeting with Longstreet, Hill, Buckner, and Maj. Gen. Benjamin F. Cheatham (who had taken over Polk’s corps). Bragg was also present. Contrary to Davis’s hopes for harmony, the generals one after another (starting with Longstreet) expressed their lack of confidence in Bragg. Davis was startled, and Bragg must have been mortified. The president may have suspected that Longstreet was angling for the command, and was offended by his forwardness. In any event, despite this clear evidence of disaffection, Davis decided that “no change for the better could be made,” and kept Bragg in command.47

  Davis had brought John C. Pemberton with him from Richmond, apparently with the idea of giving him a corps under Bragg. But he changed his mind when he discovered that such an appointment would probably provoke a mutiny in the army. (Pemberton subsequently resigned his lieutenant generalship and loyally accepted an assignment as lieutenant colonel of artillery in the Richmond defenses.) Davis authorized Bragg to relieve Hill of corps command and to demote Buckner to division command. Bragg also reorganized other divisions and brigades in an effort to minimize dissension. Longstreet eventually took his two divisions on what turned out to be a failed campaign to drive the Federals out of Knoxville, which they had occupied since early September.48

  With these departures and reorganizations, Davis and Bragg hoped for a de-escalation of the army’s internal strife. The president urged Bragg to put the whole painful experience behind him and work with his subordinates toward a common goal despite lingering personal animosity. Davis’s own military experience had convinced him, he told Bragg, that it was not “necessary that there should be kind personal relations between officers to secure their effective co-operation in all which is official.” The recent crisis “should lift men above all personal considerations and devote them wholly to their country’s cause.”49

  Davis continued his trip through the Deep South after leaving Bragg. He traveled to Alabama, Mississippi, back to Georgia, and then to South Carolina. He visited several towns and cities where he consulted with political leaders and military commanders, toured defenses, and gave public speeches praising troops from those areas, urging audiences to renew their efforts for victory, and predicting success for these efforts. He finally headed for home through North Carolina and arrived in Richmond on November 7, a month and a day after he had departed.50

  Back in the capital the observant War Department clerk John Jones noted that Davis’s decision to retain Bragg in command “in spite of the tremendous prejudice against him in and out of the army” was extremely unpopular. “Unless Gen. Bragg does something more for the cause before Congress meets a month hence, we shall have more clamor against the government than ever.”51

  Bad news followed Davis to Richmond. A Confederate attempt to capture the reopened Union supply line across the Tennessee River below Lookout Mountain was a fiasco. Grant continued to build up a powerful force in Chattanooga. On November 24 he struck. Northern troops under Joseph Hooker (who had come south with the reinforcements from the Army of the Potomac) drove the Confederates off Lookout Mountain. The next day George Thomas’s soldiers in the Army of the Cumberland broke through the main Confederate line on Missionary Ridge with an attack that seemed to have no chance to succeed—until it did. The demoralized soldiers of the Army of Tennessee fled in panic, defying all of Bragg’s efforts to stop them. Most of them did not stop until they reached Ringgold, Georgia, fifteen miles to the south.

  The position where the breakthrough occurred was held mainly by Maj. Gen. John C. Breckinridge’s corps. His dispositions were faulty and he appeared to have been drunk during the battle. Nevertheless, the chief blame came to rest as usual on Bragg’s slumping shoulders. The general manfully accepted responsibility. “The disaster admits of no palliation,” he told Davis, “and is justly disparaging to me as a commander.” But the cabal against him must share the blame, he added. “I fear we both erred in the conclusion for me to retain command here after the clamor raised against me—The warfare has been carried on successfully, and the fruits are bitter.” Bragg submitted his resignation; this time Davis promptly accepted it and appointed William Hardee as his successor.52

  Public condemnation did not stop with Bragg; it went right up to the top. The fire-eating secessionist Edmund Ruffin declared that “the President is the first and main cause of this great disaster and panic, by his obstinately retaining Gen. Bragg in command.” A North Carolina woman whose diary revealed close attention to wartime events had been a supporter of Davis until now. But “it is sad to myself to realize how my admiration has lessened for Mr. Davis,” she wrote in December 1863, “since the loss of Vicksburg, a calamity brought on us by his obstinacy in retaining Pemberton in command, & now still further diminished by his indomitable pride of opinion in upholding Bragg.”53

  Davis had no time for regrets. He had to find a new commander for the Confederacy’s second most important army, for Hardee had turned down the post because he did not feel up to the task of leading that troubled organization. The president again tried to persuade Lee to take the job. Lee responded that he would go “if ordered,” but made clear his preference to remain where he was. He suggested Beauregard, but that officer remained in Davis’s bad graces. The president asked Lee to come to Richmond “for full conference” on the problem. Lee assumed that Davis intended to order him to Georgia. If so, Lee talked him out of it. Instead, he urged Davis to appoint Joseph Johnston, even though Lee was fully aware of the president’s distaste for the prospect. Similar pressures in support of Johnston came from Congress, from several high-ranking officers including Polk and Hardee, and from Secretary of War Seddon. Most other cabinet members shared Davis’s distrust of Johnston’s capacity. But the president finally recognized that he had no alternative. On December 16 he ordered Johnston to take command.54 The die was cast; only time would tell if it would prove to be true metal.

  5.

  WE SHOULD TAKE THE INITIATIVE

  As commander in chief, Davis spent most of his time and energy on questions of strategy and command. But armies must be armed, fed, and supplied. Although he was reluctant to delegate authority on matters in which he took great interest, Davis did leave the main responsibility for logistics to his chief of ordnance, commissary general, and quartermaster general.

  With the appointment of Josiah Gorgas as head of the Bureau of Ordnance, Davis made one of his best choices. Gorgas proved to be a master of organization and improvisation. He built an arms industry virtually from scratch and created an efficient fleet of blockade runners that by 1862 had ended the arms famine that initially crippled Confederate operations. Appeals went out to Southern churches and plantations to turn in their bells to be melted down and turned into cannon. Moonshiners responded to appeals to their patriotism and turned in their copper stills to make percussion caps for rifles. Southern women saved the contents of chamber pots to be leached for niter to produce gunpowder. The Ordnance Bureau located limestone caves in the southern Appalachians that contained niter deposits. Normally modest and self-effacing, Gorgas could not resist boasting of his achievements in the privacy of his diary. On the third anniversary of his appointment, April 8, 1864, he wrote that “from being one of the worst supplied of the Bureaus of the War Department,” the Ordnance Bureau “is now the best. Large arsenals have been organized at Richmond, Fayetteville, Augusta, Charleston, Columbus, Macon, Atlanta and Selma. . . . A superb powder mill has been built at Augusta. . . . Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a sabre—a pound of powder—no shot nor shell (except at the Tredegar Works) we now make all these in quantities to meet the demands of our large armies.”1

  Gorgas’s pride in what he had accomplished was fully justified. Although he was a native of Pennsylvania (who had married the daughter of a governor of Alabama), Gorgas faced none of the anti-Yankee prejudice that stung other Northern-born officers. But even his genius could not overcome the accelerating deterioration of Sout
hern railroads and the consequent bottlenecks of transportation that created shortages of everything except ordnance for Southern soldiers and civilians alike. Before the war the South had imported nearly all of its railroad iron and locomotives from the North or abroad. Some of the Confederacy’s prime iron-producing regions in Tennessee had been conquered and occupied by the enemy early in the war. When rails, engines, and wheels wore out, replacements were not available. Blockade-running vessels, built for speed and stealth, could not bring in such heavy, bulky freight. Gorgas was able to keep Southern soldiers well armed through the end of the war because weapons and gunpowder had priority on what rail capacity there was.

  More problematic were the commissary and quartermaster bureaus. Davis appointed his friend from West Point and regular-army days Lucius B. Northrop as commissary general. A man of congenial personality might have been able to overcome criticisms of the inevitable food-supply deficiencies in the Confederacy. But Northrop’s personality was described as “peevish, obstinate, condescending, and difficult.”2 These qualities compounded the ill will directed toward Northrop by soldiers who held him responsible for their chronically short rations. “Northrop—what a bone of contention he is,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut in 1863. “Even if the army is mistaken and Northrop is not inefficient—still if they believe it, something ought to be conceded to their prejudices.”3

  In truth, some of the problems with food supply were beyond Northrop’s control. Thousands of square miles of grain- and meat-producing areas of the South were conquered and occupied by enemy forces. The fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson cut off the main part of the Confederacy from western livestock. Union control of most of the Confederacy’s navigable rivers and the blockade’s interruption of coastal shipping forced transport of supplies onto the South’s inadequate and worsening rail network.

  Northrop did not help matters by establishing a centralized system of procurement and distribution. Warehouses were sometimes distant from the armies, especially the Army of Northern Virginia. The purchase of food closer to army operations where transport was less difficult would have been more expensive but perhaps more effective. When commissary agents did try to impress food supplies from local farmers or to seize them under the Confederate tax in kind, however, farmers sometimes hid their crops or livestock to avoid seizure. The rampant inflation that plagued the Confederate economy also made farmers reluctant to sell at government rates, which were invariably lower than market prices. In view of these structural problems, perhaps Davis was correct to defend Northrop and to keep him at his post despite widespread demands for his removal. But the president’s stubborn support for Northrop seemed to be one more example of his favoritism toward incompetent friends.4

  Ironically, Davis undercut one of Northrop’s most ambitious efforts to feed the armies by trading Southern cotton for Northern food and salt. In October 1862 Northrop informed the president through Secretary of War Randolph that “the Army cannot be subsisted without permitting trade to some extent with Confederate Ports in the possession of the Enemy.” Both Union and Confederate legislation forbade trade with the enemy. These laws were honored in the breach, however. And in any case, Randolph insisted, this prohibition did not apply to the government. “I think it will be found,” he added, “that in European wars dealings between the Government of one nation and the subjects of another engaged in mutual hostilities are of ordinary occurrence.” This “everyone else does it” argument did not impress Davis. Nor did Randolph’s assertion that the only alternative to such a deal was “the Starvation of our armies.” Before embarking on such a dishonorable course, Davis wrote, “the necessity must be absolute.”5

  Davis did approve a smaller arrangement by the governor of Mississippi to exchange cotton for Northern salt, but only because a French merchant acted as a go-between to provide the salt and export the cotton through a Confederate port. This fig leaf of legality satisfied Davis’s sense of honor, but any proposition for direct trade “cannot be entertained.” Northrop and Randolph’s plan to trade cotton for commissary supplies fell through. “The President resisted it in toto,” according to a War Department official. This refusal may have played some part in Randolph’s decision to resign as secretary of war.6

  Davis never did change his mind about the illegitimacy of trade with the enemy. But when General Edmund Kirby Smith’s Trans-Mississippi Department became a quasi-independent fiefdom after the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Kirby Smith found that he could not feed armies or civilians without such trade. Some generals commanding local areas also approved various cotton-for-food trades on a small scale. Preoccupied with many different matters, Davis looked the other way.7

  The shock of bread riots in the spring of 1863 was an eye-opener for the president. Drought in parts of the South the previous summer had curtailed food production. By the following spring, supplies were exhausted or priced at famine levels, and some people were literally starving. They suspected that storekeepers and government warehouses still had food that they were holding for higher prices or for the army. In a dozen or more places that spring, hungry women staged bread riots. Many of them were wives of soldiers. Armed with knives or revolvers, they stalked into shops owned by men they denounced as “speculators” and asked the price of bacon or cornmeal or salt. Upon hearing it, they denounced such “extortion” and took what they wanted.

  Davis himself became involved with the largest riot, which took place in Richmond on April 2. On that morning several hundred women gathered in a church and proceeded to the governor’s mansion to demand the release of emergency stocks of food from government warehouses. The governor said he could do nothing for them, whereupon the crowd’s mood turned ugly. Shouting “Bread or blood!” and joined by boys and a few men, they smashed store windows and took shoes, clothing, even jewelry, as well as food. Hastily summoned militiamen appeared with their muskets. The mayor warned the crowd to desist or face the possibility of being shot.

  At this moment Davis arrived on the scene. Although he was still recovering from a recent illness, he climbed onto a wagon and addressed the crowd. He promised the release of food supplies and appealed to their patriotism. He urged them to disband so that the muskets of the militia could be turned against the common enemy, the Yankees. A few small boys jeered him; the rest of the group maintained a sullen silence. Davis took out his watch and gave the crowd five minutes to disperse, or he would order the troops to fire. The captain told his men to load their weapons. Four minutes passed. Raising his watch, Davis said solemnly: “My friends, you have one minute more.” Whether he would have ordered the militia to fire, and whether they would have obeyed—the crowd may have included some of their wives or daughters—will never be known. The assemblage melted away. Police arrested forty-four women and twenty-nine men as members or accessories of the mob; some of them may have served short jail sentences.8

  The government released some of its stock of rice to civilians. Apprehensive merchants brought out reserve supplies of food, and prices dropped. The immediate crisis passed, but shortages and inflation continued to take a physical and psychological toll on the Southern people until the end of the war—and beyond. Two days after the Richmond riot, Congress passed a resolution calling on planters to convert part of their cotton and tobacco acreage to food crops. Davis endorsed this action and issued a proclamation appealing to farmers’ “love of country” to carry the policy into effect. But neither Davis nor anyone else could resolve the intractable problems of transportation, distribution, inflation, and loss of territory that plagued the Confederate economy.

  Meanwhile, the president faced a fight with Congress over a personnel issue in the War Department. The Confederacy’s quartermaster general was Col. Abraham C. Myers, who had many of the same difficulties equipping the army with uniforms, shoes, horses, and wagons as Northrop did supplying it with food. Unlike Northrop, however, Myers was popular with Congress and unpopular with Davis. Th
e reasons for the president’s antipathy are unclear. Mrs. Myers and Mrs. Davis did not get along, and in the spring of 1862 Marion Myers was reported to have called Varina Davis “an old squaw.” The president showed no immediate reaction to this rumor. In March 1863 Congress designated the rank of brigadier general for the position of quartermaster general, expecting that Davis would promote Myers. Instead, the president appointed Brig. Gen. Alexander R. Lawton to the post in August.

  This action provoked a row with Congress. The Senate did not confirm Lawton, but Davis kept him in office anyway. Senator Louis Wigfall denounced the president’s “petty tyranny & reckless disregard of law and contemptuous treatment of Congress.” The Senate voted 15–9 that Myers was still quartermaster general. And seventy-six members of the House signed a letter to Davis insisting that he reinstate Myers. Davis refused, and in February 1864 the Senate finally confirmed Lawton—six months after he had begun doing the job of quartermaster general. Davis won this round, but at the cost of alienating many members of Congress.9

  On another matter, however, Davis and his Congress were in harmony. On January 12, 1863, the president issued a proclamation stipulating that captured officers and men of black Union regiments would be turned over to states to be tried for inciting or participating in slave insurrections. Congress enacted legislation endorsing this policy but substituting military courts for state courts.10 This change would have made no difference in the likely punishment—execution. But carrying out this policy proved to be impracticable. Union secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton ordered all exchanges of Confederate officers stopped so they could be held as hostages for retaliation if the Confederacy executed Northern officers.11 The Davis administration decided to restore captured ex-slave soldiers to bondage instead of putting them to death—though in fact many were killed by enraged Southern soldiers rather than allowed to surrender. “Captured slaves should be returned to their masters” if they could be found, Davis informed one Confederate general. “Until such time, they might be usefully employed on public works.”12