Dixie Victorious: An Alternate history of the Civil War

by Peter Tsouras

  *23.

  Benjamin Cousins, Changes of Vast Moment: the Battle of the Tennessee Gaps (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1994) p. 248.

  *24.

  Ibid., p. 377. Sherman’s Army of Mississippi lost nearly 9,600 men in their frontal assaults on Hardee’s line. Palmer lost over 5,000 in their battles. Hardee’s Corps, including Walker, lost about 4,000—half of Sherman’s losses. Kershaw and Law lost about 3,500 in their Bell Buckle attack. Hill lost virtually Liddell’s whole division, 4,000 of 4,700.

  8

  CONFEDERATE BLACK

  AND GRAY

  A Revolution in the

  Minds of Men

  Peter G. Tsouras

  Richmond, Virginia, June 2, 1868

  The crack of the gavel echoed through the new marble chamber of the Confederate States Congress. The chairman called the committee to order and invited the first witness to approach and take the oath.

  The witness strode down the aisle past adoring spectators like the Confederate Mars that he was. Though in middle age he moved with the grace and coiled strength of a leopard among cows. He placed his hand on the Bible and swore the oath and sat down.

  The chairman was all graciousness. “General Forrest, this committee thanks you for your assistance in this matter.”

  “I am glad to be of service, Sir.”

  “General Forrest, I believe you are familiar with the issue with which this committee has been dealing, one of some controversy in our young republic—the amendment to the Veterans’ Pension Bill of 1866 respecting the Confederate States Colored Troops.

  “Yes, I am, Mr. Chairman.”

  “Well, then, General, in your opinion should the pensions for former slaves be set lower than for free Negroes who enlisted voluntarily?”

  “Mr. Chairman, let me illustrate my position by relating my own experience with both slaves and free Negroes under arms. At the beginning of the war, I said to the 45 colored fellows on my plantation that I was going into the army; and that if they would go with me, if we got whipped they would be free anyhow, and that if we succeeded and slavery was perpetuated, if they would act faithfully with me to the end of the war, I would set them free. Eighteen months before the end of the war closed I was satisfied…”

  And here he paused and then emphasized the next three words,

  “at the time, that we were going to be defeated, and I gave those 45, or 44 of them, their free papers for fear I might be called.

  They fought as faithfully and courageously before manumission as after it. I led men, gentlemen. Slave and free they all bled the same deep red for the Confederacy. And I trust this committee will give equal treatment under the law to ALL veterans of the Confederate States Colored Troops who served honorably in the late war.”1

  January 1864

  The war was eating the South alive. Not even the most diehard Southern secessionist could have imagined the train of events unleashed by the decision to fire upon Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on that dreadful day in 1861. Since then the South had poured out a torrent of blood and treasure to stave off the increasing might of the Union armies and the flood of material that sustained them. But to no avail. The borders of the Confederacy burned ever southward despite every sacrifice.

  The South was financially exhausted and had tapped the bottom of its white manpower barrel despite a draconian conscription effort. Yet, as the South grew weaker, the North grew stronger. Its already huge 3:1 manpower advantage in its white population was now further increased by the large scale enlistment of foreign immigrants, Northern blacks, and runaway Southern slaves in the Union Army. The Northern cause was strengthened by this by more than the numerical increase in its order-of-battle. Much of the population of the North and an even larger part of its fighting men had been radicalized by the revolutionary nature of the war itself.

  Had the Federal Government appealed to the Northern man to enlist to suppress slavery after Fort Sumter, the South would quickly have received its independence. The idea of fighting for black emancipation was not a popular idea in the North outside of trouble-making Massachusetts which had been a thorn in everyone’s side since it broke the King’s Peace in Boston in 1774. No, the Northern man fought for the honor of the flag and for the very precious idea that his own liberties were inextricably bound with the survival of the Union. The failure of the Union was the failure of the democratic experiment. Dictators would plant themselves on the ruins of the Union.

  But war has a mind of its own and is never constrained by those who pick up the sword. Such was the course of the Civil War. By early 1863, Northern recruitment of white volunteers was drying up as the war stalemated. Southern valor in all its fury had fought Northern courage and numbers to a standstill. Imperceptibly, though, the war had become a revolutionary process, unleashing new passions and experiences. As the Union armies penetrated deeper into the Confederacy, the reality of slavery became a first hand experience for the Union soldier. The idea of making soldiers of black men had been firmly suppressed at the beginning of the war. As the death toll mounted, the Union soldier began to make the altogether common-sense conclusion that this wonderful liberty he was fighting for might be worth sharing. He also had a practical motive, typified in the statement that “A black man can stop a bullet as well as a white man.” Those thoughts were also occurring in the South.

  Confederate representatives in Europe early in 1863 were already discussing the possibility of negating Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation by freeing slaves to fight in the Confederate Army. Undoubtedly, they were influenced by the strong European anti-slavery opinions. Despite the South’s many friends in Europe, these envoys could make no headway. Always it was slavery, like a bone in the throat, that strangled their every effort to secure European assistance for the Confederacy. The irony was that the South had many friends in Europe among the elites who did not wish the Union’s infectious experiment in democracy to succeed. That success would give new power to the thrust toward democracy in states where it was making headway or in those where reform had been frustrated. There was a palpable tension in the issue as well as opportunity. In September of that year a rumor swept through London that the South would free a half million slaves and conscript them for military service. The Confederate representative in London sent a secret dispatch to the Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin, urging the adoption of just such a course. Other contemporary communications to Benjamin within the Confederacy also urged the same action. Benjamin rejected them as impractical but left the door open by replying that the subject was one “which has awakened attention in several quarters lately.”2 None of these conversations was made public. No one had the nerve to bell the cat.

  HQ, Army of Tennessee, Dalton, Georgia, January 2, 1864

  The corps and division commanders of the Army of Tennessee had no idea why they had been ordered to attend a meeting at General Johnston’s headquarters. They were surprised when Lieutenant General William “Old Reliable” Hardee addressed them, stating that Major General Pat Cleburne, one of his division commanders, had prepared a paper on an “important subject.”3 Not a pin dropped as Cleburne read his manifesto to the assembled corps and division commanders of the Army of Tennessee on that cold night in January 1864. Cleburne’s educated Irish accent was still a novelty in a sea of liquid Southern English. They gave him their complete attention because they had already given him their complete respect as the finest division commander in the army. Already some, including Jefferson Davis, called him the Stonewall of the West.

  The 36-year-old Patrick Ronayne Cleburne was a gentleman and a natural soldier through and through—spare, distant, taciturn, just, and exacting—he lived as purely as a blue flame. He truly was a chevalier sans peur et sans reproche—a knight without fear or stain on his honor.

  He was by birth an Anglo-Irishman, a Protestant, his father a prosperous physician in County Cork. The British Isles in the budding of the Victorian era hammered out men in the forge of empire. A
mong the middle and professional classes, the bar was set high indeed with a Protestant severity matched only in clanking Prussia. His family expected him to follow his father’s profession, for which he had no passion. So when young Cleburne failed Greek and Latin in the entrance examinations for Trinity College in 1846, his shame drove him to enlist into the brutal oblivion of the British Army as a common soldier.

  Yet whatever weakness had caused his failure burned away in the harsh but professional routine of garrison life in Ireland. If nothing else, a man learned to soldier in a British infantry regiment. Luckily he had joined a good regiment, the 41st Foot (the Welsh Regiment). By all accounts, Cleburne became an exemplary soldier and was promoted corporal before buying himself out in 1849. The man who hung up his red coat was not the boy who had run away to hide in it. There was a quiet seriousness in him and clarity of purpose:

  “He had learned useful lessons in the army, to apply in later life: patience, a disciplined cool nature, self-control, and an austere life style of self-denial. More importantly, he came to appreciate the position of those at the mercy of authority.”4

  As he left the army, Ireland was writhing in the worst of the potato famine, a land without hope and without a future. Cleburne, with a brother and sister, joined the countless Irish, Catholic and Protestant, who fled the stricken land for America. He made his way to Helena, Arkansas, on the Mississippi River, and fell passionately in love with his adopted country. By 1860, he was a pillar of his new community, a lawyer, and a man who would back a friend in a gun fight without question and with a steely coolness that met the highest standards of Southern male expectations.

  With civil war on the horizon the local counties formed a militia company, the Yell Rifles. Cleburne was the first to enlist, as a private, and was quickly elected its captain. His reputation for leadership was clear, but it helped that he was the only man with any military experience, a quality in short supply in the young Confederacy. To its great good fortune, the young army in gray had found more than a good corporal drill master. Experience, maturity, and natural talent now all combined to produce a superlative leader of men and master of the battlefield.

  “Cleburne knew not the meaning of fear and so compelling was his personality and so dynamic his leadership that he was able to impress his gallantry and dauntlessness on those whom he commanded.”5

  In less than two short years of intense effort and fighting, the former British corporal rose to Confederate major general by December 1862.6 Truly, at that moment in time, careers were open to talent.

  From the beginning he was in the thick of the fighting—Shiloh, Richmond (Kentucky), and Perryville. As major general he commanded the 2d Division of Hardee’s Corps, turning it into one of the great fighting formations in American history, North and South. Such was the reputation of his division that it was the only one allowed to keep its original colors when the Confederate battle flag was issued to the army to replace the previous regimental colors. The men in blue would have cause to fear whenever they saw the blue flag with a centered white moon and “crossed cannons inverted” appear on the field. He led the division at Stone’s River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. In the army’s desperate retreat after its defeat at Chattanooga, Cleburne and the 2d Division saved the artillery and trains by inflicting a stinging reverse on Hooker’s pursuing corps at Ringgold’s Gap. It was the only bright spot in the dismal, near disastrous campaign that had begun so brightly with the victory at Chickamauga. For retrieving the honor of the Army of Tennessee, Cleburne received the singular reward of the official thanks of the Congress and President.

  Now in 1864 that valor and skill shown on so many battlefields had earned him the attention of the senior officers of the Army of Tennessee. In stark words he described the deterioration of the morale of the army that came from shrinking numbers as the ranks of the enemy swelled.

  “Our soldiers can see no end to this state of affairs except in our own exhaustion; hence, instead of rising to the occasion, they are sinking into a fatal apathy, growing weary of hardships and slaughters which promise no results.”

  The consequences were obvious:

  “If this state continues much longer we must be subjugated. Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late. We can givebut a faint idea when we say it means the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood. It means the history of our heroic struggle will be written by the enemy.”

  In addition the reasons for the impending disaster were plain.

  “We can see three great causes operating to destroy us: First, the inferiority of our armies to those of the enemy in point of numbers; second, the poverty of our single source of supply in comparison with his several sources; third, the fact that slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.”7

  The solution was equally plain.

  “We propose… that we immediately commence training a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves, and further that we guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war. As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—giveup the negro slaves rather than be a slave himself”8

  It was a fool’s hope, he explained, that Britain, after freeing its own slaves, would aid the Confederacy to retain its human chattels, such was the intensity of anti-slavery feeling in that country as well as elsewhere in Europe. The conclusion was as simple as it was earthshaking. The South could not have both slavery and independence. It must choose. And as slavery was of lesser importance than independence, it must be sacrificed to achieve the greater goal. Enroll slaves in the Confederate Army and reward faithful service with freedom for themselves and their families. Then Britain and other countries would no longer be hindered by the stigma of slavery in coming to the South’s aid. Then the wind would be taken out of the North’s moral crusade and black enlistments in the Union Army would dry up.

  The clarity of Cleburne’s proposal was stunning. He would destroy the Old South to save it. The Old South was doomed in any case, he could see. A New South would be born and, for the sake of liberty, the Southern people must giveit birth, not a vengeful North. That made all the difference in the world. Cleburne’s clarity came from seeing the problem with different eyes. Although an adopted Southerner, he still had a different perspective, shaped in another society. Cleburne was no slave holder; nor did he have any special abolitionist feelings for the Southern slaves. If anything, he stated once that he was indifferent to the fate of the blacks in the South. But he valued liberty above all for it had given him a chance in life. He also remembered the wanton cruelty of the Famine and how it had destroyed his homeland. Above all, Cleburne displayed the gift of the master strategist for he had identified slavery as the South’s negative center of gravity. All issues were increasingly controlled for ill by it in some fashion. It hung like a growing dead weight on the back of the Confederacy. Yet, unlike Cleburne, the Southern people and leadership were prisoners of their own history. They had grown up in the system that was like second nature to them.

  Cleburne recognized this as he urged the greatest of sacrifices:

  “It would remove forever all selfish taint from our cause and place independence above any question of property. The very magnitude of the sacrifice itself, such as no nation has ever voluntarily made before, would appall our enemies, destroy his spirit and finances, and fill our hearts with a pride and singleness which would clothe us with new strength in battle. Apart from all other aspects of the questions, the necessity for more fighting men is upon us. We can only get a sufficiency by making the negro share the clanger and hardships of the war. If we arm and train him and make him fight for the country in her hour of
dire distress, every consideration of principle and policy demands that we should set him and his whole race who side with us free.

  It is a first principle with mankind that he who offers his life in defense of the State should receive from her in return his freedom and happiness, and we believe in the acknowledgement of this principle… For many years, ever since the agitation on the subject of slavery commenced, the negro has been dreaming of freedom, and his vivid imagination has surrounded that condition with so many gratifications that is has become the paradise of his hopes. To attain it he will tempt dangers and difficulties not exceeded by the bravest soldiers in the field. The hope of freedom is perhaps the only moral incentive that can be applied to him in his present condition. It would be preposterous then to expect him to fight against it with any degree of enthusiasm, therefore we must bind him to our cause by no doubtful bonds; we must leave no possible loophole for treachery to creep in. The slaves are dangerous now, but armed, trained, and collected in an army they would be a thousand fold more dangerous; therefore, when we make soldiers of them we make free men of them beyond all question, and thus enlist their sympathies also. We can do this more effectually than the North can now do, for we can give the negro not only his own freedom, but that of his wife and child, and can secure it to him in his old home. To do this we must immediately make his marriage and parental relation sacred in the eyes of the law and forbid their sale. The past legislation of the South concedes that a large free middle class of negro blood, between master and slave, must sooner or later destroy the institution. If, then, we touch the institution at all, we would do best to make the most of it, and by emancipating the whole race upon reasonable terms and within such reasonable time as will prepare both races for the change, secure to ourselves all the advantages, and to our enemies all the disadvantages that can arise, both at home and abroad, from such a sacrifice. Satisfy the negro that, if he faithfully adheres to our standard during the war, he shall receive his freedom and that of his race. Give him as an earnest of our intentions such immediate immunities as will impress him with our sincerity and be in keeping with his new conditions, enroll a portion of his class as soldiers of the Confederacy, and we can change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength.”9