by Bruce Catton
Wherever the blame belonged, the moral was clear enough. Like Fort Donelson, Roanoke Island had been lost because the Confederacy had not quite been able to make an adequate defense of a vital strong point, and although mistakes had been made the underlying trouble was a simple lack of resources. The Confederate domain was so big that it could not be defended everywhere. During the next few weeks Burnside and Goldsborough methodically overran all of North Carolina’s inland seaports, from Elizabeth City on the north to Beaufort on the south, and although they at last repeated the Port Royal story, failing to exploit their gains aggressively, they had sliced off one more piece of Southern territory and had clamped one more constrictive grip on the new nation. Middle and western Tennessee were gone, the Atlantic coastline was going fast, the trans-Mississippi was crumbling, New Orleans was facing a dire threat; if the Federals now moved on Richmond with all their strength, the war might be approaching its end.
4: Time for Compulsion
The weather in Richmond was as bad as the news from the fighting fronts. There was a cold, relentless rain which turned unpaved streets to mud, and February 22, which was to witness the inauguration of Jefferson Davis for his six-year term as President of the permanent Confederate government, struck Attorney General Bragg as “one of the worst days I ever saw.” The bad weather and bad news had turned the attorney general into a pessimist. He wondered if the Confederacy would live to inaugurate another president, and in his diary he recorded a skeptical verdict: “Time alone can answer—but I fear not.” A furloughed soldier in town to see the sights wrote that he fortified himself by buying an umbrella but that most of his comrades bought whiskey, and Capital Square, where the inaugural address would be delivered from a canopied wooden platform, was all bobbing with umbrellas as the crowd assembled.1
In the Confederate White House, Mr. Davis retired to his room to kneel in long prayer “for the divine support I need so sorely,” and at noon he went to the Capitol, to greet the new Congress in the Hall of Delegates and to sit by while Vice-President Stephens took the oath of office. Mr. Davis was gaunt and pale, for his health had not been good of late, and the committee on arrangements suggested that it might be better if the ceremonies were held indoors, but he insisted on going through with the program as originally planned; there was a high symbolism to this affair, marking the transition from a provisional government to one which was to last forever, and none of the formalities would be slighted. The procession formed and moved out into the rain, and when Mr. Davis mounted the platform he seemed to Mrs. Davis “a willing victim going to his funeral pyre.” He was sworn in, bending to kiss a Bible which a Nashville publisher had proudly presented as the first Bible to be printed in the Confederacy; then, bareheaded, with rain coming down on the expectant crowd, he began his address.2
The Southern people had floated to war on oratory, but the war had changed and the only eloquence that mattered now was the terrible eloquence of the thing done, and most of the things done lately had been done by Yankees. More than any of those who listened to him, Jefferson Davis was aware that this nation which was now proclaiming its permanence might die before summer unless battles were won, and the means by which battles could be won were not immediately visible. Joe Johnston, immobilized at Centreville by rains which turned the Virginia roads into impassable troughs of wet clay, had fewer men in camp now than he had had two months ago, and the Federals in his front outnumbered him by three to one. Sooner or later they would advance—this very day, as a matter of fact, was the one specified in Mr. Lincoln’s order as the date for a great forward movement everywhere. Burnside could move up to Norfolk almost any time he chose, and the great Federal fleet could strike anywhere; and the Yankee armies that were starting up the Tennessee and down the Mississippi could be stopped by nothing much short of a military miracle. None of this could be said in public. Mr. Davis could do little but recite inspiring generalities.
Within limits, he was frank enough. He pointed out that the last hopes for reunion and a solution of sectional differences “have been dispelled by the malignity and barbarity of the Northern states in the prosecution of the existing war.” Civil liberties in the North had vanished, the jails were full of men arrested without due process, for opinion’s sake, and the men who reigned in Washington, “feeling power and forgetting right, were determined to respect no law but their own will.” The South had won victories and it had suffered defeats—“the tide for the moment is against us”—but no patriot could doubt that the final outcome would be victory. It had to be victory, because “nothing could be so bad as failure, and any sacrifice would be cheap as the price of success in such a contest.” Perhaps Providence meant that the Southern people must learn the real value of liberty by paying a high price for it; they were contending, after all, against “the tyranny of an unbridled majority, the most odious and least responsible form of despotism.” Men must deserve the aid of a higher power; “With humble gratitude and adoration, acknowledging the Providence which has so visibly protected the Confederacy during its brief but eventful career, to Thee, O God, I trustingly commit myself, and prayerfully invoke Thy blessing on my country and its cause.”3
The message seemed to be well received. The furloughed soldier who had bought the umbrella wrote that people listened as attentively “as if it had been beautiful spring weather,” and a War Department clerk believed that the candid comment on recent defeats bespoke a more effective policy for the future and said stoutly: “We must all stand up for our country.” Wispy Alec Stephens commented that “the country must work out its own deliverance,” adding: “Our new government is now in its crisis: if it can stand and will stand the blow that will be dealt in the next eighty or ninety days, it may ride the storm in safety.”4
The cabinet had gone over the speech with care, in the two or three days preceding the inauguration, striking out words and putting words in until Mr. Bragg concluded that this must be “the best seasoned document surely that ever was issued”; but although he had made certain contributions of his own Mr. Bragg confessed that the whole business had seemed like a waste of time—“I was thinking of how we were to escape the storm which threatened to overwhelm both Gov’t and people.” The Confederacy, he believed, needed good luck, good management, and a great deal of energy, and he concluded: “Too much has been left to our generals.” This remark was one the Republican radicals in Washington would gladly have taken for their own. (For a good footnote, add Halleck’s complaint to McClellan that too many decisions were being made by politicians.) In any case, while the speech was in preparation Mr. Davis told the cabinet that the Confederacy must shorten its lines. Specifically, Joe Johnston would have to leave northern Virginia and get closer to Richmond, which would be in grave danger of capture as soon as spring came.5
Plans for retreat were top secret, of course, but Mr. Davis discussed the worsening military situation in a message which went to Congress three days after the inaugural. He confessed frankly that the government had tried to do more than it could do and that it had run into trouble as a result. The army was not big enough, and it was in bad shape because the expiration of the short-term enlistments was forcing it to reorganize under the most difficult conditions. The policy of short-term enlistments, like the government’s overoptimistic estimate of its own capacity, simply reflected the original belief that the war would be short. Mr. Davis pointed out that he had opposed the policy and that Congress, inspired by the people, had adopted it, but he was not disposed to be censorious.
“It was not deemed possible,” he recalled, “that anything so insane as a persistent attempt to subjugate these states could be made, still less that the delusion would so far prevail as to give the war the vast proportions which it has assumed.” But the delusion had prevailed—had perhaps even grown somewhat in recent weeks—and the army now was in such an unsettled condition that it was hard to say just how big it actually was. (Mr. Davis would have a concrete suggestion for Congress on this point
before long.) A War Department official was admitting privately that the Confederacy now was weaker than it had been in July 1861, and was darkly noting that “the enemy are rapidly acquiring the character of being better soldiers than ourselves.” Joe Johnston’s troop returns were dismayingly eloquent. In December he had had, at Centreville, in the Shenandoah Valley and along the Potomac, 62,000 effectives, present for duty; in February he had but 47,000.6
General Johnston had in fact been having a most unhappy winter, the ordinary problems of Army command having been intensified by two special factors—an unwise act of Congress, and the unusual personality of the Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin.
At the end of 1861 Congress had tackled the one-year enlistments and in a laudable effort to help the Army had almost ruined it. Congress passed a law providing a $50 bounty and a 60-day furlough for any soldier who re-enlisted for three years or the duration of the war, and it specified that if he wanted to he could shift from his own branch of the service to another—from infantry to artillery, for instance—or move to a different company in his old branch. Furthermore, after the re-enlistees got settled in their new units they could elect new company and regimental officers, which of course meant that most of the good disciplinarians would be replaced by army-politician types who would no more speak harshly to the men under them than a Congressman would offend his loyal constituents. So there was a general coming and going and shuffling about such as front-line military camps rarely see or dream of; and the crowning difficulty was that the furloughs which sent so many soldiers home were issued, not by the army commander but by the Secretary of War.
Mr. Benjamin was a wealthy lawyer-politician from Louisiana, in some ways the most brilliant man in the cabinet, unquestionably the one who best knew how to get along with Jefferson Davis. He was of unshaken equanimity, always smiling and yet not really easygoing either; sharing with Edwin M. Stanton the belief that generals must be kept in their place by the civil authorities. He distributed furloughs to General Johnston’s soldiers with the easy grace of a good politician, despite the general’s complaint that “the discipline of the army cannot be maintained under such circumstances,” and he had a way of issuing orders to Johnston’s subordinates without regard for the normal chain of command. In January Mr. Benjamin in this way nearly drove Stonewall Jackson out of the Army.
Jackson, who by now was a major general, and a difficult man to handle in his own right, commanded under Johnston in the Shenandoah Valley, and around the first of the year he marched west to maneuver the Federals out of the town of Romney. Having done this he returned to Winchester, leaving Romney occupied by a division under the Brigadier General Loring whom Lee had found so touchy during the fall campaign. The winter was cold and snowy and things at Romney were dull, and Loring and his officers were discontented; they sent a round robin complaint to the War Department, and Benjamin promptly wired Jackson that Loring’s command was in danger of capture and must be withdrawn. Jackson at once obeyed, after which he sent in his resignation, explaining that “with such interference in my command I cannot expect to be of much service in the field.” In the end, largely because of the active intervention of General Johnston and Virginia’s Governor Letcher, the business was smoothed over, Jackson withdrawing his resignation and Benjamin tacitly agreeing that the Secretary of War ought not to issue direct tactical instructions to officers in the field. (Benjamin had never really meant any harm; he simply wanted to be accommodating to some unhappy constituents.) But the affair remained in General Johnston’s little black book as one of many points of complaint against the Secretary.7
Now, with the crisis of the war approaching, there began a steady deterioration in the relationship between General Johnston and President Davis.
In the summer Johnston had made, and lost, a sharp argument concerning his proper rank, since which time his attitude toward Mr. Davis had been correct but somewhat distant. His acrid disagreements with Secretary Benjamin had made his attitude toward the President still more reserved; after all, Mr. Davis supported Mr. Benjamin in these disputes. Now the question of the best way to use Johnston’s army caused the President and the general to drift still farther apart. Each man was a bit thorny, ready to take offense and to meditate on the offense after taking it, and although their basic ideas about the military problem were much the same they differed about the ways in which those ideas should be expounded and put into effect. They began to misunderstand one another, and misunderstanding presently bred mistrust; and before spring came General Johnston and his government were under the same sort of cloud that was settling down upon General McClellan and the government in Washington.
In mid-February Mr. Davis asked Johnston to come to Richmond to confer on a matter so highly secret that it could not be discussed by mail. Johnston came down and met with the President and cabinet on February 19 and 20, and Mr. Davis told him what he had just told the cabinet—that the army in northern Virginia must be withdrawn: McClellan would advance before long, and Burnside would doubtless come up through Norfolk, and all available troops must be within supporting distance of the capital. Johnston had already written that his position was dangerously exposed and inadequately manned, and he agreed to the withdrawal readily enough; but he argued that before he could retreat he must send to the rear a number of heavy guns, a great quantity of supplies, and an inordinate amount of camp baggage and equipment, and the water-soaked roads were so abominable just now that it was impossible to move even field artillery, to say nothing of siege guns and a huge wagon train. For the moment he was totally immobilized, and he did not see how he could move at all until winter ended and the roads became dry.8
Apparently misunderstanding began here. Johnston wrote that although no formal order was issued there was a general understanding that “the army was to fall back as soon as possible,” and a few days later he wrote to the President about “the progress of our preparations to execute your plans.” But Mr. Davis was not at all sure that the plans were his; he felt that they were, in fact, General Johnston’s, and he had a different idea as to what they actually called for. He hoped that when Johnston got rid of his heavy equipment he might even move forward on the offensive (provided, of course, that his army could be reinforced) and the President evidently believed that Johnston was not to retreat without first consulting Richmond. Some time later Mr. Davis wrote that when the retreat was made Johnston was so poorly informed about the terrain in his rear that he did not know how to select a new position—which, said Mr. Davis, “was a great shock to my confidence in him” and indicated that “he had neglected the primary duty of a commander.”9
General Johnston, meanwhile, got a shock of his own. The projected retreat was of course the gravest of military secrets; but when Johnston returned to his hotel, immediately after leaving the office of the President on February 20, he met a colonel who gave him an interesting rumor he had just picked up in the lobby: the cabinet was talking about moving the army back from Centreville. The next day Johnston met another acquaintance—an unfortunate who, the general explained, was too deaf to overhear anything not intended for his ears—who had picked up the same story the same evening. Thus the strategic discussion which was so highly confidential that the President had not even wanted to write a letter about it in advance had leaked out of the White House with miraculous speed; so that the substance of it was circulating in a hotel lobby before Johnston himself got there.10
This may have had long-range consequences. One of the items about which Mr. Davis complained the most, as he and General Johnston drew farther apart, was the fact that General Johnston was so very reticent about his military plans. He would not discuss these, except in the broadest and most general terms, and this reticence was one of the things which finally made it impossible for the two men to work together at all. Johnston was a reserved sort to begin with, and it seems altogether likely that his experience in Richmond on February 20 confirmed him in the instinctive belief that it just was n
ot safe to discuss military secrets with civilians—not even with the civilian who was at the head of the government.
But all of that was for the future, and what mattered immediately was different. Confidential news might go all across town on the first winds that blew, President and general might disagree on what was to be done and on the reasons for doing it, storing up much personal bitterness, one man against the other; yet underneath all of this the Confederacy, blindly but effectively, was this winter making up its collective mind that it would go on with the war in spite of recent disasters. What the people of the North had done after Bull Run the people of the South were doing now: drawing new determination out of humiliation and defeat, discarding unthinking arrogance and preparing to see the war as it actually was and not as it had been ignorantly imagined.
The editor of a newspaper called The Telegraph, in the town of Washington, Arkansas, called the turn when he summed up the lesson that had been taught by the disaster at Fort Donelson. The people of the South, he said, had committed the classic error of those who go to war overconfidently: “We have despised the enemy and laughed at their threats, until, almost too late, we find ourselves in their power.” He went on: “We have allowed our chivalry to cool most wonderfully, while we have been pluming ourselves on being ‘the superior race,’ and when our wives or sisters did some noble, self-sacrificing act, wondering ‘if such a people could ever be conquered.’ The wonderment has been expressed again and again even ad nauseam, and now it is answered. They may be. Not by force of arms, but from decay of chivalry and innate love of ease.” He suggested that it was time to buckle down to it.11
