Dixie Betrayed (25 page)

Informal get-togethers were fairly common as well, and the Davises sometimes hosted meals in the White House, but after a
time the president decided that government should come first, and according to Varina, “We ceased to entertain, except at
formal receptions or informal dinners and breakfasts given to as many as Mr. Davis’s health permitted us to invite.” Late
in the war, as social events were on the upswing, Varina hosted a great many of these breakfasts and luncheons. Mary Chesnut
recorded the fare included “gumbo, ducks, and olives, supreme de voaille, chickens in jelly, oysters, lettuce salad, chocolate
jelly cake, claret soup, champagne, etc., etc.”
⁶
While Jefferson Davis’s workaholic nature and frequent bouts of illness held in check the social life of the White House,
events did carry on without him. Davis also sometimes held breakfasts with cabinet members.

A
T
the end of April, the opposing eastern armies approached each other west of Fredericksburg along the Rappahannock and the
Rapidan. “Fighting Joe” Hooker marched the “finest army on the planet,” as he called it, the Federal Army of the Potomac,
westward away from Falmouth, hoping to hit Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army from the side and rear. Lee split his force, leaving
part of it facing the Federal troops positioned along the Rappahannock River at Fredericksburg and marching the other westward
to face Hooker’s main force, near the crossroads of Chancellorsville.

On April 29 Federal troops crossed the Rappahannock. At first the situation looked poor for Lee’s Southerners, who were in
danger of being crushed by the pincer movement. Lee’s army of sixty thousand, much undersupplied, faced both Hooker’s seventy-five
thousand and Sedgwick’s slowly advancing forty thousand. One-third of the enormous Union army would assault Lee’s flank and
rear; another third, under Maj. Gen. John Sedgwick, would repeat Burnside’s maneuver of attacking across the river at Fredericksburg
and plowing westward. The final third of the Federal army lay in reserve.

Rather than a Confederate disaster, however, Chancellorsville would be Lee’s masterpiece. The bold commander gambled by splitting
his army and relying on Stonewall Jackson’s corps in a crucial role. Jackson’s men smashed directly into the Union army on
May 1, unleashing a tremendous firefight. That evening Lee and Jackson held a war council, and the following day Jackson led
his troops on a fourteen-mile flank march around the Federal right. Late in the afternoon Jackson’s men struck, crushing Hooker’s
lines. “The events of the few hours of this afternoon and evening are imprinted on my memory in a grand picture,” wrote Capt.
Thomas L. Livermore of the Eighteenth New Hampshire Infantry. “I can now, and probably always shall be able to again bring
before my eyes the dusty plain bounded by long lines of men on all sides; the smoke of musketry and batteries, whose thunders
still reverberate in my ears.”
⁷
On the other side jubilation and confidence were the order of the day. Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke, a staff officer
of Maj. Gen. Jeb Stuart’s, noted, “A more magnificent spectacle can hardly be imagined than that which greeted me when I reached
the crest of the plateau, and beheld on this side the long lines of our swiftly advancing troops stretching as far as the
eye could reach, their red flags fluttering in the breeze, and their arms glittering in the morning sun; and farther on, dense
and huddled masses of the Federals flying in utter rout toward the United States Ford.”
⁸

But the emerging victory would come at a great cost to the Confederacy. While reconnoitering his troops and riding into a
patch of woods alongside the Orange Turnpike, Jackson was fired on accidentally by his own men. As described by Jackson’s
chaplain, James Power Smith, “Under this volley, when not two rods from the troops, the general received three balls at the
same instant. One penetrated the palm of his right hand and was cut out that night from the back of his hand. A second passed
around the wrist of the left arm and out through the left hand. A third ball passed through the left arm half-way from shoulder
to elbow. The large bone of the upper arm was splintered to the elbow-joint, and the wound bled freely.”
⁹
Jackson was carried off the field, his left arm amputated, and plans made to transport him by ambulance to a railroad station
and on to Richmond.

While Lee directed the battle and worried over Jackson, Hooker was having a disastrous day on the field. Not only had he ignored
the admonitions of his corps commanders regarding Confederate troop movements, convincing himself that Jackson’s men were
retreating, but the next day, leaning on a column at the Chancellorsville Tavern, which he employed as a headquarters, Hooker
was knocked to the ground when the column was hit by a shell. “General Hooker was lying down I think in a soldier’s tent by
himself,” wrote Maj. Gen. Darius N. Couch following the incident. “Raising himself a little as I entered, he said: ‘Couch,
I turn the command of the army over to you.’ . . . This was three-quarters of an hour after his hurt. He seemed rather dull,
but possessed of his mental faculties.”
¹⁰

The Confederate victory was complete. Although Sedgwick had fought his way westward from Fredericksburg and a sharp clash
erupted about Salem Church, Hooker’s force was demoralized, and he was discredited completely. With the Union army on the
retreat, Lee could celebrate a terrific triumph.

Eight days after his wounding at Chancellorsville, Jackson died at Guinea’s Station, Virginia, his last words reputedly being,
“No, no, let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” The South had lost its most celebrated general
of the hour. Much later, the Federal general Oliver O. Howard wrote, “Stonewall Jackson was victorious. Even his enemies praise
him; but, providentially for us, it was the last battle that he waged against the American Union. For, in bold planning, in
energy of execution, which he had the power to diffuse, in indefatigable activity and moral ascendancy, Jackson stood head
and shoulders above his confrères, and after his death General Lee could not replace him.”
¹¹

And of course there were other casualties. Back in Richmond many women had become nurses and administered to the sick and
wounded. One such nurse, Kate Mason Rowland, served at Winder Hospital just outside the city. In early May casualties streamed
in from the Chancellorsville battlefield. Rowland wrote:

The sick and wounded are pouring in. We all went out to the wards with lanterns, tin buckets of water and sponges and wet
the wounds, we carried a supply of lint and bandages, but with only two surgeons it was a long while before all could be attended
to. Sounds of misery greeted our ears as we entered, some groaning, others crying like children, and some too weak and suffering
to do anything but turn a grateful look upon us as we squeezed the cold water from the sponge over their stiffened and bandaged
limbs.
¹²

Meanwhile, in the western theater, the Confederate military situation appeared alarming. Along the Mississippi River the Rebel
bastion at Vicksburg was the target of Federal military operations that moved north from New Orleans and south from Tennessee.
The campaign for Vicksburg originated in the autumn of 1862, when Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant struck south along the
railroads following the battle of Corinth. The approach didn’t work, and Grant discovered that attempting to maintain long
and imperiled supply lines over this route was too problematic.

In April 1863 the stubborn Federal commander opened a second campaign to control the Mississippi. This time Grant marched
his troops south of Vicksburg, crossed the Mississippi River, and prepared to attack eastward. It was one of the most daring
military maneuvers attempted to that time, as Grant relied on long, tenuous lines of communication and planned to fight “behind
enemy lines” without sources of fresh supplies. Union Brig. Gen. Benjamin H. Grierson led a diversionary raid from La Grange,
Tennessee, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, confusing the Confederate response to the impending assaults. “Much of the country through
which we passed was almost entirely destitute of forage and provisions,” wrote Grierson. “It was but seldom that we obtained
over one meal per day. Many of the inhabitants must undoubtedly suffer for want of the necessities of life, which have reached
most fabulous prices.”
¹³

Confederate forces consisted of the garrison at Vicksburg under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton, a Northern-born officer who, nonetheless,
enjoyed the good graces of Jefferson Davis; and an army near Jackson commanded by Joe Johnston, back in commission but not
in his old post. During the first two and a half weeks in May, Grant’s men accomplished amazing feats: marching eastward following
a battle at Port Gibson, they fought and won four battles, separating the two Confederate forces, casting off Johnston into
a northward retreat, capturing the city of Jackson, and turning to attack Vicksburg from the east. It was a stunning beginning
to what became a siege of Vicksburg itself.

The fierce determination of the Federal campaign was reflected in a letter Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote toward
the end of the siege. “Vicksburg contains many of my old pupils and friends,” wrote Sherman. “Should it fall into our hands
I will treat them with kindness, but they have sowed the wind and must reap the whirlwind.”
¹⁴

In the city itself Pemberton and his strong defensive lines held off the Yankee juggernaut. Life in the city for the soldiers
and the civilians was slowly becoming unbearable, however. Food was scarce and matériel was dwindling rapidly, and the Rebel
army’s ability to fight off attacks was diminishing. The psychological effect on the Southerners was disastrous. In March
a civilian who happened to be a Northerner caught in the city wrote this diary entry: “The slow shelling of Vicksburg goes
on all the time, and we have grown indifferent. It does not at present interrupt or interfere with daily avocations, but I
suspect they are only getting the range of different points; and when they have them all complete, showers of shot will rain
on us all at once.” Soldiers and townsfolk lived in cellars, caverns, or earthen caves carved out of the landscape, approximating
crude bombproof shelters. The same diarist later penned, “The cellar is so damp and musty the bedding has to be carried out
and laid in the sun every day, with the forecast that it may be demolished at any moment. The confinement is dreadful. To
sit and listen as if waiting for death in a horrible manner would drive me insane.”
¹⁵

The suffering continued through May and June as the siege dragged on with infrequent attacks but scattered, intense fighting
along the lines north, east, and south of the city. One of the most notable attempts to break the lines occurred on May 25,
three days after the siege began. Engineers working under the supervision of Union capt. Andrew Hickenlooper, chief engineer
of the Seventeenth Army Corps, had constructed a mine under the Third Louisiana Infantry Redan, the principal fort protecting
the Old Jackson Road approach into town. On May 25 Hickenlooper exploded twenty-two hundred pounds of black powder set along
the mine, as a prelude to a massive attack.

Later Hickenlooper recalled the scene:

At the appointed moment it appeared as though the whole fort and connecting outworks commenced an upward movement, gradually
breaking into fragments and growing less bulky in appearance, until it looked like an immense fountain of finely pulverized
earth, mingled with flashes of fire and clouds of smoke, through which could occasionally be caught a glimpse of some dark
objects—men, gun-carriages, shelters, etc.
¹⁶

But still this attempt to break through the lines, and another attempt six days later, failed. The siege at Vicksburg ground
on, not one Yankee certain of the competency of the Federal commander Grant. Nor did the Confederates’ faith rest in the abilities
of Pemberton.

B
ACK
in Richmond many in the government worried greatly over the fate of Vicksburg, but the people of the South were more distracted
and heartbroken over the death of Stonewall Jackson. Charlotte Wigfall, wife of Louis Wigfall, relayed the country’s lament
over the fallen leader. “We are all saddened to the heart to-night by hearing [of] the death of our hero Jackson,” she wrote.
“It will cause mourning all over our land and each person seems to feel as if he had lost a relative. I feel more disheartened
about the war now than I have ever felt before. It seems to me it is to be interminable, and what a wretched life of anxiety
it is to look forward to!”
¹⁷

“We had great excitement here on account of Gen. Jackson’s death, and a long procession passed by Mama’s house,” wrote the
youngest Wigfall daughter, Fannie, just ten years old. She continued:

And just before it passed 3 thousand Yankees arrived [prisoners of war], and I had to walk by them nearly the whole way from
the capitol square to Mama’s house, and then as I was on the wrong side of the pavement I had to pass right through them.
Directly after the hearse went his horse came with his coat pantaloons boots, and spurs, and the flag all draped in black
crepe, and Gens. Longstreet, Elzey, and Pickett, and President Davis, and all of General Winder’s staff.
¹⁸

The Confederate president attempted to boost hopes for victory that spring. Davis told the Confederacy:

At no previous period of the war have our forces been so numerous, so well organized, and so thoroughly disciplined, armed,
and equipped as at present. Disaster has been the result of their [Union forces’] every effort to turn or to storm Vicksburg
and Port Hudson, as well as of every attack on our batteries on the Red River, the Tallahatchie, and other navigable streams.
Within a few weeks the falling waters and the increasing heat of summer will complete their discomfiture and compel their
baffled and defeated forces to the abandonment of expeditions on which was based their chief hope of subjugation.
¹⁹