Never Call Retreat (9 page)

This responsibility of course belonged to Mr. Davis, who did not dream of trying to evade it. On the matter of war aims he was completely inflexible, and no proclamation from Washington could make the slightest difference to him. The Southern struggle defined itself, and the fact that the world in which that struggle must be waged was now being redefined most drastically mattered not at all. To the end Mr. Davis would abide by the defiant sentence he had flung to the world at Montgomery, two years earlier: "All we ask is to be let alone." The only problem he would even recognize was the matter of how that aim was to be achieved. He would apply himself to military matters.

As far as the military front in Virginia was concerned there seemed no immediate ground for worry. The eternal wastage of war was creating problems of supply, transportation, and recruitment, to be sure, but these could be thought about later, or perhaps, with sufficient dedication, could simply be overridden. The encouraging point was that the Federals in the east showed no sign of coming up with a soldier who could cope with General Lee. Until they did, the President could contemplate the Virginia front with serenity.

The trouble was in the west, where the Federal advance would certainly be resumed before long. It would move with greater force than before. To meet the new advance with equal force was out of the question. The only hope lay in superior generalship. What was needed in the Mississippi Valley was the kind of strategic brilliance that, in the east, had produced the miracle of the Seven Days. To ask for that, to be sure, was to ask for a good deal, but nothing less would do. It was the President's task to find the right man and put him to work.

As a first step it was necessary to take a long look at General Braxton Bragg, whom nobody suspected of having that sort of brilliance. Mr. Davis liked General Bragg as a man and admired him as a soldier, and after the war Mr. Davis' critics complained that he clung to Bragg too long and defended him much too warmly; but the fact remains that in the winter of 1863 the President tried to remove Bragg from his command and was kept from doing it by none other than General Joseph E. Johnston.

On January 22 Johnston was inspecting the defenses of Mobile, Alabama, when he got a telegram from the President telling him to go at once to Bragg's headquarters at Tullahoma, Tennessee, stopping en route at Chattanooga to pick up a letter of instructions. Obeying, Johnston found that the letter ordered him to take soundings among Bragg's subordinates and let the President know whether Bragg had lost the confidence of his army. Obviously, the President was meditating a change in command and would base his decision largely on Johnston's report. Going on to Tullahoma, where he spent three weeks investigating, Johnston got a look at an extremely odd state of affairs.
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Bragg was under heavy criticism for the retreat from Murfreesboro, and much of it rested on the charge that he had ordered the retreat against the advice of his corps and division commanders. This was not true; the retreat had first been urged by Polk's division commanders, Major Generals B. F. Cheatham and J. M. Withers, Polk himself had endorsed their proposal, and by the time the withdrawal began there was virtually unanimous agreement that nothing else was possible. But Bragg had a genius for the maladroit, and after the battle in an attempt to quiet the criticism he made it much worse. Polling his officers on the matter of the retreat, he phrased his letter so clumsily that they considered themselves asked to say whether or not he had lost their confidence. Without a dissenting vote his corps and division commanders replied that this was unfortunately the case. They admired and respected him as a man and a patriot, they said, but they did think the army needed a new commander.
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Bragg was deeply dejected. He wrote to a friend that he feared his usefulness was impaired and confessed that he wondered "whether it would not be better for the President to send someone to relieve me," and he wrote to Mr. Davis urging him, "as a favor to myself and justice to the cause we both represent and ardently support" to disregard personal feelings and dispose of the matter for the general good. Mr. Davis bleakly commented that "it is not given to all men of ability to excite enthusiasm and to win the affection of their troops," and he added that only men who had that gift "could overcome the distrust and alienation of their principal officers."
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Mr. Davis would act after he got General Johnston's report.

It was logical to refer the case to Johnston but it was also unfortunate. Strategic planning in the west was already partly paralyzed because the general and the administration had such different ideas, and this action simply made the paralysis worse. Mr. Davis and the War Department believed that Johnston controlled the armies of both Bragg and Pemberton, with ample powers, and hence controlled the situation in the Mississippi Valley. Johnston felt that these armies were so far apart and faced such different problems that he really controlled nothing. He told his friend Senator Wigfall: "These armies cannot, in the nature of things, form one command. The mistake of the government has been, and is, trying to make them one." Richmond now was preparing to exercise the authority that Johnston thought it should have been exercising all along, but it was asking him to say what it ought to do, Johnston was proud, oddly sensitive, beset by inner resentments. The administration might not get the advice it was expecting to get.

Johnston methodically completed his investigation and then, to Richmond's surprise, reported bluntly that "the interests of the service require that General Bragg should not be removed." Bragg's generals had lost faith in him but Johnston believed that the enlisted men had not; Johnston held that the army was in very good spirits, and pointed out that its numbers were actually larger in mid-February than they had been before the battle of Stone's River—the last fact, he said, being due to Bragg's excellent system of rounding up absentees and making soldiers out of them. All in all, Johnston felt that Bragg had done well and "has just earned, if not won, the gratitude of the country." There was one additional point, which may have been controlling. If Johnston called for Bragg's removal, he himself would undoubtedly be put in the man's place; he knew that both Polk and Hardee had begged the President to take such a step. So Johnston wrote stiffly that "the part I have borne in this investigation would render it inconsistent with my personal honor to occupy that position."
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Richmond did not like Johnston's finding. Secretary Seddon wrote to him, pointing out that Johnston had ample authority to assume the direct command of either of the two armies in his department; if he did not want to displace Bragg, could he not establish himself with Bragg's army and direct all of its field operations, letting Bragg keep his present title and serve as an administrator or executive officer? As delicately as he could, President Davis made it more pointed: since Johnston already was in command in the west, "the removal of General Bragg would only affect you in so far as it deprived you of his services"; instead of taking Bragg's place, Johnston would simply be asked to get along without him. Mr. Davis was as sensitive to matters of punctilio as anybody, and he assured General Johnston: "I do not think that your personal honor is involved, as you could have nothing to gain by the removal of General Bragg." Mr. Seddon wrote a second letter, expressing his appreciation of "the nobility of spirit" which moved General Johnston and going on to make a frank appeal: "Let me urge you, my dear general, to think well, in view of all the great interests to our beloved South involved in the decision, on this line of action, and if possible make the sacrifice of your honorable delicacy to the importance of the occasion and the greatness of our cause."
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This did no good. For once the administration was handling Johnston with gloves on, and it was accomplishing nothing at all. Accordingly, on March 9, Secretary Seddon sent a flat order: "Order General Bragg to report to the War Department here for conference. Assume yourself direct charge of the army in Middle Tennessee." Johnston replied that he would obey; yet when he returned to Tullahoma he found that Mrs. Bragg was extremely ill, and he notified Richmond that he could not send Bragg off at such a time . . . and a bit later, when Mrs. Bragg recovered, Johnston himself fell ill and informed the President that inasmuch as he was unable to serve in the field Bragg's services were indispensable. In the end, Bragg kept his command.
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Like General Holmes, General Johnston had found it inadvisable to obey a direct order from Richmond.

Johnston was so guarded, and so politely formal, that about all that Richmond could understand was that he simply would not take Bragg's place as commander of the Army of Tennessee and that he did not think his existing command enabled him to do an effective job. To Senator Wigfall Johnston wrote more frankly. He told Wigfall what he had told Mr. Davis, that Bragg had done well and ought to be retained; if he must be relieved, however, Johnston thought that General Longstreet, "the senior Lieut. Gen. & highest in reputation," was undoubtedly the man for the place. He complained that Richmond did not understand the importance of central Tennessee and did not realize that the westerners in Rosecrans' army were twice as dangerous as the easterners in the Army of the Potomac; actually, troops from Virginia should be sent west to reinforce Bragg. And, for himself: if he were to have a new assignment, he wanted "to be replaced where the Yankee missiles found me"—in short, he wanted to go back to command the Army of Northern Virginia.

He expounded this thought more fully in a second letter to Wigfall. He had been told, he said, that the President and Secretary of War "think they have given me the highest military position in the Confederacy," with full control over all the armies east of the Mississippi and west of the mountains. If the job was that big, he said, "ought not our highest military officer to occupy it? It seems to me so—that principle would bring Lee here—I might then with great propriety be replaced in my old command." But he did not think the western command was actually the highest in the Confederacy; it set up a system that could not work, "it is giving each army two generals who are to command in succession," and its result could only be strategic confusion. Would not Senator Wigfall delicately convey these ideas to Mr. Seddon? It might be, of course, that Richmond would not agree and would continue to think it necessary to have one-man control of the armies in Tennessee and Mississippi. If so, "it seems to me that the assignment of Lee to this command & of me to my old army would be a good and pleasant solution of the question."
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This good and pleasant solution was never adopted, which is not surprising in view of the fact that the very existence of the Confederate government had come to depend (at least in the minds of the men who controlled that government) on the presence in Virginia of Robert E. Lee; and the paralysis in western command was not remedied, perhaps because as things stood no real remedy was possible. The central authority was too insecure and unsteady, the tradition of regional independence was too great. The inexorable pressure of the Federal armies, each one stronger than any force that could be brought against it, was driving the elements of Confederate strength apart rather than bringing them together. At the moment when Richmond found itself unable to bend Joe Johnston to its will, Johnston himself began to find that Pemberton was unmanageable; a War Department inspector sent west to study the situation reported, in April, that Johnston "receives no intelligence from General Pemberton, who ignores his authority, is mortified at his command over him and receives his suggestions with coldness or opposition."
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Yet although the Mississippi Valley was far from Richmond, it was nevertheless the place where the Confederacy could receive mortal injury, and President Davis was well aware of it. General Josiah Gorgas, emerging from a long conference with the President late in March, wrote that "he is at present evidently wholly devoted to the defense of the Mississippi and thinks and talks of little else." A few days later the President composed a letter to the several Senators and Congressmen from Arkansas, who had complained that their state was suffering invasion because too many of its troops were serving east of the river. To these men Mr. Davis tried to explain the military principle which he saw so clearly but about which he seemed able to do very little: "Our safety—our very existence—depends on the complete blending of the military strength of all the states into one united body, to be used anywhere and everywhere as the exigencies of the contest may require for the good of the
whole."
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This was admirably put; and yet this military principle cut squarely across a political principle that lay at the heart of the Confederacy's creation—the belief that a central authority strong enough to enforce such unity would be an unendurable menace to human freedom. Vice-President Stephens knew about this, and worried about it; and it seemed to him that "our President is aiming at the obtainment of power inconsistent with public liberty." Whether the public liberty thus menaced would survive total defeat in the present war was a matter to which Mr. Stephens did not address himself publicly, but he wrote to a friend: "Our country is in a sad condition; worse than the people are at all aware of. It is painful to me to look towards the future. I shrink from it as from a frightful gulf towards which we are rapidly tending."
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6. A Question of Control

ATTORNEY GENERAL EDWARD BATES was a border state moderate in his attitude toward slavery. He opposed it enough to be a Republican but not enough to seem out of place in Missouri, and Editor Joseph Medill of the Chicago
Tribune

once unkindly referred to him as a fossil taken from the quarry in error. But Mr. Bates was at least a thorough realist, and now he thought it important for people to understand exactly what war and emancipation were going to mean.