The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (129 page)

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In their first reports of Gettysburg, southern newspapers hailed the battle as a climactic triumph. “A brilliant and crushing victory has been achieved,” the Charleston
Mercury
exulted on July 8, and two days later the Richmond
Examiner
informed its readers that the Army of Northern Virginia, with upwards of 30,000 prisoners in tow, was on the march for Baltimore. Presently, when it was learned that the graybacks had withdrawn instead to the Potomac, these and other southern journals assured the public that there was “nothing bad in this news beyond a disappointment”; Lee, whose “retrograde movement” had been “dictated by strategy and prudence,” was “perfectly master of the situation.” Though the victory “had not been decisive” because of “the semblance of a retreat,” the outcome of the Pennsylvania conflict remained “favorable to the South.” Not until the last week of the month did the
Examiner
refer to the “repulse at Gettysburg.” By that time, however, the
Mercury’s
editor had also come full circle and like his Richmond colleague had recovered, through hindsight, his accustomed position as an acid critic of the Administration’s conduct of the war. “It is impossible for an invasion to have been more foolish and disastrous,” he pronounced.

For the most part, Lee’s weary soldiers were content to leave such public judgments to the home-front critics, but privately there were some who agreed with the angry Carolinian. They had been mishandled and they knew it. “The campaign is a failure,” a Virginia captain wrote home on his return to native soil, “and the worst failure the South has ever made. Gettysburg sets off Fredericksburg. Lee seems to have become as weak as Burnside. And no blow since the fall of New Orleans had been so telling against us.” News of the loss of Vicksburg, which the strike across the Potomac had been designed in part to prevent, served to deepen the gloom, especially for those whose lofty posts afforded them a long-range view of the probable consequences. Longstreet, for example, wrote years later, looking back: “This surrender, taken in connection with the Gettysburg defeat, was, of course, very discouraging
to our superior officers, though I do not know that it was felt as keenly by the rank and file. For myself, I felt that our last hope was gone, and that it was now only a question of time with us.” Officials in Richmond also were staggered by the double blow, and of these perhaps the hardest hit was Seddon, who had put his faith in Johnston. Nowadays, according to a War Department clerk, the Secretary resembled “a galvanized corpse which has been buried two months. The circles around his eyes are absolutely black.” Others about the office were as grim, particularly after reading the preliminary reports of the commanders in the field. “Gettysburg has shaken my faith in Lee as a general,” R. G. H. Kean, chief of the Bureau of War, recorded in his diary on July 26. “To fight an enemy superior in numbers at such terrible disadvantage of position in the heart of his own territory, when the freedom of movement gave him the advantage of selecting his own time and place for accepting battle, seems to have been a great military blunder. [Moreover] the battle was worse in execution than in plan.… God help this unhappy country!” Two days later another high-placed diarist, Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas, who had worked brilliantly and hard to provide the enormous amounts of matériel lost or expended, west and east, confessed an even darker view of the situation. “It seems incredible that human power could effect such a change in so brief a space,” he lamented. “Yesterday we rode on the pinnacle of success; today absolute ruin seems to be our portion. The Confederacy totters to its destruction.”

The one exception was Davis, who neither contributed to nor shared in the prevailing atmosphere of gloom that settled over the capital as a result of the triphammer blows struck by the Federals east and west. It was not that he failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation, the extent and intensity of the danger in both directions. He did. “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence,” he admitted in mid-July. Rather, it was as if defeat, even disaster, whatever else it brought, also brought release from dread and a curious inverse lift of the spirit after a time of strain which had begun with Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi River and the death of Stonewall Jackson. Visitors to the White House in mid-May found him “thin and frail and gaunt with grief,” and the tension increased tremendously when Vicksburg was besieged and Lee started north on June 3, the President’s fifty-fifth birthday. Mrs Davis said afterwards that throughout this time her husband was “a prey to the acutest anxiety”: so much so, indeed, that he found it nearly intolerable to have to wait deskbound in Richmond while his and the nation’s fate was perhaps being decided in Pennsylvania and far-off Mississippi. He yearned for the field, a return to his first profession, and like Lincoln—who would declare somewhat later, under a similar press of anxiety: “If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself”—he considered personal intervention. At any rate he expressed
such a hope aloud, if only to his wife. “If I could take one wing and Lee the other,” she heard him say one hot June night, “I think we could between us wrest a victory from those people.” But that was not to be, either for him or his opponent, though presently there was disquieting news from Bragg and Buckner that Rosecrans and Burnside were on the march in Middle and East Tennessee, and hard on the heels of this came the first vague reports of Lee’s retreat and Pemberton’s surrender. Moreover, on July 10, when Vicksburg’s fall was officially confirmed and Lee reported his army marooned on the hostile northern bank of the Potomac, bad news arrived from still another quarter. Beauregard wired that the enemy had effected a sudden lodgment on Morris Island; Fort Wagner had not been taken, the Creole declared, but the build-up and the pressure were unrelenting. Three days later, however, with Bragg in full retreat and the possible loss of Charleston increasing the strain on the President’s frayed nerves, word came from Lee that his army was over the swollen river at last and back on the soil of Virginia, unpursued. Davis seized upon this one gleam of brightness in the gloom, and the clerk who had noted the black circles around Seddon’s eyes recorded in his diary: “The President is quite amiable now. The newspaper editors can find easy access and he welcomes them with a smile.”

There was more to this than a grasping at straws, though of course there was that as well; nor was his smile altogether forced, though of course it was in part. Davis saw in every loss of mere territory a corresponding gain, if only in the sense that what had been lost no longer required defending. Just as the early fall of Nashville and New Orleans had permitted a tighter concentration of the Confederacy’s limited military resources and had given its field commanders more freedom of action by reducing the number of fixed positions they were obliged to defend, so might the loss of the Mississippi make the defense of what remained at once more compact and more fluid. What remained after all was the heartland. Contracted though its borders were, from the Richmond apex south through the Carolinas to Savannah on the Atlantic and southwest through East Tennessee and Alabama to Mobile on the Gulf, the nation’s productive center remained untouched. There the mills continued to grind out powder, forge guns, weave cloth; there were grown the crops and cattle that would feed the armies; there on the two seaboards were the ports into which the blockade-runners steamed. In the final analysis, as Davis saw it, everything else was extra—even his home state, which now was reduced to serving as a buffer. Besides, merely because the far western portion of the country had been severed from the rest, it did not follow that the severed portion would die or even, necessarily, stop fighting. In point of fact, some of the advantages he saw accruing to the East as a result of the amputation might also obtain in the Transmississippi, if only the leaders there were as determined as he himself was. Accordingly, after making himself accessible to the Richmond
editors so that they might spread these newest views among the defenders of the heartland, he took as his first task next day, July 14, the writing of a series of letters designed to encourage resolution among the leaders and people whose duties and homes lay beyond the great river just fallen to the Union.

Of these several letters the first went to Kirby Smith, commander of that vast region which in time would be known as Kirby-Smithdom. “You now have not merely a military, but also a political problem involved in your command,” Davis told him, and went on to suggest that necessity be made a virtue and a source of strength. Cut off as it was, except by sea, the Transmississippi “must needs be to a great extent self-sustaining,” he wrote, urging the development of new plants in the interior to manufacture gun carriages and wagons, tan leather for shoes and harness, and weave cloth for uniforms and blankets, as well as the establishment of a rolling mill for the production of ironclad vessels, “which will enable you in some contingencies to assume the offensive” on the Arkansas and the Red. In any case, he added, “the endurance of our people is to be sorely tested, and nothing will serve more to encourage and sustain them than a zealous application of their industry to the task of producing within themselves whatever is necessary for their comfortable existence. And in proportion as the country exhibits a power to sustain itself, so will the men able to bear arms be inspired with a determination to repel invasion.… May God guide and preserve you,” the long letter ended, “and grant to us a future in which we may congratulate each other on the achievement of the independence and peace of our country.” This was followed by almost as long a letter to Theophilus Holmes, the only one of Smith’s three chief subordinates who had suffered a defeat. Far from indulging in criminations for the botched assault on Helena, the details of which were not yet known in Richmond, Davis chose rather “to renew to you the assurance of my full confidence and most friendly regards.… The clouds are truly dark over us,” he admitted, but “the storm may yet be averted if the increase of danger shall arouse the people to such a vigorous action as our situation clearly indicates.” Nor were the military leaders the only ones to whom the President wrote in this “darkest hour.” He also addressed himself, in a similar vein of encouragement, to Governors Harris Flanagin of Arkansas, Francis R. Lubbock of Texas, and Thomas C. Reynolds of Missouri. And having received from Senator R. W. Johnston a gloomy report of dissatisfaction in Arkansas, including some talk of seceding from the sundered Confederacy, he replied on this same July 14: “Though it was well for me to know the worst, it pained me to observe how far your confidence was shaken and your criticism severe on men who I think deserve to be trusted. In proportion as our difficulties increase, so must we all cling together, judge charitably of each other, and strive to bear and forbear, however great may be the sacrifice and bitter
the trial.… The sacrifices of our people have been very heavy both of blood and of treasure; many like myself have been robbed of all which the toil of many years had gathered; but the prize for which we strive—freedom, and independence—is worth whatever it may cost. With union and energy, the rallying of every man able to bear arms to the defense of his country, we shall succeed, and if we leave our children poor we shall leave them a better heritage than wealth.”

In urging these Westerners to “judge charitably of each other, and strive to bear and forbear,” he was preaching what he practiced in the East in regard to Lee and Pemberton. Both had come under a storm of criticism: especially the latter, who not only had suffered a sounder defeat, but also had no earlier triumphs to offset it. So bitter was the feeling against him in the region through which he marched his Vicksburg parolees on their way to Demopolis, Alabama—a scarecrow force, severely reduced by desertions which increased with every mile it covered—that the President was obliged in mid-July to detach Hardee from Bragg, despite the touch-and-go situation in Tennessee, and send him to Demopolis to gather up the stragglers and assume the task of remolding them into a fighting unit. This left Pemberton without a command, though he had been exchanged and was available for duty. In early August, Davis wrote him a sympathetic letter: “To some men it is given to be commended for what they are expected to do, and to be sheltered, when they fail, by a transfer of the blame which may attach. To others it is decreed that their success shall be denied or treated as a necessary result, and their failures imputed to incapacity or crime.… General Lee and yourself have seemed to me to be examples of the second class, and my confidence has not been diminished because ‘letter writers’ have not sent forth your praise on the wings of the press. I am no stranger to the misrepresentation of which malignity is capable, nor to the generation of such feeling by the conscientious discharge of duty.” However, it was no easy thing to find employment for a discredited lieutenant general. Bragg at first expressed a willingness to take him, but presently, having conferred with his officers, reported somewhat cryptically that it “would not be advisable.” Pemberton returned to Richmond, and after waiting eight months for an assignment, appealed to the Commander in Chief to release him for service “in any capacity in which you think I may be useful.” Davis replied that his confidence in him was unimpaired—“I thought and still think that you did right to risk an army for the purpose of keeping command of even a section of the Mississippi River. Had you succeeded none would have blamed; had you not made the attempt, few if any would have defended your course”—but ended, two months later, by accepting the Pennsylvanian’s resignation as a lieutenant general, at which rank he was unemployable, and by presenting him with a commission as a lieutenant colonel of artillery, the rank he had held in that same branch when he first crossed
over and threw in with the South. In this capacity Pemberton served out the war, often in the thick of battle, thereby demonstrating a greater devotion to the cause he had adopted than did many who had inherited it as a birthright.