The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (165 page)

Not that the citizens themselves were cold or unfriendly. “The streets along the line of procession were thronged with people anxious to get a look at the President,” a
Courier
reporter wrote. “The men cheered and the ladies waved their handkerchiefs in token of recognition.” Proud of their resistance to Du Pont’s and Dahlgren’s iron fleet, as well as of their standing up to Gillmore’s long-range shelling—which had recently begun anew, after a respite of about a month—they were pleased that the Chief Executive had come to praise their valor and share their danger. Flags were draped across the fronts of homes and buildings, and garlands of laurel stretched from the city hall to the courthouse, supporting a large banner that bid him welcome. This was Davis’s first Charleston visit since the spring of 1850, when he had accompanied the body of John C. Calhoun from Washington to its grave in St Philip’s churchyard, and he recalled that sad occasion when he spoke today from the portico of the city hall. In saluting the defenders of Sumter, he had special praise for the fort’s commander, Major Stephen Elliott, and predicted that if the Federals ever took the city they would find no more than a “mass of rubbish,” so determined were its people in their choice of whether to “leave it a heap of ruins or a prey for Yankee spoils.” (“Ruins! Ruins!” the crowd shouted.) “Let us trust to our commanding general, to those having the charge and responsibilities of our affairs,” Davis said, with a sidelong glance at Beauregard, and he added a note of caution, as he had done in all his speeches this past month: “It is by united effort, by fraternal feeling, by harmonious co-operation, by casting away all personal considerations … that our success is to be achieved. He who would now seek to drag down him who is struggling, if not a traitor, is first cousin to one; for he is striking the most deadly blows that can be [struck]. He who would attempt to promote his own personal ends … is not worthy of the Confederate liberty for which we
are fighting.” In closing, he thanked the people and assured them of his prayers “for each and all, and above all for the sacred soil of Charleston.”

At the reception held afterwards in the council chamber, people inquired of one another whether they had noticed that the President, after singling out Major Elliott for praise, not only had failed to congratulate Beauregard for his skillful defense of the city by land and water, but also had not mentioned him by name. Indeed, except for that one sidelong reference to “our commanding general,” when the crowd was advised to put its trust in those in charge, Old Bory might as well not have been in Charleston at all, so far as Davis was concerned. Most of those present had noted this omission, which could scarcely have been anything but intentional, it seemed to them, on the part of a man as attentive to the amenities as the President normally was. Certainly Beauregard himself had felt the slight, and it was observed that he did not attend a dinner given that evening in Davis’s honor by former governor William Aiken in his house on Wragg’s Square. In point of fact, the general had already declined an invitation two days earlier. “It would afford me much pleasure to dine with you,” he had told Aiken, “but candor requires me to inform you that my relations with the President being strictly official, I cannot participate in any act of politeness which might make him suppose otherwise.” However, even if he had accepted earlier, he most likely would not have attended a dinner honoring a man who had just given him what amounted to a cut direct. Hard on the heels of the brief reference to him in the speech, moreover, had come the allusion to complainers as cousins to traitors, and this perhaps infuriated the Creole worst of all, touching him as it did where he was tender. Unburdening his feelings to a friend, he protested that Davis had “done more than if he had thrust a fratricidal dagger into my heart! he has
killed
my
enthusiasm
for our holy cause! … May God forgive him,” he added; “I fear I shall not have charity enough to pardon him.”

Although Davis saw little or nothing of the general out of hours, according to a friendly diarist he spent a pleasant week as the former governor’s house guest, “Beauregard, Rhetts, Jordan to the contrary notwithstanding.… Mr Aiken’s perfect old Carolina style of living delighted him,” the diarist noted, not only because of “those old grey-haired darkies and their automatic, noiseless perfection of training,” but also because it afforded him the leisure, while resting from the rigors of his journey, to hear firsthand accounts of the unsuccessful but persistent siege-in-progress. Gillmore had resumed his bombardment from Cummings Point a week ago, on October 26, and while at first it had been as furious as before, it presently slacked off to an intermittent shelling. An occasional big incendiary projectile was flung at Charleston, but mostly he concentrated his attention on Sumter, chipping away at the upper casemates until it began to seem to observers that the fort, daily reduced in height as debris from the ramparts slid down the outer walls, was sinking
slowly beneath the choppy surface of the harbor. The defenders were on the alert for another small-boat assault, but none was attempted; Gillmore and Dahlgren, it was said, were unwilling to risk a recurrence of the previous fiasco, though each kept insisting that the other should try his hand at reducing the ugly thing. To the Confederates, however, the squat, battered pentagon was a symbol of their long-odds resistance, and as such it took on a strange beauty. An engineer captain wrote home of the feelings aroused by the sight of its rugged outline against the night sky, lanterns gleaming in unseen hands as work crews piled sandbags on the rubble, sentinels huddled for warmth over small fires in the casemates. “That ruin is beautiful,” he declared, and added: “But it is more than this, it is emblematic also.… Is it not in some respects an image of the human soul, once ruined by the fall, yet with gleams of beauty and energetic striving after strength, surrounded by dangers and watching, against its foes?”

Nor, as might have been expected with the resourceful Beauregard in charge, had the garrison’s efforts been limited entirely to the defensive. Using money donated for the purpose by Charlestonians, the general had had designed and built a cigar-shaped torpedo boat, twenty feet long and five feet wide, powered by a small engine and equipped with a ten-foot spar that had at its bulbous tip a 75-pound charge of powder, primed to explode when one of its four percussion nipples came in contact with anything solid, such as the iron side of a ship. Manned by a crew of four—captain and pilot, engineer and fireman—she was christened
David
and sent forth after sunset, October 5, to try her luck on the blockading squadron just across the bar. Her chosen Goliath was the outsized
New Ironsides
, the Yankee flagship that had escaped destruction back in April when the boiler-torpedo, over which Du Pont unwittingly stopped her during his attack, failed to detonate. Undetected by enemy lookouts, the
David
made contact with her spar-tip charge six feet below the
Ironsides’
waterline, but the resultant explosion threw up a great column of water that doused the little vessel’s fires when it came down and nearly swamped her. As she drifted powerless out to sea, the jolted bluejackets on the ironclad’s deck opened on her with a heavy fire of musketry and grape, prompting all four of her crew to go over the side. Two of these were picked up by the Federals, the captain as he paddled about in the darkness and the fireman when he was found clinging next morning to the
Ironsides’
rudder; they were clapped in irons and later sent North by Dahlgren to be tried for employing a weapon not sanctioned by civilized nations. Nothing came of that, however; they presently were exchanged, for the captain and a seaman from a captured Union gunboat, and sent back to Charleston. The other two had been there all along. Returning to the half-swamped
David
after the firing stopped, the pilot found that the engineer had been clinging to her all this time because he could not swim. They relighted her fires with
a bull’s-eye lantern and, eluding searchers on all sides, steamed back into the harbor before dawn. As for the
New Ironsides
, she had not been seriously damaged, the main force of the underwater explosion having fortunately been absorbed by one of her inner bulkheads. After a trip down to Port Royal for repairs to a few leaky seams, she soon returned to duty with the squadron—though from this time on, it was observed, her crew was quick to sound the alarm and open fire whenever a drifting log or a floating patch of seaweed, or less comically an incautious friendly longboat, happened near her in the dark.

Firsthand knowledge of such events as this brief sortie by the
David
, even though it failed in its purpose, and of such reactions to destruction as those of the engineer captain to the ruins of Sumter, even though no response could be made to the diurnal pounding, served to strengthen Davis’s conviction that the South could never be subdued, no matter how much of its apparently limitless wealth and strength the North expended and exerted in its attempt to bring her to her knees; Charleston, for him, was proof enough that the unconquerable spirit of his people could never be humbled, despite the odds and the malignity, as it seemed to him, with which they were brought to bear. He stayed through November 8—his fifth Sunday away from the national capital and his wife and children—then returned the following day to the Old Dominion. Lee, he learned on arrival, was falling back across the Rapidan, having suffered a double reversal two nights ago at Kelly’s Ford and Rappahannock Bridge. Davis did not doubt that the Virginian would be able to hold this new river line, whatever had happened along the old one; his confidence in Lee was complete. His concern was more for what might happen around Chattanooga, for he now was informed that Bragg, while continuing to maintain that the weather prevented a strike at the newly opened Federal supply line on his immediate left, had been quick to adopt the suggestion that Longstreet be sent against Burnside, far off on his right, thereby reducing his army by one fourth.

On the face of it, that did not seem too risky, considering the great natural strength of his position, but others as well as Davis saw the danger in that direction, not only to Bragg but also to the authority that had backed him in the recent intramural crisis. Davis had everywhere been “received with cheers” on his journey, a War Department diarist observed. “His austerity and inflexibility have been relaxed, and he has made popular speeches wherever he has gone.… The press, a portion rather, praises the President for his carefulness in making a tour of the armies and forts south of us; but as he retained Bragg in command, how soon the tune would change if Bragg should meet with a disaster!” No one understood this better than Davis, who still believed that the best defense against a Federal assault, even upon so impregnable a position as the one held by the Army of Tennessee, would be for Bragg to knock the enemy in his immediate front off balance with an offensive of his
own, and this seemed all the more the proper course now that it was known that the man in command at Chattanooga was Grant, who had made the worst sort of trouble for the Confederacy almost everywhere he had been sent, so far in the war. Accordingly, two days after his return to Richmond, being still immersed in a mass of paperwork collected in his absence, Davis had Custis Lee send Bragg a reminder of this point of view. “His Excellency regrets that the weather and condition of the roads have suspended the movement [on your left],” Lee wired, “but hopes that such obstacles to your plans will not long obstruct them. He feels assured that you will not allow the enemy to get up all his reinforcements before striking him, if it can be avoided.” The President, Lee added, stressing by repetition the danger in delay, “does not deem it necessary to call your attention to the importance of doing whatever is to be done before the enemy can collect his forces, as the longer the time given him for this purpose, the greater will be the disparity in numbers.”

Unlike Davis, who twice in the past eleven months had visited every Confederate state east of the Mississippi except Florida and Louisiana, addressing crowds along the way and calling for national unity in them all, Lincoln in two and one half years—aside, that is, from four quick trips on army business: once to confer with Winfield Scott at West Point, twice to see McClellan, on the James and the Antietam, and once to visit with Joe Hooker on the Rappahannock line—had been no farther than a carriage ride from the White House. He had made no speeches on any of the exceptional occasions, being strictly concerned with military affairs, and for the most part even the citizens of Washington had not known he was gone until after he returned. This was not to say that he had not concerned himself with national unity or that he had made no appeals to the people in his efforts to achieve it; he had indeed, and repeatedly, in messages to Congress, in proclamations, and in public and private letters to individuals and institutions. One of the most successful of these had been his late-August letter to James Conkling, ostensibly an expression of regret that he was unable to attend a rally of “unconditional Union men” in his home town of Springfield, but actually a stump speech to be delivered by proxy at the meeting. John Murray Forbes, a prominent Boston businessman, had been so impressed with the arguments therein advanced in support of the government’s views on the Negro question—“a plain letter to plain people,” he called it—that he wrote directly to Lincoln in mid-September, suggesting that he also set the public mind aright on what Forbes considered the true issue of the war. “Our friends abroad see it,” he declared; “John Bright and his glorious band of European republicans see that we are fighting for Democracy, or (to get rid of the technical name) for liberal institutions.… My suggestion then is that you should seize an early opportunity, and
any subsequent chance, to teach your great audience of plain people that the war is not North against South, but the
People
against the
Aristocrats
. If you can place this in the same strong light that you have the Negro question, you will settle it in men’s minds as you have that.”