The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (23 page)

External security, however, seemed the most pressing issue before the Davis government in the spring of 1862. On March 28 the President took a significant step toward improving Confederate military strength and away from the traditions of state rights and individualism characteristic of the ante-bellum South. At the urging of War Secretary Randolph, the President requested from Congress the first military draft on the North American continent. Davis proposed that “all persons residing within the Confederate States, between the ages of 18 and 35 years, and rightfully subject to military duty, shall be held to be in the military service of the Confederate States, and that some plain and simple method be adopted for their prompt enrollment and organization.”
²⁴
By April 16 the Congress had complied, and the Confederacy had a conscription act.

The act “to Further Provide for the Public Defense” obligated all white males between eighteen and thirty-five to three-years’ service or less, should the war end sooner; a second law, passed in September, raised the age limit to forty-five. Men eligible for the draft who could secure an acceptable substitute, someone otherwise ineligible, did not have to serve. Those already in service would remain, and twelve-month volunteers, the majority of the army, received a sixty-day furlough and the privilege of electing officers at the company level.
²⁵

A few days later, on April 21 Congress dealt with the most basic question regarding the draft: exemption. Obviously the government could not simply herd almost an entire generation into the field and leave no producers at home to support the Southern army. Too, certain groups of men possessing special skills or holding important positions in civil society were of more use to the cause at home than in the military. Accordingly Congress decided upon a “class-exemption” system in which all those in specific occupations were relieved of responsibility for military service. The classes of exemption included national and state officers, railroad employees, druggists, professors, schoolteachers, miners, ministers, pilots, nurses, and iron-furnace and foundry laborers. The War Department had discretionary power to grant other class exemptions in crucial industries or special circumstances.
²⁶

To enforce the conscription act the War Office first depended upon the Adjutant and Inspector General’s Office and later (December 1862) upon a separate Conscript Bureau. The law removed from the states the responsibility for recruiting and organizing units for the national army, placing this responsibility with the central government, and expanding the authority of the Davis government far beyond the power merely to raise armies. The War Department used its discretionary power to subsidize the South’s war industries. Those manufacturing establishments engaged in the production of essential materials had little difficulty securing draft-exempt labor; nonessential industries suffered from labor shortages and received little sympathy in Richmond. Exemption thus became a means to husband, channel, and organize the South’s resources not only of manpower but of material.
²⁷

Naturally the draft law and its enforcement were less than perfect, and naturally many Southerners resented on principle the departure from state rights and individual liberty that conscription represented. Some of this resentment worked to the advantage of the cause. Southern men began volunteering again, if only to avoid the stigma of conscript. Yet, for motives high-minded and mean, many Southerners resisted the draft or assisted evasion by others. The substitute and exemption systems were abused. Professional substitutes took payment from their sponsors, enlisted, deserted, and sought more sponsors. State governors frustrated the exemption process by claiming more state officers than they needed and by obstructing the conscription process. The classic example was Georgia’s Governor Joe Brown, who exempted more men than any other governor and fought conscription in the courts. President Davis wrote Brown extended letters—actually legal briefs—and in November of 1862 sent former interim Secretary of State William M. Browne on a diplomatic mission to seek the compliance of the Georgia Governor. The state Supreme Court in Georgia upheld the draft unanimously; still Brown persisted and withheld troops whenever possible.

On the other side, Conscription Bureau officers too often resembled kidnapers or at least “press gangs” in their efforts to enforce the draft. And Congress did not make the draft more palatable when in October 1862, in the name of exemption reform, it exempted owners or overseers of twenty or more slaves. This species of class exemption stimulated class conflict; Southern yeomen resented so blatant a symbol of the “rich man’s war” as “poor man’s fight.”
²⁸

In sum, conscription as practiced by the Confederacy was never what Davis asked—“some plain and simple method … for … prompt enrollment and organization.” Conscription produced only about 82,000 soldiers and more than any other issue exposed latent conflict between state and national government in the South. Further, the exemption system stirred class conflict that the would-be Southern nation did not need. Yet, without conscription, the Confederacy could never have endured the campaigning season of 1862, much less the remaining years of the war; and with conscription, the Confederacy did manage to mobilize, however imperfectly, just about the entire Southern military population. There were approximately 1,000,000 white men between eighteen and forty-five in the Confederacy. At one time or another about 750,000 of these men were Confederate soldiers. If the number of men exempted from service or detailed from service to perform some vital civilian task is added to that, the total involved in the war would very nearly approximate the South’s military population. Even so, figures on the comparative size of Confederate and Union armies reveal the numerical odds faced by the South. The following are “present-forduty” totals.

Conscription was an extreme measure, but it was doubtless necessary to keep the odds from running even more heavily against the Confederacy.
²⁹

While Davis was shuffling his administration and Congress was passing the habeas corpus and conscription acts, McClellan’s army on the Peninsula was looming larger and more ominous. Obviously, laws and cabinet changes could have no direct effect on the immediate military threat. Accordingly, the Confederate Congress made legal provision for moving the Southern capital if necessary, authorized the Treasury Department to buy cotton, sell more bonds, and print more paper money, and on April 21 adjourned.
³⁰
Some Southerners viewed the congressmen’s hasty departure from Richmond as unseemly: “To leave Richmond at the very moment of the hazard,” the
Examiner
scolded, “is not the way to encourage the army or help a cause in peril.”
³¹
Yet there was truth in the statement of Representative Lucius Dupre of Louisiana that, “People look somewhere else than to this Congress for aid.”
³²
In April 1862, the salvation of the Southern nation depended on immediate military action.

Already the Confederate military mind had begun to change. The Union successes following the Battle of Manassas clearly demonstrated that the South faced a long, multifront war. The elastic strategy of offensive defense might work, but Southern military expectations needed scaling down, and success required a more modest definition. This was evident enough in Richmond, but even on the geographical fringe of the Confederacy, in Houston, Texas, newspaper editor E. H. Cushing cited the battle of Shiloh and concluded, “There will be no decisive battle…. Let us not deceive ourselves…. It [winning independence] must be done by hard knocks, long continued against an inveterate foe. And when we have gained our freedom, there will be time enough to determine when and where the ‘decisive’ battle was fought.”
³³

Within the Confederate high command, strategic expectations were becoming more realistic and the offensive defense more elastic. Evidence of military realism appeared, for example, along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. To meet the threat to the Atlantic coastline in the deep South, President Davis sent Robert E. Lee to command a newly created department. Lee, the son of Revolutionary hero “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, had been prominent in the old army of the Union. He agonized over the secession of his native Virginia but ultimately determined that he was more Virginian than American and offered his services to Governor John Letcher. Lee commanded Virginia state troops until they and he transferred to the Confederate Service, then accepted an ambiguous command in western Virginia and spent three months trying in vain to coordinate the defense of the Kanawha Valley.
³⁴
In early November he journeyed to South Carolina just in time to witness the Federal success at Port Royal, then spent the remainder of his time as departmental commander attempting to prevent the enemy from expanding the breach made there. Lee’s actions were unpopular but successful. He essentially abandoned the coast and withdrew into the interior to concentrate his resources and draw the Federals away from their ships and floating batteries. Planters in the South Carolina and Georgia coastal lowlands reacted with understandable dismay, but Lee persisted. He constructed a viable defense line to protect the cities of Charleston and Savannah and to maintain the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. By withdrawing up the rivers, Lee was able to obstruct the passage of amphibious forces and to neutralize the superior firepower of the Union navy.
³⁵

In mid-March the President himself displayed a significant change of mind. In a letter to a circuit judge in Marion, Alabama, responding to criticism of his conduct of the war, Davis acknowledged “the error of my attempt to defend all the frontier.” He then protested that his policy was not “purely defensive” and, referring to Shiloh, explained, “The advantage of selecting the time and place of attack was too apparent to have been overlooked, but the means might have been wanting.”
³⁶
Shiloh was an example of the offensive defense—concentrate and attack—in action; but Shiloh was less than a victory, and Beauregard still lacked “means” in the west.

Perhaps Lee of all men best understood and expressed the offensive-defense concept. In a letter written in January 1863, he summarized the strategy in three sentences. “It is [as] impossible for him [the enemy] to have a large operating army at every assailable point in our territory as it is for us to keep one to defend it. We must move our troops from point to point as required, and by close observation and accurate information the true point of attack can generally be ascertained…. Partial encroachments of the enemy we must expect, but they can always be recovered, and any defeat of their large army will reinstate everything.”
³⁷

With the proper means Davis hoped for victory, but by mid-April time was short. McClellan was cautious, but he would not respect Magruder’s phantom Yorktown-Warwick line forever. Davis realized that for better or worse, he had to make some commitment before McClellan marched on Richmond.

On April 14 the President held a council of war. He had previously recalled Lee to Virginia to serve as his military advisor, so Lee and War Secretary Randolph represented the administration. Joseph E. Johnston, just returned from an inspection of Magruder’s works, came with two of his subordinates, Gustavus W. Smith and James Longstreet. Johnston’s army had retreated from Manassas to the Rappahannock River, where it could move to meet an attack from Washington or march to the peninsula with equal ease. Johnston, however, had neglected to tell the War Department his plans and had destroyed a massive amount of accumulated supplies at Manassas. Davis clearly desired no more such surprises from his main field army, and he wanted some plan agreed upon for dealing with McClellan.

The six Confederates met from eleven o’clock on the morning of the fourteenth until one o’clock on the morning of the fifteenth. Longstreet and the President said little, for Davis adopted the position of judge, and Longstreet was both hard of hearing and new to councils of grand strategy. Johnston and Smith advocated a stand at Richmond; Lee and Randolph favored a battle on the peninsula. In the end Davis announced in favor of meeting McClellan on the peninsula. Sooner or later, he reasoned, the Confederates would have to do battle with the blue host, and a siege of Richmond could have only one result: the destruction of the army and capital at once.
³⁸

Johnston was less than sanguine about his prospects. He recalled later, “The belief that events on the Peninsula would soon compel the Confederate government to adopt my method of opposing the Federal army reconciled me somewhat to the necessity of obeying the President’s order.”
³⁹
What Johnston did during the next month was march his men into Magruder’s works and then back out again, back up the peninsula to the vicinity of Richmond. Having complied with the letter, if not the spirit, of his instructions, he prepared in mid-May to fight McClellan’s army near Richmond, as he had originally intended.

The President was irked and desperate. Lee tried to mediate between the Commander and the Commander-in-Chief. Randolph packed up the War Office and prepared to supervise the evacuation of the capital. In Richmond there was wild panic for a time; Varina Davis led a sizable number of refugees who sought safety elsewhere. Among those who remained, a stoic mood surfaced; Governor Letcher and Richmond Mayor Joseph Mayo made pugnacious speeches to mass meetings, and the city’s newspapers published bold editorials.
⁴⁰