The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (28 page)

Thus as the military campaigning season of 1863 opened, the Confederacy had reason for renewed faith in French friendship and hope for intervention. As it happened, though, Napoleon remained a step or two ahead of the Southerners. His mediation gesture of January 1863 was precisely that—a gesture, more rhetorical than real, designed to placate French politicians. As for the Mexican venture, it was primarily a pawn in the Emperor’s Austrian diplomacy; he schemed to trade Mexico to Austrian Prince Maxmilian in exchange for territorial concessions in Italy and thus reemerge as savior and guarantor of
Risorgimento.
But Napoleon was nothing if not flexible. The French, like the British, were prepared to respond to Southern victory; and like the British, Napoleon kept his options open in 1863 while surveying the rival armies.
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Perhaps the ultimate reality of the Southern diplomatic circumstance displayed itself, not in Europe or Mexico, but closer to home, among nations much less sophisticated than Britain and France. On August 12, 1861, Confederate commissioner Albert Pike concluded one of several treaties between his government and elements of the “Five Civilized Tribes” living in Indian territory (Oklahoma). Among quaint-sounding articles that forbade stealing horses and going “upon the warpath” was a pledge on the part of the Confederate government that the Indians would not “henceforward… be in any wise troubled or molested by any power or people, State or person whatever.”
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Pike, a resourceful and knowledgeable emissary, made sound suggestions to President Davis on Indian policy. The Indians sought protection against the United States, Pike pointed out, and as long as the Confederates could provide that protection, the tribes would be loyal allies. In fact Indian forces fought for the South at Pea Ridge in March of 1862, and elsewhere. But after the Confederate defeat at Pea Ridge, the South was never again in a position to prevent Northern invasion of Indian territory. The United States pressed its advantage, and the Indians lost enthusiasm for the Southern cause.
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The Confederate-Indian situation was bluntly instructive. As in other foreign relations, the Confederacy’s hopes ultimately marched with its armies, and so it was involved in a vicious diplomatic circle. To secure recognition and aid both in Europe and North America, the Confederacy had to win on the battlefield, and the surest way to win on the battlefield was to win foreign recognition and aid. The South’s sometime allies in Indian territory paid no homage to King Cotton, nor did they respond to incidents touching national pride and face. They, like others among the world’s peoples, did respond to power or the lack of power. Consequently they recognized and assisted the Confederacy in rough accord with the South’s capacity to return the favor.

D
URING the early months of 1863 as the Confederacy marked the second anniversary of its founding and the first year of its permanent government, the new nation appeared to be normal. The Southern nation had endured, indeed prevailed, for two campaigning seasons without the loss of truly critical land or battles. And even though the war went on, Confederate prospects in 1863 looked far more hopeful than they had in 1862. At Richmond a distinguished foreign visitor, Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, found an orderly government and “at least as much difficulty in gaining access to the great men as there would be in European countries.” On the surface at least the South seemed to have achieved wartime stability.
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Yet beneath this superficial stasis the Confederacy was far from normal. The continued strain of wartime exposed new flaws in the fabric of Confederate nationality. On January 6, 1863, for example, Dodson Ramseur’s division of Lee’s army marched through Richmond with many of its members barefoot. No wonder that in 1863 the Confederate Patent Office issued four separate patents for wooden shoe soles; shoes were a small matter until men had to march without them.
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The new challenges which beset the Confederacy in 1863 were, more accurately, new versions of old challenges. They called for novel responses which transformed the Confederate South still more from its ante-bellum origins. Jefferson Davis faced a new political crisis with a Congress whose members faced their own political crises in upcoming fall elections. Southern soldiers and civilians encountered increasing shortages of supplies and provisions, and the Confederate government confronted a shortage of specie and a declining faith in inflated treasury notes. And Southern armies again faced Northern invasions during another campaigning season. These circumstances, whether interpreted as chronic problems or crises, clamored for resolution as the year 1863 began.

President Davis’ new political difficulties had begun back in the fall of 1862 with his cabinet. George W. Randolph had been a capable secretary of war. By October 1862, Randolph had impressed upon Davis and Richmond officialdom the significance of the west as a theater of military operations and had argued successfully for some relaxation in the departmental command structure.
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Beyond the Appalachians, Randolph perceived, the war demanded a fluidity too often unappreciated in Richmond. But when he attempted to act on his enthusiasm by shifting some troops in the western command without consulting the President, Davis responded by reminding Randolph of the relative powers of commander-in-chief and secretary of war. Randolph resigned in haste on November 15, and Davis accepted the resignation in greater haste. When Randolph described the war secretary’s job as that of a “chief clerk,” the quarrel became public and the antiadministration press elaborated upon the theme.
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To cope with the situation, Davis installed General Gustavus W. Smith in the War Office ad interim and cast about for Randolph’s replacement. On November 22 he gave the war portfolio to James A. Seddon and thus forestalled political crisis. Seddon was a Virginian, a disciple of Calhoun, and a staunch secessionist. He was, however, more scholar than warrior, and his sickly appearance raised questions about his capacity to sustain the work load of the War Office. But he proved to be a practical and clear-eyed administrator, bowing to the President’s expertise in military matters but contributing a large measure of common sense and efficiency in the day-to-day conduct of the war. Press and public reaction to Seddon’s appointment was generally favorable. The Richmond
Examiner
and Charleston
Mercury,
two of the administration’s most consistent critics, endorsed the new secretary, and Virginians were satisfied that one of their own was again in the cabinet.
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Although Seddon was the President’s first choice to replace Randolph, Davis had seriously considered Joseph E. Johnston. The Virginian general had spent most of the campaigning season of 1862 recovering from wounds sustained at Seven Pines, and just about the time that the Randolph-Davis squabble came to crisis, he reported himself fit for duty. What Johnston wanted most was command of the Army of Northern Virginia, which he still considered his own. That army was now Lee’s, but Johnston did merit an important command, and even though the General and the President had had their differences, Davis held Johnston’s generalship in high esteem. Seddon had much to do with the solution to the problem of finding a use for Johnston, and in so doing built upon Randolph’s legacy of concern for coordination of the western command. In late November, Seddon and Davis decided to make a superdepartment, a theater actually, of the Confederate heartland between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, and command of this new military structure went to Johnston. The command included three field armies: Edmund Kirby Smith’s in east Tennessee, Braxton Bragg’s in middle Tennessee, and John C. Pemberton’s covering Vicksburg. Johnston’s mission was coordination. Beyond this fact, however, his duties and authority were somewhat ambiguous.
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Aware at last of problems in the western theater, Davis resolved to view the situation at first hand. He wished to confer with Bragg, inspect the armies, visit political leaders, and show himself to the people—all in the hope, as he wrote to Lee, that “something may be done to bring out men not heretofore in service, and to arouse all classes to united and desperate resistance.”
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Traveling first to Murfreesboro, where Bragg stood between two Federal armies at Nashville and Chattanooga, Davis made a speech to the troops, then, with commanding General Johnston in tow, hurried on to visit Pemberton at Vicksburg. On December 26 he addressed the Mississippi legislature and a few days later returned to Richmond, stopping on his way to consult with local leaders and test the climate of public opinion.
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Returning to the capital on the night of January 5, Davis found to his surprise a band and a modest crowd at the station. The occasion demanded a speech, and Davis rose to the occasion with accounts of Southern heroism, tales of Yankee atrocities, and exhortations to greater patriotism which stirred his audience. Yet through the speech ran a current of estrangement between President and people; Davis spoke as a visitor to the city in which he had lived for nearly two years. He protested that “constant labor in the duties of office, borne down by care, and with an anxiety which has left me scarcely a moment for repose, I have had but little opportunity for social intercourse among you,” and concluded with the hope “that at some future time we shall be better acquainted.”
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As President, Jefferson Davis led the Southern revolution as capably, perhaps, as any man could have led it, but his political personality had severe limitations, and Confederate Southerners had to look beyond him to find inspiration for the cause.
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While the President was traveling to Richmond, Bragg’s army fought a major battle at Murfreesboro on December 31, 1863.
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Bragg described the battle as a victory, and Davis accepted the word but not the fact. How was he to explain Bragg’s subsequent retreat to Tullahoma? Acting decisively Davis ordered Johnston to investigate the matter, then to take command of Bragg’s army and send the “victorious” general to Richmond to make a personal accounting. A series of circumstances having little relation to the military situation frustrated these plans, however, and Johnston’s role in the structure of command remained unclear in all but outline. Davis and Seddon probably thought of Johnston as a sort of trouble-shooter; Johnston himself believed and wrote to his friends in Congress that he had been exiled and elevated to a position of inconsequence.
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Having dealt with the politics of administration in the Randolph crisis, the politics of command in Johnson’s theater assignment, and the politics of personality in his western tour, President Davis girded himself to face the politics of politicians when Congress came back into session on January 12, 1863.

The session lasted until May, and for the first two months the Southern solons distinguished themselves more by what they did not do than by what they did. Congress debated but did not enact bills to establish a Supreme Court, seat cabinet members in Congress, create a general staff for the army, and renew the President’s authority to suspend habeas corpus. The Supreme Court and habeas corpus bills had the support of Davis and the administration, which in part explained their failure; for in an election year, congressmen were reluctant to expand the power of the central government and were sensitive to the abuses of martial law by some commanders. Even though the Confederate Constitution made provision for a Supreme Court, Congress never passed the requisite enabling legislation. Consequently ultimate judicial authority remained in the state courts instead of the central government. Still, to an amazing degree state courts in the Confederacy upheld the prerogative of the Davis government. Hence the Confederate judicial system remained fragmented in structure but centralized in substance.
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Author of the general staff and the cabinet member seating bills was Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas. The idea of permitting commanders to appoint their own staffs had considerable merit, but the merits of the bill got lost in what became a conflict of prerogative and personality between president and senator. The President had already vetoed Wigfall’s general staff proposal once, on the ground that it infringed upon presidential power, and from that moment Wigfall became an open political enemy of Davis. Wigfall reintroduced his general staff bill and offered the cabinet member seating bill as opposition measures, and as such the Senate rejected them. Thus, although the Confederate Constitution made provision for the seating of cabinet members in Congress, no member of Davis’ cabinet ever got the opportunity to explain his program to Congress in person. That was not all to the bad; cabinet members were able to escape the invective of antiadministration men like Wigfall in the Senate or Henry S. Foote in the House. But it was unfortunate that Wigfall’s general staff scheme, which could only have improved the normally poor quality of staff work in Southern armies, lost to personal rancor and Davis’ inflexibility.
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The fate of these four pieces of legislation dramatized the erosion of administration influence, erosion which increased during the remaining two years of the Confederacy’s life. That the opposition never coalesced into a party structure gave some index of its fragmentation. Ultimately antiadministration sentiment in Congress, like the attempted obstruction of national policies in some of the states, was a measure of the political metamorphosis within the Confederate South. With some allowance for individual quirks and for the limitations of Jefferson Davis’ political personality, the fundamental issue which divided the Davis government from its foes was state rights versus nationalism. In the name of wartime emergency, the Davis administration had all but destroyed the political philosophy which underlay the founding of the Southern republic. Interestingly, the Confederate Congress sometimes led the way.
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During the final month and a half of the session, Congress debated and enacted three crucial bills which expanded still further the authority of the Richmond government. In March, Congress authorized quartermaster and commissary officers to seize private property for the use of field armies.
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In reality the law merely legitimized the existing practice by which armies lived off the land when necessary. The army paid for the impressed items in accord with a War Department schedule of standard prices. Unfortunately for producers, the schedule consistently fixed prices below the open market value, and the government paid in depreciated currency. Unfortunately for civilian consumers, army agents often seized supplies en route to local markets and thus produced a scarcity of food and forage in Southern cities and towns. The impressment process, with its ills and inequities, was doubtless necessary as a supplement to the efforts of the Commissary and Quartermaster Bureaus, and though Southern civilians complained, they generally submitted to this infringement of property rights for the sake of the cause. Ironically that cause had originally included concern for the sanctity of private property in slaves, yet the act of March 26 gave sanction to the impressment of slaves as military laborers.
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Congress began debating ways and means of financing the Southern nation and its war early in the 1863 session. Secretary of the Treasury Memminger reported on January 10 what Congressmen already knew too well: the policy of financing the war by issuing treasury notes had produced rampant inflation.
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In January 1863, a gold dollar in Richmond brought three dollars in treasury notes.
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And the trend worsened every day. Yet clearly the government needed enormous amounts of money to sustain its existence. Memminger’s solution was simple and logical—for a peacetime economy. He proposed to remove as much as two-thirds of the paper money from circulation by offering to exchange non-interest-bearing notes for interest-bearing bonds.
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On March 23, Congress enacted the policy and authorized Memminger to issue each month up to $50 million in treasury notes which could be exchanged for thirty-year bonds bearing 6 percent interest.
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Under the provisions of this act the government printed more than $500 million worth of notes, the largest issue of notes ever made in the Confederacy, but the inflation rate discouraged investment in bonds, and only $21- million worth of notes were withdrawn from circulation. By January 1, 1864, a gold dollar in Richmond was worth eighteen to twenty dollars in Confederate notes, reflecting an inflation rate of over 600 percent. The wonder was that the government survived for another fifteen months thereafter.
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