The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (39 page)

Thus Lee would remain with the Army of Northern Virginia and necessarily compete with Johnston for manpower and resources with which to conduct the campaigns of 1864. When Johnston joined the Army of Tennessee at Dalton, he found that he had begun the competition at a significant disadvantage. Although Davis had assured him that his new command was in fine fighting trim, Johnston found out otherwise. Bragg’s old subordinates were still divided into hostile camps along pro-and anti-Bragg lines, and the troops were in pitiful condition physically and mentally. Johnston met this challenge characteristically. He complained to Davis and about Davis to others; but he also began putting an army together at Dalton. He offered amnesty to deserters and furloughs to the faithful in the ranks. He occupied his subordinates constructively with the collection and movement of much-needed supplies and with the reinstitution of order and discipline. Before long, members of the Army of Tennessee were again fighting among themselves—this time however with snowballs and renewed
esprit.
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Meanwhile in Richmond Davis addressed the more basic problem of expanding the ranks for the 1864 campaigning season. When Congress assembled on December 7, 1863, Davis urged immediate attention to measures designed to swell the draft. He also urged passage of a law to employ free blacks and slaves in noncombatant military duties formerly performed by soldiers. Eventually the Congress did authorize use of 20,000 black Confederates as cooks, teamsters, laborers, nurses, and the like,
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and eventually Congress revised significantly the Conscription Act. At Davis’ request the new law, passed February 17, 1864, severely limited the number of draft exempt categories and expanded the military age limits from eighteen to forty-five to seventeen to fifty. The most significant feature of the new act, however, was the vast prerogatives it gave the President and War Department to control the South’s labor pool. By cutting drastically the number of legal exemptions from the military, the Congress gave the administration power to allocate manpower through the system of military details. In effect the law said that if the War Office deemed a man’s contribution to the economy worth more than his service as a soldier, the government could draft him and send him back to his work or farm as a soldier on special assignment. In theory at least the law gave to the administration the power to manage totally the Southern economy as it related to labor.
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In practice the Conscription Act of 1864 came to quite a bit less. The fact was that the South’s manpower reserve was fairly well depleted, and many of those who remained subject to the draft resisted conscription to the point of violence. Despite renewed efforts on the part of the Conscription Bureau, inefficiency characterized its operations and undermined still more the confidence of Confederates in their government. Thus the results of the new law were disappointing. An estimated 15,820 conscripts joined the South’s armies between January 1 and April 1, 1864. About as many volunteered during that period in indirect response to the conscription program. Yet during the same time the Conscript Bureau exempted 26,000 and detailed 13,000 more—generating a net loss for the military. Most significant was the fact that on June 30, 1864, the sum total of the present-for-duty strength in all Confederate armies was no more than 200,000. That figure was 30,000 to 40,000 less than the total strength at the end of 1863 and perhaps 100,000 less than Confederate strength a year earlier. And the Southern total was roughly one-third that of the enemy’s.
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Mercifully, these depressing figures and ratios were unknown to Confederates in the winter of 1863–1864. But many Southerners had a pretty good intuitive grasp of the numerical odds against them, and those in the armies had first-hand experience with the growing disparity in strength. During December of 1863 one Southern officer, especially, subjected the dilemma to searching analysis and proposed a radical solution. That officer was Patrick Cleburne, a division commander in the Army of Tennessee. A native of Ireland, Cleburne had emigrated to the United States in 1849. He settled in Helena, Arkansas, and by 1856 was an established local lawyer. He began his Confederate military career as captain of the “Yell Rifles” and advanced on the strength of aggressive achievement to major general in command of a division. “The Stonewall Jackson of the West,” as his admirers described him, was a bold fighter, and in December 1863, Cleburne proved himself an equally bold thinker.
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On the evening of January 2, 1864, at a meeting of general officers of the Army of Tennessee, Cleburne presented his prepared brief. He began by painting a vivid, gloomy picture of his country’s position and prospects. Southerners had poured out blood and treasure for nearly three years in what appeared to be a losing cause. Defeat alone loomed, and defeat would mean destruction of everything sacred to Southerners including the very memory of their struggle and sacrifice. Three factors were most influential in producing the South’s sad circumstance: the Confederacy lacked soldiers, the South lacked supplies, and “slavery, from being one of our chief sources of strength at the commencement of the war, has now become, in a military point of view, one of our chief sources of weakness.” To remedy these deficiencies at one stroke, Cleburne proposed “that we immediately commence training a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves, and further that we guarantee freedom within a reasonable time to every slave, in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy in this war.” Cleburne continued for some pages to justify his solution in terms of military, economic, propaganda, and moral values. He asserted, “As between the loss of independence and the loss of slavery, we assume that every patriot will freely give up the latter—give up the Negro slave rather than be a slave himself.”
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“Cleburne’s Memorial” was not the first suggestion by a Confederate to arm Southern slaves. In fact, during 1861 several groups of free black Southerners offered themselves as soldiers to the Confederate War Department, and although the War Office rejected each of these applications, some blacks did serve in the Southern armies. Already in 1863 a number of individual Confederates and the Alabama legislature had recommended to the Richmond government enlistment of slave soldiers.
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Before Cleburne, however, no one had advanced so comprehensive a plan, and no one had seriously proposed universal emancipation as Confederate policy. Cleburne was not, however, an isolated farmer; he was a respected general officer with more than enough combat and administrative experience to lend credence to his military judgments.

Predictably, as soon as Cleburne concluded reading his paper a heated debate ensued among his colleagues. The debate was inconclusive, and Johnston, the commanding general, made it more so by deciding not to forward Cleburne’s Memorial through channels to Richmond. One of Cleburne’s severest critics, however, Georgian general W. H. T. Walker, did request a copy of the “incendiary” document from the author and sent it directly to the President with a letter expressing appropriate outrage. Meanwhile Cleburne’s proposition remained for a time an open, substantive question among the officer corps in the Army of Tennessee. Unfortunately it then became a political question, and Cleburne’s “brother officers” tended to divide over the issue in rough accord with the old pro-and anti-Bragg factionalism.
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Davis received Walker’s letter and a copy of Cleburne’s Memorial on January 28 and immediately decided to close the debate. Next day War Secretary Seddon wrote Johnston to order “suppression, not only of the memorial itself, but likewise of all discussion and controversy respecting or growing out of it.” Seddon and Davis had “no doubt … of the patriotic intents of its gallant author,” but “the agitation and controversy which must spring from the presentation of such views by officers high in public confidence are to be deeply deprecated.” From this point Cleburne’s proposal inspired little or no discussion of its merits. The controversy survived, however, in
ad hominem
attacks and counterattacks among officers of the Army of Tennessee. Although Cleburne scrupulously remained a noncombatant in this rancorous campaign, he suffered from it. Three times within the next eight months Cleburne was passed over for command of an army corps and promotion to lieutenant general. In each case less distinguished, less controversial men received the honors.
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Cleburne’s ideas, however, persisted. Even though Davis dismissed Cleburne’s radical suggestion in January of 1864, he could not avoid the fundamental question it raised. If choice were necessary, would Southerners choose slavery or independence? For the moment, the President and others hoped never to have to make the choice, but having already sacrificed much of that which had called the Confederacy into being, Davis and other Southerners had now to wonder about the limits of sacrifice and the goal of national independence.

Even while Cleburne pondered what for Southerners might be the ultimate sacrifice, the President and his Congress were attempting to sustain and extend corporate sacrifices already made. From a considerable wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth during the winter session of 1863–1864 emerged four significant pieces of legislation in addition to the new Conscription Act.

With less difficulty than he expected Davis got a new law authorizing suspension of habeas corpus. The authority which had lain in limbo for almost a year conferred upon the President, the Secretary of War, and the commanding general of the Trans-Mississippi Department power to detain traitors and to refuse to deliver their prisoners to civil authorities. Thus the centralizing and nationalizing tendencies of the Richmond government were again upheld at the expense of individual liberties and state rights.
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As expected, Congress paid much attention to the Confederacy’s economic peril. On February 17, 1864, a new tax bill became law. The new levy was especially severe regarding personalty and provided some relief to agricultural interests by allowing the 5 percent tax on arable land to be deducted from the tax in kind. For the most part, however, the tax law merely extended the program enacted in 1863 and called forth further material sacrifice from Confederates in order to maintain the war effort.
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On the same day that the new tax law passed, Congress responded at Treasury Secretary Memminger’s urging to the deepening currency crisis in the nation. The plain fact was that despite inducements, Confederates were not exchanging treasury notes for interest-paying, noncirculating bonds. Accordingly the notes continued to circulate, and paper money threatened to flood the country as the government’s printing presses continued to roll. The solution, Memminger believed, was to force the exchange of notes for bonds in order to reduce the amount of paper in circulation. Congress agreed and on February 17 enacted a “Compulsory Funding Measure.” The law said in effect that note holders who failed to exchange treasury paper for bonds would suffer devaluation by as much as one-third of the face value of their notes. By this means Memminger and Congress hoped to reduce the amount of currency in circulation by as much as two-thirds. The scheme failed. It failed because Southerners did not exchange their paper, because a new issue of notes designed to prevent too rapid a deflation only renewed the inflationary spiral, and because these fiscal manipulations only served to undermine further the confidence of the people in their government.
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The final piece of legislation in response to the new realities of national life was a law to regulate further the economy. As the blockade tightened, the administration became increasingly alarmed over nonessential cargoes “run in.” The Confederate cause seemed to demand that every hard-won import contribute to the war effort and not to private enrichment or consumer tastes. Consequently on February 6, 1864, Congress passed a law requiring that anyone exporting cotton, tobacco, or any other element of the South’s staple wealth do so only under the President’s direction, and Davis immediately required every vessel to surrender at least half its cargo space to government shipments. As a result the government in effect conducted the Confederacy’s foreign commerce during the final year of its life. Using impressed cotton and the congressional authority over blockade running, the supply agencies of the War Department practiced the nearest thing to state socialism to appear in the nineteenth century.
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The new draft, habeas corpus law, tax levy, currency-reduction legislation, and governmental blockade-running monopoly were rather drastic measures. Congress and the administration resorted to these expedients in answer to what they perceived as a crisis in the national fate. Taken together, they seem to have been acts of creative desperation. The hard truth was that law and policy could not tap resources which did not exist, and even had the Confederates been able to commit 100 percent of themselves and their property to the war effort, in 1864 this would probably not have been enough. Perhaps Congress and country could congratulate themselves as winter turned to spring in 1864 that they had made every reasonable sacrifice and sold almost every nonessential portion of the Southern soul in the name of national salvation, but many wondered with reason if even this much would be enough.
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Confederates believed that they were as prepared as they could be for the renewal of large-scale combat in the spring of 1864. The President and Secretary of War realized that the South’s military situation was precarious but continued their attempt to focus upon two fronts at the same time. Davis brought Bragg to Richmond to be a kind of chief of staff and personal advisor. Longstreet and his corps returned to Lee’s army in early April. Eventually, on May 15, Beauregard and the bulk of Confederate troops in the Carolinas concentrated also in Virginia. In late April, Davis reaffirmed Smith’s “full authority” in the trans-Mississippi over matters military and civil. Thus did Davis narrow his vision to his two remaining field armies, Lee’s and Johnston’s, and assemble his clans for a last campaign. Yet even with the concentration Davis was able to effect, the Army of Tennessee and the Army of Northern Virginia were each outnumbered by roughly two to one.
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