The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (45 page)

Southerners entered the Confederacy asserting that cotton was king. Before long they began to wonder with the editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger,
“Yes, Cotton is King, but I often times fear the King he resembles is possibly—Lear.”
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The demands of “modern” war dethroned not only King Cotton but a great deal of the South’s agrarian enthusiasm as well. The Confederacy’s economic emphasis was industrial and centrally organized from the top, the War Department. Confederate war industry sustained the South’s war effort. Agriculture not only lost priority in the Confederate mind; it failed the test of war. For a number of reasons rebel armies usually ran out of butter before they ran out of guns.

The Confederate experience upset many of the old saws about class and hierarchy in the South. The so-called solid South came unhinged amid bread riots, strikes, and dissent. War compelled the planters to reconfirm their pretensions to social leadership and forced the slaveholding class to assert its leadership on the field as well as in the fields. Too, the unsettling ways of war brought many “new people” to the fore who might have remained anonymous in peacetime.

Even though the “work ethic” held little sway among the rebels, certainly the Confederate South was not leisured. Romanticism came hard to a people involved in the reality of war. Drill sergeants and bureaucrats at least circumscribed Southerns’ vaunted individualism. Southern belles came off their pedestals and labored in hospitals and factories for the cause. In short Confederate Southerners gave up, in one way or another, most of those characteristics that they had called the Confederacy into being to protect.

By the fall of 1864 little was left to sacrifice, and many Southerners despaired. Yet even as the nation came apart and some Southerners ceased to resist their enemies, the Confederacy lived on in the steadfastness of its soldiers and the energy of national debate over slavery. In the end Southerners themselves decided for emancipation in the vain hope of national survival. Like so many other creative decisions which the Confederates made or to which they assented, the decision to arm and free black Confederates is open to more than one interpretation. Both then and now, many have said that Confederate emancipation was the desperate measure of a dying people. Like the other transforming aspects of the Confederate experience—political, economic, social, and cultural—the emancipation debate in the Confederate South is analogous to an eight-ounce glass in which there are four ounces of liquid. Of course the glass is half empty—the Confederacy was doomed from the outset by its archaic polity, society, economy, and “peculiar institution.” But the glass is also half full—the Confederate experience was a positive attempt to transcend a “peculiar” past in order to achieve Southern self-determination.

In April 1865, the Confederate struggle had but one goal: independence, the ability to exist as a people. As long as Richmond survived as a kind of embattled city-state the cause endured.

On April 2, 1865, however, Lee pronounced the capital no longer tenable. At a country crossroads appropriately named Five Forks, southwest of Petersburg, on April 1, George E. Pickett lost his division and Lee’s flank while attending a shad bake nearby. The Federals were within reach of the last rail line into the capital and were nearly astride the only escape route open to the Southern government and Lee’s army. Lee acted decisively.
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The fateful message from the front reached the telegraph room of the War Department on Sunday morning April 2 while Jefferson Davis worshiped at St. Paul’s Church a few blocks away. When the church sexton interrupted the President’s participation in the an-tecommunion service, the incident caused little alarm; Davis frequently had had to attend to government business on short notice. Davis left the church quietly and quickly. Then other members of the government began receiving messages, and before the service concluded most of the worshipers had guessed the reason. The Confederacy was about to evacuate its capital; Lee’s army was in flight.

Richmond began a difficult twenty-four hours. Davis and his government departed by train for Danville, Virginia. The Army of Northern Virginia was marching pell-mell toward the west. Lee hoped to outdistance the Federals and join Johnston for a last stand in the field. Meanwhile the capital endured chaos, riot, and fire. The chaos was perhaps natural. The riot began when hungry people broke into the government commissary to find food and when thirsty people took offense at the barrels of liquor being poured into the streets by Virginia militia. The fire was an outgrowth of chaos, riot, and the exploding shells from the armory burned by the retreating Confederates. Next morning, on April 3, Joseph Mayo, the same mayor who swore in 1862 never to give up the city, rode out in a carriage to find a Union officer to whom he might surrender.
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Meanwhile Lee’s troops forced their way west in the hopes of securing time, supplies, and a route South. Davis and his government on wheels reached Danville, and on April 4 the President issued what would be his last proclamation to the Confederate people. His thinking about such a contingency had developed since November when he had assured Congress that the nation would survive with or without a land base. The war would continue, Davis told his fellow Southerners.

We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle the memory of which is to endure for all ages…. Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating on the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible, and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free.
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The “new phase” of which the President spoke was a guerrilla phase. Davis proposed to fight on from the hills or wherever Confederates kept the faith.

Even though Davis’ ideas reversed the normal pattern of guerrilla operations and envisioned a transition from regular forces to partisans instead of the other way around, the President had some precedent for his “new-phase” strategy. The Spanish in 1807 had frustrated Napoleon and with help from the outside had thrown off their French conquerors. Davis was relying, too, upon the tradition of bushwhacking already present in the Confederate war. And there were other Southerners who shared the President’s dream.

For example Wade Hampton, successor to Stuart as commander of Lee’s cavalry, wrote to Davis:

The main reason urged for negotiation [for peace] is to spare the infliction of any further suffering on the people. Nothing can be more fallacious than this reasoning.
No
suffering which can be inflicted by the passage over our country of the Yankee armies can equal what would fall on us if we return to the Union.
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In a more direct vein, another cavalry general, Thomas T. Mumford, wrote orders to his dispersed brigade.

We still have a country, a flag, an army, a Government. Then to horse! … Let us who struck the last blow as an organized part of the Army of Northern Virginia strike the first with that victorious army which, by the blessings of our gracious God, will yet come to redeem her hallowed soil.
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Yet Davis, Hampton, and Mumford were among a tiny minority of Southerners who embraced a new war “to the knife.”

While the President and his party fled farther South into North Carolina, Lee’s army sought safety. As the troops marched they diminished in number. Some were captured; some were cut off from the main army; some simply went home. The crisis came at Appomattox, where, of the approximately 60,000 soldiers who had marched out of the trenches around Richmond and Petersburg, less than 8,000 remained. The Federals were in front of them and behind them in strength. Lee needed to make a decision.
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While the General pondered, an artillery staff officer offered the sort of advice Davis would have given had he been present: Let the men take to the hills, let the Confederate army become like “rabbits and partridges” in order to fight on against their enemies.

Lee was patient with the staff officer, but he had obviously considered and rejected this counsel. Partisan war was not possible, Lee maintained. “The men would not fight that way. Their homes have been overrun, and many would go to look after their families,” he said. Even more important, Lee continued:

We must consider its effect on the country as a whole. Already it is demoralized by four years of war. If I took your advice the men would be without rations and under no control of officers. They would be compelled to rob and steal in order to live. They would become mere bands of marauders, and the enemy’s cavalry would pursue them and overrun many sections they may never have occasion to visit.
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In the face of this alternative, this kind of independence, Lee preferred peace.

On April 9, the General met with Grant at Wilbur McLean’s house and surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. McLean had moved from Manassas because the war was disruptive, and he was tired of having his home used as a headquarters. Now peace came to McLean’s parlor, although in the aftermath of surrender enemy officers took away pieces of furniture from the historic room. No matter; for McLean and Lee’s army the war was over.

Ironically it was a Northern officer who best described the Army of Northern Virginia’s final parade, the march into Appomattox to stack arms. General Joshua Chamberlain, who received the formal surrender on behalf of Grant, recalled the procession which took place on April 12:

Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond….

Instruction had been given; and when the head of each division column comes opposite our group, our bugle sounds the signal and instantly our whole line from right to left, regiment by regiment in succession, gives the soldier’s salutation, from the “order arms” to the old “carry”—the marching salute. Gordon [General John B.] at the head of the column, riding with heavy spirit and downcast face, catches the sound of shifting arms, looks up, and, taking the meaning, wheels superbly, making with himself and his horse one uplifted figure, with profound salutation as he drops the point of his sword to the boot toe; then facing to his own command, gives word for his successive brigades to pass us with the same position of the manual,—honor answering honor. On our part not a sound of trumpet, nor roll of drum; not a cheer nor word, nor whisper of vainglorying, nor motion of man standing again at the order, but an awed stillness rather, a breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead!
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The Confederacy lived on, though, in the person of Jefferson Davis, and Lee dutifully reported his surrender shortly after the fact. Later, on April 20 the General wrote Davis more details of that last nightmarish week between the evacuation of Richmond and his surrender. He took some pains to speak to the issue of a “new phase” of war. “A partisan war may be continued,” Lee wrote, “and hostilities protracted causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence.”
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What Lee meant by “a separate independence” was independence within a defined place with stable relationships among people. The independence for which Davis grasped was that of a guerrilla nomad who might have to conduct reprisals against his own people. What Davis now asked was that Southerners make the ultimate sacrifice: that of themselves and their fundamental attachment to people and place. The overwhelming majority of Southerners would have none of it.

A few days after Lee explained his rejection of the partisan option, on April 25, the President ordered Joe Johnston to begin the war’s new phase. Johnston, who had conferred with Davis earlier and made clear the hopelessness of his army’s situation, received the President’s order by telegraph on the morning of April 26. Davis ordered Johnston to disband his infantry and appoint a future rendezvous for the men in order that they might continue the fight as partisans. Johnston himself was to join Davis with as many mounted troops as he could muster.
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Johnston refused. Later he explained that Davis’ order threatened the safety of the army and the people in order to secure a limited protection for the government. Like Lee, Johnston chose surrender, on April 29, instead of partisan war, and he did so in the face of a direct order to the contrary.
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Even Forrest, for whom Sherman was convinced “nothing is left … but death or highway robbery” as a guerrilla chieftain, determined to go home in peace. To his troops on May 9 Forrest pronounced the cause “hopeless” and the Confederate government “at an end.” “That we are beaten,” he stated, “is a self-evident fact, and any further resistance on our part would be justly regarded as the very height of folly and rashness.”
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Thus Davis continued his flight alone, virtually an exile in his own country. Southerners as a people had had enough of fighting; they accepted defeat. And in so doing they affirmed that culture of the folk—the primacy of people and place—that perhaps best defined them as a people. Having sacrificed or been willing to sacrifice most of the ideological tenets they went to war to defend, ultimately Confederate Southerners were willing to lose their national life in order to save life itself.
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Davis did not understand. He fled until on May 10 a small force of Union cavalry captured him at Irwinville, Georgia. Davis endured imprisonment, the threat of a trial for treason, and the stigma of defeat. He never gave up. To the end of his life, he continued to champion a cause which was long since lost. More than twenty years later he wrote in his memoir,
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,
“that the war was, on the part of the United States Government, one of aggression and usurpation, and, on the part of the South, was for the defense of an inherent, unalienable right.”
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