Dixie Betrayed (5 page)

Despite Northern fears of a natural Southern affinity for combat, raising the army was a huge challenge. Complicating matters,
the Provisional Congress created both the Army of the Confederate States (the regular army) and the Provisional Army of the
Confederate States (a volunteer army). The regular army was to be the permanent force, the provisional army the force required
during the present war emergency. Officers could hold commissions concurrently in both services. This instantly created an
administrative thicket, and few officers and troops ended up serving as “regulars.” Some 100,000 men were authorized as provisional
soldiers to serve either six-month or one-year enlistments. Few realized at the time how inadequate this seemingly vast number
would be.

In getting through the first bits of legislation, Davis learned he would have several vocal opponents in Congress. Chief among
them was South Carolinian Robert Barnwell Rhett. A cranky, vitriolic man by the time of the oncoming war, Rhett, sixty, had
been a lawyer in Charleston before rising to be a state legislator, attorney general of South Carolina, U.S. representative
from South Carolina, and eventually U.S. senator. A bold speaker, incredibly self-assured, he filled the Senate seat vacated
by John C. Calhoun, the firebrand of Southern politics, and quickly became a volcanic and unforgiving protector of all things
Southern. Rhett offered an odd mixture of pride, obstinacy, and extreme self-righteousness. This made him attractive to many
as a symbol of everything Southern, but was a real turnoff for many others.

Rhett—who in 1838 had pretentiously changed his name from Robert Barnwell Smith in order to add distinction—had taken on a
dual role in the conflict. In addition to leading the South Carolina radicals, he had bought the
Charleston Mercury,
installing his son and namesake as editor. As the secession crisis approached, Rhett had used the Senate dais to lash out
at Northerners who were destroying the Southern lifestyle and used the paper back home to stir up support for leaving the
old Union.

Rhett had fiery, ghostly eyes, a prominent nose, and was balding, with wisps of hair on the sides and top of his head. He
was clean shaven and had a stark, savage stare that penetrated, leaving the appearance of an evangelical preacher. Rhett had
used his amazing powers of rhetoric to play an important role at the South Carolina convention in 1860, earning him the name
“father of secession.” He argued strongly that slavery could never survive the presidency of Lincoln. But though he urged
an independent South, Rhett feared that the new Confederacy would fall victim to its politicians and would never prosper as
he imagined it could. He had no idea how right he would turn out to be.

Rhett had traveled to Montgomery as head of the South Carolina delegation. He had recently gone through a difficult personal
period, one in which his confidence and ego had received a series of blows. One of these was the death of his granddaughter
Ann “Nannie” Rhett from scarlet fever.
¹⁹
“Nannies [
sic
] departure has broken one more link which bound me to life,” he wrote. “My life appears to me to be as worthless as any body.
. . . Let us try to bow with and conform to his will—and at the foot of the cross bury all our rebellion and wrong. Pray for
me.”
²⁰

To make matters worse, Rhett’s daughter Katherine, Nannie’s mother, died shortly afterward. It was perhaps inevitable that
his heartbroken anger would search for an immediate target, and as the Montgomery landscape thawed and war became closer,
Rhett turned his attention to the new Confederate president. Charged with a bitter spirit and a devout certainty in the absolute
correctness of everything he felt, Rhett unloaded on Jefferson Davis in every way he could.

Another caustic member of the Georgia delegation in Congress was Robert Augustus Toombs. His coal black, puffy eyes and robust
physical appearance made him a man’s man and a magnetic personality for women. He was, physically, the anti-Stephens. He stood
six feet tall, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and had long, wavy hair and a bit of a beard. A vehement and overpowering
speaker, Toombs was prone to sarcasm and overstatement. He drank, smoked, gambled, and mastered an obscene vocabulary that
ranked among the most spectacular and horrifying of his time. From his earliest days he was arrogant, combative, and rebellious
toward authority.

Thanks to this combination of traits, Toombs sank to the bottom of his law class at the University of Virginia at age nineteen.
But he eventually prospered despite his limitations—and sometimes because of them. Born in 1810 in Wilkes County, Georgia,
Toombs was fifty when the war started. He was a large man who lived large. Toombs resided in a Greek Revival mansion in the
town of Washington, Georgia—the result of his success as a lawyer whose courtroom speeches often were stunning to both juries
and opponents. He had served as a captain in the Georgia volunteers battling Indians in the 1830s and was a veteran of the
Georgia House of Representatives, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, where he spent most of the 1850s
and the days immediately before Georgia’s secession.

Toombs was an ardent state rightist, a Southern radical who had been a Whig but converted in the mid-1850s to the Democratic
Party. When Lincoln was elected and secession winds blew, Toombs had balked at first, but then his hotheaded rhetoric returned,
and he had become an ardent supporter of the revolution. He had been considered by many Southerners a contender for the presidency
of the Confederacy and may have succeeded at snatching the nomination, but his excessive drinking sealed his fate. “He was
tight
every day at dinner,” wrote Aleck Stephens.

Toombs had strongly disliked losing the presidential bid to Jefferson Davis, and an afterglow of bitterness was left in the
fiery Georgian’s eyes. As a member of the Provisional Congress, his surly disposition would not be lost on others.

Loyalists to Jefferson Davis made special note of two others in town. William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, who had introduced
Davis when the man met his hour, was thought by many to be the leading fire-eater of his time. A quick-tempered, pasty-faced
man with hair that curled behind his ears, a prominent nose, and beady eyes, Yancey had killed his wife’s uncle in a fight
in 1838. Furiously in support of Southern independence, he was a native Georgian whose life had taken him to Massachusetts
under the wing of an abolitionist stepfather. Yancey’s relationship with his stepfather was far from close, and the orator
savagely attacked abolitionists in every possible public speech.

Yancey’s subsequent careers in politics and as a newspaperman led him to prominence. After stints in the Alabama state legislature
and the U.S. Congress, he gained notoriety by fighting a duel with Congressman Thomas L. Clingman, a future Confederate general.
(The duel ended in a harmless exchange of pistol shots.) He also spoke around the country. He repeatedly asked groups around
the South to “fire the Southern heart” against the hated Yankees. Considered too radical to be a delegate to the Montgomery
convention—the majority of delegates wanted to project an air of moderation—Yancey instead served as a political envoy for
Davis as the weeks passed.

A legitimate member of the Montgomery convention and subsequently of Congress, South Carolina politician Lawrence M. Keitt
had been another, with Rhett, in the forefront calling for South Carolina’s secession. Keitt was so outspoken about state
rights and hating Yankees that he had joined his friend and fellow South Carolinian Preston Brooks in the U.S. Senate when
Brooks attacked abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane in the U.S. Capitol Building in 1856. A gruff,
burly man, with intense eyes, willowy hair, and a thick beard, Keitt may have developed some of his intense hatred for Unionists
because his brother had been killed by slaves in Florida. Indeed, Keitt—like Aleck Stephens—remarked plainly about how slavery
was indeed the cause of the whole war. “It is the great central point from which we are now proceeding,” he flatly said.
²¹

Keitt, like Rhett, had made a career out of being a critic of the government, and when he found himself in session in Montgomery
under a new government, he could hardly contain himself—it was simply a way of life; his seething antigovernment feelings
couldn’t screech to a halt, even in Montgomery. They would have to be redirected—if not at Lincoln, then perhaps toward Davis.
Rhett and Keitt, after all, each entertained notions of leading the Confederacy, as did many who flocked to Montgomery. That
sense of loss coupled with personal unhappiness for Keitt, Rhett, and others was the formula for trouble ahead. Lost dreams
change people. And they change revolutions, too.

The stage had been set for disaster.

A
S
he sat in his suite at the Exchange Hotel, poring over letters coming in from all over the world, Jefferson Davis’s dreams
were rapidly coming true. He was now the leader of the newest nation on Earth. He had a large circle of advisers around him.
He had a busy Confederate Congress meeting down the street to help him push through legislation that would forge a new government.
And he had the will of the South to raise armies against the tyrannical Lincoln administration. What more could the Confederate
president want?

When journalist William Howard Russell passed through Montgomery, he sought out Davis and met him, describing his impressions
of the Confederate leader in his journal. Russell found Davis a “slight, light figure,” presented “erect and straight,” but
also “anxious,” with a “very haggard, careworn, and pain-drawn look, though no trace of anything but the utmost confidence
and the greatest decision could be detected in conversation.”
¹

Amid the tornado of creating a government, the new president had his comforts. He was both relieved and distracted by the
arrival of his family from Mississippi. In March Varina Howell Davis, now the president’s wife of sixteen years, arrived at
the Exchange Hotel along with their children, the mainstay and focus of Davis’s life. The children were Margaret Howell (“Maggie”),
age six; Jefferson Davis Jr., age four; and Joseph E. Davis, age two. A fourth child, Samuel E. Davis, had died in 1854, at
age two. Two more children would arrive during the war and be christened “babies of the Confederacy.”

The Davises all lived in the Exchange Hotel for the next few weeks. Then, in mid-April, they moved to a house two blocks away
from their first Montgomery address. Celebrated as the “First White House of the Confederacy,” this two-story clapboard, Federal-style
structure, the Edmund S. Harrison House, was leased by the Confederate Congress for use as an Executive Mansion. Varina would
quickly put her stamp on the place, decorating it and arranging things to be just the way she wanted them, suitable for the
household of the leader of a nation.

In the weeks that followed the Confederacy’s birth, Davis did his best to incite a national feeling of unity from the people
of the South, as well as to justify the South’s political stand. In Montgomery in late April, he told the Congress:

All these carefully worded clauses proved unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern States of a political
school which has persistently claimed that the government thus formed was not a compact
between
States, but was in effect a national government, set up
above
and
over
the States.

An organization created by the States to secure the blessings of liberty and independence against
foreign
aggression has been gradually perverted into a machine for their control in their
domestic
affairs.

After relating how slavery did not work economically in the North, Davis wrote that African slaves had “augmented from 600,000”
at the constitutional compact to “upward of 4,000,000.” “In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal
savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers,” he claimed, “and supplied not only with bodily comforts
but with careful religious instruction.”

“Under the supervision of a superior race,” the Confederate leader asserted, “their labor had been so directed as not only
to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of
wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people.”
²
As far as President Davis was concerned, slavery worked well for all parties involved.

U
NLIKE
the purely festive mood of Montgomery, tension plagued the Yankee capital as Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln stood before
the Capitol and was inaugurated. Sharpshooters roamed the rooftops of buildings on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s inauguration
drew throngs. Some twenty-five thousand people came to the nation’s capital to see what would happen on this most uncertain
of days. Early in the day the early March weather was cool but pleasant; later it turned “bleak and chilly.”
³
Such was the national forecast, too: both sections of the country knew they were headed for war, but few knew how fast it
might come.

Only the day before Lincoln’s inauguration, Bvt. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, still general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, had written
a note to New York politician William H. Seward, declaring that one of the options available to Lincoln was simply, “Say to
the seceded States, Wayward Sisters, depart in peace!”
⁴
But Lincoln was unlikely to entertain such an idea. He seemed firmly to believe the motto of the United States,
e pluribus unum
—“one out of many”— embodied all that America stood for. As Lincoln rode from the Executive Mansion to the Capitol beside
James Buchanan, a military guard stretched throughout the town, boarding and blocking entrance areas, nervously watching windows
along the route of travel. It was hardly a confidence builder.
⁵