Never Call Retreat (47 page)

Stephens probably would have agreed—he felt that the times were so far out of joint that hardly anyone was behaving intelligently—but at the moment he believed national disaster was taking shape at the direct urging of the President, and it was hard for him to talk about anything else. Mr. Davis was calling on the Confederate Congress to pass an act suspending the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.

Mr. Davis liked this no better than any other old-line Democrat would like it, but his hand was forced.

His armies were being crippled by absenteeism—by the desertion of men already in service and by the failure of drafted men to report for duty—and six months ago he had said bitterly that there were so many of these absentees that if they all came into camp they would create something like a military millennium: that is, there would be "numerical equality between our force and that of the invaders." Since then, the situation had grown worse; yet when an unwilling man was conscripted, or an absentee was plucked from an imperfectly exempt job and ordered back to the army, some judge could almost always be found to release him on a writ. This had gone so far that Mr. Davis feared lest "desertion, already a frightful evil, will become the order of the day." He asked Congress much the same question Mr. Lincoln had raised in the Vallandigham case: "Who will arrest the deserter when most of those at home are engaged with him in the common cause of setting the government at defiance?"

There was increasing war-weariness. As Mr. Davis carefully put it, "it can no longer be doubted that the zeal with which the people sprang to arms at the beginning of the contest has, in some parts of the Confederacy, been impaired by the long continuance and magnitude of the struggle." Confederate society was supposed to be harmonious, but it unquestionably contained secret organizations through which misguided citizens worked actively for submission, reunion, and abolition. Spies kept coming and going, citizens in areas near the enemy lines were notoriously in touch with the Federal authorities, and Ben Butler was believed to be plotting with certain disloyalists in Richmond to bring about a slave insurrection. There was little jury-proof evidence, however. If suspected persons were arrested they speedily went free, as the draftees and absentees went free, on writs, and Mr. Davis felt compelled to inquire: "Must the independence for which we are contending ... be put in peril for the sake of conformity to the technicalities of the law of treason?"
²

As far as Stephens was concerned, something much more important was in peril: the sacred principle that led to secession in the first place. He not only marched to the beat of a different drum but felt that keeping in step meant more than the final destination of the march, and so he wrote dolefully: "If the pending proposition before Congress passes, to put the whole country under martial law, with the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and the President signs and enforces it, and the people submit to it, constitutional liberty will go down, never to rise again on this continent, I fear. This is the worst that can befall us. Far better that our country should be over-run by the enemy, our cities sacked and burned and our land laid desolate, than that the people should thus suffer the citadel of their liberties to be entered and taken by their professed friends."
³

Congress at last did pass the pending proposition and the President did enforce it, and to an extent the people submitted; and Stephens looked on, the doctrinaire liberal in full bloom, preferring to fail and to come to ruin rather than to try to win by inadmissible means. He brooded, and in the spring he assured Senator Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia that although he did not really hate Mr. Davis he had begun to doubt his good intentions. The President had given up too many states' rights principles, all he did was consistent with the belief that he wanted absolute power, and "My hostility and wrath (and I have enough of it to burst ten thousand bottles) is not against him or any man or men, but against the thing—the measures, and the policy which I see is leading us to despotism."
⁴

This meant little, except that what had happened in the North was also happening in the South: criticism of the President increased when military fortunes declined. Robert Toombs, who had been Secretary of State and then served for a time as a hard-to-manage brigadier general, said that real control over practically everything was falling into the hands of the President and the "old army" crowd, predicted "the entire surrender of the country, executive, legislative and judicial departments, to Mr. Davis," and said that when that happened "the cause will collapse."
⁵
The Confederate tide had for one reason and another left Toombs on the beach, which naturally irked him; equally irksome was his suspicion that the Congress seemed to be going on the beach also. It gave Mr. Davis most of the legislation he needed, but it exerted little actual power, and it broke out every so often in sharp criticism which helped neither the cause nor the status of the critics.

Typical was the effervescence of Congressman Henry S. Foote of Tennessee, whom a Richmond editor considered "a voluble debater, but afflicted with extravagance and a colicky delivery." Foote was making the rafters quiver with his denunciations of the President. He blamed Mr. Davis for the defeat at Chattanooga, and demanded a Congressional investigation of it; demanded also an investigation of the causes of the loss of Vicksburg, and an investigation of the fraud and corruption which seemed to taint the quartermaster and commissary departments; he also called upon Congress to demand the retirement of all generals who lacked the confidence of the army and the people. What he demanded, Foote did not get, one reason being that he himself unmistakably lacked stature. The House remembered an encounter he had had with Edward S. Dargan, a member from Alabama. While Dargan was speaking, Foote called out that he was a damned rascal, on which Dargan drew a bowie knife and rushed at him. Other members overpowered Dargan, wrestling him to the floor and taking away his knife; seeing which, Foote struck an attitude, smote his breast dramatically, and cried: "I defy the steel of the assassin!"
⁶

A critic of this sort could do little harm, and in the main Mr. Davis got about as much co-operation from Congress as any President is likely to get—more, in some respects, than Mr. Lincoln got in Washington. Toward the end of the war, and for that matter long afterward as well, there was a good deal of talk about an anti-Davis coalition or cabal, but the opposition in Congress was not organized and although it harassed him sorely it never seriously handicapped him. The state governors were another matter. They were jealous of their prerogatives, alert to every last paragraph of the states' rights creed, and they were not going to be stranded on any beach; when they spoke up Mr. Davis had to listen.

One who spoke sharply as 1863 closed was Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, who told the President he ought to try to make terms with the enemy.

North Carolina had done as well as any state in sending good fighting men into the Confederate armies, but before the war it had never belonged to the "Gulf Squadron," hot for secession and noisy about King Cotton, and it contained now a number of honest patriots who were both confused and tired—along with a certain number of the kind of people Mr. Davis was thinking about when he asked for suspension of the privilege of the writ. Governor Vance said that there was much discontent in the state, and he believed it probably could not be removed "except by making some effort at negotiation with the enemy." He was by no means calling for submission. He simply argued that "if fair terms are rejected" (by Washington) "it will tend greatly to strengthen and intensify the war feeling, and will rally all classes to a more cordial support of the government." If the Confederacy publicly offered to negotiate, Vance said, it would at least "convince the humblest of our citizens—who sometimes forget the actual situation—that the government is tender of their lives and would not prolong their sufferings unnecessarily one moment." He added a sentence containing a small drop of acid: "Though statesmen might regard this as useless, the people will not, and I think our cause will be strengthened thereby."

What Governor Vance proposed was entirely logical; the difficulty, as Mr. Davis promptly pointed out, was that there was nothing that the President could do about it. Offers to negotiate had in fact been made, the most recent having won Vice-President Stephens a rebuff at Hampton Roads, six months ago. The Confederacy could not make peace proposals in the ordinary way of a warring nation because the Federals simply refused to receive its envoys. The only other course Mr. Davis could think of was for the President to announce his country's desire to make peace in his messages to Congress, and this he had done from the beginning: "I cannot recall at this time one instance in which I have failed to announce that our only desire was peace, and the only terms which found a
sine qua non
were precisely those that you suggest, namely, 'a demand to be let alone.'" None of this had had any effect.

Furthermore, the Northern President had made his own position clear, as Mr. Davis pointed out: "Have we not been apprised by that despot that we can only expect his gracious pardon by emancipating all our slaves, swearing allegiance and obedience to him and his proclamations, and becoming in point of fact the slaves of our own Negroes? Can there be in North Carolina one citizen so fallen beneath the dignity of his ancestors as to accept, or to enter into conference on the basis of these terms? ... It is with Lincoln alone that we ever could confer, and his own partisans at the North avow unequivocally that his purpose in his message and proclamation was to shut out all hope that he would
ever
treat with us, on
any
terms." The only possible course, Mr. Davis concluded, was to go on fighting until the enemy was willing to admit complete defeat: "Then and not till then will it be possible to treat of peace."
⁷

It was impossible to quarrel with what Mr. Davis said; impossible, as well, to see in it anything less than the confession of a fatal handicap on statesmanship. The only negotiators now were the men with guns in their hands, because there was no longer anything for anyone else to negotiate. The very least Mr. Davis would accept was precisely the thing his opponent would not concede at any price, and if the two men had met face to face they would have had nothing to say to one another; in a sense, each man now was fighting for an unconditional surrender by the other. There was nothing to do with this war but fight it out.

The men with guns would do their best. From his camp below the Rapidan General Lee contemplated the future with hope, even though the immediate present depressed him. His army was wretchedly fed and clothed; the meat ration had been reduced again, there seemed to be no reserve stocks on hand, and the general tartly reminded Colonel Northrop that when food supplies ran short "this was the only army in which it is found necessary to reduce the rations." Joe Johnston's army, Lee found, was getting the full allowance of everything, although General Johnston was complaining that it was impossible for him to accumulate the extra stocks that would enable him to take the offensive; and the best Colonel Northrop could say was that "for months we have been living from hand to mouth." There was meat in Virginia's border counties, but the farmers refused to take Confederate money for it, and Lee suggested that the government get it by barter, sending cotton in and taking meat out. The dire nature of his need was illustrated by his comment: "I do not consider the objection that some of this cotton would find its way to the enemy as worthy of being weighed against the benefits that we would derive from adequate supplies of articles of prime necessity to the army." There was a serious shortage of shoes, blankets and clothing also, because these items were wearing out (even in the comparative inactivity of a winter camp) faster than they were being replaced. The chief trouble, of course, was the collapsing railroad system, whose condition was not improved by the railroads' inability to get repair and maintenance men detailed from the army. Service to Lee's camp was bad, and Lee warned Secretary Seddon that if it got much worse "it will be impossible for me to keep the army in its present position."
⁸

Despite these problems, when he looked to the spring Lee thought in terms of the offensive; a limited offensive, designed to avert disaster rather than to gain a victory that might win the war, but an offensive nonetheless. Early in February Lee told the President he saw two possibilities. If Longstreet's force could be reinforced and given greater mobility, Longstreet might be able to get up into Kentucky and force the Federals to recall their troops from the Chattanooga-Knoxville area. Alternatively, if Longstreet could be secretly returned to Lee, "I might succeed in forcing Gen. Meade back to Washington," which would disrupt any designs the Federals might have for an advance in Virginia. Each of these plans was modest; what Lee was thinking about was the need to put the invaders off balance. "If we could take the initiative, fall upon them unsuspectedly," he wrote, "we might damage their plans & embarrass them the whole summer." It was idle to think of anything much more substantial than this: "We are not in a condition, & never have been in my opinion, to invade the enemy's country with a prospect of permanent benefit. But we can alarm & embarrass him to some extent, & thus prevent his undertaking anything of magnitude against us."
⁸

Lee's letter to Mr. Davis, set beside Mr. Davis' letter to Governor Vance, showed what the Confederacy was up against. In a military sense it was impossible to win an unlimited victory; in a political sense it was impossible to consider anything less. It was going to be extremely hard to fit these two impossibilities together, and perhaps neither the soldier nor the statesman at that moment fully grasped the implications of the terrible divergence in their appraisals. There was only one favorable factor, and its importance would be realized only gradually—would be seen most clearly, apparently, by Joe Johnston: in November the people of the North were going to have a presidential election.