Terrible Swift Sword (27 page)

Plans
for retreat were top secret, of course, but Mr. Davis discussed the worsening
military situation in a message which went to Congress three days after the
inaugural. He confessed frankly that the government had tried to do more than
it could do and that it had run into trouble as a result. The army was not big
enough, and it was in bad shape because the expiration of the short-term
enlistments was forcing it to reorganize under the most difficult conditions.
The policy of short-term enlistments, like the government's overoptimistic
estimate of its own capacity, simply reflected the original belief that the
war would be short. Mr. Davis pointed out that he had opposed the policy and
that Congress, inspired by the people, had adopted it, but he was not disposed
to be censorious.

"It was not deemed possible," he
recalled, "that anything so insane as a persistent attempt to subjugate
these states could be made, still less that the delusion would so far prevail
as to give the war the vast proportions which it has assumed." But the
delusion had prevailed—had perhaps even grown somewhat in recent weeks—and the
army now was in such an unsettled condition that it was hard to say just how
big it actually was. (Mr. Davis would have a concrete suggestion for Congress
on this point before long.) A War Department official was admitting privately
that the Confederacy now was weaker than it had been in July 1861, and was
darkly noting that "the enemy are rapidly acquiring the character of
being better soldiers than ourselves." Joe Johnston's troop returns were
dismayingly eloquent. In December he had had, at Centreville, in the Shenandoah
Valley and along the Potomac, 62,000 effectives, present for duty; in February
he had but 47.000.
⁶

General Johnston had in fact been having
a most unhappy winter, the ordinary problems of Army command having been
intensified by two special factors—an unwise act of Congress, and the unusual
personality of the Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin.

At
the end of 1861 Congress had tackled the one-year enlistments and in a
laudable effort to help the Army had almost ruined it. Congress passed a law
providing a $50 bounty and a 60-day furlough for any soldier who re-enlisted
for three years or the duration of the war, and it specified that if he wanted
to he could shift from his own branch of the service to another—from infantry
to artillery, for instance—or move to a different company in his old branch.
Furthermore, after the re-enlistees got settled in their new units they could
elect new company and regimental officers, which of course meant that most of
the good disciplinarians would be replaced by army-politician types who would
no more speak harshly to the men under them than a Congressman would offend
his loyal constituents. So there was a general coming and going and shuffling
about such as front-line military camps rarely see or dream of; and the
crowning difficulty was that the furloughs which sent so many soldiers home
were issued, not by the army commander, but by the Secretary of War.

Mr.
Benjamin was a wealthy lawyer-politician from Louisiana, in some ways the most
brilliant man in the cabinet, unquestionably the one who best knew how to get
along with Jefferson Davis. He was of unshaken equanimity, always smiling and
yet not really easy-going either; sharing with Edwin M. Stanton the belief that
generals must be kept in their place by the civil authorities. He distributed
furloughs to General Johnston's soldiers with the easy grace of a good
politician, despite the general's complaint that "the discipline of the
army cannot be maintained under such circumstances," and he had a way of
issuing orders to Johnston's subordinates without regard for the normal chain
of command. In January, Mr. Benjamin in this way nearly drove Stonewall
Jackson out of the Army.

Jackson, who by now was a major general,
and a difficult man to handle in his own right, commanded under Johnston in the
Shenandoah Valley, and around the first of the year he marched west to maneuver
the Federals out of the town of Romney. Having done this he returned to
Winchester, leaving Romney occupied by a division under the Brigadier General
Loring whom Lee had found so touchy during the fall campaign. The winter was
cold and snowy and things at Romney were dull, and Loring and his officers were
discontented; they sent a round robin complaint to the War Department, and
Benjamin promptly wired Jackson that Loring's command was in danger of capture
and must be withdrawn. Jackson at once obeyed, after which he sent in his
resignation, explaining that "with such interference in my command I
cannot expect to be of much service in the field." In the end, largely because
of the active intervention of General Johnston and Virginia's Governor Letcher,
the business was smoothed over, Jackson withdrawing his resignation and
Benjamin tacitly agreeing that the Secretary of War ought not to issue direct
tactical instructions to officers in the field. (Benjamin had never really
meant any harm; he simply wanted to be accommodating to some unhappy
constituents.) But the affair remained in General Johnston's little black book
as one of many points of complaint against the Secretary.
⁷

Now, with the crisis of the war
approaching, there began a steady deterioration in the relationship between
General Johnston and President Davis.

In the summer
Johnston had made, and lost, a sharp argument concerning his proper rank, since
which time his attitude toward Mr. Davis had been correct but somewhat distant.
His acrid disagreements with Secretary Benjamin had made his attitude toward
the President still more reserved; after all, Mr. Davis supported Mr. Benjamin
in these disputes. Now the question of the best way to use Johnston's army
caused the President and the general to drift still farther apart. Each man was
a bit thorny, ready to take offense and to meditate on the offense after taking
it, and although then-basic ideas about the military problem were much the same
they differed about the ways in which those ideas should be expounded and put
into effect. They began to misunderstand one another, and misunderstanding
presently bred mistrust; and before spring came General Johnston and his government
were under the same sort of cloud that was settling down upon General McClellan
and the government in Washington.

In mid-February Mr. Davis asked Johnston
to come to Richmond to confer on a matter so highly secret that it could not be
discussed by mail. Johnston came down and met with the President and cabinet on
February 19 and 20, and Mr. Davis told him what he had just told the
cabinet—that the army in northern Virginia must be withdrawn: McClellan would
advance before long, and Burnside would doubtless come up through Norfolk, and
all available troops must be within supporting distance of the capital.
Johnston had already written that his position was dangerously exposed and
inadequately manned, and he agreed to the withdrawal readily enough; but he
argued that before he could retreat he must send to the rear a number of heavy
guns, a great quantity of supplies, and an inordinate amount of camp baggage
and equipment, and the water-soaked roads were so abominable just now that it
was impossible to move even field artillery, to say nothing of siege guns and a
huge wagon train. For the moment he was totally immobilized, and he did not see
how he could move at all until winter ended and the roads became dry.
⁸

Apparently misunderstanding began here.
Johnston wrote that although no formal order was issued there was a general
understanding that "the army was to fall back as soon as possible,"
and a few days later he wrote to the President about "the progress of our
preparations to execute your plans." But Mr. Davis was not at all sure
that the plans were his; he felt that they were, in fact, General Johnston's,
and he had a different idea as to what they actually called for. He hoped that
when Johnston got rid of his heavy equipment he might even move forward on the
offensive (provided, of course, that his army could be reinforced), and the
President evidently believed that Johnston was not to retreat without first
consulting Richmond. Some time later Mr. Davis wrote that when the retreat was
made Johnston was so poorly informed about the terrain in his rear that he did
not know how to select a new position—which, said Mr. Davis, "was a great
shock to my confidence in him" and indicated that "he had neglected
the primary duty of a commander."
⁹

General Johnston, meanwhile, got a shock
of his own. The projected retreat was of course the gravest of military secrets;
but when Johnston returned to his hotel, immediately after leaving the office
of the President on February 20, he met a colonel who gave him an interesting
rumor he had just picked up in the lobby: the cabinet was talking about moving
the army back from Centreville. The next day Johnston met another
acquaintance—an unfortunate who, the general explained, was too deaf to
overhear anything not intended for his ears—who had picked up the same story
the same evening. Thus the strategic discussion which was so highly
confidential that the President had not even wanted to write a letter about it
in advance had leaked out of the White House with miraculous speed; so that the
substance of it was circulating in a hotel lobby before Johnston himself got
there.
¹⁰

This may have had long-range
consequences. One of the items about which Mr. Davis complained the most, as he
and General Johnston drew farther apart, was the fact that General Johnston
was so very reticent about his military plans. He would not discuss these,
except in the broadest and most general terms, and this reticence was one of
the things which finally made it impossible for the two men to work together at
all. Johnston was a reserved sort to begin with, and it seems altogether
likely that his experience in Richmond on February 20 confirmed him in the
instinctive belief that it just was not safe to discuss military secrets with
civilians—not even with the civilian who was at the head of the government.

But all of that was for the future, and
what mattered immediately was different. Confidential news might go all across
town on the first winds that blew, President and general might disagree on what
was to be done and on the reasons for doing it, storing up much personal
bitterness, one man against the other; yet underneath all of this the
Confederacy, blindly but effectively, was this winter making up its collective
mind that it would go on with the war in spite of recent disasters. What the
people of the North had done after Bull Run the people of the South were doing
now: drawing new determination out of humiliation and defeat, discarding
unthinking arrogance and preparing to see the war as it actually was and not
as it had been ignorantly imagined.

The
editor of a newspaper called
The
Telegraph,
in the town of
Washington, Arkansas, called the turn when he summed up the lesson that had
been taught by the disaster at Fort Donelson. The people of the South, he said,
had committed the classsic error of those who go to war overconfidently:
"We have despised the enemy and laughed at their threats, until, almost
too late, we find ourselves in their power." He went on: "We have
allowed our chivalry to cool most wonderfully, while we have been pluming
ourselves on being 'the superior race,' and when our wives or sisters did some
noble, self-sacrificing act, wondering 'if such a people could ever be
conquered.' The wonderment has been expressed again and again even
ad
nauseam,
and now it is
answered.
They may be.
Not
by force of arms, but from decay of chivalry and innate love of ease." He
suggested that it was time to buckle down to it.
¹¹

In years to come, some Southern patriots
would complain that Mr. Davis was too stiff-necked and unyielding to admit that
he had made mistakes or to correct mistakes once they took place, but at this
time he was humble and thoughtful. To a correspondent in Alabama he wrote,
"I fully acknowledge the error of my attempt to defend all the frontier,
seaboard and inland," but he pointed out that the lack of men and
munitions had made an offensive policy impossible; "necessity, not choice,
has compelled us to occupy strong positions and everywhere to confront the
enemy without reserves." Everyone had supposed the Confederacy stronger
than it actually was, and it had not been possible to correct this delusion
because "an exact statement of the facts would have exposed our weakness
to the enemy." The thing to do now was to avoid vain recriminations and
get down to the task of raising a bigger army and using it aggressively.
¹²

Mr.
Davis began by reorganizing his own cabinet. He would keep Mr. Benjamin, whose
counsel seemed indispensable, but Mr. Benjamin obviously could not remain in
the War Department: Congress and the public were blaming him for the loss of
Roanoke Island, and it was clear that the man could not get along with the
generals—Joe Johnston was widely quoted as having remarked, at a Richmond
dinner table, that the Confederacy could not succeed with Mr. Benjamin as
Secretary of War. So Benjamin was made Secretary of State—R. M. T. Hunter had
left the cabinet to enter the Senate—and George W. Randolph, a grandson of
Thomas Jefferson, a former officer in the United States Navy, and a successful
lawyer and politician, went to the War Department. Thomas Bragg, who had grown
so deeply discouraged of late, was asked by Mr. Davis to resign as attorney general,
and was replaced by Thomas Hill Watts of Alabama, who had supported the
Bell-Everett ticket in 1860 but who was generally believed to be a follower of
William L. Yancey. Congress confirmed the new appointments, with some grumbling—it
did not like Benjamin at all, and a good many Congressmen would have been happy
to see Stephen Mallory replaced as head of the Navy Department—and then
Congress made its own contribution by passing a bill to provide the Confederate
states with an active general-in-chief to run all of the armies. Mr. Davis
immediately vetoed this bill, on the ground that it undercut the President's
constitutional powers, but he bent to the wind by calling General Lee to
Richmond and giving him, "under the direction of the President," control
of military operations. Final control, of course, would remain with Mr. Davis,
and no one who knew the man doubted that he would exercise it, but the move at
least brought the South's best soldier back to the capital. Lee wrote to his
wife that he could see neither "advantage or pleasure" in the new
assignment, but he accepted uncomplainingly, comforting himself with the belief
that it would eventually lead to an active command in the field. Robert Toombs
said tartly that the arrangement simply meant that Davis and Lee together would
be Secretary of War no matter who nominally held the office.
¹³