On the other side, General George Thomas—who enjoyed the distinction of never leaving the battlefield through four years of war—had placed lines of heavy artillery in the paths of the charging Confederates. In a single salvo of shattering noise, the artillery opened up and tore the advancing Confederates to shreds. The noise was so intense that it reportedly drove the rabbits mad, and they tried to crawl under prostrate soldiers for protection. A second charge penetrated the Union line west of Round Forest and succeeded in capturing one thousand prisoners and eleven guns. But still the midwesterners held Round Forest as a cigar-chomping General Rosecrans, in rumpled hat and bloodstained overcoat, rallied his forces up and down the line.
Bragg was so certain Rosecrans would retreat, weighed down as he was with many Union casualties and Confederate prisoners in tow, that he sent a victory message to President Davis: “God has granted us a happy New Year.” But Bragg’s God proved to be a New Year’s angel of darkness. Instead of retiring, Rosecrans decided to remain in the field overnight, moving his army from the Round Forest to higher ground perfectly situated for a strategic defensive position. There the Federals launched a fierce counterattack that claimed seventeen hundred casualties in little over an hour.
With a third of his troops dead, wounded, or missing, Bragg could neither follow up his tactical victory with an attack on Rosecrans’s larger army nor drive it back. Instead, badly intimidated, he called off the attack and retreated to a new position south of Murfreesboro, leaving a bloodbath behind. Clearly Lincoln was not the only president dealing with incompetent generals. Federal losses totaled 12,906 of 41,400 engaged. In proportional terms, this would prove to be the deadliest battle the North would fight. The Confederates lost 11,739 out of 34,739 engaged.
As Rosecrans’s equally savaged army fell into Murfreesboro to recover, Lincoln confronted serious problems of his own, both within his cabinet and within his eastern army. A cabinet split between Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase threatened to undermine Lincoln’s authority and respect. Radical Republican senators, working with Chase, sought to remove Seward from office and push Lincoln into total emancipation alongside total war. After listening to the senators and to his cabinet, Lincoln determined to retain both cabinet members and refuse each of their resignations. Nor was he yet ready for total emancipation.
The military leadership crisis continued. In the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln’s generals were alternatingly hesitant and arrogant at the most inopportune times, thus squandering their numerical and material superiority. Burnside was clearly incompetent, but his most likely successor, Fighting Joe Hooker, evidenced an excess of ambition and a shortage of discretion. Nevertheless, Lincoln felt he had no choice, and, on January 25, 1863, he replaced Burnside with Hooker. Knowing the disaffection that Hooker’s fellow officers felt for him, Lincoln followed up his promotion with a blistering letter of “fatherly” advice to the arrogant general:
You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not an indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm. But I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country.... I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying, that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.... Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.
12
The soldiers were not happy with the turnover in generals. For John Emerson Anderson, recently released from a Confederate prison, the verdict remained uncertain: “You may think my patriotism is shaken but I tell you no, I think if we cannot find any leader to take command of us that will lead us on to victory, there [is] little use in continuing the war. However we cannot tell what Hooker will do.”
13
Other soldiers extended their criticisms to the entire officer corps. In a letter to his wife, William Willoughby of New Haven complained:
I have just been out for Regimental Inspection by our beautiful Colonel who was beautifully drunk and who had a beautiful fight last night with one Captain Quinn of Company “G” over three or 4W.—s [whores] who they got to quarter in their Barracks through the night.... In the fight “pistols” was cocked and swords drawn. Other officers had to interfere and separate before order could be restored. A good portion of the company and Regimental Officers are a poor drunken sett of fellows wholly unfit for the position they hold. And it is not very encouraging to go into battle with such men to lead us.
14
Lincoln’s problems with the press would not go away either. Criticism of his generals and plans abounded, but often on the basis of rumor and unsubstantiated reports. The press of daily issues frequently led to incomplete and even misleading accounts of key battles. In an effort to harness irresponsible and sensationalist reporting, Hooker ordered all dispatches to be signed by their writers. But still the scurrilous reporting continued.
Because the religious press appeared weekly and was written by ministers rather than journalists, it promoted itself as superior in terms of sober reflection and accuracy. On January 8 the
New York Evangelist
carried an account of Murfreesboro under the “Course of Events” column. In the following week’s issue, three editors pointed out the advantages of a weekly print: “We think weekly papers have an advantage over the Daily. Conflicting rumors have time to be compared, and the truth to be sifted out from them all. Many of our readers have told us that they get a better idea of the General Progress of the War from the ‘Course of Events’ ... than from all the daily papers put together.”
15
But whatever truth was sifted out by virtue of delay, the avoidance of moral commentary was as characteristic of the religious press as of the secular.
Late January and early February 1863 saw one of the worst winters on record, and left both Union and Confederate armies resting and nursing their wounds. In the East Hooker was preparing his Army of the Potomac for a major spring campaign, while in the West Grant was still indecisive around Vicksburg. Moral commentary was absent, but not the commerce of war. For some time, the secular and religious press had been filled with advertisements for caskets. By 1863 another item increasingly appeared in the press: mourning clothes. Philadelphia’s
American Presbyterian
advertised that “families about putting on Mourning will find it to their advantage to examine our stock before purchasing elsewhere.”
16
On the home front, Confederate sermons continued to impress on listeners the consolation of God’s sovereignty and the demands of duty. In a thanksgiving sermon preached to the First Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, the pastor, W. Rees, spoke on the theme of divine Providence, enjoining all his hearers to depend on God rather than armies or foreign deliverers.
17
In the North, sermons on Washington’s Birthday began, for the first time, to liken Lincoln to the Founding General-Father of the nation. In a Washington’s Birthday sermon on “Loyalty,” Horace C. Hovey conceded that at the moment Lincoln was no George Washington. But emancipation represented a noble moment:
We cannot but wish that in all points there was a closer resemblance between him and the illustrious Washington. Yet coming generations may have as much occasion to bless Abraham Lincoln, as we have to bless George Washington; and the muse of History may record with equal pride his name who broke the yoke of Slavery, and whose strong arm struck off the chains of British tyranny.
18
On a more ominous note, Northern citizens were beginning to learn about life in Confederate prisons. In another Washington’s Birthday sermon, the Reverend Samuel Spear reported on a returning prisoner of war who had been imprisoned in Richmond. The prison, he noted, was
about one hundred feet in length and thirty-five feet in width, and containing in a single room some two hundred and thirty men ... furnished with no beds or blankets, and [who] live on a pint of soup salted with saltpeter and a small piece of bread, supplied twice a day. The prison is literally alive with vermin.... Such facts stir my blood. They arouse my indignation against this wicked rebellion, and against the men who are its leaders.
19
As bad as that sounded, it was nothing compared to what was coming in both Northern and Southern prisons.
While the battlefields returned a mixed verdict for the Confederacy, internal divisions caused increasing concern and represented a turning point in Confederate morale that only a military victory could offset. Davis, no less than Lincoln, desperately needed battlefield triumphs. The notion that a single party could transcend internal divisions and contentions was, by 1863, a bad joke in Southern circles. The conflicts were especially sharp in Richmond where the national government interacted with local government and Richmond’s citizenry. Everywhere there were divisions: rich and poor, pro-and anti-Davis factions, local versus Confederate governments, religious versus secular press. All began to fray under the pressure of relentless war and increasing shortages for the military and the home front.
20
Class conflict grew especially intense as currency inflated at a staggering rate, driven by speculators who profited at the painful expense of ordinary men and women whose savings dwindled in value and soon disappeared. The historian William J. Kimball observes that “by the end of 1862 there were obviously two distinct classes of people in wartime Richmond ... the haves and the have nots.”
21
These class tensions exacerbated tensions raised by military defeats and would only grow worse.
Dissent and contention did not signal an erosion of Confederate nationalism or capitulation to Unionist sentiment as some historians have claimed.
22
But they did eliminate the myth that one party could preclude deep divisions or that the Confederacy could transcend politics and stand as a model of unity. Just as the Davis administration could no longer speak for the people at large, or even the state and local governments, so neither magistrates nor ministers could any longer claim to speak for the poor in all their interests.
23
As scarcity fell unevenly on the population, many laborers sank into a depression that questioned the Confederacy.
Economic tensions further strained Richmond society and prompted ethnic discrimination. Wages did not keep up with inflation, even while the salaries of city officials increased by a total of more than 200 percent. Despite their self-righteous criticisms of Grant’s anti-Semitism, the South was no better. Judah Benjamin was Davis’s most loyal cabinet member and a model of religious tolerance for Southern Christian apologists. But his appointment did not prevent Jew-baiting among the general populace.
With spring, an exasperated and wildly anti-Semitic war clerk, J. B. Jones, exclaimed: “Oh the extortioners! General Winder has issued an order fixing the maximum price of certain articles of marketing, which has only the effect of keeping a great many things out of market. The farmers have to pay the merchants and Jews their extortionate prices.... It does more harm than good.” Elsewhere Jones observed, “The president is thin and haggard; and it has been whispered on the street that he will immediately be baptized and confirmed. I hope so, because it may place a great gulf between him and the [Jewish] descendants of those who crucified the Saviour.”
24
Clearly Jones wanted Jews to go away from Richmond as badly as Grant wanted Jews expelled from contact with the Northern armies.
Jones observed that after January 1863 Davis was “rarely seen in the streets now.” Instead Davis frequented St. Paul’s, leading Jones to conclude: “I am rather inclined to credit the rumor that he intends to join the church. All his messages and proclamations indicate that he is looking for a mightier power than England for assistance.”
25
In fact, Davis did convert, and the conversion was a sincere search “for a mightier power.” Like many of his generals and his Northern counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, Davis found religion increasingly significant as the battles raged on. In all these cases, conversion was preparation for martyrdom and death, and it translated into terms of “no surrender.”
CHAPTER 22
“AS SAVAGE AS SAVAGES”
N
ationalism endured in the Confederacy, but the optimism contained in the Confederate jeremiad could no longer hold the unquestioned loyalty of the secular press and politicians as the suffering continued. Although the ministry invented a rhetoric of sacred nationhood around the ritual conventions of the fast and the thanksgiving day, they could not fix its meanings nor shape a cohesive and consensual Confederate ideology that automatically absorbed alternative visions. Defeats and disappointments inevitably strained unanimity among the populace and challenged the unquestioned supremacy of the clergy as moral authorities.
At the beginning of the war, Southern pulpits and the secular press had been engaged in a common enterprise: banging the drum for a “Christian” and “manly” war effort. But the strains on the Confederate government in the midst of total war and the social stresses upon a rapidly transforming capital city could not smooth over ideological differences among various factions for long.
For some, “Christian” and “manly” became separated. The new political function for the church and religious role for the state, especially in times of military defeat or internal discord, did not ring true. Vicious political battles over Confederate policy, public discontent over the moral decline of the wartime Confederacy, economic profiteering, hoarding, social breakdown—all flagrantly contradicted the spiritual and national consensus called for on fast days.