The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville (162 page)

Meanwhile, there were the odds to face, and Davis faced them. He did not know what future combinations were being designed for the Confederacy’s destruction, but he knew they would be heavy when they came. Here in the East, Lee could be trusted to cope with whatever forces the Union high command might conceive to be his match. Likewise in the Transmississippi, though the outlook was far from bright, Hindman’s improvisations, Magruder’s theatrical ingenuity, and Taylor’s hard-working common sense gave promise of achieving at least a balance. It was in the West—that region between the Blue Ridge and the Mississippi, where Federal troops had scored their most substantial gains—that the Commander in Chief perceived the gravest danger. Whether Johnston would prove himself another Lee, coördinating the efforts of his separate armies in order to frustrate those of his opponents, remained to be seen. So far, though, the signs had not been promising. A gloom had descended on the gamecock general, who seemed more intent on acquiring troops from outside his department than on setting up a system for the mutual support of those within it. Also, there were continuing rumors of dissension in Bragg’s army. All
this seemed to indicate a need for intervention, or at any rate a personal inspection, by the man who had designed the new command arrangement in the first place. Davis had not been more than a day’s trip from Richmond since his arrival in late May of the year before, but now in early December he packed his bags for the long ride to Chattanooga and Vicksburg. Thus he would not only see at first hand the nature of the problems in the region which was his home; he would also provide an answer to those critics who complained that the authorities in the capital had no concern for what went on outside the eastern theater.

One drawback this had, and for Davis it was of the kind that could never be taken lightly. The trip would mean another separation from the family he had missed so much while they were in North Carolina for the summer. “I go into the nursery as a bird may go to the robbed nest,” he had written his wife in June, and he added: “My ease, my health, my property, my life I can give to the cause of my country. The heroism which could lay my wife and children on any sacrificial altar is not mine.” For all the busyness and anxiety of those days and nights when McClellan’s campfires rimmed the east, the White House had seemed to him an empty thing without the laughter of his sons and the companionship of the woman who was his only confidante. “I have no attraction to draw me from my office now,” he wrote, “and home is no longer a locality.”

In September they returned, to his great joy. Mrs Davis found him thinner, the failing eye gone blinder and the lines grooved deeper in his face. “I have no political wish beyond the success of our cause,” he had written her, “no personal desire but to be relieved from further connection with office. Opposition in any form can only disturb me inasmuch as it may endanger the public welfare.” But the critics were in full bay again as the fall wore on, including his own Vice President, and it was clear to his wife that he was indeed disturbed. At the outset, back in Montgomery, he had spoken of “a people united in heart, where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole.” Lately this evaluation had been considerably modified. “Revolutions develop the high qualities of the good and the great,” he wrote, “but they cannot change the nature of the vicious and the selfish.” He had this to live with now, this change of outlook, this reassessment of his fellow man: with the result that he was more troubled by neuralgia than ever, and more in need of his wife’s ministrations. Present dangers, front and rear, had given even pretended dangers an increased reality and had added to his sympathy for all sufferers everywhere, including those in the world of light fiction. One day, for example, when he was confined to bed with a cloth over his eyes and forehead, she tried to relieve the monotony by reading to him from a current melodramatic novel. He was so quiet she thought he was asleep, but she did not stop for fear of waking him.
As she approached the climax of the story, wherein the bad man had the heroine in his power and was advancing on her for some evil purpose, Mrs Davis heard a voice exclaim: “The infernal villain!” and looking around saw her husband sitting bolt upright in bed, with both fists clenched.

Whether this was the result of too much imagination, or too little, was a question which would linger down the years. But some there were, already, who believed that nothing except short-sightedness could hide the eventual outcome of the long-odds struggle from anyone willing to examine the facts disclosed in the course of this opening half of the second year of conflict. Senator Herschel V. Johnson of Georgia, Stephen Douglas’s running-mate in the 1860 election and now a prominent member of the Confederate Congress, replied to a question from a friend in late October: “You ask me if I have confidence in the success of the Southern Confederacy? I pray for success but I do not expect success.… The enemy in due time will penetrate the heart of the Confederacy … & the hearts of our people will quake & their spirits will yield to the force of overpowering numbers.” He saw the outcome clearly, and he found it unavoidable. “The enemy is superior to us in everything but courage, & therefore it is quite certain, if the war is to go on until exhaustion overtake the one side or the other side, that we shall be the first to be exhausted.”

Whether or not this would be the case—whether the South, fighting for such anachronisms as slavery and self-government, could sustain the conflict past the breaking point of northern determination—Davis did not know. Much of what his dead friend Albert Sidney Johnston had called “the fair, broad, abounding land” had already fallen to the invaders. How much more would fall, or whether the rising blue tide could be stemmed, was dependent on the gray-clad men in the southern ranks and the spirit with which they followed their star-crossed battle flags. Just now that spirit was at its height. “We may be annihilated,” the first soldier of them all had said, “but we cannot be conquered.” Davis thought so, too, though he offered no easy solutions in support of his belief. Now in December, as he prepared to leave on his journey to the troubled western theater, he could only repeat what he had told his wife in May: “I cultivate hope and patience, and trust to the blunders of our enemy and the gallantry of our troops for ultimate success.”

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“Our cause, we love to think, is specially God’s,” the Connecticut theologian Horace Bushnell told his Hartford congregation. “Every drum-beat is a hymn; the cannon thunder God; the electric silence, darting victory along the wires, is the inaudible greeting of God’s favoring
word.” His belief that the evil was all on the other side was based on a conviction that war had come because willful men beyond the Potomac had laid rude hands on the tabernacle of the law. “Law … is grounded in right, [and] right is a moral idea, at whose summit stands God, as the everlasting vindicator.” Thus the logic came full circle: “We associate God and religion with all we are fighting for, and we are not satisfied with any mere human atheistic way of speaking as to means, or measures, or battles, or victories, or the great deeds to win them.”

The assertion that this was a holy war—in fact, a crusade—was by no means restricted to those who made it from a pulpit. “Vindicating the majesty of an insulted Government, by extirpating all
rebels
, and fumigating their nests with the brimstone of unmitigated Hell, I conceive to be the holy purpose of our further efforts,” a Massachusetts colonel wrote home to his governor from Beaufort, South Carolina, and being within fifty airline miles of the very birthplace of rebellion, he added: “I hope I shall … do something … in ‘The Great Fumigation,’ before the sulphur gives out.” Just what it was that he proposed to do, with regard to those he called “our Southern brethren,” he had announced while waiting at Annapolis for the ship that brought him down the coast. “Do we fight them to avenge … insult? No! The thing we seek is
permanent
dominion. And what instance is there of permanent dominion without changing, revolutionizing, absorbing, the institutions, life, and manners of the conquered peoples?… They think we mean to take their
Slaves
. Bah! We must take their
ports
, their
mines
, their
water power
, the very
soil
they plough, and develop them by the hands of our
artisan
armies.… We are to be a regenerating, colonizing power, or we are to be whipped. Schoolmasters, with howitzers, must instruct our Southern brethren that they are a set of d—-d fools in everything that relates to … modern civilization.…
This army must not come back
. Settlement, migration must put the seal on battle, or we gain nothing.”

Tecumseh Sherman, biding his time in Memphis—where sharp-eyed men with itchy palms had followed in the wake of advancing armies, much as refuse along the right-of-way was sucked into the rearward vacuum of a speeding locomotive—threw the blame in another direction. “The cause of the war is not alone in the nigger,” he told his wife, “but in the mercenary spirit of our countrymen.… Cincinnati furnishes more contraband goods than Charleston, and has done more to prolong the war than the State of South Carolina. Not a merchant there but would sell salt, bacon, powder and lead, if they can make money by it.” So the volatile red-haired general wrote, finding his former nerve-jangled opinion reinforced by the difficulties since encountered all along the fighting front. “If the North design to conquer the South, we must begin at Kentucky and reconquer the country from there as we did from the Indians. It was this conviction then as plainly as now that made
men think I was insane. A good many flatterers now want to make me a prophet.”

Prophet or not, he could speak like one in an early October letter to his senator brother: “I rather think you now agree with me that this is no common war.… You must now see that I was right in not seeking prominence at the outstart. I knew and know yet that the northern people have to unlearn all their experience of the past thirty years and be born again before they will see the truth.” None of it had been easy thus far, nor was it going to be any easier in the future. The prow of the ship might pierce the wave, yet once it was clear of the vessel’s stern the wave was whole again: “Though our armies pass across and through the land, the war closes in behind and leaves the same enemy behind.… I don’t see the end,” he concluded, “or the beginning of the end, but suppose we must prevail and persist or perish.” He saw only one solution, an outgrowth of the statement to his wife that the Federal armies would have to “reconquer the country … as we did from the Indians.” What was required from here on was harshness. “We cannot change the hearts of the people of the South,” he told his friend and superior Grant: “but we can make war so terrible that they will realize the fact that however brave and gallant and devoted to their country, still they are mortal and should exhaust all peaceful remedies before they fly to war.”

For Lincoln, too, it was a question of “prevail and persist or perish.” For him, moreover, there was the added problem of coördinating the efforts—and, if possible, reconciling the views—of these three random extremists, together with those of more than twenty million other individuals along and behind the firing line. The best way to accomplish this, he knew, was to unite them under a leader whose competence they believed in and whose views they would adopt as their own, even when those views came into conflict with their preconceptions. In facing this task, he started not from scratch, but from somewhere well behind it. “The President is an honest, plain, shrewd magistrate,”
Harper’s Weekly
had told its readers a year ago this December. “He is not a brilliant orator; he is not a great leader. He views his office as strictly an executive one, and wishes to cast responsibility, as much as possible, upon Congress.” This tallied with the view of Attorney General Edward Bates, who wrote in his diary after attending a cabinet meeting held at about the same time, “The President is an excellent man, and in the main wise, but he lacks will and purpose, and I greatly fear he has not the power to command.”