The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (37 page)

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RIDAY, August 21, 1863, was by proclamation of Jefferson Davis a day of “fasting, humiliation, and prayer” in the Confederate States. On this day the President invited his countrymen to go to their “respective places of public worship” and to pray for divine favor “on our suffering country."
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Throughout the war Davis periodically proclaimed days of fasting and public prayer either in thanksgiving for a recent victory or in penance for defeats. In May 1862, the President had been baptized and confirmed in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, and he realized as a matter of personal piety and public policy that the Confederate cause required God on the Southern side.
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Regardless of God’s preference, Southern churches ever served as staunch boosters of Confederate morale. Clerical fire-eaters like South Carolina Presbyterian James H. Thornwell and Louisianan Benjamin M. Palmer were among the most enthusiastic advocates of secession, and most Southern Protestant denominations made ecclesiastical secessions from their Northern brethren before the political schism in 1860 and 1861. Then, from the beginning of the war, Southern churches of all sorts with few exceptions promoted the cause militant. Clergymen served the Southern army as chaplains, and a few, such as Episcopal Bishop of Louisiana Leonidas Polk, undertook combat service.
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Behind the battle lines religious organizations and presses prepared and distributed tracts and portions of scripture for the moral and spiritual uplift of the army and nation.
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Presbyterian pastor Moses D. Höge personally shepherded more than 300,000 Bibles from England through the blockade in 1862,
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and throughout the Confederacy clergymen regularly delivered patriotic sermons to stir the blood of the faithful. Southerners were the “chosen people” in these orations; Yankees were Philistines whom Jehovah would surely destroy in His time. In times of victory Southern arms were like those of Joshua; in the wake of defeats God was chastising and cleansing Confederates to prepare them for eventual triumph.

When not resounding with the prophecy of Southern patriotism, Confederate churches were centers of volunteer action in support of the war effort. Moreover, by donations of everything from pew cushions to brass bells, Southern churches gave direct material aid to the cause. Among all the institutions in Southern life, perhaps the church most faithfully served the Confederate army and nation. The press was often fractious on policy and tactics; the schools weakened or closed; but the church usually remained constant and seemed to thrive on the emotional and physical sacrifices of wartime.
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Thus in the midst of the national depression stemming from military reverses in the summer of 1863, President Davis directed his fellow Southerners to their places of worship. Although some Confederates were asking with more cynicism than humor what made a fast day different from any other, religious leaders responded as usual and counseled congregations to renew their hopes and amend their lives for the sake of victory.

Some Southerners, though, did not go to church on August 21, 1863. While many sought new strength for their souls and salve for their bruised morale, some took more direct action in the Southern crusade. At about five o’clock in the morning approximately 450 Southern rebels under the command of William Clarke Quantrill thundered down upon Lawrence, Kansas. Four hours later the raiders clattered away and left the town a smoking shambles, 150 of its inhabitants dead and thirty more wounded.
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Quantrill styled himself a colonel in the Confederate army and insisted that his tactics served the cause. In December 1862, he had visited Secretary of War James A. Seddon in Richmond to secure his commission and press upon Seddon the need for a “no-quarter” fight to the finish in the Confederate west. Seddon termed Quantrill’s notions of war “barbarism” and denied him his commission. When Quantrill returned to Missouri, he claimed a colonelcy anyway and carried on guerrilla warfare in precisely the manner he had outlined to Seddon.
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The war in western Missouri and eastern Kansas was indeed “mean,” a continuation of the raiding and bushwhacking which had been going on there since the mid-1850s. Conditioned by such circumstances and driven by a compulsion to “be somebody,” Quantrill had won considerable notice, or notoriety, even before his raid on Lawrence. He attracted to his band of partisans and outlaws some men who doubtless believed they served a cause larger than themselves. Others, however, joined Quantrill only to indulge their lust for blood and booty.
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The affair at Lawrence was revealing. Long a center of abolitionism and unionism, Lawrence was a natural but ambitious target for the bushwhackers. As soon as the raiders overwhelmed the small body of Federal troops in the town and one of them tied an American flag to the tail of his horse, the raid degenerated into a series of murders, robberies, and burnings directed against unarmed civilians, though women and children went unharmed. Quantrill’s band broke into fragments of undisciplined, brutal individuals. Only one of Quantrill’s followers was a casualty and only because he had become too drunk to ride out of Lawrence with the rest. Apologists for Quantrill later emphasized the symbolism of Lawrence, the savage nature of border warfare, and the raiders’ respect for women and children. Nevertheless the affair was never so much a military action as it was the simple massacre of all but defenseless civilians. And for his leadership in such activities Quantrill earned considerably more infamy than fame.
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The paradox of August 21, 1863, was striking. At the same time that Southern pulpits rang with the rhetoric of righteousness and prayers for the cause, one of Qpantrill’s bushwhackers was screaming at the widow whose husband and brother-in-law he had just helped murder, “We are fiends from hell!”
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To complete the irony, the most often played theme in public pronouncements of members of the Confederate government during the summer of 1863 concerned the numbers and severity of atrocities committed by the enemy.
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Perhaps there was significance in the fact that the vicious actions of 450 guerrillas produced at least a limited victory while the prayers of many times that number yielded considerably less. Because they sought to defend their homes from invasion, the Confederates had quite naturally chosen to fight a conventional war for the control of land areas. Precedent existed for an unconventional conflict of bushwhacking bands and guerrilla forces, yet as long as partisan activity threatened Southerners’ commitment to people and place, invited reprisals from the enemy, and precluded the maintenance of racial subordination in slavery, the Confederates eschewed guerrilla warfare.
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To be sure there had been some bushwhacking, and there were a few cavalry units organized in accord with the act of Congress authorizing “partisan rangers.” The audacious exploits of John S. Mosby’s men behind enemy lines, like John Hunt Morgan’s daring raids into Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, fired the Southern imagination during the summer of 1863.
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However, in the broader scope of the Confederate war effort, the efforts of Morgan and Mosby were more or less side shows. The President and his generals tolerated the irregulars because their exploits had a beneficial effect on public morale, their activities usually complemented those of conventional forces, and the individuals involved would serve the cause in no other way. And Morgan’s and Mosby’s troopers, if not Quantrill’s, adhered to a mild mutation of the “civilized” code of warfare.
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By the summer of 1863 guerrilla warfare had become a more viable option for Confederate strategists than it had been in 1861. Large chunks of Southern soil had fallen into the hands of the enemy, and the prospect of winning back this territory by conventional means seemed tenuous at best in the near future. Thus the possibility for a large-scale partisan effort existed if the Confederates were willing to endure reprisals from the enemy, surrender control of black Southerners, and give themselves over to the rootless barbarism prescribed by Quantrill. Southerners recognized to their chagrin that their war had become “mean,” and they began, perhaps for the first time, actually to fear for their success by conventional military operations. But for the most part they rejected the guerrilla alternative and prayed for divine intervention by conventional means. God, though, appeared to be on the side with the strongest battalions.
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Thus the resort of Southerners to the extremes of prayer and savagery on August 21 was in itself an index of failing Confederate fortunes. Confederates had adopted a traditional nineteenth-century mode of warfare that demanded that Southerners fight their war on the enemy’s terms: with masses of men supported by an integrated logistical economy. Accordingly, the Confederacy had husbanded its resources as best it could and had sacrificed significant portions of the Southern ideological soul in an effort to create and sustain the war. Though the Southern war machine had never been exactly well oiled or efficient, it had functioned well enough. Late in the campaigning season of 1863, however, it displayed unmistakable signs of disintegration and decay. And as the war went badly, the fabric of Southern national life began to unravel. Predictably, military disintegration and national unraveling fed upon each other. The Confederacy survived for a year and a half longer, and during that period Southerners continued to husband and to sacrifice. By degrees, though, the creative national response to the challenge of war turned desperate; and by the time the war wound down, the South was exhausted, and the Southern nation was no more.

Pressure from the enemy mounted during the fall of 1863. While Grant consolidated his victory over Pemberton and Johnston at Vicksburg and Meade probed South in an effort to renew his battle with Lee, Rosecrans finally moved on Chattanooga and Bragg’s Southern army.

In the vicinity of Murfreesboro, Rosecran’s base, the two armies had sparred with each other. Bragg of necessity remained on the defensive as he dispatched troop units to Vicksburg and thereby increased his numerical inferiority. By the time Vicksburg fell, the enemy at Murfreesboro outnumbered Bragg’s Confederates by about a three to two ratio. Clearly, in Bragg’s mind at least, Rosecrans had the initiative and eventually he chose to exercise it.
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On June 26, Rosecrans put his army in motion. By a series of sharp skirmishes and astute maneuvers, the Federals advanced on Bragg’s Confederates and in nine days drove them from Tullahoma and occupied their former camps. On July 4, while Pemberton was surrendering Vicksburg and Lee was deciding to retreat from the catharsis at Gettysburg, Bragg’s army of Tennessee marched into Chattanooga and began preparations for a showdown stand in the Confederate heartland.

Chattanooga was important symbolically and substantively. If the enemy could seize the city, they might destroy the Army of Tennessee in the process. In terms of both political and military logistics Chattanooga was a significant rail link between Richmond and the seaboard Confederacy and the Southern hinterland between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. Chattanooga was the last defensible strong point left to the Confederacy in Tennessee. And, finally, Chattanooga was important because Bragg and the Southern military hierarchy made it so; the Confederates chose to stand and fight there, and thus the resultant campaign, like the campaigns at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, possessed a significance which transcended factors more immediate and mundane.
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The opening round in the battle for Chattanooga was time-consuming and inconclusive. After his lightninglike advance to the Tennessee, Rosecrans hesitated. For a month and a half the Union commander delayed, and both armies girded for the fight. The Confederates in Chattanooga depended upon the Western and Atlantic Railroad from Atlanta for supplies. To occupy the city after the enemy cut this supply line would be worse than folly; it would almost inevitably result in the loss of both army and city. Accordingly Rosecrans elected to try to bypass Chattanooga, cross the Tennessee, and seize the rail line at some point behind the Confederates. Bragg, still on the defensive, attempted to guess where the Federals would try to cross the river and to prevent the crossing. Bragg’s guess was wrong. The Union army on August 16 made a feint at the river northeast of Chattanooga and then moved in strength to a crossing at Caperton’s Ferry, southwest of the city. When Bragg realized what was happening, he had no choice but to abandon Chattanooga and attempt a stand farther south.
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By the end of the first week in September the situation was again in flux. The Army of Tennessee was dispersed but intact in the rugged mountainous region of northwest Georgia. Rosecrans had maneuvered Bragg out of Tennessee at small cost to himself, but neither had the Confederates suffered significantly. Bragg hoped that when Rosecrans divided his forces to track down the Confederates, the hunted might become the hunters and destroy the Federals piecemeal. Reinforcements encouraged Bragg’s hope; a division from Johnston’s army and Longstreet’s entire corps from the Army of Northern Virginia were on the way. Bragg’s first attempts to seize the initiative, however, proved frustrating. Even though the enemy did just about what Bragg hoped they would do—divide themselves in the mountains—the recently reorganized Army of Tennessee was unable to capitalize upon the circumstance.

At last, on September 20, Bragg had his day. Federal troop units were scattered due south of Chattanooga along a line parallel to the Lafayette Road, which ran into the city. Bragg’s army was able to cross Chickamauga Creek, which also roughly paralleled the Lafayette Road, and advance in fairly good order upon the enemy. If the Confederates could seize and hold any portion of the road between elements of Rosecrans’ army and Chattanooga, then the Federals would be cut off from their base of supply and ripe for destruction.
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