The Day Of The Confederacy - Chapters I-II



Chapter I. The Secession Movement

The secession movement had three distinct stages. The first, beginning
with the news that Lincoln was elected, closed with the news, sent
broadcast over the South from Charleston, that Federal troops had taken
possession of Fort Sumter on the night of the 28th of December. During
this period the likelihood of secession was the topic of discussion in the
lower South. What to do in case the lower South seceded was the question
which perplexed the upper South. In this period no State north of South
Carolina contemplated taking the initiative. In the Southeastern and Gulf
States immediate action of some sort was expected. Whether it would be
secession or some other new course was not certain on the day of Lincoln's
election. Various States earlier in the year had provided for conventions
of their people in the event of a Republican victory. The first to
assemble was the convention of South Carolina, which organized at
Columbia, on December 17, 1860. Two weeks earlier Congress had met.
Northerners and Southerners had at once joined issue on their relation in
the Union. The House had appointed its committee of thirty-three to
consider the condition of the country. So unpromising indeed from the
Southern point of view had been the early discussions of this committee
that a conference of Southern members of Congress had sent out their
famous address To Our Constituents: "The argument is exhausted. All hope
of relief in the Union . . . is extinguished, and we trust the South will
not be deceived by appearances or the pretense of new guarantees. In our
judgment the Republicans are resolute in the purpose to grant nothing that
will or ought to satisfy the South. We are satisfied the honor, safety,
and independence of the Southern people require the organization of a
Southern Confederacy--a result to be obtained only by separate state
secession." Among the signers of this address were the two statesmen who
had in native talent no superiors at Washington--Judah P. Benjamin of
Louisiana and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi.

The appeal To Our Constituents was not the only assurance of support
tendered to the convention of South Carolina. To represent them at this
convention the governors of Alabama and Mississippi had appointed
delegates. Mr. Hooker of Mississippi and Mr. Elmore of Alabama made
addresses before the convention on the night of the 17th of December. Both
reiterated views which during two days of lobbying they had disseminated
in Columbia "on all proper occasions." Their argument, summed up in
Elmore's report to Governor Moore of Alabama, was "that the only course to
unite the Southern States in any plan of cooperation which could promise
safety was for South Carolina to take the lead and secede at once without
delay or hesitation...that the only effective plan of cooperation must
ensue after one State had seceded and presented the issue when the plain
question would be presented to the other Southern States whether they
would stand by the seceding State engaged in a common cause or abandon her
to the fate of coercion by the arms of the Government of the United
States."

Ten years before, in the unsuccessful secession movement of 1850 and 1851,
Andrew Pickens Butler, perhaps the ablest South Carolinian then living,
strove to arrest the movement by exactly the opposite argument. Though
desiring secession, he threw all his weight against it because the rest of
the South was averse. He charged his opponents, whose leader was Robert
Barnwell Rhett, with aiming to place the other Southern States "in such
circumstances that, having a common destiny, they would be compelled to be
involved in a common sacrifice." He protested that "to force a sovereign
State to take a position against its consent is to make of it a reluctant
associate.... Both interest and honor must require the Southern States to
take council together."

That acute thinker was now in his grave. The bold enthusiast whom he
defeated in 1851 had now no opponent that was his match. No great
personality resisted the fiery advocates from Alabama and Mississippi.
Their advice was accepted. On December 20, 1860, the cause that ten years
before had failed was successful. The convention, having adjourned from
Columbia to Charleston, passed an ordinance of secession.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, at a hundred meetings, the secession issue was
being hotly discussed. But there was not yet any certainty which way the
scale would turn. An invitation from South Carolina to join in a general
Southern convention had been declined by the Governor in November.
Governor Brown has left an account ascribing the comparative coolness and
deliberation of the hour to the prevailing impression that President
Buchanan had pledged himself not to alter the military status at
Charleston. In an interview between South Carolina representatives and the
President, the Carolinians understood that such a pledge was given. "It
was generally understood by the country," says Governor Brown, "that such
an agreement...had been entered Into...and that Governor Floyd of
Virginia, then Secretary of War, had expressed his determination to resign
his position in the Cabinet in case of the refusal of the President to
carry out the agreement in good faith. The resignation of Governor Floyd
was therefore naturally looked upon, should it occur, as a signal given to
the South that reinforcements were to be sent to Charleston and that the
coercive policy had been adopted by the Federal Government."

While the "canvass in Georgia for members of the State convention was
progressing with much interest on both sides," there came suddenly the
news that Anderson had transferred his garrison from Fort Moultrie to the
island fortress of Sumter. That same day commissioners from South
Carolina, newly arrived at Washington, sought in vain to persuade the
President to order Anderson back to Moultrie. The Secretary of War made
the subject an issue before the Cabinet. Unable to carry his point, two
days later he resigned.*

* The President had already asked for Floyd's resignation because of
financial irregularities, and Floyd was shrewd enough to use Anderson's
coup as an excuse for resigning. See Rhodes, "History of the United
States," vol. II pp. 225, 236 (note).

The Georgia Governor, who had not hitherto been in the front rank of the
aggressives, now struck a great blow. Senator Toombs had telegraphed from
Washington that Fort Pulaski, guarding the Savannah River, was "in
danger." The Governor had reached the same conclusion. He mustered the
state militia and seized Fort Pulaski. Early in the morning on January 3,
1861, the fort was occupied by Georgia troops. Shortly afterward, Brown
wrote to a commissioner sent by the Governor of Alabama to confer with
him:
"While many of our most patriotic and intelligent citizens in both States
have doubted the propriety of immediate secession, I feel quite confident
that recent events have dispelled those doubts from the minds of most men
who have, till within the past few days, honestly sustained them." The
first stage of the secession movement was at an end; the second had begun.

A belief that Washington had entered upon a policy of aggression swept the
lower South. The state conventions assembling about this time passed
ordinances of secession--Mississippi, January 9; Florida, January 10;
Alabama, January 11; Georgia, January 19; Louisiana, January 26; Texas,
February 1. But this result was not achieved without considerable
opposition. In Georgia the Unionists put up a stout fight. The issue was
not upon the right to secede--virtually no one denied the right--but upon
the wisdom of invoking the right. Stephens, gloomy and pessimistic, led
the opposition. Toombs came down from Washington to take part with the
secessionists. From South Carolina and Alabama, both ceaselessly active
for secession, commissioners appeared to lobby at Milledgeville, as
commissioners of Alabama and Mississippi had lobbied at Columbia. Besides
the out-and-out Unionists, there were those who wanted to temporize, to
threaten the North, and to wait for developments. The motion on which
these men and the Unionists made their last stand together went against
them 164 to 133. Then at last came the square question: Shall we secede?
Even on this question, the minority was dangerously large. Though the
temporizers came over to the secessionists, and with them came Stephens,
there was still a minority of 89 irreconcilables against the majority
numbering 208.

"My allegiance," said Stephens afterwards, "was, as I considered it, not
due to the United States, or to the people of the United States, but to
Georgia, in her sovereign capacity. Georgia had never parted with her
right to demand the ultimate allegiance of her citizens."

The attempt in Georgia to restrain impetuosity and advance with
deliberation was paralleled in Alabama, where also the aggressives were
determined not to permit delay. In the Alabama convention, the
conservatives brought forward a plan for a general Southern convention to
be held at Nashville in February. It was rejected by a vote of 54 to 45.
An attempt to delay secession until after the 4th of March was defeated by
the same vote.

The determination of the radicals to precipitate the issue received
interesting criticism from the Governor of Texas, old Sam Houston. To a
commissioner from Alabama who was sent out to preach the cause in Texas
the Governor wrote, in substance, that since Alabama would not wait to
consult the people of Texas he saw nothing to discuss at that time, and he
went on to say:

Recognizing as I do the fact that the sectional tendencies of the Black
Republican party call for determined constitutional resistance at the
hands of the united South, I also feel that the million and a half of
noble-hearted, conservative men who have stood by the South, even to this
hour, deserve some sympathy and support. Although we have lost the day, we
have to recollect that our conservative Northern friends cast over a
quarter of a million more votes against the Black Republicans than we of
the entire South. I cannot declare myself ready to desert them as well as
our Southern brethren of the border (and such, I believe, will be the
sentiment of Texas) until at least one firm attempt has been made to
preserve our constitutional rights within the Union.

Nevertheless, Houston was not able to control his State. Delegates from
Texas attended the later sessions of a general Congress of the seceding
States which, on the invitation of Alabama, met at Montgomery on the 4th
of February. A contemporary document of singular interest today is the
series of resolutions adopted by the Legislature of North Carolina,
setting forth that, as the State was a member of the Federal Union, it
could not accept the invitation of Alabama but should send delegates for
the purpose of persuading the South to effect a readjustment on the basis
of the Crittenden Compromise as modified by the Legislature of Virginia.
The commissioners were sent, were graciously received, were accorded seats
in the Congress, but they exerted no influence on the course of its
action.

The Congress speedily organized a provisional Government for the
Confederate States of America. The Constitution of the United States,
rather hastily reconsidered, became with a few inevitable alterations the
Constitution of the Confederacy.* Davis was unanimously elected President;
Stephens, Vice-President. Provision was made for raising an army.
Commissioners were dispatched to Washington to negotiate a treaty with the
United States; other commissioners were sent to Virginia to attempt to
withdraw that great commonwealth from the Union.

* To the observer of a later age this document appears a thing of haste.
Like the framers of the Constitution of 1787, who omitted from their
document some principles which they took for granted, the framers of 1861
left unstated their most distinctive views. The basal idea upon which the
revolution proceeded, the right of secession, is not to be found in the
new Constitution. Though the preamble declares that the States are acting
in their sovereign and independent character, the new Confederation is
declared "permanent." In the body of the document are provisions similar
to those in the Federal Constitution enabling a majority of two-thirds of
the States to amend at their pleasure, thus imposing their will upon the
minority. With three notable exceptions the new Constitution, subsequent
to the preamble, does little more than restate the Constitution of 1787
rearranged so as to include those basal principles of the English law
added to the earlier Constitution by the first eight amendments. The three
exceptions are the prohibitions (1) of the payment of bounties, (2) of the
levying of duties to promote any one form of industry, and (3) of
appropriations for internal improvements. Here was a monument to the
battle over these matters in the Federal Congress. As to the mechanism of
the new Government it was the same as the old except for a few changes of
detail. The presidential term was lengthened to six years and the
President was forbidden to succeed himself. The President was given the
power to veto items in appropriation bills. The African slave-trade was
prohibited.

The upper South was thus placed in a painful situation. Its sympathies
were with the seceding States. Most of its people felt also that if
coercion was attempted, the issue would become for Virginia and North
Carolina, no less than for South Carolina and Alabama, simply a matter of
self-preservation. As early as January, in the exciting days when Floyd's
resignation was being interpreted as a call to arms, the Virginia
Legislature had resolved that it would not consent to the coercion of a
seceding State. In May the Speaker of the North Carolina Legislature
assured a commissioner from Georgia that North Carolina would never
consent to the movement of troops "from or across" the State to attack a
seceding State. But neither Virginia nor North Carolina in this second
stage of the movement wanted to secede. They wanted to preserve the Union,
but along with the Union they wanted the principle of local autonomy. It
was a period of tense anxiety in those States of the upper South. The
frame of mind of the men who loved the Union but who loved equally their
own States and were firm for local autonomy is summed up in a letter in
which Mrs. Robert E. Lee describes the anguish of her husband as he
confronted the possibility of a divided country.

The real tragedy of the time lay in the failure of the advocates of these
two great principles--each so necessary to a far-flung democratic country
in a world of great powers!--the failure to coordinate them so as to
insure freedom at home and strength abroad. The principle for which
Lincoln stood has saved Americans in the Great War from playing such a
trembling part as that of Holland. The principle which seemed to Lee even
more essential, which did not perish at Appomattox but was transformed and
not destroyed, is what has kept us from becoming a western Prussia. And
yet if only it had been possible to coordinate the two without the price
of war! It was not possible because of the stored up bitterness of a
quarter century of recrimination. But Virginia made a last desperate
attempt to preserve the Union by calling the Peace Convention. It
assembled at Washington the day the Confederate Congress met at
Montgomery. Though twenty-one States sent delegates, it was no more able
to effect a working scheme of compromise than was the House committee of
thirty-three or the Senate committee of thirteen, both of which had
striven, had failed, and had gone their ways to a place in the great
company of historic futilities.

And so the Peace Convention came and went, and there was no consolation
for the troubled men of the upper South who did not want to secede but
were resolved not to abandon local autonomy. Virginia was the key to the
situation. If Virginia could be forced into secession, the rest of the
upper South would inevitably follow. Therefore a Virginia hothead, Roger
A. Pryor, being in Charleston in those wavering days, poured out his heart
in fiery words, urging a Charleston crowd to precipitate war, in the
certainty that Virginia would then have to come to their aid. When at last
Sumter was fired upon and Lincoln called for volunteers, the second stage
of the secession movement ended in a thunderclap. The third period was
occupied by the second group of secessions: Virginia on the 17th of April,
North Carolina and Arkansas during May, Tennessee early in June.

Sumter was the turning-point. The boom of the first cannon trained on the
island fortress deserves all the rhetoric it has inspired. Who was
immediately responsible for that firing which was destiny? Ultimate
responsibility is not upon any person. War had to be. If Sumter had not
been the starting-point, some other would have been found. Nevertheless
the question of immediate responsibility, of whose word it was that served
as the signal to begin, has produced an historic controversy.

When it was known at Charleston that Lincoln would attempt to provision
the fort, the South Carolina authorities referred the matter to the
Confederate authorities. The Cabinet, in a fateful session at Montgomery,
hesitated--drawn between the wish to keep their hold upon the moderates of
the North, who were trying to stave off war, and the desire to precipitate
Virginia into the lists. Toombs, Secretary of State in the new Government,
wavered; then seemed to find his resolution and came out strong against a
demand for surrender. "It is suicide, murder, and will lose us every
friend at the North.... It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is
fatal," said he. But the Cabinet and the President decided to take the
risk. To General Pierre Beauregard, recently placed in command of the
militia assembled at Charleston, word was sent to demand the surrender of
Fort Sumter.

On Thursday, the 7th of April, besides his instructions from Montgomery,
Beauregard was in receipt of a telegram from the Confederate commissioners
at Washington, repeating newspaper statements that the Federal relief
expedition intended to land a force "which will overcome all opposition."
There seems no doubt that Beauregard did not believe that the expedition
was intended merely to provision Sumter. Probably every one in Charleston
thought that the Federal authorities were trying to deceive them, that
Lincoln's promise not to do more than provision Sumter was a mere blind.
Fearfulness that delay might render Sumter impregnable lay back of
Beauregard's formal demand, on the 11th of April, for the surrender of the
fort. Anderson refused but "made some verbal observations" to the aides
who brought him the demand. In effect he said that lack of supplies would
compel him to surrender by the fifteenth. When this information was taken
back to the city, eager crowds were in the streets of Charleston
discussing the report that a bombardment would soon begin. But the
afternoon passed; night fell; and nothing was done. On the beautiful
terrace along the sea known as East Battery, people congregated, watching
the silent fortress whose brick walls rose sheer from the midst of the
harbor. The early hours of the night went by and as midnight approached
and still there was no flash from either the fortress or the shore
batteries which threatened it, the crowds broke up.

Meanwhile there was anxious consultation at the hotel where Beauregard had
fixed his headquarters. Pilots came in from the sea to report to the
General that a Federal vessel had appeared off the mouth of the harbor.
This news may well explain the hasty dispatch of a second expedition to
Sumter in the middle of the night. At half after one, Friday morning, four
young men, aides of Beauregard, entered the fort. Anderson repeated his
refusal to surrender at once but admitted that he would have to surrender
within three days. Thereupon the aides held a council of war. They decided
that the reply was unsatisfactory and wrote out a brief note which they
handed to Anderson informing him that the Confederates would open "fire
upon Fort Sumter in one hour from this time." The note was dated 3:20 A.M.
The aides then proceeded to Fort Johnston on the south side of the harbor
and gave the order to fire.

The council of the aides at Sumter is the dramatic detail that has caught
the imagination of historians and has led them, at least in some cases, to
yield to a literary temptation. It is so dramatic--that scene of the four
young men holding in their hands, during a moment of absolute destiny, the
fate of a people; four young men, in the irresponsible ardor of youth,
refusing to wait three days and forcing war at the instant! It is so
dramatic that one cannot judge harshly the artistic temper which is unable
to reject it. But is the incident historic? Did the four young men come to
Sumter without definite instructions? Was their conference really anything
more than a careful comparing of notes to make sure they were doing what
they were intended to do? Is not the real clue to the event a message from
Beauregard to the Secretary of War telling of his interview with the
pilots? *

*A chief authority for the dramatic version of the council of the aides is
that fiery Virginian, Roger A. Pryor. He and another accompanied the
official messengers, the signers of the note to Anderson, James Chestnut
and Stephen Lee. Years afterwards Pryor told the story of the council in a
way to establish its dramatic significance. But would there be anything
strange if a veteran survivor, looking back to his youth, as all of us do
through more or less of mirage yielded to the unconscious artist that is
in us all and dramatized this event unaware?

Dawn was breaking gray, with a faint rain in the air, when the first boom
of the cannon awakened the city. Other detonations followed in quick
succession. Shells rose into the night from both sides of the harbor and
from floating batteries. How lightly Charleston slept that night may be
inferred from the accounts in the newspapers. "At the report of the first
gun," says the Courier, "the city was nearly emptied of its inhabitants
who crowded the Battery and the wharves to witness the conflict."

The East Battery and the lower harbor of the lovely city of Charleston
have been preserved almost without alteration. What they are today they
were in the breaking dawn on April 12, 1861. Business has gone up the
rivers between which Charleston lies and has left the point of the city's
peninsula, where East Battery looks outward to the Atlantic, in its
perfect charm. There large houses, pillared, with high piazzas, stand
apart one from another among gardens. With few exceptions they were built
before the middle of the century and all, with one exception, show the
classical taste of those days. The mariner, entering the spacious inner
sea that is Charleston Harbor, sights this row of stately mansions even
before he crosses the bar seven miles distant. Holding straight onward up
into the land he heads first for the famous little island where, nowadays,
in their halo of thrilling recollection, the walls of Sumter, rising sheer
from the bosom of the water, drowse idle. Close under the lee of Sumter,
the incoming steersman brings his ship about and chooses, probably, the
eastward of two huge tentacles of the sea between which lies the city's
long but narrow peninsula. To the steersman it shows a skyline serrated by
steeples, fronted by sea, flanked southward by sea, backgrounded by an
estuary, and looped about by a sickle of wooded islands.  This same scene,
so far as city and nature go, was beheld by the crowds that swarmed East
Battery, a flagstone marine parade along the seaward side of the boulevard
that faces Sumter; that filled the windows and even the housetops; that
watched the bombardment with the eagerness of an audience in an
amphitheater; that applauded every telling shot with clapping of hands and
waving of shawls and handkerchiefs. The fort lay distant from them about
three miles, but only some fifteen hundred yards from Fort Johnston on one
side and about a mile from Fort Moultrie on the other. From both of these
latter, the cannon of those days were equal to the task of harassing
Sumter. Early in the morning of the 12th of April, though not until broad
day had come, did Anderson make reply. All that day, at first under
heavily rolling cloud and later through curiously misty sunshine, the fire
and counterfire continued. "The enthusiasm and fearlessness of the
spectators," says the Charleston Mercury, "knew no bounds." Reckless
observers even put out in small boats and roamed about the harbor almost
under the guns of the fort. Outside the bar, vessels of the relieving
squadron were now visible, and to these Anderson signaled for aid. They
made an attempt to reach the fort, but only part of the squadron had
arrived; and the vessels necessary to raise the siege were not there. The
attempt ended in failure. When night came, a string of rowboats each
carrying a huge torch kept watch along the bar to guard against surprise
from the sea.

On that Friday night the harbor was swept by storm. But in spite of
torrents of rain East Battery and the rooftops were thronged. "The wind
was inshore and the booming was startlingly distinct." At the height of
the bombardment, the sky above Sumter seemed to be filled with the flashes
of bursting shells. But during this wild night Sumter itself was both dark
and silent. Its casements did not have adequate lamps and the guns could
not be used except by day. When morning broke, clear and bright after the
night's storm, the duel was resumed.

The walls of Sumter were now crumbling. At eight o'clock Saturday morning
the barracks took fire. Soon after it was perceived from the shore that
the flag was down. Beauregard at once sent offers of assistance. With
Sumter in flames above his head, Anderson replied that he had not
surrendered; he declined assistance; and he hauled up his flag. Later in
the day the flagstaff was shot in two and again the flag fell, and again
it was raised. Flames had been kindled anew by red-hot shot, and now the
magazine was in danger. Quantities of powder were thrown into the sea.
Still the rain of red-hot shot continued. About noon, Saturday, says the
Courier, "flames burst out from every quarter of Sumter and poured from
many of its portholes...the wind was from the west driving the smoke
across the fort into the embrasures where the gunners were at work."
Nevertheless, "as if served with a new impulse," the guns of Sumter
redoubled their fire. But it was not in human endurance to keep on in the
midst of the burning fort. This splendid last effort was short. At a
quarter after one, Anderson ceased firing and raised a white flag.
Negotiations followed ending in terms of surrender--Anderson to be allowed
to remove his garrison to the fleet lying idle beyond the bar and to
salute the flag of the United States before taking it down. The
bombardment had lasted thirty-two hours without a death on either side.
The evacuation of the fort was to take place next day.

The afternoon of Sunday, the 14th of April, was a gala day in the harbor
of Charleston. The sunlight slanted across the roofs of the city, sparkled
upon the sea. Deep and rich the harbor always looks in the spring sunshine
on bright afternoons. The filmy atmosphere of these latitudes, at that
time of year, makes the sky above the darkling, afternoon sea a pale but
luminous turquoise. There is a wonderful soft strength in the peaceful
brightness of the sun. In such an atmosphere the harbor was flecked with
brilliantly decked craft of every description, all in a flutter of flags
and carrying a host of passengers in gala dress. The city swarmed across
the water to witness the ceremony of evacuation. Wherry men did a thriving
business carrying passengers to the fort.

Anderson withdrew from Sumter shortly after two o'clock amid a salute of
fifty guns. The Confederates took possession. At half after four a new
flag was raised above the battered and fire-swept walls.



Chapter II. The Davis Government

It has never been explained why Jefferson Davis was chosen President of
the Confederacy. He did not seek the office and did not wish it. He
dreamed of high military command. As a study in the irony of fate, Davis's
career is made to the hand of the dramatist. An instinctive soldier, he
was driven by circumstances three times to renounce the profession of arms
for a less congenial civilian life. His final renunciation, which proved
to be of the nature of tragedy, was his acceptance of the office of
President. Indeed, why the office was given to him seems a mystery. Rhett
was a more logical candidate. And when Rhett, early in the lobbying at
Montgomery, was set aside as too much of a radical, Toombs seemed for a
time the certain choice of the majority. The change to Davis came suddenly
at the last moment. It was puzzling at the time; it is puzzling still.

Rhett, though doubtless bitterly disappointed, bore himself with the
savoir faire of a great gentleman. At the inauguration, it was on Rhett's
arm that Davis leaned as he entered the hall of the Confederate Congress.
The night before, in a public address, Yancey had said that the man and
the hour were met. The story of the Confederacy is filled with dramatic
moments, but to the thoughtful observer few are more dramatic than the
conjunction of these three men in the inauguration of the Confederate
President. Beneath a surface of apparent unanimity they carried, like
concealed weapons, points of view that were in deadly antagonism. This
antagonism had not revealed itself hitherto. It was destined to reveal
itself almost immediately. It went so deep and spread so far that unless
we understand it, the Confederate story will be unintelligible.

A strange fatality destined all three of these great men to despair.
Yancey, who was perhaps most directly answerable of the three for the
existence of the Confederacy, lost influence almost from the moment when
his dream became established. Davis was partly responsible, for he
promptly sent him out of the country on the bootless English mission.
Thereafter, until his death in 1863, Yancey was a waning, overshadowed
figure, steadily lapsing into the background. It may be that those critics
are right who say he was only an agitator. The day of the mere agitator
was gone. Yancey passed rapidly into futile but bitter antagonism to
Davis. In this attitude he was soon to be matched by Rhett.

The discontent of the Rhett faction because their leader was not given the
portfolio of the State Department found immediate voice. But the
conclusion drawn by some that Rhett's subsequent course sprang from
personal vindictiveness is trifling. He was too large a personality, too
well defined an intellect, to be thus explained. Very probably Davis made
his first great blunder in failing to propitiate the Rhett faction. And
yet few things are more certain than that the two men, the two factions
which they symbolized, could not have formed a permanent alliance. Had
Rhett entered the Cabinet he could not have remained in it consistently
for any considerable time. The measures in which, presently, the
Administration showed its hand were measures in which Rhett could not
acquiesce. From the start he was predestined to his eventual position--the
great, unavailing genius of the opposition.

As to the comparative ignoring of these leaders of secession by the
Government which secession had created, it is often said that the
explanation is to be found in a generous as well as politic desire to put
in office the moderates and even the conservatives. Davis, relatively, was
a moderate. Stephens was a conservative. Many of the most pronounced
opponents of secession were given places in the public service. Toombs,
who received the portfolio of State, though a secessionist, was
conspicuously a moderate when compared with Rhett and Yancey. The adroit
Benjamin, who became Attorney-General, had few points in common with the
great extremists of Alabama and South Carolina.

However, the dictum that the personnel of the new Government was a triumph
for conservatism over radicalism signifies little. There was a division
among Southerners which scarcely any of them had realized except briefly
in the premature battle over secession in 1851. It was the division
between those who were conscious of the region as a whole and those who
were not. Explain it as you will, there was a moment just after the
secession movement succeeded when the South seemed to realize itself as a
whole, when it turned intuitively to those men who, as time was to
demonstrate, shared this realization. For the moment it turned away from
those others, however great their part in secession, who lacked this sense
of unity.

At this point, geography becomes essential. The South fell,
institutionally, into two grand divisions: one, with an old and firmly
established social order, where consciousness of the locality went back to
remote times; another, newly settled, where conditions were still fluid,
where that sense of the sacredness of local institutions had not yet
formed.

A typical community of the first-named class was South Carolina. Her
people had to a remarkable degree been rendered state-conscious partly by
their geographical neighbors, and partly by their long and illustrious
history, which had been interwoven with great European interests during
the colonial era and with great national interests under the Republic. It
is possible also that the Huguenots, though few in numbers, had exercised
upon the State a subtle and pervasive influence through their intellectual
power and their Latin sense for institutions.

In South Carolina, too, a wealthy leisure class with a passion for affairs
had cultivated enthusiastically that fine art which is the pride of all
aristocratic societies, the service of the State as a profession high and
exclusive, free from vulgar taint. In South Carolina all things conspired
to uphold and strengthen the sense of the State as an object of
veneration, as something over and above the mere social order, as the
sacred embodiment of the ideals of the community. Thus it is fair to say
that what has animated the heroic little countries of the Old World
Switzerland and Serbia and ever-glorious Belgium--with their passion to
remain themselves, animated South Carolina in 1861. Just as Serbia was
willing to fight to the death rather than merge her identity in the mosaic
of the Austrian Empire, so this little American community saw nothing of
happiness in any future that did not secure its virtual independence.

Typical of the newer order in the South was the community that formed the
President of the Confederacy. In the history of Mississippi previous to
the war there are six great names--Jacob Thompson, John A. Quitman, Henry
S. Foote, Robert J. Walker, Sergeant S. Prentiss, and Jefferson Davis. Not
one of them was born in the State. Thompson was born in North Carolina;
Quitman in New York; Foote in Virginia; Walker in Pennsylvania; Prentiss
in Maine; Davis in Kentucky. In 1861 the State was but forty-four years
old, younger than its most illustrious sons--if the paradox may be
permitted. How could they think of it as an entity existing in itself,
antedating not only themselves but their traditions, circumscribing them
with its all-embracing, indisputable reality? These men spoke the language
of state rights. It is true that in politics, combating the North, they
used the political philosophy taught them by South Carolina. But it was a
mental weapon in political debate; it was not for them an emotional fact.

And yet these men of the Southwest had an ideal of their own as vivid and
as binding as the state ideal of the men of the eastern coast. Though half
their leaders were born in the North, the people themselves were
overwhelmingly Southern. From all the older States, all round the huge
crescent which swung around from Kentucky coastwise to Florida,
immigration in the twenties and thirties had poured into Mississippi.
Consequently the new community presented a composite picture of the whole
South, and like all composite pictures it emphasized only the factors
common to all its parts. What all the South had in common, what made a
man a Southerner in the general sense--in distinction from a Northerner on
the one hand, or a Virginian, Carolinian, Georgian, on the other--could
have been observed with clearness in Mississippi, just before the war, as
nowhere else. Therefore, the fulfillment of the ideal of Southern life in
general terms was the vision of things hoped for by the new men of the
Southwest. The features of that vision were common to them all--country
life, broad acres, generous hospitality, an aristocratic system. The
temperaments of these men were sufficiently buoyant to enable them to
apprehend this ideal even before it had materialized. Their romantic minds
could see the gold at the end of the rainbow. Theirs was not the pride of
administering a well-ordered, inherited system, but the joy of building a
new system, in their minds wholly elastic, to be sure, but still inspired
by that old system.

What may be called the sense of Southern nationality as opposed to the
sense of state rights, strictly speaking, distinguished this brilliant
young community of the Southwest. In that community Davis spent the years
that appear to have been the most impressionable of his life. Belonging to
a "new" family just emerging into wealth, he began life as a West Pointer
and saw gallant service as a youth on the frontier; resigned from the
army to pursue a romantic attachment; came home to lead the life of a
wealthy planter and receive the impress of Mississippi; made his entry
into politics, still a soldier at heart, with the philosophy of state
rights on his lips, but in his heart that sense of the Southern people as
a new nation, which needed only the occasion to make it the relentless
enemy of the rights of the individual Southern States. Add together the
instinctive military point of view and this Southern nationalism that even
in 1861 had scarcely revealed itself; join with these a fearless and
haughty spirit, proud to the verge of arrogance, but perfectly devoted,
perfectly sincere; and you have the main lines of the political character
of Davis when he became President. It may be that as he went forward in
his great undertaking, as antagonisms developed, as Rhett and others
turned against him, Davis hardened. He lost whatever comprehension he once
had of the Rhett type. Seeking to weld into one irresistible unit all the
military power of the South, he became at last in the eyes of his
opponents a monster, while to him, more and more positively, the others
became mere dreamers.

It took about a year for this irrepressible conflict within the
Confederacy to reveal itself. During the twelve months following Davis's
election as provisional President, he dominated the situation, though the
Charleston Mercury, the Rhett organ, found opportunities to be sharply
critical of the President. He assembled armies; he initiated heroic
efforts to make up for the handicap of the South in the manufacture of
munitions and succeeded in starting a number of munition plants; though
powerless to prevent the establishment of the blockade, he was able during
that first year to keep in touch with Europe, to start out Confederate
privateers upon the high seas, and to import a considerable quantity of
arms and supplies. At the close of the year the Confederate armies were
approaching general efficiency, for all their enormous handicap, almost if
not quite as rapidly as were the Union armies. And the one great
event of the year on land, the first battle of Manassas, or Bull Run, was
a signal Confederate victory.

To be sure Davis was severely criticized in some quarters for not adopting
an aggressive policy. The Confederate Government, whether wisely or
foolishly, had not taken the people into its confidence and the lack of
munitions was not generally appreciated. The easy popular cries were all
sounded: "We are standing still!" "The country is being invaded!" "The
President is a do-nothing!" From the coast regions especially, where the
blockade was felt in all its severity, the outcry was loud.

Nevertheless, the South in the main was content with the Administration
during most of the first year. In November, when the general elections
were held, Davis was chosen without opposition as the first regular
Confederate President for six years, and Stephens became the Vice-
President. The election was followed by an important change in the
Southern Cabinet. Benjamin became Secretary of War, in succession to the
first War Secretary, Leroy P. Walker. Toombs had already left the
Confederate Cabinet. Complaining that Davis degraded him to the level of a
mere clerk, he had withdrawn the previous July. His successor in the State
Department was R. M. T. Hunter of Virginia, who remained in office until
February, 1862, when his removal to the Confederate Senate opened the way
for a further advancement of Benjamin.

Richmond, which had been designated as the capital soon after the
secession of Virginia, was the scene of the inauguration, on February 22,
1862. Although the weather proved bleak and rainy, an immense crowd
gathered around the Washington monument, in Capitol Square, to listen to
the inaugural address. By this time the confidence in the Government,
which was felt generally at the time of the election, had suffered a
shock. Foreign affairs were not progressing satisfactorily. Though England
had accorded to the Confederacy the status of a belligerent, this was poor
consolation for her refusal to make full recognition of the new
Government as an independent power. Dread of internal distress was
increasing. Gold commanded a premium of fifty percent. Disorder was a
feature of the life in the cities. It was known that several recent
military events had been victories for the Federals. A rumor was abroad
that some great disaster had taken place in Tennessee. The crowd listened
anxiously to hear the rumor denied by the President. But it was not
denied. The tense listeners noted two sentences which formed an admission
that the situation was grave: "A million men, it is estimated, are now
standing in hostile array and waging war along a frontier of thousands of
miles. Battles have been fought, sieges have been conducted, and although
the contest is not ended, and the tide for the moment is against us, the
final result in our favor is not doubtful."

Behind these carefully guarded words lay serious alarm, not only with
regard to the operations at the front but as to the composition of the
army. It had been raised under various laws and its portions were subject
to conflicting classifications; it was partly a group of state armies,
partly a single Confederate army. None of its members had enlisted for
long terms. Many enlistments would expire early in 1862. The fears of the
Confederate Administration with regard to this matter, together with its
alarm about the events at the front, were expressed by Davis in a frank
message to the Southern Congress, three days later. "I have hoped," said
he, "for several days to receive official reports in relation to our
discomfiture at Roanoke Island and the fall of Fort Donelson. They have
not yet reached Me.... The hope is still entertained that our reported
losses at Fort Donelson have been greatly exaggerated...." He went on to
condemn the policy of enlistments for short terms, "against which," said
he, "I have steadily contended"; and he enlarged upon the danger that even
patriotic men, who intended to reenlist, might go home to put their
affairs in order and that thus, at a critical moment, the army might be
seriously reduced. The accompanying report of the Confederate Secretary of
War showed a total in the army of 340,250 men. This was an inadequate
force with which to meet the great hosts which were being organized
against it in the North. To permit the slightest reduction of the army at
that moment seemed to the Southern President suicidal.

But Davis waited some time longer before proposing to the Confederate
Congress the adoption of conscription. Meanwhile, the details of two great
reverses, the loss of Roanoke Island and the loss of Fort Donelson, became
generally known. Apprehension gathered strength. Newspapers began to
discuss conscription as something inevitable. At last, on March 28, 1862,
Davis sent a message to the Confederate Congress advising the conscription
of all white males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. For this
suggestion Congress was ripe, and the first Conscription Act of the
Confederacy was signed by the President on the 16th of April. The age of
eligibility was fixed as Davis had advised; the term of service was to be
three years; every one then in service was to be retained in service
during three years from the date of his original enlistment.

This statute may be thought of as a great victory on the part of the
Administration. It was the climax of a policy of centralization in the
military establishment to which Davis had committed himself by the veto,
in January, of "A bill to authorize the Secretary of War to receive into
the service of the Confederate States a regiment of volunteers for the
protection of the frontier of Texas." This regiment was to be under the
control of the Governor of the State. In refusing to accept such troops,
Davis laid down the main proposition upon which he stood as military
executive to the end of the war, a proposition which immediately set
debate raging: "Unity and cooperation by the troops of all the States are
indispensable to success, and I must view with regret this as well as all
other indications of a purpose to divide the power of States by dividing
the means to be employed in efforts to carry on separate operations."

In these military measures of the early months of 1862 Davis's purpose
became clear. He was bent upon instituting a strong government, able to
push the war through, and careless of the niceties of constitutional law
or of the exact prerogatives of the States. His position was expressed in
the course of the year by a Virginia newspaper: "It will be time enough to
distract the councils of the State about imaginary violations of
constitutional law by the supreme government when our independence is
achieved, established, and acknowledged. It will not be until then that
the sovereignty of the States will be a reality." But there were many
Southerners who could not accept this point of view. The Mercury was
sharply critical of the veto of the Texas Regiment Bill. In the interval
between the Texas veto and the passing of the Conscription Act, the state
convention of North Carolina demanded the return of North Carolina
volunteers for the defense of their own State. No sooner was the
Conscription Act passed than its constitutionality was attacked. As the
Confederacy had no Supreme Court, the question came up before state
courts. One after another, several state supreme courts pronounced the act
constitutional and in most of the States the constitutional issue was
gradually allowed to lapse.

Nevertheless, Davis had opened Pandora's box. The clash between State and
Confederate authority had begun. An opposition party began to form. In
this first stage of its definite existence, the opposition made an
interesting attempt to control the Cabinet. Secretary Benjamin, though
greatly trusted by the President, seems never to have been a popular
minister. Congress attempted to load upon Benjamin the blame for Roanoke
Island and Fort Donelson. In the House a motion was introduced to the
effect that Benjamin had "not the confidence of the people of the
Confederate States nor of the army...and that we most respectfully request
his retirement" from the office of Secretary of War. Friends of the
Administration tabled the motion. Davis extricated his friend by taking
advantage of Hunter's retirement and promoting Benjamin to the State
Department. A month later a congressional committee appointed to
investigate the affair of Roanoke Island exonerated the officer in command
and laid the blame on his superiors, including "the late Secretary of
War."

With Benjamin safe in the Department of State, with the majority in the
Confederate Congress still fairly manageable, with the Conscription Act in
force, Davis seemed to be strong enough in the spring of 1862 to ignore
the gathering opposition. And yet there was another measure, second only
in the President's eyes to the Conscription Act, that was to breed
trouble. This was the first of the series of acts empowering him to
suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Under this act he was
permitted to set up martial law in any district threatened with invasion.
The cause of this drastic measure was the confusion and the general
demoralization that existed wherever the close approach of the enemy
created a situation too complex for the ordinary civil authorities. Davis
made use of the power thus given to him and proclaimed martial law in
Richmond, in Norfolk, in parts of South Carolina, and elsewhere. It was on
Richmond that the hand of the Administration fell heaviest. The capital
was the center of a great camp; its sudden and vast increase in population
bad been the signal for all the criminal class near and far to hurry
thither in the hope of a new field of spoliation; to deal with this
immense human congestion, the local police were powerless; every variety
of abominable contrivance to entrap and debauch men for a price was in
brazen operation. The first care of the Government under the new law was
the cleansing of the capital. General John H. Winder, appointed military
governor, did the job with thoroughness. He closed the barrooms, disarmed
the populace, and for the time at least swept the city clean of criminals.
The Administration also made certain political arrests, and even
imprisoned some extreme opponents of the Government for "offenses not
enumerated and not cognizable under the regular process of law." Such
arrests gave the enemies of the Administration another handle against it.
As we shall see later, the use that Davis made of martial law was
distorted by a thousand fault-finders and was made the basis of the charge
that the President was aiming at absolute power.

At the moment, however, Davis was master of the situation. The six months
following April 1, 1862, were doubtless, from his own point of view, the
most satisfactory part of his career as Confederate President. These
months were indeed filled with peril. There was a time when McClellan's
advance up the Peninsula appeared so threatening that the archives of the
Government were packed on railway cars prepared for immediate removal
should evacuation be necessary. There were the other great disasters
during that year, including the loss of New Orleans. The President himself
experienced a profound personal sorrow in the death of his friend, Albert
Sidney Johnston, in the bloody fight at Shiloh. It was in the midst of
this time that tried men's souls that the Richmond Examiner achieved an
unenvied immortality for one of its articles on the Administration. At a
moment when nothing should have been said to discredit in any way the
struggling Government, it described Davis as weak with fear telling his
beads in a corner of St. Paul's Church. This paper, along with the
Charleston Mercury, led the Opposition. Throughout Confederate history
these two, which were very ably edited, did the thinking for the enemies
of Davis. We shall meet them time and again.

A true picture of Davis would have shown the President resolute and
resourceful, at perhaps the height of his powers. He recruited and
supplied the armies; he fortified Richmond; he sustained the great captain
whom he had placed in command while McClellan was at the gates. When the
tide had turned and the Army of the Potomac sullenly withdrew, baffled,
there occurred the one brief space in Confederate history that was pure
sunshine. In this period took place the splendid victory of Second
Manassas. The strong military policy of the Administration had given the
Confederacy powerful armies. Lee had inspired them with victory. This
period of buoyant hope culminated in the great offensive design which
followed Second Manassas. It was known that the Northern people, or a
large part of them, had suffered a reaction; the tide was setting strong
against the Lincoln Government; in the autumn, the Northern elections
would be held. To influence those elections and at the same time to drive
the Northern armies back into their own section; to draw Maryland and
Kentucky into the Confederate States; to fall upon the invaders in the
Southwest and recover the lower Mississippi--to accomplish all these
results was the confident expectation of the President and his advisers as
they planned their great triple offensive in August, 1862. Lee was to
invade Maryland; Bragg was to invade Kentucky; Van Dorn was to break the
hold of the Federals in the Southwest. If there is one moment that is to
be considered the climax of Davis's career, the high-water mark of
Confederate hope, it was the moment of joyous expectation when the triple
offensive was launched, when Lee's army, on a brilliant autumn day,
crossed the Potomac, singing "Maryland, my Maryland".