Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (67 page)

Far more serious than his strategic misjudgments, though, were Davis’s personnel misjudgments. If Lincoln was overly prone to appoint incompetent politicians
to generalships, Davis was overly willing to appoint and defend incompetents—Leonidas Polk, Theophilus Holmes, Braxton Bragg—who were either personal friends or else men he believed had been unfairly condemned by unscrupulous and self-interested rivals (as Davis was convinced he himself had been). At the same time, though, in many cases Davis made these appointments knowing full well that he was dealing from the bottom of the deck, and he stood by them through one blunder after another simply because the supply of real military talent in circulation was so limited. “A
General
in the full acceptation of the word is a rare product, scarcely more than one can be expected in a generation,” Davis grimly observed to his brother, “but in this mighty war in which we are engaged there is need for half a dozen.”
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Davis’s military miscues were not nearly as harmful to the Confederacy as were the lamentable failures of his cabinet and the Confederate Congress. Most of Davis’s first choices for the Confederate Cabinet were dictated by the need to assure the various states that their interests were being represented in the government. His first secretaries of state and war, Leroy Pope Walker of Alabama and Robert Toombs of Georgia, were both brainless political appointees, and neither of them survived the first year of the war in office. Davis’s most talented cabinet member, Judah P. Benjamin, was also, unfortunately, his most unpopular. With a Cheshire-cat smile playing around his lips, Benjamin was described by John S. Wise as overfull of “oleaginous” slickness, with a “keg-like form and over-deferential manner suggestive of a prosperous shopkeeper,” and “more brains and less heart than any other civic leader in the South.”
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But Davis could not spare Benjamin, and each time Benjamin’s political enemies demanded that he be removed, Davis would simply shift him to another post within the cabinet, moving him from attorney general to secretary of war, and then to secretary of state.

The weakest link in Davis’s chain of cabinet secretaries was the secretary of the Treasury, Christopher Memminger. Born in Württemberg, Germany, and brought to America with his grandfather as an orphan, the wealthy South Carolina politician’s only real fiscal experience was his chairmanship of the old House Committee on Finance. He had been an important standard-bearer for secession in South Carolina, however, and the need to accommodate the South Carolinians in the Confederate government compelled Davis to make room for him in the cabinet. It is hard to know where Memminger would have done the least damage, and it was probably Davis’s own naiveté in fiscal matters that led him to park Memminger at the Treasury.
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As it turned out, Memminger’s tenure as the Confederate Treasury chief was as close as one could come to unrelieved disaster. Overconfident as a result of the Confederacy’s initial military successes in 1861, Memminger scoffed at Judah Benjamin’s proposal that the Confederate government buy up all available Southern cotton with Confederate bonds and notes, hoard the white gold to drive up the price on foreign markets, then sell it and (once the principal was repaid) use the gigantic profits to purchase the weapons and ships the Confederacy needed. In 1861, Southern credit seemed sound on the world’s financial market (an initial Confederate loan of $5 million was snapped up, even oversubscribed, at face value), and Memminger could not imagine when such good financial times would ever fail. He made no effort to prevent Northern merchants from removing hard currency from their Southern bank accounts, and allowed the specie in the vital New Orleans banks to fall into Federal hands while hardly stirring in concern when New Orleans was captured by Farragut’s ships in April 1862.
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Not until the war had dragged on into 1862 did Memminger reverse himself and attempt to buy up cotton for government use. By then, however, cotton was commanding much steeper prices, and even when he was able to purchase it, he found himself unable to find enough blockade-runners willing to ship the cotton at government prices. Memminger was not able to ensure a regular means for exporting cotton until 1863, when the Confederate Congress acted to regulate the blockade-runners. Even though this was much too little much too late, the export of Confederate cotton still helped underwrite the Erlanger loan, and it is anyone’s guess how much other financial support a cotton-starved Europe might have lent to Memminger if he had acted as decisively in 1861. This forced Memminger to resort more and more to the printing presses to print the money he needed, and he helplessly flooded the Confederate economy with notes and bonds that had little or no backing in either specie or cotton.
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If there was any single nonmilitary matter that must stand before all the others in leading to the defeat of the Confederacy, it was the stunning failure of Memminger and the Treasury to make the Confederate economy work. As late as the fall of 1863, Josiah Gorgas was confident that “there is breadstuff enough” and “war material sufficient—men, guns, powder… to carry on the war for an indefinite period.” None of it was going to change hands for the worthless shinplasters Memminger was offering, though. “The great fear of every patriot at this moment relates to our currency,” groaned Gorgas. “The fear is that a swift national bankruptcy is coming upon us.” Considering “the absolute wealth of the South,” Gorgas thought it all the more “amazing that our finances should have been allowed to run into this ruinous condition.” He knew whom to blame: “The real pinch is in the Treasury.”
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Davis’s difficulties in assembling a competent cabinet were overshadowed by several factors over which he had no control, starting with the political turbulence of the Confederate Congress. The Provisional Congress that first sat in Montgomery was composed of only fifty members, appointed by the state secession conventions and including some of the South’s most distinguished men (including a former secretary of war and a former president of the United States, John Tyler). Forty-two of them were lawyers and seventeen were planters. But once the new constitution was formally adopted and the capital moved to Richmond, a new Confederate Congress had to be elected, and when it assembled in November 1861, it turned out to be a very different assembly. The Confederate armies had sucked up a good deal of the Confederacy’s experienced leadership, with the result that only about a third of the 257 men who sat in the Confederate Congress during the war possessed any previous service in the U.S. Congress. The rest were either political amateurs or else men with nothing more than the limited experience of serving in state legislatures, who would be likely to speak only for the most narrow and local state interests. “The extremist and ultra friends of state rights, appear to have lost their reasoning,” wailed Burgess Gaither, one of North Carolina’s representatives. “They [had] shown high capacity for the destruction of the old government,” but “now exhibit none for the construction of the new one.”

Even those who could boast some experience in the old House were men whose long struggle to defend slavery there had turned them temperamentally into political outsiders, more inclined to oppose and criticize than to construct. Georgia representative Warren Aiken was “amazed to see the differences of opinion that exist among the members. It seems, sometimes, that no proposition, however plain and simple could be made that would not meet with opposition.” Absenteeism, drunkenness, and outright brawling on the floor of the House further crippled the effectiveness of the Confederate Congress. Georgia Senator Benjamin Hill hurled an inkstand at the head of William Yancey of Alabama, and when he missed, he picked up a chair to attack him again; on February 13, 1863, Henry Foote of Tennessee was attacked by a member from Alabama with a Bowie knife; an outraged female constituent of Missouri senator George Vest horsewhipped him in the lobby of the Capitol. “Some malign influence seems to preside over your councils,” complained James Henry Hammond to Virginia senator R. M. T. Hunter. “Pardon me, is the majority always drunk?”
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Mercifully for Jefferson Davis, few challenges to his calls for greater central authority in Richmond emerged from Congress during the first ten months of the war. But the sudden loss of Forts Henry and Donelson, followed by the failure to redeem the Tennessee River at Shiloh and the fall of New Orleans, badly jolted Southern complacency. On February 27, 1862, only five days after his formal inauguration as Confederate president under the new constitution, Davis suspended the writ of habeas corpus around Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, and he eventually widened his suspension of the writ to include any Southern districts threatened by invasion. On March 28 he appealed to the Confederate Congress to institute a selective military draft for all males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five “not legally exempt for good cause.” The Congress blinked, and on April 16 it passed Davis’s Conscription Act (with some important exemptions) by a margin of two to one. On August 18, 1862, Davis called on the second session of the Confederate Congress for a second conscription act that would raise the age of liability to forty-five. A third Conscription Act in February 1864 expanded the age limits yet again, from seventeen to fifty.
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The grasp of the conscription bills over the rights of the individual Southern states was greater than anything anyone had seen, even in the old Union. Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown protested the draft in pure Democratic terms as a “bold and dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the States… at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution.” To Alexander Stephens, Brown added that “I entered into this revolution to contribute my humble mite to sustain the rights of the states and prevent the consolidation of Government, and I am a rebel till this object is accomplished, no matter who may be in power.” To the delight of his constituents, Brown defied the draft in the state courts and promptly appointed large numbers of eligible Georgia males to fictitious state offices in order to exempt them. In South Carolina, Governor Francis W. Pickens was trying to impose a state draft of his own and attempted to exempt South Carolina draftees from any liability to the Confederate draft. Even in Virginia, the otherwise cooperative Governor John Letcher ordered the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute to refuse any movement to draft Virginia Military Institute cadets.
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The Conscription Acts also alienated a far more dangerous segment of Southern society in October 1862 by exempting certain classes of skilled workers, and (in response
to planter anxieties over the possibility of slave revolts when so many Southern white men were being pulled into the armies) the owners, agents, or overseers of plantations with more than twenty slaves. The intentions behind the exemption were plausible enough, but linking slave ownership to exemption from war service was a spark to the tinder of the nonslaveholders of the South. In effect, this “twenty-nigger law” protected large-scale slave-owning planters—the very people who had the most at stake in this war—from military service, while drafting the small-scale slaveholders and the nonslaveholders who had the least interest in fighting to defend slavery.

That, in turn, caused Southern yeomen who were ambivalent about the planters and their slaves anyway, and who rallied to the defense of the Confederacy only because it promised to keep the demons of abolition and black amalgamation from their doors, to wonder whether they had more to lose at the hands of the Yankees or those of the planters. “Never did a law meet with more universal odium than the exemption of slave owners,” wrote Alabama senator James Phelan to Davis. “Its influence upon the poor is most calamitous, and has awakened a spirit and elicited a discussion of which we may safely predicate the most unfortunate results.” Unless Davis agreed to “reorganize the whole system, and let popular attention be started and attracted by the prominent, rich, and influential men being swept into the ranks,” then Phelan could only promise that “it only needs some daring man to raise the standard to develop a revolt.”
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Jefferson Davis turned out to be both stubborn and resourceful in getting his legislative way with the draft. Since the Confederate Congress had declined to organize even the rudimentary Supreme Court that the Confederate constitution allowed, Davis took his defense of the conscription into the Georgia state courts, where he won, to the amazement of onlookers. There was no real debate over Davis’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and only one of the thirty-seven state supreme court justices in the Confederacy saw any contradiction between states’ rights and national conscription. In Richmond, Davis kept a working majority behind his bills and lost only one veto to an override in Congress. In time, as Confederate military fortunes died away after Antietam and Perryville, he persuaded Congress to hand him even more vital powers. In March 1863 Congress authorized quartermaster and commissary officers to confiscate food and animals for the use of the Confederate army and to offer reimbursement at well below market values. A month later, in an effort to raise more revenue and pull some of Memminger’s worthless paper currency out of circulation, Congress imposed a broad range of stiff direct taxes on the Confederate people, including a 10 percent sales tax, another 10 percent tax in kind on livestock and produce, an 8 percent value-added tax on all other agricultural products, and a
graduated income tax, up to 15 percent on all yearly incomes over $10,000. “This is no time for making nice distinctions between the laws of the Confederate Government and the laws of any State,” urged the
Richmond Dispatch
. “We want soldiers to fight, not lawyers to talk,” and “State Governments that will conform their laws to those of the Confederate Government, not raise opposition to them.”
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