The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (19 page)

Davis had troubles enough by then, and differences enough to attempt to compose, without the added problem of trying to heal this latest split between two of his friends, one of whom was among the nation’s ranking field commanders, responsible for the conduct of affairs in the largest of all its military departments, while the other was his first wife’s younger brother. Down in Georgia, for example, on March 10 — the day A. J. Smith’s gorillas left Vicksburg, beginning the ten-week campaign that would take them up and down Red River, and the day before Grant left Washington for the meeting with Sherman in Nashville, where they would begin to plan the campaign designed to bring Georgia to its knees and the Confederacy to extinction — Governor Joseph E.
Brown addressed the state legislature, which he had called into special session to hear some things he had to say on the subject of the war. What he had to say, in essence, was that the war had been a failure. This was not only because it was now to be waged on his doorstep, so to speak, but also because, as he saw it, the authorities in Richmond had abandoned the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, including “all self-government and the sovereignty of the States.”

Brown’s solution, as set forth in his address, was for the Confederacy to dissolve itself into its components, thus calling a halt to discord and bloodshed: after which, in an atmosphere of peace and fellowship, a convention of northern and southern governors would assemble at Baltimore or Memphis, Montreal or the Bermuda Islands, and each state, North as well as South, would “determine for herself what shall be her future connection, and who her future allies.” In other words, he would stop and start anew, this time without taking so many wrong turnings in the pursuit of happiness along the path that led to independence. Brown was careful, in the course of his speech, not to propose that Georgia rejoin the Union. That would have amounted to outright treason. He proposed, rather, that the Union rejoin Georgia, and he favored “negotiation” as the means of achieving this end. “In a crisis like the present,” he maintained, “Statesmanship is ever more important than Generalship. Generals can never stop a war, though it may last twenty years till one has been able to conquer the other. Statesmen terminate wars by negotiation.”

Praised for its acumen or condemned as disloyal, the address pleased some of its hearers and outraged others, depending largely on their predilections. Politically, an observer remarked, “Georgia was rent asunder.” Among the governor’s firmest supporters, though he was not in Milledgeville to hear him, was Alexander H. Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy. Stephens not only gave the speech his full approval — as well he might; “I advised it from stem to stern,” he admitted privately — but arrived in person six days later from Liberty Hall, his estate at nearby Crawfordville, to reinforce it with one of his own, twice as long and twice as bitter, in which he lashed out at the national authorities for their betrayal of the secessionist cause by adopting conscription and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. “Better, in my judgment,” he declared, “that Richmond should fall and that the enemy’s armies should sweep our whole country from the Potomac to the Gulf than that our people should submissively yield to one of these edicts.” A small, pale-faced man with burning eyes and a shrill voice, weighing less than a hundred pounds in the voluminous overcoat he wore against the chill he felt in all but the hottest weather, he spoke for three full hours, in the course of which he sustained at several points a critic’s charge that his alarm “had long ago vaulted into the hysterical.” Where personal freedom was concerned Stephens rejected all arguments
as to expediency. “Away with the idea of getting our independence first, and looking after liberty afterward!” he cried. “Our liberties, once lost, may be lost forever.” If he had to be ruled by a despot, he said darkly, he preferred that it be a northern one, and he closed on a dramatic note, quite as if he expected to be clapped in arrest by government agents as soon as he came down off the rostrum. “I do not know that I shall ever address you again, or see you again,” he told the legislators filling the chamber, row on row, from wall to wall. “As for myself,” he added by way of farewell—though he knew, as Patrick Henry had not known before him, that the authority he assailed would not dare call him to account — “give me liberty as secured in the Constitution, amongst which is the sovereignty of Georgia, or give me death!”

He proceeded not to the dungeon he had seemed to predict, but back to Liberty Hall, where he continued to fulminate, in letters and interviews, against the government of which he was nominally a part and the man whose place he would take in case of death or the impeachment he appeared to recommend. Reproached by a constituent for having “allowed your antipathy to Davis to mislead your judgment,” Stephens denied that he harbored any such enmity in his bosom. “I have regarded him as a man of good intentions,” he replied, “weak and vacillating, petulant, peevish, obstinate but not firm.” Having gone so far, however, he then revoked the disclaimer by adding: “Am now beginning to doubt his good intentions.” Meantime, back in Milledgeville, Brown’s managers were steering through the legislature a double set of resolutions introduced by Little Aleck’s younger brother Linton, one condemning the Richmond authorities for having overriden the Constitution, the other defining Georgia’s terms for peace as a return, North and South, to the “principles of 1776.” This took three days; the governor had to threaten to hold the legislators in special session “indefinitely” in order to ram the resolutions through; then on March 19 they passed them and were permitted to adjourn. Brown had his and the Vice President’s addresses printed in full, together with Linton Stephens’s resolutions, and distributed copies to all the Georgia soldiers in the armies of Lee and Johnston.

Stephens and Brown were two of the more unpleasant facts of Confederate life that had to be faced in Richmond by officials trying to get on with a long-odds war amid runaway inflation and spreading disaffection. Others were nearer at hand. In North Carolina, for example — that “vale of humility,” a native called the state, “nestled between two humps of pride,” Virginia and South Carolina — the yearning for peace had grown in ratio to a general disenchantment with “glory,” of which the war, according to Governor Zebulon Vance, had afforded the Old North State too meager a share. Less bitter than Joe Brown — of whom a fellow Georgian was saying this spring,
“Wherever you meet a growling, complaining, sore-headed man, hostile to the government and denunciatory of its measures and policy, or a croaking, despondent dyspeptic who sees no hope for the country, but, whipped himself, is trying to make everybody else feel as badly as himself, you will invariably find a friend, admirer, and defender of Governor Brown” — Vance was an unrelenting critic of the ways things were done or left undone at Richmond, and his correspondence was heavy with complaints, made directly to the President, that Carolinians were constantly being slighted in the distribution of promotions and appointments. Late in March, Davis lost patience and sought to break off the exchange, protesting that Vance had “so far infringed the proprieties of official intercourse as to preclude the possibility of reply. In order that I may not again be subjected to the necessity of making so unpleasant a remark, I must beg that a correspondence so unprofitable in its character, and which was not initiated by me, may here end, and that your future communications be restricted to such matters as may require official action.” But Vance, a self-made man from old Buncombe County, had long since learned the political value of persistence; he was not so easily restrained. Scarcely a mail arrived from Raleigh that did not include a protest by the governor that some worthy Tarheel had been snubbed or overlooked in the passing out of favors, military as well as civil. Davis could only read and sigh, thankful at least that Vance kept his distance, even though it was not so great as the distance Brown and Stephens kept.

That was by no means the case with Edward A. Pollard, who was not only very much at hand as associate editor of the Richmond
Examiner
, but also took the trouble to let the authorities know it daily. He often seemed to despise the Confederacy to its roots, and seldom relaxed in his efforts to impale its chief executive on what was agreed to be the sharpest pen in the journalistic South. Invective was his specialty, and when he got on his favorite subject — Jefferson Davis — he sometimes raised this specialty to an art. “Serene upon the frigid heights of infallible egotism,” the Kentucky-born Mississippian was “affable, kind, and subservient to his enemies” but “haughty, austere, and unbending to his friends,” and though he assumed “the superior dignity of a satrap,” he was in fact, behind the rigid mask, “an amalgam of malice and mediocrity.” Future historians of various persuasions were to take their cue from this carving-up of a man on his wrong side; it was small wonder that Pollard, who spoke with the gadfly rancor of Thersites, found many who nodded in gleeful agreement as they read his jabs and jibes. They read him, in this fourth and gloomiest spring of a war they had begun to believe they could not win, to find relief from a frustration which grew, like his own, in ratio to the dwindling of their hopes.

Thoroughly familiar with the American proclivity for blaming
national woes on the national leader, Davis had engaged in the practice too often himself not to expect it to be turned against him. He viewed it as an occupational hazard, one that more or less went with his job, and he spoke of it as a man might speak of any natural phenomenon — gravity, say, or atmospheric pressure — which could not be abolished simply because it bore within it the seeds of possible disaster. “Opposition in any form can only disturb me inasmuch as it may endanger the public welfare,” he had said. Moreover, no one could sympathize more with the people who felt this fourth-spring frustration, for no one was in a position to know as well how soundly based the feeling was. Such blame as he attached to men like Stephens and Brown and Pollard was not for entertaining, but rather for giving vent to their defeatist conclusions, since by so doing they betrayed their high positions, converting them to rostrums for the spreading of despair, and did indeed “endanger the public welfare.” As for the frustration itself, Davis not only sympathized with, he shared it. However much he might condemn those who gave way under pressure, he knew only too well how great that pressure was: especially for those who saw the problem, as he did, from within. Wherever he looked he perceived that the Confederacy’s efforts to “conquer a peace” were doomed to failure. And this applied most obviously to the three most obvious fields for aggressive endeavor, whereby the South might attempt to force its will upon its mortal adversary: 1) by entering upon negotiations with representatives from the North to obtain acceptable peace terms, 2) by mounting and sustaining a military offensive which would end with the imposition of such terms, or 3) by securing the foreign recognition and assistance which would afford the moral and physical strength now lacking to achieve the other two.

As for the first of these, Davis had pointed out the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of pursuing this line of endeavor three months ago in response to a letter from Governor Vance, in which the Carolinian urged that attempts be made to negotiate with the enemy, not only because such an expression of willingness on the part of the South to stop shooting and start talking would “convince the humblest of our citizens … that the government is tender of their lives and happiness, and would not prolong their sufferings unnecessarily one moment,” but also because the rejection by the North of such an offer would “tend greatly to strengthen and intensify the war feeling [of our people] and will rally all classes to a more cordial support of the government.” Davis replied that while such results were highly desirable, “insuperable objections” stood in the way of their being achieved. One was that, by the simple northern device of refusing to confer with “rebel” envoys, all such offers — except to the extent that they were “received as proof that we are ready for submission” — had been rejected out of hand. He himself had seldom neglected an opportunity, in his public addresses
and messages to Congress, to inform the enemy and the world that “All we ask is to be let alone.” Nothing had come of this, in or out of official channels, and it was becoming increasingly clear that to continue such efforts was “to invite insult and contumely, and to subject ourselves to indignity, without the slightest chance of being listened to.”

Suppose, though, that they did somehow manage to break through the barrier of silence. What would that do, Davis asked, but confront them with another barrier, still more “insuperable” than the first? “It is with Lincoln alone that we could confer,” he reminded Vance, “and his own partisans at the North avow unequivocally that his purpose in his message and proclamation [of Amnesty and Reconstruction] was to shut out all hope that he would
ever
treat with us, on
any
terms.” The northern President himself had made this clear and certain, according to Davis. “Have we not been apprised by that despot that we can only expect his gracious pardon by emancipating all our slaves, swearing obedience to him and his proclamation, and becoming in point of fact the slaves of our own Negroes?” In the light of this, he asked further, “can there be in North Carolina one citizen so fallen beneath the dignity of his ancestors as to accept or enter into conference on the basis of these terms? That there are a few traitors in the state who would be willing to betray their fellow citizens to such a degraded condition, in hope of being rewarded for their treachery by an escape from the common doom, may be true. But I do not believe that the vilest wretch would accept such terms for himself.”

Having gone so far — for the letter was a long one, written in the days before he sought to break off corresponding with the Tarheel governor — Davis then proceeded to the inevitable conclusion that peace, if it was to come at all, would have to be won by force of arms. “To obtain the sole terms to which you or I could listen,” he told Vance, “this struggle must continue until the enemy is beaten out of his vain confidence in our subjugation. Then and not till then will it be possible to treat of peace.”