Dixie Betrayed Read online

  Copyright © 2006 by David Eicher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  The Little, Brown and Company name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: March 2006

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07571-8

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1: Prologue

  Chapter 2: Birth of a Nation

  Chapter 3: Portrait of a President

  Chapter 4: The War Department

  Chapter 5: A Curious Cabinet

  Chapter 6: The Military High Command

  Chapter 7: State Rightisms

  Chapter 8: Richmond, the Capital

  Chapter 9: The Rise of Lee and Bragg

  Chapter 10: An Uneasy Brotherhood

  Chapter 11: Jockeying for Position

  Chapter 12: Politics Spinning Out of Control

  Chapter 13: Can’t We All Get Along?

  Chapter 14: Soiled Reputations

  Chapter 15: The President versus the Congress

  Chapter 16: Military Highs and Lows

  Chapter 17: Slaves as Soldiers?

  Chapter 18: Peace Proposals

  Chapter 19: Epilogue: Despair

  Postlude

  Appendix: Executive Officers of the Confederate States, 1861–1865

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Photographs

  Also by David J. Eicher

  Gettysburg Battlefield: The Definitive Illustrated History

  The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War

  Mystic Chords of Memory: Civil War Battlefields and Historic Sites Recaptured

  Robert E. Lee: A Life Portrait

  Civil War Battlefields: A Touring Guide

  For Chris Eicher, who already knows the meaning of the worst events in world history, and how they make us appreciate the best events even more

  “It seems to be a law of humanity that generation after generation must rescue its liberties from the insidious grasp of a foe without or within. In our case, we have to seize them from both.”

  — Lawrence M. Keitt

  “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them, even for the best purposes and objects, seldom end them. . . . The selfish, the ambitious, and the bad will generally take the lead.”

  — Alexander H. Stephens

  “I think it important that we should at least seem united & harmonious to the enemy.”

  — Clement C. Clay

  Chapter 1

  Prologue

  IT was a typical Virginia spring morning, with a slight breeze cascading and the sweet smell of honeysuckle permeating the humid air. Shafts of bright sunlight shot down through the canopy of forest and illuminated patches of dusty ground. Dense thickets of brush intermingled with the scratchy sounds of life among it; squirrels darted through last fall’s leaves; rabbits and raccoons made peace with the forest floor and stayed put, holed up against the commotion of the outdoors. In the distance could be heard faint, shrill tones of music together with the crackle and boom of drums as well as the snapping branches and shuffling leaves as men marched in loose form.

  The peace and beauty of the Wilderness, a forested area in Virginia west of Fredericksburg, masked a deepening Southern desperation.

  Ulysses Grant and George Meade were bearing down on Richmond, which had narrowly avoided capture two years earlier. Vicksburg had fallen the previous summer, as Robert E. Lee’s raid into Pennsylvania failed. Now a Yankee drive deep into Georgia was coming. Federal ships had been tightening control of the coast for months, leaving few seaports open. And the Confederacy’s largest city, New Orleans, had long ago fallen to the Union.

  Yet there was something powerfully spiritual about this Confederacy: a deep optimism that it would survive, gain independence, and live on as something great. For most Confederates, even the leaders, there was no other way to think. Most of the credit went straight to Providence. Despite some downfalls since the autumn of 1862—the retreats from Kentucky and Maryland, the losses at Vicksburg and Gettysburg—the Confederacy had whipped the Yankees at Chickamauga in the autumn of 1863. Three years of hard fighting had shaken the rabble out of the ranks of the Confederate armies; now a core of battle-hardened veterans remained, supported by a fringe cast of increasingly older and younger marchers—all true believers in the Cause. Now, if they could beat back Grant, the war might come to a close with a Southern nation intact.

  The month of May 1864 was just a few days old.

  In the Twenty-first Virginia, making its way into the Wilderness, Sgt. John H. Worsham no sooner heard the word “Forward!” than he found the regiment struck by Yankee fire. Suddenly Worsham and his comrades scrambled and shot back, striking into the Union front, reloaded, and fired madly. The men were armed with a mixture of Springfield and Enfield rifles, Mississippi rifles, and old flintlock smoothbore muskets. In an instant the battle was on, and the crackle of musketry rang out among the line, claps of bullets striking trees behind the Virginians and swishes of minié balls sailing through the air carrying reminders to stay down. As Worsham slowly moved forward, he stopped when he saw a gun protruding from an old tree stump, a Yankee crouched behind it. “Throw down your gun!” Worsham shouted; but before the Union soldier could act, another young boy in Confederate gray shot him dead. Earlier this same boy had been left by the roadside in tears because he seemed too young to keep up with the march.

  Pressing on, the Twenty-first Virginia took prisoners and moved toward a pine thicket that shrouded a concentration of the enemy. Now the heavy thud of cannon could be heard in the distance, and all knew a general battle was taking place. Just as Worsham and his comrades settled on the edge of a field and began to fire at more Yankees, both groups of Americans saw an odd sight. The firing dwindled as more and more men watched. One Union soldier and a lone Confederate had slid down into the same gully for protection, into close quarters. After seeing each other and exchanging pleasantries, the two men walked out into an adjacent road and started a “fist and skull fight.” All the soldiers within view watched in disbelief. A yell went up across each line, and the Johnny eventually pinned the Yank and brought him back into the Confederate line as a prisoner. This surreal stoppage, in the midst of the start of a great battle, must have given everyone there pause.

  AT twenty-four, John Worsham was no ordinary Southerner. Born into the middle class of Richmond, the son of a merchant tailor, he grew up in a three-story brick home at the corner of Seventh and Broad streets. Worsham received a good education at Richmond’s Shockoe School for Boys and then took his first job at Winston and Powers, Commission Merchants, as a clerk. He was descended from early Virginia settlers, prominent men in Henrico Shire as early as the 1640s. Among the early family associates was Colonial official William Byrd. As with all young Southerners in 1861, Worsham was smitten with patriotic fever. He felt a special connection to the powers that were forging this mighty contest for Southern independence; he could count Joseph Mayo, the mayor of Richmond, among family friends.

  Worsham joined a Richmond militia unit known as F Company on April 1, 1861, and twelve weeks later he was mustered into the Twenty-first Virginia Infantry under Col. William Gillam. He went
to fight, as did all Confederate boys, with high hopes for absolute success in wresting the new nation away from the tyrannical government of Abraham Lincoln. Worsham and his comrades got their first taste of war in western Virginia. “We are having rather a gay time,” he wrote his sister, “marching over mountains with roads as Rocky as can be, and so crooked that we sometimes go over the same place two or three times.” 1

  In the spring of 1864, Worsham’s hometown was reeling from a recent raid by Union cavalry on the outskirts of the city and by the escape of Federal officers from Libby Prison down on the James River. Another shock to Richmond came when little Joe Davis, the president’s son, fell to his death at age five from a second-story piazza at the Confederate White House. Yet life went on. Sallie Putnam, just nineteen and with ultrapatriotic aspirations, spent countless hours as a nurse in the city’s hospitals. “So long had the campfires glowed around Richmond,” Putnam wrote, “so long had we breathed the sulphorous [sic] vapors of battle—so accustomed had our ears been to the dread music of artillery—so signal had been our deliverance from the most elaborate combinations for capture of our city, that more surely than ever before we felt at this time that our Confederate house was built ‘upon a rock.’” 2

  Yet, unknown to John Worsham and Sallie Putnam, the Confederacy was far from built on bedrock. The Confederacy was born sick.

  ON Thursday, March 7, 1861, Washingtonians awoke to the prettiest day of the season. At the Executive Mansion Abraham Lincoln mounted his horse in the chilly, bright air and readied for a morning journey. Before breakfast, three days after his inauguration (which then occurred in early March rather than January), the new Union president rode a little more than three miles to the Soldiers’ Home on the northern outskirts of the city to meet with his cabinet officers, hoping to devise a plan to resupply the Federal garrison in Fort Sumter, South Carolina. The fort, endangered by South Carolina militia and running low on supplies, was not about to be given to the South as a Federal gift. As Lincoln rode north, his horse dislodging clumps of dirt from Fourteenth Street, he did not know that just a couple miles away one of the most influential Southerners in the coming drama also was preparing for a big day.

  Inside the U.S. Capitol, its dome unfinished, the new day began, and business resumed as usual. In the two-story rectangular Senate Chamber, its Victorian ambiance complete with mahogany desks, marble columns, statuary busts, and cigar smoke wafting up to the decorated ceiling, senators convened. They had hoped to avoid bloody strife, but it was already too late. A provisional Confederate government had met in Montgomery and elected officers for the new Southern Confederacy. South Carolina had been the first state to secede, signing its ordinance on December 20, 1860. In January Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana followed. Kansas had been admitted to the Union as a free state. Texas had left the Union in February. Now Washington politicians recalled with mixed emotions Daniel Webster’s celebrated “March Seventh speech,” which he had delivered in the old Senate Chamber exactly eleven years before, hoping to ward off conflict. “Instead of speaking of the possibility or utility of secession,” said Webster, “instead of dwelling in those caverns of darkness, instead of groping with those ideas so full of all that is horrid and horrible, let us come out into the light of day.” The opportunity had come for a “March Seventh answer” to the now-deceased Webster, this time in a new chamber and from a new perspective, one in which a new generation of Americans, in effect, told the old one to go to hell.

  Amid a packed and contentious scene, senators crowded inside to hear the debate even as they wondered who might next leave on a southbound train. But as the American nation confronted civil war, the gruff and audacious Texan Louis Trezevant Wigfall had stayed in Washington. Wigfall, age forty-four, was an attorney by training and had been a senator for just one year. He was the kind of Southerner John Quincy Adams had called “pompous, flashy, and shallow.” 3 Standing tall, dressed in black, with a thick, wiry beard and black, beady eyes, Wigfall had appointed himself spokesman for the proto-Confederacy. The model of a Southern aristocrat, often on the verge of public drunkenness, always theatrically projecting his voice, he poked, prodded, and bragged at the Yankee politicians. Wigfall was emotional, inflexible, and a hawk, like his hero John C. Calhoun, the radical South Carolina politician who, in the 1830s and 1840s, created what Southerners believed was a constitutional justification for secession. (“Now let the senator from Tennessee put that in his pipe and smoke it,” he once shot back at a bewildered Andrew Johnson.) By Wigfall’s own admission, “Diplomacy was never my forte.” 4

  A South Carolinian by birth and among the most rabid of fire-eating secessionists, Wigfall was one of the supremely influential and vocal Southern politicians of his day. He was a powerful-looking man, according to one English journalist, with a face that “was not one to be forgotten, a straight, broad brow, from which the hair rose up like the vegetation on a riverbank, beetling black eyebrows—a mouth coarse and firm, yet full of power, a square jaw—a thick, argumentative nose . . . these [features] were relieved by eyes of wonderful depth and light, such as I never saw before but in the head of a wild beast.” 5 Wigfall had a peculiar blend of power and forceful oratory, even though he was a frequent drunk. His family traced its roots in America back to the 1680s, and he was not about to be told what to do by latecomers, by frontiersmen who were less American.

  Wigfall’s role as rear guard of the emerging South was a part he had been practicing for all his life. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1859, he told his fellow senators the following year that Southerners would never accept a “black” Republican as president and let his Northern colleagues know that if Southerners failed to capture Boston, then “before you get into Texas, you may shoot me.” 6 Actively spying for the Confederacy on the streets of Washington and emboldened by drinks from various Capitol Hill bars, Wigfall angrily taunted his Northern colleagues with the prospect of Southern independence. He seriously considered kidnapping James Buchanan so Southerner John Breckinridge, the vice president, could succeed him as the chief magistrate. Fellow Texan Sam Houston called Wigfall “a little demented either from hard drink, or from the troubles of a bad conscience.” 7

  On March 7 Wigfall proclaimed: “The only question is whether we shall have a decent, peaceable, quiet funeral after the Protestant form, or whether we shall have an Irish wake at the grave? This Union is dead; it has got to be buried. . . . The seven states that have withdrawn from this Union are surely never coming back.” 8 The next day he flatly told his colleagues, “We have dissolved the union; mend it if you can; cement it with blood.” 9 Wigfall was then expelled from the United States Senate, instantly becoming a celebrity.

  A month after his expulsion, prior to the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, Wigfall rowed out to the Federal fort in a small skiff and asked about its surrender. He was considerably drunk. Subsequently branded a hero by the Southern press, Wigfall ingratiated himself with the newly elected provisional president of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis, while serving as the chief magistrate’s aide.

  But the relationship between the Texan and the Confederate president would change dramatically, and it would affect how the Confederacy fought the war. Moreover, it was not unique. Key Confederate officials turned on Davis and, indeed, on the Confederacy, when the administration needed them most. The story of the betrayal of the Confederacy is rife with arguments, selfishness, reckless behavior, drunkenness, and the peculiar mind-set of a whole generation of privileged autocrats who had learned, for many years, to put state rights above all else.

  Mind you—the Confederacy’s internal troubles were not born in a vacuum. The Union had its own complex set of political, military, and social squabbles that unleashed all types of problems for the Lincoln government throughout the war. It would be silly to think that the Confederacy’s family arguments were unique or to ascribe the Confederacy’s loss of the war entirely to them. But, in the case of the Confederacy, the pol
itical and military arguments that echoed throughout Richmond’s streets and onto the battlefields made Confederate military success—and independence—far more difficult than it might have been, maybe even impossible. State rights wounded the United States but destroyed the Confederacy.

  DAVIS and the Confederate Congress fought over a wide variety of issues all through the war—from debates over state and federal rights, to suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, to military appointments, to conscripting troops, to emancipation and the arming of slaves to fight, to peace proposals. This was a political nation that could agree on hardly anything. And many of the debates spilled out onto the battlefield through commanders such as Robert E. Lee, Joe Johnston, G. T. Beauregard, John Bell Hood, and others. Grudges, friendships, prewar spats, and stubbornness all played into campaigns of letter writing and personal appearances intended to influence the political spectrum of the South. The story of these relationships begins with the inability to compromise. And it all started with the likes of Louis T. Wigfall.

  Wigfall symbolized a huge problem for the Confederacy: his background—and that of many Southerners—would not permit domination by any central government, be it the United States or Jefferson Davis. Many observed this, including William Howard Russell of the London Times. One May morning in Montgomery, Russell awakened Wigfall in his hotel room, hoping to discover the secret cause of the Confederate revolution. Groggily, Wigfall ran his hands through his long black hair as he exclaimed to the Brit what seemed perfectly obvious to a Confederate patrician but might need to be explained to a queen. “We are a peculiar people, sir!” Wigfall began. “You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us. . . . We have no cities—we don’t want them. We have no literature—we don’t need any yet. . . . As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want.” 10