Dixie Betrayed Read online

  Wigfall was a product of his generation in time and space, as were other intellectuals of the Southern cause. They were deeply conservative, privileged, and among the first families of their respective states. They often married each other’s cousins, so many became interrelated. They lived among farming or plantation lands. Many were slave owners or had slave owners in their families. They were wealthy, having received large inheritances and having been given significant “pocket monies,” even as youths. They were considerable spenders. For the middle period of his life, for example, Wigfall was solvent for only weeks at a time.

  The cream of Southern secessionists consisted of socially prominent aristocrats, most of whom were lawyers (like Wigfall) or judges. They drank and smoked cigars and gambled and fought and had affairs. They were well educated, despite spotty behavioral records marked with episodes of arrogance; Wigfall, for one, was described in school as “a nightmare to faculty slumbers” and acquired a reputation for insurgency. 11 These men were dominated by a sense of honor and slight. Over one period of five months, Wigfall was in a fistfight, two duels, three near-duels, and one shooting—leaving one dead and two, himself included, wounded. They felt they could get away with anything. They held slavery as the summum bonum, the height of morality. And they were willing to follow causes to the neglect of both family and fortune—the greatest cause, the one they had been indoctrinated with all their lives, being state rights.

  As a result the Confederacy was in trouble right out of the gate. But for a long time, only a relatively small group realized that. Confederate nationalism was doomed. The situation grew worse as resources dwindled and all parties pushed their conflicting agendas, nearly none of which could be granted. Squabbles spread all across the war front. Congress argued with the president. The vice president argued with the president. Governors argued with the president. Generals argued with the president. Military bureau chiefs in Richmond argued with generals and with the president. The press bitterly criticized the president. The Southern government became a mess at all levels, and with a cast of thousands of players, resolution seemed unlikely.

  And yet the Confederacy found itself wrapped in a strange paradox. For all its practical troubles, the Southern nation was able to create and sustain a deep passion for the dream of a Confederate nation. This passion for an independent South burned so brightly in the hearts and minds of Rebels that it outlived the protonation, in fact, and still has a hold on the descendants of Confederate soldiers—in some cases more strongly than it did on postwar Confederates themselves. The persistent belief that the South should have won the war grew out of this postwar love affair, and many Southern writers continued to fight the war with ink on paper in the decades following Appomattox. The myth building of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, and the persistent suspicion of federal governments that is part of the human condition, gave birth to and nurtured this dream. The David versus Goliath syndrome, the American fascination with the underdog, the anomaly, captured the fascination of many Southerners.

  But more importantly this passion came from the influence of Confederate propagandists who, with noble cause at heart, tried their best to help Jefferson Davis and the young Confederate nation thwart their betrayers. It was a struggle that would turn ugly and play itself out both in the hallways and chambers of the Richmond government and on the battlefields spread across America. It was a struggle in the midst of a national crisis.

  Chapter 2

  Birth of a Nation

  MONDAY, February 18, 1861, began with a bright, blazing sun rising into a clear, blue sky far above the rooftops and cupolas of Montgomery, Alabama. A vibrant city of 8,843, Alabama’s capital was proudly transforming into the center of the whole South. It would be a noble experiment in nation building.

  Although its population was modest, Montgomery was accustomed to a flurry of activity from the earliest days on the Alabama frontier. Located in the central part of the state, with Birmingham to the north and Mobile to the south, Montgomery hosted steamboat traffic on the Alabama River and frequent trains on the Montgomery and West Point Railroad. The city’s jewel was the neoclassical State House, finished like a great Southern marble cake, with six Corinthian columns and a rust-colored dome that gave it a magnificence above any other buildings in the region.

  On the cool morning of the Confederacy’s birth, all was bustling within the city. “Montgomery has become a focal point of interest for the whole nation,” penned a visiting reporter for the New York Herald. 1 It was something of an understatement. From the Capitol Building down to the river, along the city’s principal business streets, gas lamps were extinguished one by one as dawn captured the sky above. The residents of fine homes in residential neighborhoods awoke and prepared for the big day, dressing in their best finery to catch a glimpse of the South’s new leader.

  They were not alone: throngs of visitors clogged the three principal hotels. Others stayed wherever they could, many boarding in private houses, hoping to secure employment in some capacity in this new venture called the Southern Confederacy. Interspersed among the whites in the fancy neighborhoods were African Americans, many acting as house servants. Of the 4,502 African Americans in Montgomery, about 100 were free. They lived in basic cottages that lined the city’s outer limits.

  The chief revolutionary, president-elect Jefferson Davis, had made an exhausting trip from his Brierfield plantation in Mississippi to attend his inaugural ceremony. Already the Confederate leader felt the pressure of his post; his fatigued frame held a plain, homespun suit, and his voice was so strained by making speeches along his journey that the words he uttered were too soft and flayed for many to hear.

  Long before the Confederacy was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, Jefferson Finis Davis had a celebrated, successful career as a soldier and politician. Davis’s parents, Samuel and Jane, were farmers and innkeepers who had succeeded in Georgia after the American Revolution but soon moved to Christian County, Kentucky, where they cleared a two-hundred-acre farm with the aid of several children and two slaves. By the time Jefferson came along, on June 3, 1808, he was the tenth child, born in a cabin on the farm when his mother was forty-eight. To signify the postscript to their family, Jane and Samuel added the middle name, alerting those who didn’t suspect already that Jefferson would be the last Davis child. Eight months later, and fewer than one hundred miles away, another baby would arrive on the Kentucky frontier and be named Abraham Lincoln.

  After adding horses and slaves to the clan and in search of better land, Samuel Davis moved the family again in 1810, this time to Louisiana, and a year later, to the southwestern corner of the Mississippi Territory, which would achieve statehood in 1817. There, Jefferson Davis would grow through his adolescent years and become a man, following the course of many youths, rebelling against school despite his bright mind and success. He entered college at Transylvania University, in Lexington, Kentucky, in the heart of the bluegrass region, where he resolidified ties to his native state. His studies went well at Transylvania until June 1824, when he learned his father had died. This shock rattled Davis badly. His melancholy worsened when Jefferson discovered that his father’s financial success had reversed itself over his last few years. Jefferson’s oldest brother, Joseph, now became a father figure. To further Jefferson’s education his older brother secured an appointment for him to the United States Military Academy at West Point through the help of the great political champion of the South, John C. Calhoun. (Calhoun, celebrated U.S. senator from South Carolina, was revered as the author of the most sacred principle of Southern politics: that secession, if desired, could be justified within the bounds of the Constitution.) Jefferson traveled to the Point and commenced his schooling in the autumn of 1824.

  Davis performed adequately in his studies at West Point—as well as compiling substantial numbers of demerits—and graduated twenty-third out of thirty-three in the class of July 1, 1828. Commissioned a brevet second lieutenant, he spent seven years in the U
.S. Army as an infantry officer. Frontier duty and occasional clashes with Indians marked the period. He was commissioned a first lieutenant of dragoons before resigning, in 1835. That year, he also married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor, and the couple moved to Mississippi to commence farming. Plantation life on the Davis’s eight-hundred-acre estate seemed a reasonable dream, but shortly after their marriage, the newlyweds contracted a fever, and on September 15, 1835, Sarah Taylor Davis died. Ill and depressed, Davis went to Cuba to recover. He eventually returned to Mississippi, to his Brierfield plantation, but stayed in seclusion.

  Davis spent the next ten years mostly locked away from the world. When he returned to public life, he turned to politics in Mississippi and the companionship of a very young girl from Natchez, Varina Howell. When they were married in early 1845, Varina was nineteen, Jefferson thirty-six. Independent and volatile, Varina irked her new husband at intervals but eventually transformed herself into an engine of support and encouragement for him. Soon after their marriage Jefferson was elected to Congress as a representative from Mississippi. But Davis’s term in Congress was cut short by war clouds looming to the southwest, and he was commissioned colonel of the First Mississippi Rifles, joining his former father-in-law’s army in Mexico.

  Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War career was wholly successful. His regiment, raised in the little town of Vicksburg, was assigned to Maj. Gen. Taylor’s army, while much of the army accompanied Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the army, as he marched from Veracruz to Mexico City. As Taylor’s force moved against Monterrey, Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna attacked Taylor’s force, hoping to demolish it and then turn toward Scott. Davis heroically aided the United States’ victory, was wounded in the foot, and returned home. In 1847 he was appointed to be a brigadier general in the U.S. Army but was never commissioned as such; instead, Davis was elected U.S. senator from Mississippi.

  Throughout the 1850s Jefferson Davis was transformed into the leading proponent of Southern rights in Congress, succeeding John C. Calhoun, who had died in 1850. In that year Davis resigned from the Senate and entered the race for governor of Mississippi, an act designed to help the Democratic Party by keeping his eccentric opponent out of office. Davis joined the race late and faced the irascible, reckless Henry Stuart Foote. Foote had been born a Virginian, in 1804, but settled in Alabama by age nineteen, becoming an attorney and newspaperman. Foote “called ’em as he saw ’em,” and soon this shoot-from-the-hip style led to duels with politicians he had called out in the paper. By 1850 Foote was a successful Mississippi politician who, despite his strong advocation of state rights, fancied himself a staunch Unionist.

  Prior to the election the two men already had a checkered relationship. In 1847, on a festive holiday night at Gadsby’s bar in Washington, they came to blows after a heated argument over slavery and the territories, a subject that would come to be called “squatter sovereignty.” Davis violently disagreed that territories should have the right to decide if they wanted slavery to exist within their boundaries, and the argument turned fiery. Foote said Davis was fueled by “arrogance,” and Davis’s comment that Foote had uttered “offensive language” is hardly surprising, given the latter’s record. Dragging his wounded foot, Davis lunged at Foote and began to “pummel him with repeated blows until others pulled him off.” 2

  Davis later wrote that Foote, shocked, had started to leave the room and then turned and emphasized that Davis had struck the first blow, which would mean that in a duel, Foote would choose the weapons. In a complete meltdown Davis shrieked, “Liar!” broke free from those who were holding him, and shook his fist toward Foote. Another senator jumped on Davis and began fighting, and someone shouted that Foote and Davis should be put into a room where they could square off. Foote asked, “Do you have coffee and pistols for two?” Davis replied, “Yes,” and Foote hesitated, balking at Davis’s military experience. Others in the room finally convinced the two to drop the matter and to write it off as a “Christmas frolic.” But the two men would hate each other forever. In the 1851 gubernatorial election, Foote won, further enraging Davis. The two men’s paths would cross repeatedly in the coming drama.

  Davis rose to his height in 1853, when Franklin Pierce made him U.S. secretary of war, in which role he excelled at army organization and developed a keen sense of military protocol and personalities. In 1857 he again returned to Washington as senator from Mississippi, a position from which he directed a fusillade of Southern spirit at the increasingly Northern-controlled government.

  Four years of Yankee-bashing from his post on Capitol Hill had raised Davis to preeminence among Southern politicians. Now, in a new capital city in the making, Davis prepared to take on the leadership of the South. On the morning of his inauguration, Davis left the Exchange Hotel in an open barouche led by six white horses for the journey to the Alabama State House. Bands played for the thousands strewn along Commerce Street, and thunderous cheers, smiles, and screams of joy rang throughout the city, following Alabama politician William L. Yancey’s shouted declaration that “the man and the hour have met. . . . Prosperity, honor, and victory await his administration.” 3

  “All Montgomery had flocked to Capitol Hill in holiday attire,” wrote Thomas Cooper DeLeon, a Southern journalist, of the festive day. “Bells rang and cannon boomed, and the throng—including all members of the government—stood bareheaded as the fair Virginian [Letitia Tyler, granddaughter of John Tyler] threw that flag to the breeze. . . . A shout went up from every throat that told they meant to honor and strive for it; if need be, to die for it.” 4

  As the carriage approached the State House, a band struck up the anthem “La Marseillaise,” and applause greeted the president-elect. On a platform constructed at the State House, Davis sat beside the vice president-elect, Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia. The band also played a northern minstrel song, “Dixie,” which was liked by the crowd and, in time, would become the unofficial song of the Confederacy. Davis and Stephens sat beside Howell Cobb II of Georgia, who had served as president of the Provisional Congress that had commenced its meetings two weeks before.

  As Davis looked out over the massive crowd, which perhaps numbered five thousand, he “saw troubles and thorns innumerable.” 5 The South in 1861 resembled a set of European-style nation-states, each with its own distinctive flavor and outlook on the world. Unity meant you were friendly with adjoining states, but you had little in the way of official relations with them—governmentally or politically. A shrewd politician, Davis immediately saw trouble in the diversity reflected across the sea of faces spread before him. A strong, unified Confederacy under the control of a central government would be necessary if the war that most saw as inevitable were to come. The unity of this moment, Davis worried, might be short lived.

  Waves of cheering cascaded onto the platform as Davis stood up and stretched his tall, lean form and was introduced as savior to the new Southern nation. The Mississippian invoked the spirit of 1776 and referred to “the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they are established.” The crowd erupted into applause. Davis continued, saying that if the Northern states attempted to coerce the Confederacy back into the Union, “the suffering of millions will bear testimony to the folly and wickedness of our aggressors. It is joyous, in the midst of perilous times, to look around upon a people united in heart,” Davis shouted, “where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole—where the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard,” he asserted, “they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a virtuous people.” 6

  Shouts and applause electrified the air around the State House—Davis had won his audience. Yet Davis was no one’s fool. A long, difficult ro
ad lay ahead if the Confederacy were to survive and prosper. What he could not yet see, however, were some of the specific obstacles to come, including two who were seated on the platform alongside him.

  THE Confederacy’s new vice president couldn’t have been a worse choice—at least from the president’s point of view. Alexander Hamilton Stephens was a tiny, sickly man who had a “ghostly, spectral appearance.” Born in 1812, a product of Crawfordville, Georgia, Stephens was called “Little Aleck” by those who knew him, and despite his constant systemic ailments and chronic depression, he had achieved great success. Those who saw Stephens in political meetings often thought he was a visiting teenager, or worse—as one commentator put it, “until he occasionally blinked, he seemed to be stone dead.”

  He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed ninety-six pounds and seemed to have aged prematurely. He was ghost white and stooped; at times his weight dropped to a mere eighty pounds. He was a world-class hypochondriac. But his thoughts extended beyond ailments real and imagined. Highly intelligent and gifted as an orator, Stephens had taught school before becoming a prosperous lawyer. He was a quiet intellectual who excelled at nothing more than writing thoughtfully composed letters. Little Aleck maneuvered into politics in 1836 and never looked back. Never married, he was always very close with his half-brother, Linton.

  Little Aleck’s path to the Confederacy was no less exciting than Davis’s had been. Elected to the U.S. House as a Whig in 1843, Stephens became an independent in 1850, upon the party’s decline. In 1854 he helped to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the House, one of the key events that propelled America toward war. This act promoted popular sovereignty, the idea that territorial citizens should decide themselves whether their newly formed states should permit slavery.