“Watch and wait for the morning”
In these traumatic days, with news of Appomattox and other surrenders followed by tales of their President’s flight, capture and humiliation, the people of the South were moved by conflicting emotions. Thousands vowed to leave their homes rather than live under Yankee rule.
Judge John Perkins, a congressman from Louisiana, took extreme, but not unique, action: he burned to the ground his stately bayou plantation mansion with its priceless collections of porcelains, paintings and statuary, as well as his barns, cotton presses and crops. The judge then fled into Mexico, which became the most popular haven for the Confederate fugitives.
Uncounted numbers of families, lured by the relative freedom on the frontier, flooded into Texas in a movement which was to make the Lone Star State the region’s most populous by 1880. The outflow continued in every direction until, as a contemporary wrote, “In some of the Cotton States it looked as if more white men were to be lost thus than had been lost in battle.”
The impetus for these abrupt migrations lay in the profound shock of a people who had been conditioned to expect victory. Though Confederate ruin had not surprised government officials and perceptive soldiers, to white civilians at large the demise of the Old South came as a clap of thunder from a clear sky. Joel Chandler Harris, who was to create the character of Uncle Remus, was then a boy in a remote Georgia village. He wrote later: “The last trump will cause no greater surprise and consternation … than the news of Lee’s surrender caused in that region. The public mind had not been prepared.… Almost every piece of news printed in the journals … was colored with the prospect of ultimate victory; and then the curtain came down and the lights went out … [Southerners] were confronted with conditions that had no precedent or parallel in the history of the world. It is small fault if their minds failed at first to grasp the significance and the import of these conditions, so new were they and so amazing.”
Alert Southern promoters were quick to capitalize on the public mood of the region. Newspapers fostered emigration schemes, and one New Orleans entrepreneur contracted to send 1,000 white Southerners annually into Brazil. Thousands more merely joined the enemy, moving into the North to find work in the burgeoning cities, to escape racial tensions—or to exchange the thin, exhausted farmlands of Dixie for the rich black soil of the Midwestern plains. The phenomenon of out-migration, which began to appear during the southward flight of Jefferson Davis, was to send some 8,000 to 10,000 Southerners to Central and South America (to Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and British Honduras) and to Cuba, Jamaica, Canada, Egypt and Japan.
Many of these unrepentant Confederates left their native land for no other reason than resentment of Federal efforts to force ex-Confederates to take an oath of allegiance. Though the oath was neither punitive nor restrictive, old Rebels felt that they were being treated as aliens in their home country; they hotly denied that they had been treasonable—or done anything other than resist what their leaders depicted as oppression. The Jefferson Davis doctrine that the Confederacy had merely defended the Constitution against its despoilers was widespread in the region. Many veterans were to die without taking the despised oath.
These attitudes were hardened by the numerous signs that most Northerners were unforgiving, and insisted upon saddling the South with war guilt: Andrew Johnson had taken office by declaring, “I hold that robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime and crime must be punished. Treason must be made infamous and traitors must be impoverished.”
On Memorial Day, Federal troops stood guard around graves of Southerners in Arlington Cemetery to prevent anyone from placing flowers there. Northern resentment prevented the burial of Confederate dead on the Antietam battlefield until the public health was endangered by “skeletons, rooted up by the hogs and blanching in the open fields.”
A Federal grand jury in Norfolk, Va., returned indictments of treason against Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis—and if convicted they might expect death by hanging.
Friction and occasional violence spread through the region as Federal authorities sought to force the oath upon former soldiers and officials—even those who had surrendered and been properly paroled, with guarantees that they would not be disturbed further if they ceased resistance to the Federal government.
One of these troubled young veterans was Captain George Wise, the brother of the lieutenant who had carried to Davis news of Lee’s impending surrender during the President’s halt in Danville, Va.
Captain Wise had a typical experience when he was called before a provost marshal in Richmond, who told him that he must take the oath.
“Why must I take it? I will not. My parole covers the ground.”
“You fought under General Lee?”
“Yes. And surrendered with him, and gave my parole. To demand this oath of me insults me and my general.”
“I’ll make a bargain with you, Captain,” the Federal said. “Consult General Lee and abide by his decision.” It was clear that the enemy, as well as defeated Southerners, instinctively thought of Lee as the leader of the late Confederacy. With Jefferson Davis in his prison cell, the revered commander of the Army of Northern Virginia had become the symbolic hope of the Southern people.
Wise found Lee in his Richmond home, pale and weary, but willing to see any veteran who was having trouble with the enemy. Wise held out a copy of the oath. “They want me to take this thing, General. My parole covers it and I don’t think it should be required of me. What should I do?”
“I would advise you to take it,” Lee said. “It’s absurd that it should be required of my soldiers, for, as you say, the parole practically covers it. Nevertheless, take it, I should say.”
“General, this is submission to an indignity. If I must continue to swear the same thing over at every street corner, I’ll move to another country where I can at least keep my self-respect.”
After a moment of silence Lee said sadly, “Don’t leave Virginia. Our country needs her young men now.”
When Captain Wise told his father that he had taken the oath the fiery ex-governor roared, “You’ve disgraced the family!”
“General Lee advised me to do it.”
“Oh, that alters the case. Whatever General Lee says is all right, I don’t care what it is.”
Northern newspapermen also sought Lee’s views on the plight of the South and the political dilemma facing the nation. “I’m no politician,” Lee said. “I’m a soldier—a paroled prisoner.”
Though it was not publicly known, Lee was even then seeking a pardon from President Johnson. Since General Grant had assured him that Confederate officers would not be tried for treason after his surrender at Appomattox, Lee had approached the conquering general through an intermediary, Reverdy Johnson of Maryland. Grant sent a verbal message of full support, and urged Lee to apply for a pardon.
Lee did so in mid-June 1865, less than a week after he had been indicted for treason. He made application for pardon by sending it through Grant, asking for “the benefits and full restoration of all rights of privileges” of American citizenship. He explained to Grant that he did not seek to avoid trial, but reminded him of the protection guaranteed by his parole. Grant at once urged Johnson to pardon Lee, and to go further and dismiss all indictments against paroled prisoners of war in the South. Grant’s position embarrassed the administration. Prosecutors who hesitated to challenge the integrity of the general’s paroles simply suspended proceedings against the accused traitors, though they did not remove them from the dockets. Lee, like Jefferson Davis and other leaders, was to be left in limbo. The government might reopen its case against Lee and his associates at any time.
A basic problem was that the nation was at a loss as to how to bring the devastating conflict to an end. There would never be agreement as to whether the warring sections had fought a Civil War or a War Between the States, and for generations bitter controversy would rage as to what penalties and reparations, if any, should have been exacted from the vanquished.
When General Lee was pressed for his opinion by a newspaper he managed mild criticism of the North with his plea for harmony: “The South has for a long time been anxious for peace. In my earnest belief, peace was possible two years ago, and has been since.… They [Southerners] have been looking for some word … of compromise and conciliation from the North upon which they might base a return to the Union, their own views being considered.…”
Lee made a plea for moderation toward the South, saying that oppression would keep alive the spirit of resistance. “If a people see that they are to be crushed, they sell their lives as dearly as possible.”
The general said emphatically that he deplored plans of families of any Southern state to emigrate, “especially at a time when the region needs rebuilding, and so many young Southerners have been killed or disabled.”
The general made it clear that he was not to join the diehard Rebels. He spoke of North and South as “we,” and urged the restoration of peace and prosperity, as if he were anxious to forget the war and end sectional animosities.
But he also spoke courageously of the plight of Jefferson Davis, the first Southern leader to do so: “What has Mr. Davis done?” Lee asked. “What has he done more than any other Southerner that he should be singled out for persecution? He did not originate secession, is not responsible for its beginning; he opposed it strenuously in speech and writing.”
Though Lee had accepted the verdict of the battlefield and realized that Davis would never do so, the general was not ashamed of the Confederacy or of his own role in the war. He would always resent the vengeful attitude of men like Edwin Stanton, Attorney General Joseph Holt and General Nelson A. Miles. It became increasingly clear that Americans on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line shared his view that war-born hatreds should be curbed.
But it was equally clear that thousands of young ex-Confederates would reject his advice to remain at home and suffer the armed occupation that was to come. Some of these inconsolable Johnnies drifted out of the country singly, or by twos, threes or dozens. Rarely, there was an organized band to march across the border with the hope of finding a new and better world.
On July 4, as Davis and Clay sweltered in their cells, and the Federal garrison whooped and paraded and fired muskets to mark Independence Day, a final scene in the collapse of the Confederate empire was enacted on the banks of the Rio Grande, some 2,000 miles to the southwest of the Chesapeake capes.
With a scorching wind stirring a dust storm at their backs and a tattered battle flag going before, a file of Rebel troops wound through cactus scrub toward the Mexican border at Eagle Pass. Those on foot, moving with the tireless stride of veteran infantry, kept pace with cavalrymen who rode in advance, leading pack mules. Ten new French guns, thickly covered in dust, followed the marchers, and a train of twelve-mule wagons brought up the rear.
Though other refugees had joined in the past few days, the column was no more than 500 strong, and the troops were the last organized body remaining in the field from the once-vast western armies of the Confederacy.
They were halted at the shallow stream by their commander, a slight, erect officer from whose trooper’s hat a black ostrich plume streamed in the wind. This boyish black-bearded Rebel brigadier general was Jo Shelby, commander of the Iron Brigade whose riders had terrorized enemy-held areas of the Trans-Mississippi throughout the war. Twenty-four horses had been killed under this daredevil leader, who had won fame as a guerrilla, bushwhacker and raider. The senior U.S. cavalry chief, Major General Alfred Pleasanton, who had fought Jeb Stuart in the east and Shelby in Missouri, had said, “Shelby was the best cavalry general of the South. Under other conditions he would have been one of the best in the world.”
Today he was leading into exile the largest body of troops who were to desert their homeland in a concerted flight from U.S. rule.
Shelby called an order and a trooper rode into the Rio Grande, carrying a stone about which he had wrapped the battle-worn Confederate flag. The soldiers bared their heads and came to attention. A bugler sounded a mournful call and the horseman tossed the stone into the brown water. The flag sank slowly from sight.
The column splashed into the stream and crossed into exile, into a harsh, hostile land that was to test them more cruelly than war. Jo Shelby, one of the rare Confederate generals who never surrendered, was on his way to the court of the Emperor Maximilian, an Austrian archduke sent by Napoleon III to collect debts and to revive a French empire in America.
Shelby was followed onto the Mexican shore by distinguished companions: Governors Charles S. Morehead of Kentucky and Henry W. Allen of Louisiana, and the Texas ex-governors, Pendleton Murrah and Edward Clark. There was also a swarm of army officers from other commands: Generals John B. Clark, Jr., and Sterling Price of Missouri, Danville Leadbetter of Alabama, William P. Hardeman of Texas. Among the others were Generals John Bankhead (“Prince John”) Magruder, Hamilton P. Bee, Monroe Parsons, Trusten Polk and George Flournoy. Numerous colonels and other field officers had joined—all of them willing to sacrifice home, property and prospects of reunited families to escape enemy control and avoid the despised amnesty oath.
They were not the first who had gone—Edmund Kirby Smith had already surrendered and fled, his defiance tempered at last by desertions, mutinies and partisan squabbling. His troops had simply left him, seizing all government property except for a few mules and wagons, which Smith sent “to the brush.” As an observant Union officer wrote of the dissolution of the Trans-Mississippi Department where Davis had hoped to carry on the war: “The thing is going to pieces so fast that one cannot count the fragments.” Kirby Smith had left it behind and slipped across the Rio Grande, almost alone, “mounted on a mule and dressed in shirt sleeves with a silk handkerchief tied around his neck ‘a la Texas’ and armed with revolver and shotgun.”
Kirby Smith and Shelby’s band were but a few among the thousands who had gone, or were now going, to Mexico. There were also Generals Cadmus M. Wilcox of Tennessee, T. C. Hindman, Jubal Early of Virginia, William Preston of Kentucky, Alexander T. Hawthorne of Arkansas, A. W. Terrell of Texas, and John McCausland, who had led his Confederate raiders to burn Chambersburg, Pa. Among the politicians were Isham G. Harris, ex-governor of Tennessee, Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, Congressman John Perkins of Louisiana, and the internationally famous Commodore Matthew F. Maury of Virginia. The New York Daily News reported a stream of migrants into Mexico: Judge W. G. Swan of Georgia, a former Confederate congressman, who led twenty families; General John S. Williams, who led sixty Tennesseans; and, it was reported, 150 families in western Virginia were preparing to join the crowds. Among the bands were small-town mayors, blacksmiths, carpenters, farmers, peddlers, coopers. Most of them were bound for Maximilian’s new Confederate colonies—in particular a village oasis in the jungle country called Carlota, where Shelby and his men hoped to find a life of ease. There were some who dreamed of banding with French reinforcements to invade Texas and renew the war on the Yankees.
Around campfires on foreign soil men of Shelby’s Iron Brigade sang songs celebrating their swift raids through Missouri, which had won them notoriety during the war:
Ho boys! Make a noise!
The Yankees are afraid!
The river’s up, hell’s to pay,
Shelby’s on a raid!
Shelby’s path led through country held by the fierce native troops of Benito Juárez, the rightful leader of the Mexican people and now commander of the resistance movement against Maximilian. Though Juárez was supported by the U.S. government, General Shelby hoped to pass peacefully through this territory. But his column marched on the alert, ready to fight at a moment’s notice.
Few Confederate gray uniforms remained in this motley band, but the wagons bore thousands of British Enfield muskets, with 40,000 rounds of ammunition. There were stocks of bacon, salt pork, rice, dried fruits and preserves—and Kentucky bourbon whiskey—enough to sustain a long campaign. The French cannon were well supplied with shot and shell.
When the Rebels were about fifty miles inside Mexico, the Juáristas came, seeking to buy cannon. Shelby sold them without hesitation; they were growing heavy on the trail, he said. When he was asked later how he dared place his guns in the hands of so desperate an enemy, Shelby replied in astonishment, “Why, we still had our small arms!”
Within a matter of hours a dispute broke out between the Confederates and the barefoot Juáristas, allegedly over the ownership of some horses. There was a sharp little skirmish, during which Shelby retook his guns, and immediately marched on into the interior.
Thereafter, for six exhausting weeks, foraging for food, fighting Indians, slipping past suspicious French forces, Shelby led his party through the rocky wastelands and into Mexico City. His greeting by Maximilian and the Empress Carlota was friendly enough, but Shelby was shocked to learn that organized military units were unwelcome; the new Mexican empire sought peaceful settlers. Shelby was forced to disband his little army.
Hundreds of other ex-Confederates were now coming into Mexico, lured by dreams of a new freedom—but for survivors of the Iron Brigade the tropical sanctuary had already lost much of its charm. Shelby himself made his way to Carlota, near Vera Cruz, planning to grow coffee or cotton and help in building Maximilian’s Mexico. The campaigns of the western front under the banner of the Lost Cause seemed long ago and far away.
The domestication of the old bushwhacker chief in his colony was an example lost upon his restless veterans. Some joined the French army—fifty of them the elite Third Zouaves, an African regiment—some stole away to aid Juáristas in the north. Others marched to the Pacific, to remain in California or sail for the Sandwich Islands or Japan. Still others disappeared to prospect for gold in the Sierra Madre or left for Brazil or British Honduras.
It was much later when Jefferson Davis learned of the movement to Mexico and other countries, but he was distressed by the news. Though he agreed in general with Robert E. Lee that all Southerners should remain at home, he hoped that they would not remain there submissively. He expected the South, in some unforeseen way, to rise again, “The night may be long, but it is the part of fidelity to watch and wait for the morning.”
A migration of quite another kind had begun in the South among the five million blacks of the region. Hardly noticed by the leaders of the old Confederacy, it would become one of the most spectacular shifts of population in American history, and one of the most significant.
The first reactions of former slaves to the reality of Confederate collapse were tentative and confused as they faced unprecedented upheavals in their lives. One observer watched in amazement the sudden activity among freed slaves through the countryside: “… gangs of Negroes were passing and re-passing restlessly, moving to and fro, some with bundles and some with none … their restless and uneasy movements were perfectly natural. They had suddenly come to the knowledge that they were free, and they were testing the nature and limits of their freedom. They desired to find out its length and breadth. It was extraordinary, but not perilous.”
There were also signs of future migrations which were to disperse black families from the isolated rural South into cities throughout the nation. The first step was from the backwoods farms into Southern cities. The majority were to remain docilely in place, tending fields of white landlords, but the pioneers of the new movement were already showing the way. A Northern visitor to South Carolina in the summer of 1865 was so fascinated by the spectacle of the incipient migration that he rode out to watch on a moonlit country road as streams of Negroes went past, “each carrying his bundle and making his way to Charleston and the coast, where freedom was supposed to be freer, perhaps.”