The Confederate Government, strengthened by the finally seceded States of Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas, moved the last week in May from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia, to be nearer the Border States and the expected heavy fighting. Into Richmond streamed regiments from all parts of the South. The cry in the South, “On to Washington!” snarled straight into the cry from the North, “On to Richmond!”
From the Potomac River to the Gulf Coast and the Rio Grande ran the recruiting ground of this Confederate Army. Its line zigzagged 1,500 miles from Chesapeake Bay through Kentucky and out to the corners of Kansas. Its brain and will centered in the capitol, the executive mansion, the departments, at Richmond. Its chief weapon of defense was an army of 100,000 troops. The controls of this Government were out of the hands of those who had first given it breath and fire. Rhett of the True Perpetual Separationists was now only a member of the Confederate Congress with no executive authority; the efforts to appoint him Secretary of War had failed. Yancey was shelved as a commissioner to European nations, with no power to act and no special instructions.
Russell of the Times of London wrote in Charleston: “Both sexes and all ages are for the war. Secession is the fashion here. Young ladies sing for it; old ladies pray for it; young men are dying to fight for it; old men are ready to demonstrate it.” Russell heard of a Mobile gentleman having a letter from his daughter: “She informs him she has been elected vivandiere to a New Orleans regiment, with which she intends to push on to Washington and get a lock of Abe Lincoln’s hair.”
A new and a young Government it was at Richmond. “Where will I find the State Department?” an Englishman asked Robert Toombs, Secretary of State. “In my hat, sir,” replied Toombs, “and the archives in my coat pocket.” The impulsive Toombs was soon to resign and take to the camp and battlefield. He should have been Secretary of War, said many, but that place went to Leroy Pope Walker of Alabama, a lawyer and politician, harassed by technical matters of how a people with ports restricted or closed, and with no gun or arms factories or powder mills, should create those requisites. He was soon to step from office to field service, and this Confederate War Department at Richmond took on as Acting Assistant Secretary of War one Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a West Point graduate who had become a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, later a professor of mathematics, though part of his ten years as a practicing lawyer was spent in Springfield, Illinois, with an office adjoining that of Lincoln & Herndon.
The Secretary of the Treasury, Christopher Gustavus Memminger, an orphan-asylum boy, a German Lutheran born in Wiirttemberg, a lawyer, businessman, and politician of exceptional integrity, founder of the public-school system in Charleston, was the one South Carolina name in the Cabinet. He arranged with Gazaway B. Lamar, the Southern secessionist president of the Bank of the Republic in New York, for a contract with the American Bank Note Company to engrave and print in New York the bonds and treasury notes of the Confederacy. “The work was handsomely executed on the best of bank note and bond paper,” wrote Memminger, “but with all the precaution taken by Mr. Lamar, the entire issue fell into the hands of the Federal Government and was seized as contraband of war.” Engravers rushed from Europe were therefore to direct the printing of Confederate money on paper brought from Baltimore by agents who ran the Federal picket lines.
The Navy head was Stephen R. Mallory of Florida, once chairman of the Committee on Naval Affairs ol the U.S. Senate, and having, as President Davis wrote, “for a landsman much knowledge of nautical affairs.” Mallory was the one Roman Catholic of the Cabinet. The one Jew was Judah P. Benjamin of New Orleans, whose wife was a French Roman Catholic. Twice elected U.S. Senator from Louisiana, in his advocacy of the legal grounds for slavery, he once came close to a duel with Jefferson Davis. Once when defending slavery Benjamin was classified by Senator Wade of Ohio as “a Hebrew with Egyptian principles.” He had a rare legal mind, and as Attorney General and later as Secretary of State was one of the few trusted helpers of President Davis; he toiled in his Richmond office from eight in the morning till past midnight, and was sometimes referred to as “the brains of the Confederacy.”
I he one I'exan in the Cabinet was the Postmaster General, J. H. Reagan, former Congressman, Indian fighter, and Southwestern pioneer.
Heading this Cabinet was a figure chosen as a military authority; he stood in the public eye as a moderate rather than a radical secessionist, having integrity and distinctively Southern qualities. This was the Mississippi cotton planter, West Point graduate, Black Hawk War lieutenant, Mexican War veteran wounded in service, U.S. Senator, Secretary of War under the Pierce administration, orator, horseman, man of fate—Jefferson Davis. He and Lincoln were both born in Kentucky, Davis a year earlier than Lincoln, one as a child carried north to free soil, the other as a suckling babe taken to the lower South.
Lincoln’s army of 75,000 volunteers Davis termed a “posse comitatus” to round up 5,000,000 outlaws, and in the “singular document” calling for that army “the President was usurping a power granted exclusively to Congress.” Davis would coldly and with studied politeness at intervals point to Lincoln as an ignorant usurper and a bloodthirsty despot, while Lincoln must speak and write as though Davis had no existence legal or personal, a nameless nobody, the invisible ghost of a glimmering hope.
When 17, Davis had replied to a sister’s letter telling him of his father’s death: “The intelligence contained in yours was more than sufficient to mar the satisfaction of hearing from anyone ...” This formal manner, this icy perfection, was to stay with him. One of the rare times he dropped it was in his love letters to Sarah Knox Taylor, the 16-year-old daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin. “By dreams I have been lately almost crazy, for they were of you,” he wrote to her, and again: “Kind, dear letter! I have kissed it often and often, and it has driven many mad notions from my brain.” She was too young to marry, the father frowned. But Miss Taylor visited a Kentucky aunt, the young Lieutenant resigned from the Army, the couple were married in Kentucky and went to Mississippi near Vicksburg, to Brierfield, an 800-acre plantation given them by his brother, Joseph Davis, with 14 Negro slaves on credit. Malarial fever brought both of them down. In six weeks the bride of three months died in a delirium, singing an old hymn, “Fairy Bells,” that she had from her mother.
An older brother brought to the plantation Miss Varina Howell, a 17-year-old girl from a well-to-do planter family at Natchez; she had soft liquid eyes, large curved eyebrows, with grace of speech and swift decisions. She was saved from mere prettiness by angular cheekbones and a full-lipped mournful mouth. She was 19 and he 37 when they married, and testimonies ran that she was the perfect helpmeet of a difficult man. When he was away she could write him that it was lonely for her “and I wish you had never loved me, and then I should not have encouraged myself to thinking of you . . . if you cannot come at least write more often . . . have more charity for
me, dearest, and set me a better example.” She was health to him physically and mentally, in loyalty a tigress.
His national reputation in politics began with his service in the U.S. Senate in 1847, his clashes with Douglas, his denials of secession purposes clouded by arguments that states had a Constitutional right to secede. Sam Houston of Texas briefly set forth that Davis was “ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.” Another Southerner had it Davis “could not forget what ought not to be remembered.” His wife wrote, “If anyone differs with Mr. Davis, he resents it and ascribes the difference to the perversity of his opponent.” When for nothing much he challenged Senator Benjamin to a duel, it was called off, with Davis saying, “I have an infirmity of which I am heartily ashamed: when I am aroused in a matter, I lose control of my feelings and become personal.” He lacked the skill to manage other men, but he was too positive a character to let others manage him, nor would he, as Lincoln did on occasion, ler others believe they were managing him.
While Lincoln and Douglas were debating he said he wished they would tear each other to pieces like the Kilkenny cats. When on November 6 Lincoln, though lacking a majority vote, had carried the electors of every Northern State except New Jersey, Davis on November 10 had sent a letter to Rhett: “If South Carolina has determined to secede, I advise her to do so before the Government passes into hostile hands. ’ On a sickbed racked by neuralgia, his left eye lost, Senator Davis talked with Seward, and the news came that Lincoln had declared he would concede almost every point at issue with the South except that no more Slave States could be made from Territories. Mississippi seceded January 9, and 11 days later Davis told the Senate he was officially notified of the secession of his state and must resign.
Tears were in many eyes at his saying they parted “not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children ... It only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.” At night, said his wife, in his restless tossing came often the prayer, “May God have us in his holy keeping, and grant that before it is too late peaceful counsels may prevail.”
On February 10, with a warm spring sun pouring down on leaf and petal, he and Varina were in a rose garden trimming and cutting, as though blood-red roses carry ministrations. A messenger threaded his way through the bushes and handed Jefferson Davis a telegram. His wife tried to read his face while he read the telegram. His face took on grief and she was afraid evil news had
arrived. “After a few minutes’ painful silence he told me, as a man might speak of a sentence of death.” The Montgomery delegates to the convention of the Confederate States of America had elected him provisional President, when so definitely he preferred campaign and battlefield to an administrative desk.
She wept a good-by and he rode to Montgomery, sleeping in his clothes, routed from the train by crowds roaring for their new President, calling for speeches, “bonfires at night, firing by day.” After inauguration he wrote to her: “I thought it would have gratified you to have witnessed it, and have been a memory to our children.”
Davis was a chosen spear of authority heading 11 states committed to him as against 23 states formally still in the Union with Lincoln, one side reckoned as having 9,000,000 people (including 3,900,000 slaves) as against 22,000,000 Northern people.
In the event of his death President Davis’ place would be taken by a man who could himself have been President of the Confederate States by saying Yes to one condition. On the evening of February 8 delegates from six states came to Alexander Ffamilton Stephens’ room, their spokesman Robert Toombs, ever a warm personal friend of Stephens no matter how they disputed over politics.
“Aleck,” said Toombs, “you are the choice of every man in Congress, and all of us are ready to pledge to help you form your Cabinet. There is only one point—those fellows from Virginia and the Border States want you to promise to strike the first blow. Those fellows say their States are hanging in the balance, ready to turn with the first blow. They know Buchanan will never dare to strike. They believe Lincoln will be as cowardly. Now they want the question settled in their States, and they want you, when the first opportunity offers—say, if the administration should attempt to re-enforce or provision Fort Sumter—to strike the first blow.”
The massive and bulking Toombs had spoken his portentous message to the little frail Stephens. And there was silence. The shrunken and dwarfish figure sat composed, in his slow-burning hazel eyes a touch of clairvoyance and communion. Then slowly and distinctly, “No, I will never strike the first blow.” Toombs roared, “Aleck!” and with a long look into the unflinching eyes of Stephens turned on his heel and with the other men strode from the room to where nightlong caucuses were picking another man for President.
“He had the look of being born out of season,” said a woman of this Aleck Stephens, who had fought the Know-Nothings and the anti-Catholic movements of Georgia with an unequivocal hostility, under warnings that he was wrecking the Whig party; who had thrice challenged tall heavy men to duels and had the reply in substance, “Pick some man your size.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
5 8
Stephens wanted retirement, peace, poetry, philosophy, time for friendly talks, time at his home in Liberty Hall to bathe the sore eyes of his old blind dog Rio. Yet Toombs and the others made him Vice-President of the Confederacy. He understood the North and its Lincoln, once writing of old friendships in Congress, “I was as intimate with Mr. Lincoln as with any other man except perhaps Mr. Toombs.”
CHAPTER V