Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (59 page)

An even greater prize was the Gosport navy yard, the country's premier naval base and the largest shipbuilding and repair facility in the South. Of the twelve hundred cannon and ten ships there in April 1861, many of the guns and four of the warships were modern and serviceable, including the powerful forty-gun steam frigate
Merrimack
. Most of the civilian workers and naval officers at the yard were southerners; a majority of the officers would soon resign to join the Confederacy. Commanding the eight hundred sailors and marines stationed at the yard was Commodore Charles McCauley, a bibulous sixty-eight-year-old veteran who had gone to sea before Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson

6
. Several delegates who voted No or were absent subsequently voted Aye, making the final tally 103 to 46.

Davis were born. McCauley proved unequal to the crisis posed by several thousand Virginia militia reported to be heading for the navy yard. He refused to allow the
Merrimack
and the other three ships to escape when they had a chance to do so on April 18. The next day, just before reinforcements arrived aboard two warships from Washington, McCauley ordered all facilities at the yard burned, the cannon spiked, the ships scuttled. Even these unnecessary actions were bungled; the dry dock, ordnance building, and several other structures failed to burn; most of the cannon remained salvageable and were soon on their way to forts throughout the South; the hull of the
Merrimack
survived intact and ready for its subsequent conversion into the famous ironclad
C.S.S. Virginia
.

These events occurred before Virginia officially seceded, because the ordinance would not become final until ratified in a referendum on May 23. But the mood of the people predestined the outcome. For all practical purposes Virginia joined the Confederacy on April 17. A week later Governor Letcher and the convention concluded an alliance with the Confederacy that allowed southern troops to enter the state and placed Virginia regiments under Confederate control. On April 27 the convention invited the Confederate government to make Richmond its permanent capital. The southern Congress, tired of the inadequate, overcrowded facilities in Montgomery and eager to cement Virginia's allegiance, accepted the invitation on May 21. When Virginians went to the polls on May 23 they ratified a
fait accompli
by a vote of 128, 884 to 32, 134.

Virginia brought crucial resources to the Confederacy. Her population was the South's largest. Her industrial capacity was nearly as great as that of the seven original Confederate states combined. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was the only plant in the South capable of manufacturing heavy ordnance. Virginia's heritage from the generation of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison gave her immense prestige that was expected to attract the rest of the upper South to the Confederacy. And as events turned out, perhaps the greatest asset that Virginia brought to the cause of southern independence was Robert E. Lee.

Lee was fifty-four years old in 1861, the son of a Revolutionary War hero, scion of the First Families of Virginia, a gentleman in every sense of the word, without discernible fault unless a restraint that rarely allowed emotion to break through the crust of dignity is counted a fault. He had spent his entire career in the U.S. army since graduating second in his West Point class of 1829. Lee's outstanding record in the Mexican War, his experience as an engineer officer, as a cavalry officer, and as superintendent of West Point had earned him promotion to full colonel on March 16, 1861. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott considered Lee the best officer in the army. In April, Scott urged Lincoln to offer Lee field command of the newly levied Union army. As a fellow Virginian Scott hoped that Lee, like himself, would remain loyal to the service to which he had devoted his life. Lee had made clear his dislike of slavery, which he described in 1856 as "a moral and political evil." Until the day Virginia left the Union he had also spoken against secession. "The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation," he wrote in January 1861, "if it was intended to be broken up by every member of the [Union] at will. . . . It is idle to talk of secession."
⁷

But with Virginia's decision, everything changed. "I must side either with or against my section," Lee told a northern friend. His choice was foreordained by birth and blood: "I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children." On the very day he learned of Virginia's secession, April 18, Lee also received the offer of Union command. He told his friend General Scott regretfully that he must not only decline, but must also resign from the army. "Save in defense of my native State," said Lee, "I never desire again to draw my sword." Scott replied sadly: "You have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so." Five days later Lee accepted appointment as commander in chief of Virginia's military forces; three weeks after that he became a brigadier general in the Confederate army. Most officers from the upper South made a similar decision to go with their states, some without hesitation, others with the same bodeful presentiments that Lee expressed on May 5: "I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation perhaps for our national sins."
⁸

Scores of southern officers, however, like Scott remained loyal to nation rather than section. Some of them played key roles in the eventual triumph of nation over section: Virginian George H. Thomas, who saved the Union Army of the Cumberland at Chickamauga and destroyed the Confederate Army of Tennessee at Nashville; Tennessean David G.

7
. James Ford Rhodes,
History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850
. . . 7 vols. (New York, 1893–1906), III, 299; Nevins,
War
, I, 109.

8
. Nevins,
War
, I, 107; Douglas Southall Freeman,
R. E. Lee: A Biography
, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35), I, 437, 441.

Farragut, who captured New Orleans and damned the torpedoes at Mobile Bay; North Carolinian John Gibbon, who became one of the best division commanders in the Army of the Potomac while three of his brothers fought for the South. At the same time a few northern-born officers who had married southern women chose to go with their wives' section rather than with their own, and rose to high positions in the Confederacy: New Jersey's Samuel Cooper, who married a Virginian and became adjutant general in the Confederate army; Pennsylvanian John Pemberton, who also married a Virginia woman and rose to command of the Army of Mississippi, which he surrendered to Grant at Vicksburg; and Josiah Gorgas, also of Pennsylvania, who married the daughter of an Alabama governor, became chief of ordnance for the Confederacy, where he created miracles of improvisation and instant industrialization to keep Confederate armies supplied with arms and ammunition.

II

The example of Virginia—and of Robert E. Lee—exerted a powerful influence on the rest of the upper South. Arkansas was the next state to go. Its convention had adjourned in March without taking action, subject to recall in case of emergency. Lincoln's call for troops supplied the emergency; the convention reassembled on May 6. Even before the delegates arrived in Little Rock, however, pro-secession Governor Henry Rector aligned his state with the Confederacy by seizing federal arsenals at Fort Smith and Little Rock and by allowing Confederate forces to place artillery to command the Mississippi at Helena. The convention met in an atmosphere of high emotion, the galleries packed with spectators waving Confederate flags. Within minutes an ordinance of secession came to the floor. A motion to submit this ordinance to a referendum—a test vote of unionist strength at the convention—was defeated 55 to 15. Most of the fifteen minority delegates came from the Ozark Plateau of northwest Arkansas, where few slaves lived. After defeat of this motion, the convention passed the ordinance of secession by a vote of 65 to 5.
⁹

North Carolina and Tennessee also went out during May. Even before calling the legislature into special session, the governor of North Carolina ordered the militia to seize three federal forts on the coast and

9
. Four unionist delegates later changed their votes, making the final tally 69 to 1.

the arsenal in Fayetteville. The legislature met on May 1 and authorized an election on May 13 for a convention to meet on May 20. During these weeks everyone in the state, even in the previously unionist mountain counties, seemed to favor secession. "This furor, this moral epidemic, swept over the country like a tempest, before which the entire population seemed to succumb," wrote a participant.
¹⁰
After a test vote on a procedural matter showed that the moderates were a minority, the delegates on May 20 unanimously enacted an ordinance of-secession. Meanwhile the Tennessee legislature short-circuited the convention process by adopting a "Declaration of Independence" and submitting it to a referendum scheduled for June 8. Tennessee imitated the action of Virginia by concluding a military alliance with the Confederacy and allowing Confederate troops to enter the state several weeks before the referendum. That election recorded 104,913 for secession and 47,238 against. Significantly, however, the voters of mountainous east Tennessee cast 70 percent of their ballots against secession.

Although speeches and editorials in the upper South bristled with references to rights, liberty, state sovereignty, honor, resistance to coercion, and identity with southern brothers, such rhetoric could not conceal the fundamental issue of slavery. The following table shows the correlation between slaveholding and support for secession in the Virginia and Tennessee conventions.
¹¹

The popular vote in secession referendums illustrated the point even more graphically. The voters in 35 Virginia counties with a slave population of only 2.5 percent opposed secession by a margin of three to one, while voters in the remainder of the state, where slaves constituted

10
. Sitterson,
Secession Movement in North Carolina
, 241.

11
. The data in this table were compiled from Ralph A. Wooster,
The Secession Conventions of the South
(Princeton, 1962), 151, 153, 183, 185.

36 percent of the population, supported secession by more than ten to one. The thirty counties of east Tennessee that rejected secession by more than two to one contained a slave population of only 8 percent, while the rest of the state, with a slave population of 30 percent, voted for secession by a margin of seven to one. Similar though less dramatic correlations existed in Arkansas and North Carolina, where moderate delegates had a median slaveholding about half that of the all-out secessionists.
¹²

The
Nashville Patriot
of April 24, 1861, was conscious of no irony when it cited the "community of interest existing in all the slaveholding States" as the reason why these states must unite to defend "justice and liberty."
¹³
The upper South, like the lower, went to war to defend the freedom of white men to own slaves and to take them into the territories as they saw fit, lest these white men be enslaved by Black Republicans who threatened to deprive them of these liberties.

III