Authors: David J. Eicher
Dixie Betrayed
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.
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First eBook Edition: March 2006
ISBN: 978-0-316-07571-8
Contents
Chapter 3: Portrait of a President
Chapter 6: The Military High Command
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?
Appendix: Executive Officers of the Confederate States, 1861–1865
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
Prologue
I
T
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.
A
T
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.”
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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.
O
N
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