Embattled Rebel Read online

  52.Bragg to Davis, Dec. 1, 1863, Crist, PJD, 10:94–95 and n; O.R., ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 2:682.

  53.William K. Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972–89), 3:250–51, entry of Dec. 2, 1863; Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton, eds., “Journal of a Secesh Lady”: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–1866 (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), 505–6, entry of Dec. 11, 1863.

  54.Lee to Davis, Dec. 3, 1863, Davis to Lee, Dec. 6, 1863, Lee to Davis, Dec. 7, 1863 (telegram and letter), Davis to Lee, Dec. 8, 1863, Davis to Johnston, Dec. 16, 23, 1863, Crist, PJD, 10:99, 101, 102, 104, 105–6, 112, 119–21; Steven E. Woodworth, No Band of Brothers: Problems of the Rebel High Command (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 81–86; Symonds, Johnston, 222.

  5. WE SHOULD TAKE THE INITIATIVE

  1.Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ed., The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 98.

  2.Frontis W. Johnston and Joe A. Mobley, eds., The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance, 2 vols. (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1963–95), 1:279n.

  3.C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 438, diary entry of Sept. 23, 1863.

  4.Paul D. Escott, Military Necessity: Civil-Military Relations in the Confederacy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 47; Jeremy P. Felt, “Lucius B. Northrop and the Confederacy’s Subsistence Department,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 69 (1961): 181–93; John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Howard Swiggett, 2 vols. (New York: Old Hickory Bookshop, 1935), 2:131, 136, entries of Jan. 18, 19, 26, 1864.

  5.George W. Randolph to Jefferson Davis, Oct. 30, 1862, Davis’s endorsement on a letter from Charles Jones, Nov. 14, 1862, in Crist, PJD, 8:473–74, 492.

  6.Charles Jones to Davis, Nov. 10, 14, 1862, ibid., 8:486, 492; Jones, Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, 1:179–80, 183, 185, 198, entries of Nov. 1, 6, 8, 28, 1862; Robert Garlick Hill Kean, Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean, ed. Edward Younger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 32, entry of Nov. 30, 1862.

  7.Davis to Edmund Kirby Smith, July 14, 1863, Rowland, JDC, 5:554; Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith’s Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi South, 1863–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 156, 160; Ludwell H. Johnson, “Trading with the Union: The Evolution of Confederate Policy,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78 (1970): 316, 320.

  8.Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 201–6; Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 178–207; Emory Thomas, The Confederate State of Richmond: A Biography of the Capital (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 117–22; Ernest B. Furgurson, Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 193–96; William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 497–98.

  9.W. C. Davis, Davis, 537–38; Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 437–38, 499, 551 and n, diary entries of Sept. 23, Dec. 5, 1863, Jan. 31, 1864; Alvy L. King, Louis T. Wigfall: Southern Fire-Eater (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 177–78; Diary of Robert G. H. Kean, 89–90, 126–27, 133, 136, diary entries of Aug. 9, Dec. 14, 1863, Jan. 28, Feb. 10, 1864; Davis to the Senate, Jan. 27, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:206.

  10.O.R., ser. 2, vol. 5:940–41.

  11.Ibid., 5:128, 696.

  12.Davis to Leonidas Polk, Apr. 30, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:375.

  13.Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 6:357.

  14.Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols. (reprint of 1881 ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 2:507.

  15.Davis to Zebulon Vance, July 24, 1863, Rowland, JDC, 5:576–77; Vance to Davis, July 26, 1863, Crist, PJD, 9:306.

  16.Vance to William A. Graham, Jan. 1, 1864, in Richard E. Yates, The Confederacy and Zeb Vance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958), 95.

  17.Vance to Davis, Dec. 30, 1863, Rowland, JDC, 6:141–42.

  18.Davis to Vance, Jan. 8, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:158–62.

  19.Davis’s message to Congress, Feb. 3, 1864, Rowland, JDC, 6:164–69.

  20.Vance to Davis, Feb. 9, 1864, and Davis’s endorsement on the letter, and Davis to Vance, Feb. 29, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:227–28, 268.

  21.W. Buck Yearns and John G. Barrett, eds., North Carolina Civil War Documentary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 302–4; Mark W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 249–65.

  22.Herschel V. Johnson to Davis, Jan. 4, 1864, Johnson to Alexander Stephens, July 11, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:152–53 and 153n.

  23.Davis to Clement C. Clay and Jacob Thompson, Apr. 27, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:68–69; Jacob Thompson to Judah P. Benjamin, Dec. 3, 1864, O.R., ser. 1, vol. 43, pt. 2:930–36; Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 21–24; Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North (North Quincy, Mass.: Christopher Publishing House, 1970), passim.

  24.William J. Hardee to J. C. Ives, Dec. 24, 1863, O.R., ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 3:860.

  25.Davis to Joseph E. Johnston, Dec. 23, 1863, Crist, PJD, 10:119–21. See also James Seddon to Johnston, Dec. 18, 1863, ibid., 10:121n.

  26.Johnston to Davis, Jan. 2, 1864, ibid., 10:144–46.

  27.Johnston to Davis, Feb. 1, 1864, William M. Browne to Davis, Feb. 14, 1864, ibid., 10:215–16, 233–34; Richard M. McMurry, “‘The Enemy at Richmond’: Joseph E. Johnston and the Confederate Government,” in John T. Hubbell, ed., Conflict and Command (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2012), 213–14.

  28.Polk to Davis, Feb. 9, 1864, Davis to Johnston, Feb. 11, 1864, Johnston to Davis, Feb. 13, 1864, Davis to Johnston, Feb. 15, 17, 1864, Davis to Hardee, Feb. 21, 1864, Davis to Polk, Feb. 23, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:227, 232, 234–35, 256, 259, and Rowland, JDC, 6:170–72; interview of Davis with William D. Gale, July 30, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:571.

  29.Herman Hattaway and Richard E. Beringer, Jefferson Davis, Confederate President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 319–21; Craig L. Symonds, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 236–38; Herman Hattaway, “The General Whom the President Elevated Too High,” in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Jefferson Davis’s Generals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 92–93.

  30.John Bell Hood to Davis, Mar. 7, 1864, O.R., ser. 1, vol. 32, pt. 3:606–7.

  31.Davis to James Longstreet, Mar. 7, 1864, Rowland, JDC, 6:199–201.

  32.Longstreet to Johnston, Mar. 14, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:290, 293–94n; Symonds, Johnston, 234–36; Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 272–74.

  33.Hood to Bragg, Apr. 13, 1864, in Richard M. McMurry, John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 97.

  34.Richmond Examiner quoted in Jones, Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, 2:157, entry of Feb. 25, 1864; Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton, eds., “Journal of a Secesh Lady”: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–1866 (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), 531, entry of Feb. 28, 1864.

  35.Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 643, diary entry of Sept. 19, 1864; Crist, PJD, 10:252n.

  6. WE MUST BEAT SHERMAN

  1.Rowland, JDC, 6:247–48, 250.

  2.Varina Howell Davis, Jefferson Davis
, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife, 2 vols. (New York: Belford, 1890), 498; Rowland, JDC, 6:253.

  3.Crist, PJD, 10:423; John H. Reagan, Memoirs, with Special Reference to Secession and the Civil War (reprint of 1906 ed., Austin, Tex.: Pemberton Press, 1968), 191.

  4.Crist, PJD, 10:423; Steven E. Woodworth, No Band of Brothers: Problems of the Rebel High Command (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 106–8.

  5.Jefferson Davis to Robert E. Lee, May 20, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:424–26 and 427–28n; Woodworth, No Band of Brothers, 108–14.

  6.Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ed., The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 108, diary entry of May 20, 1864.

  7.Robert Ransom and Burton Harrison quoted in Crist, PJD, 10:459n.

  8.John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Howard Swiggett, 2 vols. (New York: Old Hickory Bookshop, 1935), 2:272, 275, entries of Aug. 25, 30, 1864.

  9.Davis to Joseph E. Johnston, May 18, 1864, Davis to Lee, May 20, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:420, 426. See also ibid., 10:432n.

  10.Johnston to Davis, May 20, 21, 1864, ibid., 10:433, 434.

  11.John Bell Hood to Davis, May 21, 1864, ibid., 10:434.

  12.C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), 616, 624, entries of June 4 and July 25, 1864; Robert Garlick Hill Kean, Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean, ed. Edward Younger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 151, entry of May 22, 1864.

  13.Davis’s endorsement on a telegram from Maj. Gen. Stephen D. Lee to Braxton Bragg, June 22, 1864, Davis to Johnston, July 7, 11, 1864, Johnston to Davis, July 8, 12, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:503, 508, 513–14, 516; Davis to Johnston (letter), July 11, 1864, Rowland, JDC, 6:289–91.

  14.Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 278–79; Thomas Connelly and Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 160; Craig L. Symonds, Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 274–75, 281.

  15.Joseph Brown to Davis, June 28, 1864, Davis to Brown, June 29, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:492.

  16.Brown to Davis, July 5, 1864, Davis to Brown, July 5, 1864, Brown to Davis, July 7, 1864, ibid., 10:501, 506.

  17.Johnston to Davis, July 8, 1864, ibid., 10:508–9.

  18.Davis to Bragg, July 9, 1864, Benjamin H. Hill to William T. Walthall, Oct. 12, 1878, recounting Hill’s interview with Davis, ibid., 10:509, 513.

  19.Davis to Lee, July 12, 1864, Lee to Davis, July 12, 1864, ibid., 10:513.

  20.Lee to Davis, July 12, 1864, Davis to Lee, July 13, 1864, ibid., 517, 519.

  21.Bragg to Davis, July 15, 1864 (telegram), Bragg to Davis, July 15, 1864 (letter), ibid., 10:522–25.

  22.Diary of Robert G. H. Kean, 166, diary entry of July 14, 1864.

  23.Crist, PJD, 10:531–32.

  24.O.R., ser. 1, vol. 38, pt. 5:885; Symonds, Johnston, 295.

  25.Davis to Hood, Aug. 5, 1864, Crist, PJD, 10:586.

  26.Johnson to Davis, Aug. 9, 1864, ibid., 10:599.

  27.New York World, July 12, 1864.

  28.James M. McPherson, Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 231–37.

  29.No official record of this meeting was kept. This account and the quotations are taken from Gilmore’s article in Atlantic Monthly 8 (Sept. 1864): 372–83. Gilmore wrote a briefer version describing the meeting in the Boston Transcript, July 22, 1864, and a longer one in his memoirs many years later. These versions vary slightly in detail but agree in substance, as does Judah Benjamin’s account in a circular sent to Confederate envoys abroad after Gilmore’s article was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Crist, PJD, 10:533–34, excerpts Gilmore’s Atlantic Monthly article and Benjamin’s circular.

  30.Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 8:151.

  31.Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States During the Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1865), 419–20.

  32.Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 3:479, entry of Sept. 2, 1864; Alexander H. Stephens to Herschel V. Johnson, Sept. 5, 1864, and Charleston Mercury both quoted in Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 115, 113. Neither Stephens nor the editor of the Mercury had learned of the fall of Atlanta when they penned these remarks.

  33.O.R., ser. 1, vol. 38, pt. 5:777.

  34.Richmond Examiner, Sept. 5, 1864.

  35.North Carolinian quoted in Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 119; Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 645, 648, diary entries of Sept. 21, 29, 1864.

  36.Richmond Examiner, Sept. 5, 1864.

  37.Davis speech at Macon, Georgia, Sept. 23, 1864, in Crist, PJD, 11:61.

  38.Ibid., 61–63.

  39.Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York: Century, 1897), 313.

  40.Crist, PJD, 11:83.

  41.Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 131–32; Rowland, JDC, 6:358.

  42.Crist, PJD, 11:91–92.

  43.Ibid., 10:587n, 592, 11:35–36, 46–47, 67–68; Rowland, JDC, 6:344–45, 348; T. Harry Williams, P. G. T. Beauregard: Na- poleon in Gray (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955), 241–42.

  44.Woodworth, Davis and His Generals, 292–94.

  45.William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, Oct. 9, 11, 1864, O.R., ser. 1, vol. 39, pt. 3:162, 202.

  46.Rowland, JDC, 6:386.

  7. THE LAST RESORT

  1.Jefferson Davis to John Bell Hood, Nov. 7, 1864, Crist, PJD, 11:145. See also William J. Cooper, Jefferson Davis, American (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 499–500; Herman Hattaway and Richard E. Beringer, Jefferson Davis, Confederate President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 340–41; and Steven E. Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 294–95.

  2.Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, 2 vols. (reprint of 1881 ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 2:482–83; William J. Cooper, “A Reassessment of Jefferson Davis as War Leader: The Case from Atlanta to Nashville,” Journal of Southern History 36 (1970): 199–204.

  3.Davis to Howell Cobb, Nov. 18, 1864, Beauregard to Samuel Cooper, Nov. 18, 1864, with Davis’s endorsement, Davis to Hardee, Nov. 24, 1864, Davis to Beauregard, Nov. 30, 1864, P. A. Lawson to Davis, Dec. 27, 1864, Davis to Hugh R. Davis, Jan. 8, 1865, Crist, PJD, 11:170, 171, 184, 194, 255, 287; Davis to William M. Browne, Nov. 22, 1864, Rowland, JDC, 6:410.

  4.Richmond Examiner, Dec. 21, 1864, in Frederick S. Daniel, The Richmond Examiner During the War (reprint of 1868 ed., New York: Arno Press, 1970), 215; Louis T. Wigfall quoted in Crist, PJD, 11:264n.

  5.Virginia Clay quoted in Michael B. Ballard, A Long Shadow: Jefferson Davis and the Final Days of the Confederacy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 27; Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ed., The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 147–48, entry of Jan. 6, 1865.

  6.John B. Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital, ed. Howard Swiggett, 2 vols. (New York: Old Hickory Bookshop, 1935), 2:359, entry of Jan. 17, 1865; Beth G. Crabtree and James W. Patton, eds., “Journal of a Secesh Lady”: The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston, 1860–1866 (Raleigh: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1979), 658, entry of Jan. 22, 1865.
/>   7.Robert Garlick Hill Kean, Inside the Confederate Government: The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean, ed. Edward Younger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 190, entry of Jan. 22, 1865.

  8.Davis to James F. Johnson and Hugh W. Sheffey, Jan. 18, 1865, Crist, PJD, 11:335–37 and n; Steven E. Woodworth, Davis and Lee at War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 309–11; Paul D. Escott, Military Necessity: Civil-Military Relations in the Confederacy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006), 155–57.

  9.Richard Hawes to Davis, Jan. 11, 1865, Crist, PJD, 11:305–6.

  10.Alexander H. Stephens and congressmen cited in ibid., 11:309n; Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980), 164–65.

  11.Francis Preston Blair to Davis, Dec. 30, 1864 (two letters), Rowland, JDC, 6:432–33; Crist, PJD, 11:320n.

  12.Meeting between Davis and Blair, ibid., 11:315–25.

  13.Abraham Lincoln to Blair, Jan. 18, 1865, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 8:220–21.

  14.Crist, PJD, 11:355–56, 379n. Charles W. Sanders, “Jefferson Davis and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference: ‘To secure peace to the two countries,’” Journal of Southern History 63 (1997): 803–26, argues unconvincingly that Davis hoped the conference might succeed in achieving peace with independence.

  15.Crist, PJD, 11:356.

  16.Ulysses S. Grant to Edwin M. Stanton, Feb. 2, 1865, in Basler, Collected Works of Lincoln, 8:282.

  17.Lincoln’s instructions to Seward, Jan. 31, 1865, ibid., 8:279.

  18.Rowland, JDC, 6:465–67.

  19.Jones, Rebel War Clerk’s Diary, 2:411, entry of Feb. 7, 1865; Richmond Dispatch, Feb. 7, 1865, quoted in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: Century, 1890), 10:130–31.

  20.Richmond Examiner and Stephens quoted in Cooper, Davis, 513.