The Critical Year
The great military events of the year 1863 have pushed out of men's
memories the less dramatic but scarcely less important civil events. To
begin with, in this year two of the greatest personalities in the South
passed from the political stage: in the summer Yancey died; and in the
autumn, Rhett went into retirement.
The ever malicious Pollard insists that Yancey's death was due
ultimately to a personal encounter with a Senator from Georgia on the
floor of the Senate. The curious may find the discreditable story
embalmed in the secret journal of the Senate, where are the various
motions designed to keep the incident from the knowledge of the world.
Whether it really caused Yancey's death is another question. However,
the moment of his passing has dramatic significance. Just as the battle
over conscription was fully begun, when the fear that the Confederate
Government had arrayed itself against the rights of the States had
definitely taken shape, when this dread had been reënforced by the alarm
over the suspension of habeas corpus, the great pioneer of the secession
movement went to his grave, despairing of the country he had failed to
lead. His death occurred in the same month as the Battle of Gettysburg,
at the very time when the Confederacy was dividing against itself.
The withdrawal of Rhett from active life was an incident of the
congressional elections. He had consented to stand for Congress in the
Third District of South Carolina but was defeated. The full explanation
of the vote is still to be made plain; it seems clear, however, that
South Carolina at this time knew its own mind quite positively. Five of
the six representatives returned to the Second Congress, including
Rhett's opponent, Lewis M. Ayer, had sat in the First Congress. The
subsequent history of the South Carolina delegation and of the State
Government shows that by 1863 South Carolina had become, broadly
speaking, on almost all issues an anti-Davis State. And yet the largest
personality and probably the ablest mind in the State was rejected as a
candidate for Congress. No character in American history is a finer
challenge to the biographer than this powerful figure of Rhett, who in
1861 at the supreme crisis of his life seemed the master of his world
and yet in every lesser crisis was a comparative failure. As in Yancey,
so in Rhett, there was something that fitted him to one great moment but
did not fit him to others. There can be little doubt that his defeat at
the polls of his own district deeply mortified him. He withdrew from
politics, and though he doubtless, through the editorship of one of his
sons, inspired the continued opposition of the Mercury to the
Government, Rhett himself hardly reappears in Confederate history except
for a single occasion during the debate a year later upon the burning
question of arming the slaves.
The year was marked by very bitter attacks upon President Davis on the
part of the opposition press. The Mercury revived the issue of the
conduct of the war which had for some time been overshadowed by other
issues. In the spring, to be sure, things had begun to look brighter,
and Chancellorsville had raised Lee's reputation to its zenith. The
disasters of the summer, Gettysburg and Vicksburg, were for a time
minimized by the Government and do not appear to have caused the alarm
which their strategic importance might well have created. But when in
the latter days of July the facts became generally known, the Mercury
arraigned the President's conduct of the war as "a vast complication of
incompetence and folly"; it condemned the whole scheme of the Northern
invasion and maintained that Lee should have stood on the defensive
while twenty or thirty thousand men were sent to the relief of
Vicksburg. These two ideas it bitterly reiterated and in August went so
far as to quote Macaulay's famous passage on Parliament's dread of a
decisive victory over Charles and to apply it to Davis in unrestrained
language that reminds one of Pollard.
Equally unrestrained were the attacks upon other items of the policy of
the Confederate Government. The Impressment Law began to be a target.
Farmers who were compelled to accept the prices fixed by the impressment
commissioners cried out that they were being ruined. Men of the stamp of
Toombs came to their assistance with railing accusations such as this:
"I have heard it said that we should not sacrifice liberty to
independence, but I tell you, my countrymen, that the two are
inseparable.... If we lose our liberty we shall lose our
independence.... I would rather see the whole country the cemetery of
freedom than the habitation of slaves." Protests which poured in upon
the Government insisted that the power to impress supplies did not carry
with it the power to fix prices. Worthy men, ridden by the traditional
ideas of political science and unable to modify these in the light of
the present emergency, wailed out their despair over the "usurpation" of
Richmond.
The tax in kind was denounced in the same vein. The licensing provisions
of this law and its income tax did not satisfy the popular imagination.
These provisions concerned the classes that could borrow. The classes
that could not borrow, that had no resources but their crops, felt that
they were being driven to the wall. The bitter saying went around that
it was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." As land and slaves
were not directly taxed, the popular discontent appeared to have ground
for its anger. Furthermore, it must never be forgotten that this was the
first general tax that the poor people of the South were ever conscious
of paying. To people who knew the tax-gatherer as little more than a
mythical being, he suddenly appeared like a malevolent creature who
swept off ruthlessly the tenth of their produce. It is not strange that
an intemperate reaction against the planters and their leadership
followed. The illusion spread that they were not doing their share of
the fighting; and as rich men were permitted to hire substitutes to
represent them in the army, this really baseless report was easily
propped up in the public mind with what appeared to be reason.
In North Carolina, where the peasant farmer was a larger political
factor than in any other State, this feeling against the Confederate
Government because of the tax in kind was most dangerous. In the course
of the summer, while the military fortunes of the Confederacy were
toppling at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the North Carolina farmers in a
panic of self-preservation held numerous meetings of protest and
denunciation. They expressed their thoughtless terror in resolutions
asserting that the action of Congress "in secret session, without
consulting with their constituents at home, taking from the hard
laborers of the Confederacy one-tenth of the people's living, instead of
taking back their own currency in tax, is unjust and tyrannical." Other
resolutions called the tax "unconstitutional, anti-republican, and
oppressive"; and still others pledged the farmers "to resist to the
bitter end any such monarchical tax."
A leader of the discontented in North Carolina was found in W. W.
Holden, the editor of the Raleigh Progress, who before the war had
attempted to be spokesman for the men of small property by advocating
taxes on slaves and similar measures. He proposed as the conclusion of
the whole matter the opening of negotiations for peace. We shall see
later how deep-seated was this singular delusion that peace could be had
for the asking. In 1863, however, many men in North Carolina took up the
suggestion with delight. Jonathan Worth wrote in his diary, on hearing
that the influential North Carolina Standard had come out for peace: "I
still abhor, as I always did, this accursed war and the wicked men,
North and South, who inaugurated it. The whole country at the North and
the South is a great military despotism." With such discontent in the
air, the elections in North Carolina drew near. The feeling was intense
and riots occurred. Newspaper offices were demolished--among them
Holden's, to destroy which a detachment of passing soldiers converted
itself into a mob. In the western counties deserters from the army,
combined in bands, were joined by other deserters from Tennessee, and
terrorized the countryside. Governor Vance, alarmed at the progress
which this disorder was making, issued a proclamation imploring his
rebellious countrymen to conduct in a peaceable manner their campaign
for the repeal of obnoxious laws.
The measure of political unrest in North Carolina was indicated in the
autumn when a new delegation to Congress was chosen. Of the ten who
composed it, eight were new men. Though they did not stand for a clearly
defined program, they represented on the whole anti-Davis tendencies.
The Confederate Administration had failed to carry the day in the North
Carolina elections; and in Georgia there were even more sweeping
evidences of unrest. Of the ten representatives chosen for the Second
Congress nine had not sat in the First, and Georgia now was in the main
frankly anti-Davis. There had been set up at Richmond a new organ of the
Government called the Sentinel, which was more entirely under the
presidential shadow than even the Enquirer and the Courier. Speaking of
the elections, the Sentinel deplored the "upheaval of political
elements" revealed by the defeat of so many tried representatives whose
constituents had not returned them to the Second Congress.
What was Davis doing while the ground was thus being cut from under his
feet? For one thing he gave his endorsement to the formation of
"Confederate Societies" whose members bound themselves to take
Confederate money as legal tender. He wrote a letter to one such society
in Mississippi, praising it for attempting "by common consent to bring
down the prices of all articles to the standard of the soldiers' wages"
and adding that the passion of speculation had "seduced citizens of all
classes from a determined prosecution of the war to an effort to amass
money." The Sentinel advocated the establishment of a law fixing maximum
prices. The discussion of this proposal seems to make plain the raison
d'être for the existence of the Sentinel. Even such stanch government
organs as the Enquirer and the Courier shied at the idea, but the
Mercury denounced it vigorously, giving long extracts from Thiers, and
discussed the mistakes of the French Revolution with its "law of
maximum."
Davis, however, did not take an active part in the political campaign,
nor did the other members of the Government. It was not because of any
notion that the President should not leave the capital that Davis did
not visit the disaffected regions of North Carolina when the startled
populace winced under its first experience with taxation. Three times
during his Administration Davis left Richmond on extended journeys: late
in 1862, when Vicksburg had become a chief concern of the Government, he
went as far afield as Mississippi in order to get entirely in touch with
the military situation in those parts; in the month of October, 1863,
when there was another moment of intense military anxiety, Davis again
visited the front; and of a third journey which he undertook in 1864, we
shall hear in time. It is to be noted that each of these journeys was
prompted by a military motive; and here, possibly, we get an explanation
of his inadequacy as a statesman. He could not lay aside his interest in
military affairs for the supremely important concerns of civil office;
and he failed to understand how to ingratiate his Administration by
personal appeals to popular imagination.
In October, 1863,--the very month in which his old rival Rhett suffered
his final defeat,--Davis undertook a journey because Bragg, after his
great victory at Chickamauga, appeared to be letting slip a golden
opportunity, and because there were reports of dissension among Bragg's
officers and of general confusion in his army. After he had, as he
thought, restored harmony in the camp, Davis turned southward on a tour
of appeal and inspiration. He went as far as Mobile, and returning bent
his course through Charleston, where, at the beginning of November, less
than two weeks after Rhett's defeat, Davis was received with all due
formalities. Members of the Rhett family were among those who formally
received the President at the railway station. There was a parade of
welcome, an official reception, a speech by the President from the steps
of the city hall, and much applause by friends of the Administration.
But certain ominous signs were not lacking. The Mercury, for example,
tucked away in an obscure column its account of the event, while its
rival, the Courier, made the President's visit the feature of the day.
Davis returned to Richmond, early in November, to throw himself again
with his whole soul into problems that were chiefly military. He did not
realize that the crisis had come and gone and that he had failed to
grasp the significance of the internal political situation. The
Government had failed to carry the elections and to secure a working
majority in Congress. Never again was it to have behind it a firm and
confident support. The unity of the secession movement had passed away.
Thereafter the Government was always to be regarded with suspicion by
the extreme believers in state sovereignty and by those who were
sullenly convinced that the burdens of the war were unfairly
distributed. And there were not wanting men who were ready to construe
each emergency measure as a step toward a coup d'état.