Dixie Betrayed (9 page)

The Provisional Congress could look at a small but growing list of accomplishments, however. It had produced a provisional
constitution that attempted to instill state rights into the document, referring in the preamble to “Sovereign and Independent
States.” The Constitution allowed states to raise peacetime armies and navies, though it did not allow them to make war on
a foreign nation unless invaded first. The word “United” was excised from the document, “The Republic of Washington” rejected
as an alternative, and finally, “Confederate” chosen, which according to one delegate, “truly expresses our present condition.”
¹²

Vice President Stephens, along with Robert Toombs, pushed for the English cabinet form of government, wherein cabinet officers
were chosen from within Congress. This was not made mandatory but was possible under the new system, as was simultaneous holding
of political and military offices—something the United States Constitution forbade. An export tax initiative suggested that
Congress expected to raise significant funds from exporting tobacco and cotton. Congress would determine judicial districts
in the New South, and a Supreme Court would be organized from all the district judges.

The many governmental departments of the Confederacy, although just forming, duplicated the United States system with one
exception: the Post Office Department. The U.S. postmaster general was operating under a huge deficit, which Southerners felt
was wasteful and, in effect, a subsidy for businesses. So the Confederate Congress ordered their postmaster to turn a profit
by March 1, 1863.

The Confederacy also had to plan for expansion, since Congress saw promise among the border states. Such areas, which might
support the South or remain behind with the old Union, were critical to the Confederacy’s success. Until April the border
states had divided loyalties; Lincoln’s call for 75,000 men from the North ended this. In response the Confederate Congress
had sent commissioners to woo the potential partners. In Missouri the state’s pro-Southern governor, Claiborne F. Jackson,
called a special session of the legislature, and the state teetered on secession for several months. Secession was brewing
in Kentucky, too, and a pro-Southern contingency began meeting in the southern part of the state to start a Confederate government.
Arizona Territory considered itself pro-Confederate, and rumblings of secession were heard there. Native Americans scattered
across the Plains and American Southwest felt a strong attraction to the Confederacy. Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Creeks,
and Cherokees held meetings, declared themselves free nations, and appointed commissioners to meet with the Confederacy. On
May 3 Lincoln had called for more volunteers, building the Yankee army to nearly 160,000 strong. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee,
and North Carolina seceded, making eleven Confederate states. The potential for others to join the Confederate cause seemed
real.

On the battlefields, events were moving slowly. Soldiers like John Worsham of the Twenty-first Virginia were drilled to within
an inch of their lives but wondered if they would see real action. In the late spring of 1861, Worsham’s men, equipped with
the best uniforms and guns they could obtain, moved slowly into the Shenandoah Valley under the guidance of Brig. Gen. Thomas
J. Jackson, an eccentric ex-professor from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. The overall commander of this force
of several thousand, consisting of Virginia state troops, was Maj. Gen. Robert E. Lee. Near month’s end, on May 29, Worsham
had his first taste of battle. Near Aquia Creek, Virginia, a Federal gunboat stopped and fired a few shots before voyaging
away. It was rather a letdown. But a week later three Yankee gunboats approached the position of the Twenty-first Virginia
and, in Worsham’s words, “commenced to bombard the earthworks near the wharf.”

Worsham reported that “the enemy threw six-, eight-, and ten-inch shots at Captain Walker, who put some of his small three-inch
rifled cannon into the works and replied. The firing lasted several hours.” During the action, nearly all the Yankee cannonballs
whizzed over the heads of Worsham and his comrades. “The family living inside the earthworks had a chicken coop knocked to
pieces,” Worsham wrote. “The old cock confined in it came out of the ruins, mounted the debris, flapped his wings, and crowed.
That was the only casualty on our side.”
¹³

Action began to sprout elsewhere across the American landscape. Yankee Brig. Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, without authority, moved
forces into Baltimore and occupied the city, which had well-known Southern sympathies. Riots erupted in St. Louis, in the
center of another area of divided loyalties. Near the end of May, Yankee troops advanced into Virginia, occupying Alexandria
and pushing out three small Confederate brigades.

Late in the month the Confederacy pulled up stakes and moved to Richmond.

T
HE
first weeks of summer 1861 produced a terrific swell of war across the South, particularly after Lincoln had called for troops
to bring the Confederates back into the Union. As young men rode horses, fitted uniforms, tested weapons, and organized companies
all across the South, Davis organized his cabinet. The secretary of state would be Robert Toombs. Christopher G. Memminger
of South Carolina would be the secretary of the treasury. The secretary of war was Leroy P. Walker. Floridian Stephen R. Mallory
was secretary of the navy. John H. Reagan of Texas was the postmaster general. The office of attorney general was filled by
Judah P. Benjamin, an intellectual who many would call the “brains of the Confederacy.” (In the U.S. government, the attorney
general was not a cabinet-level post; the Confederacy tried to correct this by making it so.)

At the government’s formation in Montgomery, no foreign policy for the proto-Confederacy existed; Toombs had to invent it
piecemeal as he went along. Before long the Georgian became irritated at being the foreign minister of a nation with no foreign
relations. It was Toombs who, when a visitor to Montgomery asked him where the State Department was, famously replied, “in
my hat,” as he withdrew some papers from it. As springtime ebbed across the Southern landscape, Toombs increasingly turned
his attention to military matters, becoming bored with the affairs of state.

In addition to everything else, Toombs was a realist. Once summer approached he wrote his friend Stephens with worries over
the coming war:

The North is acting with wild and reckless vigour . . . They act as tho’ they believe they will be impotent after the first
effort (which I believe is true) and seem determined to make that overwhelming and effective. . . . [Winfield] Scott has near
eighty thousand threatening Virginia and full command of the bay, rivers, and inlets. The prospect ahead looks very gloomy.
It will take courage and energy to avert great disaster and we have far too little of the latter for the crisis.
¹

Later he fretted to Stephens over the scant money available to the Confederacy. “Men will not see that the revolution must
rest on the treasury,” he wrote, “without it,
it must fail.
”
²

The treasury secretary, Christopher Gustavus Memminger, was an old South Carolina aristocrat. He was a distinguished-looking
fellow, a well-dressed, detail-oriented man, with silvery hair that waved over his ears, a fit, erect bearing, a prominent
nose, and small, penetrating eyes that exuded a sense of confidence and precision. Nearing his sixties, Memminger had been
born in Nayhingen, Württemberg, in what is now southern Germany, and was brought to the United States as an orphan at age
three. Raised in a Charleston orphanage, Memminger eventually was taken into the home of a trustee, Thomas Bennett, who adopted
him. (Bennett later became governor of the state.) Memminger thereby was grafted into South Carolina society from complete
anonymity. He was a hardworking, deeply religious young man. Studying law, as many upper-class young men attempted to do,
Memminger was admitted to the bar in 1824. Well known as a leading light in his state by the time war clouds approached, Memminger
served as director of a variety of professional companies in and around Charleston and owned a large plantation house and
property in excess of more than $200,000. He also held titles to fifteen slaves.

Memminger had spent a good portion of his youth admiring the Federal Union, but his support for a central government slowly
dissipated. By the time of John Brown’s raid into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 (which scared the daylights out of slave
owners as they imagined a mass uprising of ax-wielding former servants), Memminger had solidified himself with the secessionists.
As a leading attorney and one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, he was selected to go to the Montgomery convention, where
he wasted no time divining thoughts on the proto-Confederacy. Memminger had a treatise printed up, “Plan of a Provisional
Government for the Southern Confederacy,” and, like Benjamin, stood out as calm and intellectual amid the hyperemotion.

Davis’s appointment of Memminger as secretary of the treasury had been a little startling, as the two were not known to each
other. The original plan, according to Mary Boykin Chesnut, was that Davis wanted to make the politician Robert W. Barnwell
secretary of state and Toombs secretary of the treasury. Barnwell refused, and so the plan was altered, bringing the dark
horse Memminger in as a second choice, as recommended by various members of the South Carolina delegation.

The choice to head the Navy Department was also made on political grounds. A significant factor in the selection of Stephen
Russell Mallory as secretary of the navy was his residence in Florida, another state Davis wanted to appease by including
it in the cabinet. Mallory was about fifty when war commenced; he had been born at Port of Spain, in the British West Indies,
in either 1811, 1812, or 1813, depending on which source is to be believed. He was stout, balding, with wavy dark hair trimmed
meticulously and brushed with gray, a distinguished-looking, practical politician. His father had been working in the Caribbean
as a construction engineer at the time of Stephen’s birth, and the family moved around until settling at Key West, Florida,
in 1820. During the family moves Mallory had received only snippets of formal education; finally, in his early twenties, he
became inspector of customs at Key West and set about improving his education by studying law. Admitted to the Florida bar,
Mallory took part in the Seminole War, married, served as a county judge, and spent much of the 1850s as a U.S. senator, elected
as a Democrat. As chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee in the Senate, he well understood navy business. He had declined
an appointment as U.S. minister to Spain and, despite his initial opposition to secession, resigned from the Senate in 1861
to support his beloved South.

To head the postal department, Davis looked to Texas, appointing John Henninger Reagan, a Tennessee native who had moved to
the Lone Star State at age twenty-one. At the time of the firing on Sumter, Reagan was forty-two, a former clerk, bookkeeper,
tutor, and plantation overseer. While in his twenties, Reagan had become interested in military affairs and joined the Republic
of Texas Army as an Indian fighter. He subsequently was a planter, surveyor, lawyer, judge, and finally, a Texas legislator.
Elected a U.S. representative from Texas in 1857, Reagan spent the years leading up to secession in Washington as a staunch
Southern supporter, but he opposed radical measures. Hoping that a compromise could be found in the days preceding the Civil
War, he had returned to Texas in January 1861.

Reagan had a formidable physical presence, with a hefty frame; jet black hair brushed back over his head and ears; a thick,
black beard; and coal black eyes. At the Provisional Congress in Montgomery, Reagan caught the attention of Jefferson Davis
when the Texan told him he “would not have voted for you as president.” Reagan explained that Davis would have been great
as the South’s leading general, and this flattery may have laid the groundwork for Reagan’s appointment as postmaster general.

The final member of Davis’s inner circle wielded enormous influence within the administration. Judah Philip Benjamin, age
forty-nine, had been born in St. Croix, British West Indies, a British subject of Sephardic Jewish settlers. He was raised
in Charleston and grew to adulthood in New Orleans; at the time these cities were home to two of the largest Jewish communities
in the nation. His father was one of the founders of the first Reform Congregation of America, and it’s likely Benjamin was
confirmed at its temple. At the tender age of fourteen, Benjamin left his deeply Jewish upbringing to attend Yale Law School.
He was admitted to the Louisiana bar at the age of twenty-one and married Natalie Martin, the daughter of a wealthy New Orleans
planter, which propelled him into the life of a sugar planter and politician. A plump, good-natured man with a perpetual smile,
Benjamin had neatly combed, slightly curled hair, a short beard with no mustache, and sad eyes that seemed to signify wisdom
in a glance. Elected to the Louisiana legislature, Benjamin was active in state politics in the Whig Party until he exploded
onto the national scene with his election as a U.S. senator from Louisiana, in 1853. More than once he had to defend his religion,
one time rebuking Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio with these words: “It is true that I am a Jew, and when my ancestors were
receiving their Ten Commandments from the immediate Deity, amidst the thunderings and lightnings of Mount Sinai, the ancestors
of my opponent were herding swine in the forests of Great Britain.”

Later switching to the Democratic Party, Benjamin was reelected and stayed in the Senate, befriending Jefferson Davis and
encountering odd situations and trouble as his influence grew. Benjamin was once so insulted by Davis that he challenged him
to a duel, but the future Confederate president apologized, and the situation was diffused. Because of scandalous rumors about
Benjamin’s wife circulating in Washington, Mrs. Benjamin took the couple’s daughter to Paris, and the Benjamins saw each other
only about once per year thereafter.