Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

swift national bankruptcy is coming upon us.” Considering “the absolute wealth of the South,” Gorgas thought it all the more “amazing that our finances should have been allowed to run into this ruinous condition.” He knew whom to blame: “The real pinch is in the Treasury.”85

Davis’s difficulties in assembling a competent cabinet were overshadowed by several factors over which he had no control, starting with the political turbulence of the Confederate Congress. The Provisional Congress that first sat in Montgomery was composed of only fifty members, appointed by the state secession conventions and including some of the South’s most distinguished men (including a former secretary of war and a former president of the United States, John Tyler). Forty-two of them were lawyers and seventeen were planters. But once the new constitution was formally adopted and the capital moved to Richmond, a new Confederate Congress had to be elected, and when it assembled in November 1861, it turned out to be a very different assembly. The Confederate armies had sucked up a good deal of the Confederacy’s experienced leadership, with the result that only about a third of the 257 men who sat in the Confederate Congress during the war possessed any previous service in the U.S. Congress. The rest were either political amateurs or else men with nothing more than the limited experience of serving in state legislatures, who would be likely to speak only for the most narrow and local state interests. “The extremist and ultra friends of state rights, appear to have lost their reasoning,” wailed Burgess Gaither, one of North Carolina’s representatives. “They [had] shown high capacity for the destruction of the old government,” but “now exhibit none for the construction of the new one.”

Even those who could boast some experience in the old House were men whose long struggle to defend slavery there had turned them temperamentally into political outsiders, more inclined to oppose and criticize than to construct. Georgia representative Warren Aiken was “amazed to see the differences of opinion that exist among the members. It seems, sometimes, that no proposition, however plain and simple could be made that would not meet with opposition.” Absenteeism, drunkenness, and outright brawling on the floor of the House further crippled the effectiveness of the Confederate Congress. Georgia Senator Benjamin Hill hurled an inkstand at the head of William Yancey of Alabama, and when he missed, he picked up a chair to attack him again; on February 13, 1863, Henry Foote of Tennessee was attacked by a member from Alabama with a Bowie knife; an outraged female constituent of Missouri senator George Vest horsewhipped him in the lobby of the Capitol. “Some malign influence seems to preside over your councils,” complained James Henry Hammond to Virginia senator R. M. T. Hunter. “Pardon me, is the majority always drunk?”86

Mercifully for Jefferson Davis, few challenges to his calls for greater central authority in Richmond emerged from Congress during the first ten months of the war. But the sudden loss of Forts Henry and Donelson, followed by the failure to redeem the Tennessee River at Shiloh and the fall of New Orleans, badly jolted Southern complacency. On February 27, 1862, only five days after his formal inauguration as Confederate president under the new constitution, Davis suspended the writ of habeas corpus around Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, and he eventually widened his suspension of the writ to include any Southern districts threatened by invasion. On March 28 he appealed to the Confederate Congress to institute a selective military draft for all males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five “not legally exempt for good cause.” The Congress blinked, and on April 16 it passed Davis’s Conscription Act (with some important exemptions) by a margin of two to one. On August 18, 1862, Davis called on the second session of the Confederate Congress for a second conscription act that would raise the age of liability to forty-five. A third Conscription Act in February 1864 expanded the age limits yet again, from seventeen to fifty.87

The grasp of the conscription bills over the rights of the individual Southern states was greater than anything anyone had seen, even in the old Union. Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown protested the draft in pure Democratic terms as a “bold and dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the States… at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution.” To Alexander Stephens, Brown added that “I entered into this revolution to contribute my humble mite to sustain the rights of the states and prevent the consolidation of Government, and I am a rebel till this object is accomplished, no matter who may be in power.” To the delight of his constituents, Brown defied the draft in the state courts and promptly appointed large numbers of eligible Georgia males to fictitious state offices in order to exempt them. In South Carolina, Governor Francis W. Pickens was trying to impose a state draft of his own and attempted to exempt South Carolina draftees from any liability to the Confederate draft. Even in Virginia, the otherwise cooperative Governor John Letcher ordered the superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute to refuse any movement to draft Virginia Military Institute cadets.88

The Conscription Acts also alienated a far more dangerous segment of Southern society in October 1862 by exempting certain classes of skilled workers, and (in response to planter anxieties over the possibility of slave revolts when so many Southern white men were being pulled into the armies) the owners, agents, or overseers of plantations with more than twenty slaves. The intentions behind the exemption were plausible enough, but linking slave ownership to exemption from war service was a spark to the tinder of the nonslaveholders of the South. In effect, this “twenty-nigger law” protected large-scale slave-owning planters—the very people who had the most at stake in this war—from military service, while drafting the small-scale slaveholders and the nonslaveholders who had the least interest in fighting to defend slavery.

That, in turn,