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

caused Southern yeomen who were ambivalent about the planters and their slaves anyway, and who rallied to the defense of the Confederacy only because it promised to keep the demons of abolition and black amalgamation from their doors, to wonder whether they had more to lose at the hands of the Yankees or those of the planters. “Never did a law meet with more universal odium than the exemption of slave owners,” wrote Alabama senator James Phelan to Davis. “Its influence upon the poor is most calamitous, and has awakened a spirit and elicited a discussion of which we may safely predicate the most unfortunate results.” Unless Davis agreed to “reorganize the whole system, and let popular attention be started and attracted by the prominent, rich, and influential men being swept into the ranks,” then Phelan could only promise that “it only needs some daring man to raise the standard to develop a revolt.”89

Jefferson Davis turned out to be both stubborn and resourceful in getting his legislative way with the draft. Since the Confederate Congress had declined to organize even the rudimentary Supreme Court that the Confederate constitution allowed, Davis took his defense of the conscription into the Georgia state courts, where he won, to the amazement of onlookers. There was no real debate over Davis’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and only one of the thirty-seven state supreme court justices in the Confederacy saw any contradiction between states’ rights and national conscription. In Richmond, Davis kept a working majority behind his bills and lost only one veto to an override in Congress. In time, as Confederate military fortunes died away after Antietam and Perryville, he persuaded Congress to hand him even more vital powers. In March 1863 Congress authorized quartermaster and commissary officers to confiscate food and animals for the use of the Confederate army and to offer reimbursement at well below market values. A month later, in an effort to raise more revenue and pull some of Memminger’s worthless paper currency out of circulation, Congress imposed a broad range of stiff direct taxes on the Confederate people, including a 10 percent sales tax, another 10 percent tax in kind on livestock and produce, an 8 percent value-added tax on all other agricultural products, and a graduated income tax, up to 15 percent on all yearly incomes over $10,000. “This is no time for making nice distinctions between the laws of the Confederate Government and the laws of any State,” urged the Richmond Dispatch. “We want soldiers to fight, not lawyers to talk,” and “State Governments that will conform their laws to those of the Confederate Government, not raise opposition to them.”90

This did not entirely eliminate the howls of the state sovereignty loyalists against the “Aristocratic and demanding Horse leeches of the Confederate Service.” R. M. T. Hunter, once one of Davis’s cabinet members and now a senator from Virginia, turned on the Confederate president, and even Davis’s own vice president, Alexander Stephens, became a bitter critic of Davis’s national policies. But the critical factor exerting downward pressure on confidence in Davis’s government was its strategic failures. The tightening of the blockade and the gradual collapse of the Confederacy’s own internal transportation system spelled increasing want and dislocation for Southern society. Governor John Milton of Florida had 13,000 destitute families on the public dole by 1864, in a state that had only cast 14,000 votes (and therefore had about as many white households) in the 1860 election. Although Davis and the governors urged cotton planters to switch to planting grains and cereals for the war, much of what they might grow had no way to reach vital Confederate markets.91

The shortages, combined with the unreliability of Memminger’s unceasing flood of unbacked bonds and notes, drove prices on goods to astronomical levels. In Richmond, John B. Jones, a War Department clerk, found that “a dollar in gold sold for $18 Confederate money” on November 21, 1863, while “a genteel suit of clothes cannot be had for less than $700” and “a pair of boots, $200—if good.” Two weeks later, after Bragg had been driven off Missionary Ridge, one gold dollar was fetching twenty-eight Confederate ones. On a combined family income of $7,200 in 1864, Jones was forced to buy “flour at $300 a barrel; meal, $50 per bushel; and even fresh fish at $5 per pound.” By the end of the year, Richmond hospital steward Luther Swank found flour going at $400 a barrel, sweet potatoes at $40 a bushel, and butter at $11 a pound. In the Treasury Department, Jones confided to his diary, “some of the clerks would shoot Mr. Memminger cheerfully.”92

As the price for creating an independent Confederate nation rose higher and higher, more and more Southern hearts grew faint with war-weariness, and more and more began to kick against the goads. George Pickett, occupying his time with garrison duties on the Rappahannock, warned that while “a greater portion of our loyal men, the chivalry and high-toned gentlemen of the country, have volunteered, and are far from their homes,” there remained “a strong element among those who are left either to be non-combatants or to fall back under the old flag. … We have to fear them most” who “have refused to volunteer, while the proprietors of the country are actually in the field… and would join the enemy should an occasion occur.” William W. Holden, the editor of the Raleigh Standard, began editorializing for a negotiated peace in 1863, only to have soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, stopping in Raleigh on September 9, 1863, on the their way to reinforce Braxton Bragg in the West, destroy his press. Undaunted, Holden resumed publication of the Standard and in 1864 ran for governor of North Carolina against Zebulon Vance on the un-spoken promise to take North Carolina out of the war or out of the Confederacy.

In the Carolinas and northern Alabama, secret anti-war movements with names such as the Order of the Heroes of America