This review by Florence King appears in the October
issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe, click
here.
Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the
Civil War
by David J. Eicher
(Little, Brown, 338 pages, $27.95)
IF I KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ARGUING with publishers it’s a safe bet
that the title of this book was not the author’s idea. Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the
Civil War is guaranteed to turn on the grassy-knoll set,
making it a “selling title,” something that fills publishers with
glee and authors with despair.
The grassy-knollers will be disappointed at finding no murky
conspiracy theories herein, but readers with an appreciation of the
human comedy and a taste for irony and paradox will relish this
energetically argued and engagingly written examination of the
politics of self-destruction that should have been entitled
Dixie in Denial: How the Confederacy Became Its Own Worst
Enemy.
“The Confederacy was born sick,” writes David Eicher, and placed
in the waiting arms of history’s finest Catch-22: Having seceded
from a strong, centralized government, the South had to construct a
strong, centralized government of its own if it wanted to be
powerful enough to guarantee the sacred principle of States Rights.
To free itself from one Union, it had to submit to another.
Leaders with a philosophical bent might have worked through this
conundrum, but there weren’t any. The Southern statesmen who
dominated the Secession apparatus were the type Wilbur J. Cash
called “beaux sabreurs,” swaggering aristocrats or aristocratic
wannabes who considered violent explosions of temper to be a
gentleman’s calling much like horsemanship or fencing, and who,
moreover, lacked all conception of irony and paradox and believed
introspection was for sissies. The only shade of gray they knew was
the Confederate uniform.$tChief among them was Texas Sen. Louis T.
Wigfall, a South Carolina planter by birth, who “explained” the
South to a British journalist thusly: “We’re a peculiar people,
sir. You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us…. We
have no cities — we don’t want them. We have no literature — we
don’t need any.” With a sense of honor perpetually on hair trigger
and antennae tuned to pick up the merest hint of a slight, Wigfall
racked up, in the course of five months, two duels, several
near-challenges, a fistfight, and a shooting affray, all abetted by
his two-fisted drinking — he was three sheets to the wind most of
the time.
In 1859 he had seriously considered kidnapping President James
Buchanan so that Vice President John Breckinridge, a Southerner,
could succeed him. After seven states seceded following Lincoln’s
election, Wigfall rose on the Senate floor and declaimed, “We have
dissolved the Union; mend it if you can; cement it with blood.” The
speech got him expelled from the Senate. In a bellicose frenzy, he
rushed to Charleston to see if the bombardment had started. It
hadn’t, so Wigfall got drunk, rowed out to Fort Sumter alone, and
demanded that the Yankees surrender to him personally. This act of
derring-do made him the hero of the Southern press and won him the
accolade of “fire-eating.”
It kicked off a more-fire-eating-than-thou contest among rabid
Secessionists who gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to draft the
Confederate Constitution. They included William Lowndes Yancey of
Alabama, who killed his wife’s uncle in a fight. Robert Barnwell
Rhett of South Carolina, dubbed the “father of Secession,” who
cultivated a “stark, savage stare” and lashed out at the North for
trying to destroy the “Southern Way of Life.” Robert Augustus
Toombs of Georgia, whose obscene vocabulary marked him as a
textbook case of scatological mania, who lost a bid to be President
of the Confederacy because-in this gang, mind you — he drank
too much.
And finally, there was Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina, whose
brother was murdered by slaves. Keitt had accompanied Rep. Preston
Brooks as a kind of dueller’s second when Brooks caned and nearly
killed the abolitionist Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Keitt
had made a career as a despiser of government — any government —
and, writes Eicher, “he couldn’t stop; it was simply a way of life;
his seething anti-government feelings couldn’t screech to a halt,
even in Montgomery. They would have to be redirected — if not at
Lincoln, then perhaps toward Davis.”
DAVIS, AS IT HAPPENED, was the easiest of targets. If ever a man
was shaped by a middle name, it was he. The youngest of ten
children whose mother was 48 when he was born, he was christened
Jefferson Finis Davis by a father who made sure everyone
would know that he was unexpected, unwanted, and not to be
repeated. An Abraham Finis Lincoln would have cracked jokes about
it, but Jefferson Finis Davis did not crack jokes about
anything.
Nor did he have the Lincolnesque touch in tragedy. Like Lincoln,
Davis lost the woman he loved in his youth and a son in his
presidency, but where Lincoln’s bereavements were cast in
conventional sweet sorrow, Davis’s were pure Edgar Allan Poe. His
first wife, Sarah Taylor (Zachary Taylor’s daughter), died on their
honeymoon — some accounts say in his arms-from a swampland fever.
He waited ten years before remarrying, at 36, a girl of 19, Varina
Howell. They had several children, including a son who died in the
Confederate White House in Richmond — not in his bed like Willie
Lincoln, but from falling out the window.
This was the man fated to herd Dixie’s cats: insecure,
repressed, rigid, suspicious, secretive, cold, and humorless. It
says as much about the man as the nation he was to lead that the
most famous line in his Inaugural address was: “All we ask is to be
let alone.”
“States Rights wounded the United States,” writes Eckerd, “but
it destroyed the Confederacy.” From the moment Davis took office,
everywhere he looked he saw the 800-pound gorilla of States Rights,
and then pretended that he hadn’t seen it. Admitting that it was
really there would have demolished his idealized mental picture of
the Confederacy as a strong, unified new nation with himself at the
head, wielding the authority that leaders need to win a war.
It is axiomatic that a nation going to war needs a regular army
under a unified command, but Davis’s efforts to form one were
immediately challenged by governors who invoked States Rights as a
rationale for controlling their own troops. The most troublesome
was Gov. Joseph Brown of Georgia, who demanded the right to say how
Georgia troops were supplied, who commanded them, and even when and
where they fought.
The governors used the same argument against conscription —
“the most alarming stride towards consolidation that has ever
occurred,” Brown howled. Tennessee agreed: “If agents of the
Confederate Government had the right to go into any State and take
therefrom the men belonging to that State, how were States Rights
and State Sovereignty to be maintained?” The blind spot just got
bigger; the phrase agents of the Confederate Government is
already beginning to sound like a synonym for damnyankees.
Several disputes cut too close to the bone to bear discussion
and were tabled repeatedly. One was the establishment of a Supreme
Court. The name alone was enough to set off the usual suspects, who
latched onto the phrase “fatal stab” to describe their reactions.
William Lowndes Yancey warned that the power of a Supreme Court
over state courts “would subvert and destroy the power of the
States.” Others still blamed the old Supreme Court for the United
States Bank, an act which had strengthened Federal authority. And
Louis T. Wigfall, apropos of nothing timely, delivered a prolix
eulogy to the long-dead Chief Justice John Marshall of Virginia,
bewailing the fact that his “imperial genius and unspotted virtue
should have been so long connected with the old Supreme Court.” But
worst of all, a Supreme Court had to rely on precedents, and as yet
there weren’t any; a Confederate appellate court would be forced to
use U.S. precedents, an intolerable blasphemy. The matter was
tabled.
Equally traumatizing was the authority to suspend the writ of
habeas corpus and declare martial law. Many Confederates saw this
as the ultimate sin of big governments and did not want to grant
Davis the power no matter how desperate conditions became. When
eventually he did suspend the writ in Portsmouth and Norfolk, he
got hate mail and threats from Virginians.
The Confederate Constitution as originally written did not
mention Secession. Some thought that this was hypocrisy on a par
with the U.S. Constitution and maintained that honor and
philosophical purity demanded an Amendment guaranteeing the right
to secede. This should have been greeted as a triumph of logic;
after all, if you can’t secede from the Confederacy, who can you
secede from? But the proposal did not sit well in the Southern
subconscious. Phrases such as “an aggrieved State shall be allowed
to go in peace” posed a threat, triggering visions of Pandora’s box
that no one wanted to explore too closely. “The whole thing was
dropped as a dangerous idea,” writes Eicher.
The question that cut closest to the bone and was tabled most
often was the use of slaves in the war effort. Male slaves had been
subject to short-term impressment for labor since the start of the
war, but as time went on the debate centered around whether to arm
them and use them as soldiers. “Inimical to our cause” was the
common tight-lipped objection, though the specific underlying fear
was expressed more floridly by Louis T. Wigfall. There was also the
fear that they would desert if they got too close to Yankee lines.
To prevent this, someone put forth the insane idea that the
government buy 100,000 slaves from their owners and give one to
each white soldier.
But it was the question of how to reward slaves for their
service that led the Davis government into the ultimate Catch-22.
If the North won the war, they would be emancipated, so the only
possible reward the South could offer them was emancipation. But if
the Davis government took this step, it would be an admission that
governments had the power to free slaves, which would have been an
endorsement of the Emancipation Proclamation.
They finally passed a slave-soldier bill, but no slave ever saw
action in the Confederate Army. They were still drilling when
Richmond fell.
THE SOUTH’S FESTIVAL OF DENIAL did not end with Lee’s surrender. In
a deliciously wry Epilogue, Eicher demolishes the accepted wisdom
that history is always written by the victors as he regales us with
the story of the Second Denial.
The North did not see any point in boasting about its victory
and preferred to forget the late unpleasantness and get back to the
good old Yankee business of making money. Southerners, however,
decided that Appomattox was all a mistake because the Confederacy
had actually won the war. It stood to reason; they had the best
generals and had won so many battles that it could not be said that
they had sustained a military defeat. No, it was that they
had been crushed by “overwhelming numbers and resources,” as Lee
put it in his farewell to his troops. There was no fault to be
found in the South’s fighting; it was the lack of war
materiel and the huge supply of foreign immigrants who enlisted in
the Union army as soon as they got off the boat.
To prove it, Southerners took up pens as they had once taken up
arms and fought the war all over again on paper. The literature
that Louis J. Wigfall had insisted the South did not need was
needed now, and the revisionists answered this new call to the
colors, turning out so many fervent histories, biographies, and
memoirs that an anonymous wag gave them the collective title, “An
Unbiased Account of the War Between the States from the Southern
Point of View.”
By the end of the 19th century, abetted by the well-oiled
publicity machines of ancestor societies such as United Daughters
of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, the
revisionists had convinced not only the South but much of the rest
of America as well to see the Confederacy as the apotheosis of
romance and to accept as revealed truth the mystique of the Lost
Cause.
Students of the Civil War will like this book, but students of
human nature will love it.
