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Spring 1865

The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Terrible Times of Shipwreck

Col. Joseph Frederick Waring, the commander of Mississippi's Jefferson Davis Legion, was a well-read and observant Confederate cavalry officer. He concluded one Saturday in the dead of the winter of 1864–65 that the season of the year affected the morale of Southern civilians. "The people give way every winter to despondency," Colonel Waring wrote in his diary on January 14, 1865. "I have seen it now for four winters." It was an observation that rang truer than ever during the gloomy weeks of late 1864 and early 1865.

Less than four years earlier, the Confederacy had gone to war in a springtime of optimism. Then season followed season, the casualty rolls lengthened, the Federal armies advanced again and again, and Southern spirits dropped. Now the fourth winter of the war settled across a beleaguered Confederacy. From Virginia to Texas, Southerners despaired of victory.

In their mansions, houses, and log cabins, women prayed for the return of their loved ones. Only a few still believed that these men would come home to an independent Confederacy. In mid-January 1865 Mary Boykin Chesnut, a well-connected South Carolinian, learned there would be peace negotiations between the North and South, but the news brought her no cheer. She wrote tersely in her diary: "No hope—no good. Who dares hope?" That same winter Lydia Johnston, the wife of Gen. Joseph E. "Old Joe" Johnston, wrote from Lincolnton, North Carolina, to her friend Charlotte Wigfall in Richmond: "Oh these terrible times of shipwreck—everything looks hopeless to me now, and then if we are to go down—we are so far apart that we can see nothing of each other, but the glimpse of a distant pale face as it sinks out of sight!"

While Southern civilians despaired of victory, their soldiers suffered stern hardships. The men of the Army of Northern Virginia, tied down in the siege at Petersburg, Virginia, had little to eat. Many days the troops received either meat or a starch—cornmeal or flour—but not both. After four or five meatless days, their commissary officers tried with varying success to supply them with some sorghum or sugar. "To these deficiencies of food," wrote division commander Maj. Gen. Joseph B. Kershaw, "I attribute the number of desertions daily occurring and a general feeling of depression existing."

The Army of Northern Virginia lacked food and firewood. The Confederates had been well settled around Petersburg since the previous June and had used many of the trees around them to construct fortifications and winter quarters. "We suffered for firewood," a South Carolina veteran reported. "The growth about the camp, never heavy, was soon consumed by the troops; and for the last two months of our stay here we were obliged to carry logs on our shoulders for the distance of a mile or more, in order to have any fire at all." Historian Earl Hess, citing a late twentieth-century study, states that during the more than nine months the soldiers spent in the area, they cut down more than half of its timber.

Lt. Gen. James "Old Pete" Longstreet, the Army of Northern Virginia's senior corps commander, imposed a rational policy on timbering north of the James River. His soldiers were to cut first the trees in front of their lines and save those to the rear for later use. Wood rationing became a standard practice. In the Forty-ninth North Carolina, for example, each company drew ten sticks of green pinewood and a bushel of coal a day.

Partly because the Southerners lacked firewood, warm clothing, and food, many of them began leaving the Petersburg trenches. On February 25, 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee was forced to report a brutal truth to the Confederate adjutant general: "Hundreds of men are deserting nightly and I cannot keep the army together unless examples are made of [convicted deserters]." During ten days of that month, more than a thousand men left the ranks. At the end of that dismal February, General Lee told the secretary of war that desertion "proceeds from the discouraging sentiment out of the Army, which, unless it can be checked, will bring us calamity." The arrival of a new month did not improve the situation. Reports covering the period from February 15 through March 18 showed that more than three thousand men deserted the Army of Northern Virginia.

That winter Lee's men wrote letters and diary entries that reveal they accepted desertion as a routine fact of life. An Alabamian informed his wife in early March that "the spirit of the army is very low[,] desertion is getting to be a daily thing." "Fourteen left our Brigade last night," another soldier wrote his spouse on March 15, "& went over to the yankees.... Numbers go over to the yankees every night." He added: "And what speaks worse for the spirit of the army, is that the men on the picket line fire off their guns into the air & will not try to shoot down those who are in the act of deserting to the enemy." A third veteran wrote to his aunt: "[W]hen I got Back the Boys Said to me what did you com back for all the other Boys has Runaway."

Confederate senior officers recognized that alarming numbers of soldiers were leaving the ranks, and they often offered what historian Tracy Power has called "an administrative interpretation of desertion." In their efforts to explain why so many veterans were abandoning the army, some commanders emphasized physical hardships—shortages of food and other essentials—and they pointed to the government's failure to meet its commitments for pay and authorized leaves. These explanations offered at least some hope, because they held out the possibility that stronger logistics could address the desertion problem.

The letters written by the troops, however, suggest that the causes were more fundamental, and more difficult to resolve, than their officers wanted to acknowledge. The correspondence from the men of the Army of Northern Virginia suggests that, as Power has framed it, "many soldiers deserted because they believed that the war was already lost or that their families needed them more than the Confederacy did."

By the winter of 1864–65, letters from loved ones to Lee's men, appealing to them to come home, had become sadly common. Pvt. Robert Stiles referred to correspondence that "could not be read without tears—letters in which a wife and mother, crazed by her starving children's cries for bread, required a husband and father to choose between his God-imposed obligations to her and to them and his allegiance to his country, his duty as a soldier." Col. Walter Taylor of Lee's staff stated that he knew of "hundreds of letters" in which mothers, wives, and sisters lamented their hardships and asked their loved one to return home.

Married men were receptive to these appeals; fathers were particularly so. A scholarly statistical study by historian Joseph Glatthaar shows that over the course of the war married men in the Army of Northern Virginia "were nearly a third more likely to desert. Even more powerful was the motivation to look after one's children. Fathers were 80% more likely to flee the army than childless soldiers."

Appeals from the home front encouraged so much desertion that in early March a Virginia officer acknowledged: "It is useless to conceal the truth any longer. Many of our people at home have become so demoralized that they write to their husbands, sons and brothers that desertion now is not dishonorable." "Friends write, imprudently they communicate their despondent feelings to friends in the army," a Georgian wrote to his sister on March 21, 1865, "and you see the legitimate result—desertion. People at home have done more harm by discouraging the army than they have any idea." Lee himself sadly concluded that civilians contributed significantly to desertion rates. "It seems that the men are influenced by the representations of their friends at home," he reported to the Confederate secretary of war, "who appear to have become very despondent as to our success. They think the cause desperate and write to the soldiers, advising them to take care of themselves, assuring them that if they will return home the bands of deserters so far outnumber the home guards that they will be in no danger of arrest."

The Confederates suffered the same problems of high desertion and low morale in the region west of Lee's army, the critically important area defended by the Army of Tennessee. The field force in the western theater had tried for years to protect a front that ran for several hundred miles and was more than two and a half times longer than the one assigned to the more prestigious Army of Northern Virginia. The Army of Tennessee became the hard-luck outfit of the South, racked by feuding among its leaders, neglected by Richmond, and defeated in battle time and again.

By the winter of 1864–65, the western Confederates had suffered so many reverses that they despaired of victory. After Gen. John Bell Hood's disastrous Tennessee campaign, one veteran wrote to his wife: "Our army was badly whipped and it seems that they are not going to get over it Soon, especially if Gen. Hood remains in Command." On January 17 another observer informed Brig. Gen. Basil Duke: "Genl Hood's army is ... the worst whipped army you ever saw." Describing morale on the North Carolina front, an infantryman referred to the same fundamental problem that afflicted the Army of Northern Virginia. "The men are all very much disheartened," he related, "and the people at home are even more so and they write that strain to the soldiers and that makes them more dispirited ... there would be very few deserters if the soldiers letters [from home] were of a cheerful tone."

Still farther west, in the Trans-Mississippi Confederacy, four years of Civil War had brought unrelenting grief. After a two-week foray through parts of Louisiana and Arkansas in January 1865, a Federal officer painted a stark landscape. "No squad of men, much less an army," he reported, "can live anywhere we have been. The people have neither seed, corn, nor bread, or the mills to grind the corn in if they had it." Some Trans-Mississippi farmers continued to produce decent harvests, but they found it nearly impossible to ship them. Wagons had worn out, draft animals suffered exhaustion, steamboats had fallen into disrepair, and rail lines lay in shambles. Shortly after the war ended, a journalist lamented: "There is nothing in the State of Texas so sadly out of joint, out of repair, out of time, out of efficient officers, and as we are led to believe, out of money, as our Rail-roads.... A discreet person never thinks of taking passage on a Texas Rail-road without first getting his life insured, saying his prayers, and then writing to some friendly freighter, to meet him half-way along the track, and transport him to the depot."

Confederate morale in the Trans-Mississippi had collapsed. In February 1865 a furloughed Southern soldier made his way back to Texas only to find that nearly every resident of his region "appeared dispirited and whipped." By then many of the troops were putting themselves on leave—permanently. Whole regiments seemed to melt from the ranks. Early that January, newspapers in Galveston and San Antonio ran a column and a half of names of men who were listed officially as deserters. A fugitive from the garrison at Alexandria, Louisiana, reported that the soldiers of that state "are discouraged and are deserting daily, some going to Mexico, some to the Federal lines. They have not been paid for more than a year."

In the Trans-Mississippi and elsewhere that winter, desertion and sickness crippled the Confederacy. In December 1864 fewer than half the men on the rolls were in fact with their regiments. As officially reported, only 196,016 out of 400,787 Southern soldiers, or 49 percent, were present for duty. By April 1865 these numbers would decline to 160,198 out of 358,692, or 45 percent. While many men had fallen too ill to continue to fight, others had abandoned the cause. They agreed with one of Lee's veterans, who in January 1865 confessed: "There are a good many of us who believe this shooting match has gone on long enough. A government that has run out of rations can't expect to do much more fighting, and to keep on in a reckless and wanton expenditure of human life."

While Southern morale was low on every front, one Confederate remained as determined as ever—President Jefferson Davis. Lee met with the chief executive in March 1865 and came away impressed both with his superior's faith about the outcome of the ongoing struggle and with his strong will power. Historian Steven Woodworth, a careful student of both President Davis and General Lee, believes that the greatest difference in their views during the last months of the war lay in the president's "increasingly unrealistic faith in the continued possibility of Confederate victory." Davis's biographer William C. Davis observes that, as late as February 1865, "Jefferson Davis simply would not countenance that his desperate cause did not still have a chance."

Many Southerners hoped that Lee would be able to reverse the fortunes of their cause. The most successful of their field generals, he had saved Richmond in the early summer of 1862 and then had given the Confederacy other dramatic victories. "The greatest single factor engendering Confederate hope after the midpoint of the war," writes historian Gary Gallagher, "was trust in Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Viriginia."

Since the day Lee had taken command of the Army of Northern Virginia, his authority had been limited to that organization. If he were given control of all of the Confederacy's armies, many believed, greater results would follow. "It is to be hoped," Waring of the Jeff Davis Legion wrote on January 14, 1865, "that Gen. Lee will be made Generalissimo. If he is made so, it will give great confidence to the people." Three days after Waring expressed this opinion, the Virginia legislature recommended in a secret bill that Lee be appointed commander of all Confederate field forces.

This proposal would help centralize and strengthen the South's strategic planning, to some extent at the expense of the military authority of the civilian commander in chief. President Davis nonetheless replied to the Virginia lawmakers that he supported the idea. In the past, he told them, Lee had been reluctant to assume this larger role while still directly commanding the Army of Northern Virginia. This position stated by the general himself and nothing else, Davis asserted, prevented Lee's taking greater authority. The president then wrote to his most successful army commander and reopened the subject. Lee promptly answered that he was pleased with Davis's confidence in him, but he questioned what he could accomplish if his responsibilities were expanded.

The matter did not end there, because the Confederate Congress forced the issue. On January 15, two days before the Virginia legislature voted in secret, the Confederate Senate had passed overwhelmingly a resolution calling for Davis to make Lee general in chief. On January 19, the Confederate House concurred with the Senate on this appointment.

Davis and Lee accepted the congressional mandate. The president endorsed the elevation of Lee, given his record in the field. Davis did see to it that the final version of the bill gave the general in chief "command of all the military forces of the Confederate states," wording that the chief executive believed protected his own authority as commander in chief. On February 1 Davis gave the new position to Lee, who set aside his earlier reservations and on the ninth assumed the broader responsibilities. During the weeks following the general's promotion, it became evident that his increased role did not change either his personal or his professional relationship with the president.

The Federal counterparts to the Davis-Lee command team were capable leaders, committed to waging war until a Union victory was won. When the conflict began, President Abraham Lincoln lacked any significant experience with military affairs, but as the fighting continued, he grew into his role as commander in chief. President Lincoln had many qualities that helped save the Union: an ability to identify and use the strengths of others, an appreciation of sound ideas, a skill at developing political support for the war effort from diverse quarters, and a determination to stay the course through years of appalling bloodshed. As commander in chief, he maintained an unwavering focus on restoring the Union. "With razor-like acuteness," writes historian Joseph Glatthaar, "Lincoln sliced away all the extraneous concerns until only a single, core issue remained: the reunion of the states. Nothing else mattered."

Lincoln benefited not only from having appointed a general in chief nearly a year before the Confederacy did so but also from the qualities of the soldier who held this position. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was a straightforward man who presented an ordinary appearance. Officers found him at his headquarters wearing a slouch hat and a short coat, with no display of the three-star rank that he uniquely held. In his modest dress and other traits, General Grant modeled himself on Maj. Gen. Zachary Taylor, who, with brevet Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, had shared billing as the two preeminent heroes of the Old Army. As a young officer, Grant had served under General Taylor, nicknamed "Old Rough and Ready," in the northern theater of the Mexican-American War. Late in his life, as the retired president, Grant would write of Taylor what many others said of Grant himself: "No soldier could face either danger or responsibility more calmly than he. These are qualities more rarely found than genius or physical courage."

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Excerpted from Spring 1865 by Perry D. Jamieson. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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