Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

(in western North Carolina and southwestern Virginia), the Peace and Constitutional Society (in the hill country of Arkansas), and the Peace Society (in northern Alabama) sprang into existence. The yeomen of the piney woods of Alabama had been reluctant secessionists to start with, and by the spring of 1862 Unionists in Winston County were raising recruits for the Union army. Overall, at least 100,000 Southerners ended up enlisting to fight against the Confederacy.93

Those who weren’t actually volunteering to fight the Confederates were concealing Confederate army deserters; before the end of the war, Winston County had sheltered between 8,000 and 10,000 deserters. “The Conscript law… has filled the mountains with disaffected desperadoes of the worst character, who joining with the deserters from our Army form very formidable bands of outlaws,” complained North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, and one of Vance’s advisers warned him that he might as well leave them alone, since “the deserters are more numerous & better armed and drilled than the Militia is, consequently there is more danger of their banding themselves together for armed resistance.”94 Some Southern counties simply deserted the Confederacy en masse: in western Virginia, the nonslaveholding mountain counties created their own new state, Kanawha, in August 1861—effectively seceding from secession—and in 1863 they were formally admitted to the Union as the state of West Virginia.

The Confederate government was not slow to retaliate. An elaborate internal passport system was created, starting in 1861 and becoming general throughout the Confederacy by 1864. In early 1863, Confederate troops swept down on Unionists in Shelton Laurel, in rural Madison County, and shot thirteen of them after being told by a senior officer, “I want no reports from you about your course at Laurel,” nor “to be troubled with any prisoners.” In Arkansas, Confederate general Thomas Hindman authorized the destruction of “all the cotton” on the Arkansas River and “its tributaries or the country beyond” and to arrest “as Traitors to the confederacy all persons resisting the execution of this order.” Nine resisters were shot, “Hindman himself witnessing the execution.”95 In the spring of 1864, George Pickett captured twenty-two North Carolinians who had been members of the state militia but then deserted to join Union forces along the occupied Carolina coast. Pickett refused to treat them as Union prisoners of war. Instead, he court-martialed them and hanged them all, over the protests of their Union commandant, Major General John Peck. After each hanging, Pickett allowed the bodies to be stripped of clothing and shoes by his own men, and as the prisoners were sent one by one to the gallows, Pickett leered, “God damn you, I reckon you will hardly ever go back there again, you damned rascals; I’ll have you shot, and all other damned rascals who desert.” That April, Confederate cavalry under Col. Robert Lowry rode through Jones County, Mississippi, which had a reputation for Unionism, hanging ten men for “armed resistance.”96

The ebbing of the Confederacy’s military and financial fortunes did little to endear the Davis administration to the Confederate voter, and the Confederacy’s congressional elections in the fall of 1863 showed a significant drop in confidence in Davis’s policies. The number of anti-administration representatives in the Confederate House rose from 26 to 41 out of a total of 106, while in the Confederate Senate, Davis clung on to a thin majority of 14 pro-administration members out of 26. None of the new members from North Carolina had voted for secession two years before, and one of the Alabama representatives was so plainly in favor of an immediate peace that the Congress voted to expel him. Alexander Stephens, who had become so alienated from Davis that he spent most of his vice presidency at home in Georgia, issued a public letter on September 22, 1864, calling for “a peaceful adjustment of our present difficulties and strife through the medium of a convention of the States… It would be an appeal on both sides from the sword to reason and justice.”97

Yet Davis beat back every attempt to unseat his administration. A bill to limit the tenure of cabinet officers to two years died on Davis’s desk, and his congressional backers kept turning the trick for him on crucial votes. Despite the desertions and draft resistance, the Confederacy managed to mobilize more than three-quarters of its available military manpower. In fact, far from being intimidated by his administration’s losses at the polls, Davis had still more demands to make of Congress in name of Confederate nationhood. When the last session of the First Confederate Congress arrived in Richmond on December 7, 1863, Davis immediately urged new taxes and fresh additions to the conscription laws that allowed the government to reach into the civilian labor pool to reassign and reallocate workers. Two months later, he also obtained a new and expanded suspension of habeas corpus, a supervisory monopoly over all blockade-running enterprises, and on February 17, 1864, a compulsory funding bill that would compel Confederate citizens to pay their taxes either in specie or in government bonds. Once again, the centralizing authority of the Richmond government had overridden the localism and individualism that three years before had been the very cause of southern secession. “Will you please to inform me,” demanded North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance, “what remains of the boasted sovereignty of the States?”98

None of these measures, however, could stanch the ebbing of the Confederacy’s territory and armies, and so on November 7, 1864, when the second (and last) session of the Second Congress met, Davis finally decided to trade in the last symbol of the old South in a bid to save the new Confederacy. He asked Congress to allow the Confederate government to purchase 40,000 slaves, enlist them as soldiers in the Confederate army, and emancipate them upon completion of their enlistment as a reward for service. “Should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”99

Actually,