Dixie Betrayed (4 page)

These men were the seedlings of the Confederacy, each selected at secession meetings held in the individual states beginning
in December 1860. The forty-three chosen ones represented their home states with the same relative force as representation
in the old U.S. Congress, though when it came to voting, each state had only one collective vote. The mission for the Montgomery
convention would be to elect a provisional president and vice president, draft a Confederate Constitution, and write the initial
legislation of the New South that would ready it for war with the North.

The Montgomery convention, held in great style within the Alabama State House, assembled in secrecy and with a hell of a task
ahead of it. Those gathered were largely attorneys and planters, many of them wealthy enough to own slaves, but by no means
all motivated by the peculiar institution. About 60 percent were Democrats and 40 percent were ex-Whigs. The average age of
the men was forty-seven. About half were Unionists who had been lukewarm, at best, over secession. Yet the fire-eaters, the
rabid secessionists who rattled the door frames with their angry oratory, had no intention of compromising. Alexander Stephens
described the men assembled for the convention as politicians of “substance, character, and, most of all, impeccable conservatism.”
¹⁰
But, as is often the case, one man’s “conservative” is another’s “radical.”

On the first morning of the Congress, Little Aleck awoke at his lodging and entertained breakfast before writing letters,
chiefly to his brother Linton. Poised to make history, Stephens walked the half mile to the State House for the opening of
the noontime session of the convention. The streets were jammed with visitors from the countryside, all of whom were in town
to see the historic opening of the political meeting, and the cloudy, cold skies had opened up to splays of warm sunshine.

Burdened by his heavy coat and a hat awkwardly tipped upon his boyish head, Little Aleck marched past the throngs of curiosity
seekers and up the steps of the State House. On entering the building, he walked straight into the rotunda and spied the Senate
Chamber where the forty-three representatives would meet (though only thirty-seven were on hand that first day). Stephens
walked into the octagonal chamber amid a flurry of others streaming into the building and awaited what would become the birth
of the Confederacy.

Patriotic displays covered the white plaster walls inside the chamber. Desks were arranged so as to provide sufficient room
for the delegates, and room for many visitors was reserved on the wooden benches in the third-floor balcony. The ladies of
Montgomery had assembled an impressive spread of fruits, meats, and bread, all placed outside the chamber’s door so that delegates
and visitors would not go hungry as they launched a revolution. Presiding over all was George Washington, who peered out of
Gilbert Stuart’s portrait, hung prominently.

As noon approached, a weird and slightly bemused men’s club began to form. Delegates walked from desk to desk introducing
themselves, some old acquaintances, but most strangers. After mixed conversations and much anticipation from the gallery above,
the gavel struck at 12:30 p.m. to call the session to order. Six judges were present, twelve state legislators, twelve congressmen,
seven senators, one governor, and two cabinet secretaries.
¹¹

Alabama legislator Robert Barnwell served as presiding officer, welcoming delegates from sister states afar. After a blessing
from a local reverend, Barnwell asked for a vote on a true presiding officer, a provisional president of the convention. “Howell
Cobb of Georgia,” he suggested, and asked that the election be accomplished by acclamation. A journalist inside the room noted
that Cobb, in making his acceptance speech, appeared like a “fat, pussy, round-faced fellow, who, although he has been Secretary
of the Treasury, looks much more like spending money for the comfort of the inner man, than finding out where it comes from.”
¹²

Getting down to business, the body next elected other officers—a secretary, a doorkeeper, a messenger, and so on—and then
Cobb brought down his gavel, with a storm of applause from the floor and from the gallery. The Confederacy had finished its
first day of business.

Montgomery’s State House would serve as headquarters of the proto-Confederacy for weeks to come, each day witnessing Cobb’s
opening remarks and the local reverend’s prayer. A national correspondent on the scene dubbed the building the “Temple of
Mystery and Birthplace of Liberty.”
¹³
Business commenced at 10 a.m., and there was much of it. The work lasted through late afternoon, at which time either a supper
break was called or the day was terminated. Some days the delegates returned to the State House to work long into the evening.

Throngs of spectators filled the galleries each day, wild with curiosity or looking for government work. The first major order
of business was drafting a Confederate Constitution. This took all of four days. The path to constitutionality might have
taken two different avenues: sticking close to the old U.S. Constitution or radically striking out. The delegates chose the
former, beginning their revolution conservatively and safely.

With the exception of some differences—significant as they were—the document the Southerners crafted was copied verbatim from
the U.S. Constitution. The differences guaranteed state rights and protected slavery. The document explained how each state
“acted in its sovereign and independent character” to make a “permanent federal government.” There was also hypocrisy: no
formula for secession was allowed in the Confederate Constitution.

A provisional constitution in hand, Cobb and friends set about to elect a provisional president and vice president for the
nation at large. Jefferson Davis was still on his Mississippi plantation, but in the meantime, Little Aleck Stephens was inaugurated
as vice president on February 11, his forty-ninth birthday. Introduced to the delegation, the crowd, and the newspapermen
in the chamber, he thanked the assembly briefly before deferring to the as-yet-missing President Davis.

W
HEN
Stephens and his comrades went home to their Montgomery hotels and boardinghouses, they had plenty to contemplate. Following
the spark that ignited the fire, namely South Carolina’s secession on December 20, the entire nation had unraveled politically.
While the Montgomery convention lumbered on, another meeting would be held in Washington, a so-called Peace Convention. At
the request of the Virginia General Assembly, 132 representatives of twenty-one states came together to work out an eleventh-hour
peace accord. But few had any hope that it would resolve anything. While President Buchanan remained in office as lame duck
for another month, he was not about to do anything during the coming weeks—he would leave the mess for Lincoln.

As for the man from Illinois, a tall, gaunt figure, no one really knew much about him. To Southerners he was certainly that
“black Republican” who would threaten their vital interests and ruin slavery. But Lincoln really hadn’t said a lot since his
election; what he would do when he arrived in Washington was still unknown.

Although war loomed it certainly didn’t seem the only option. Many, including the influential
New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley, simply wanted to “let the erring sisters go”— to allow the Southern states that had seceded to keep
their independence. Why fight to keep them in the Union if they really didn’t want to belong? Southerners were experienced
as soldiers, skilled outdoorsmen, horsemen, and hunters. Should a war come, certainly a Rebel could lick ten Yankees. Even
the Yankees seemed to acknowledge that would probably be the case. Perhaps letting the South go made sense.

Indeed, across Dixie, local militia units assembled, recruited, and drilled for the potential action that might come. Every
town seemed interested in raising a company; every county seemed to be full of lawyers, clerks, farmhands, and planters primed
and ready to take their respective places in the hierarchy of a fighting South.

Militarily, the center of attention was Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the most powerful and well located of several forts that
guarded Charleston Harbor. Tensions at the Federal forts in Charleston had risen to alarming levels by late 1860, and the
evening following Christmas 1860, Maj. Robert Anderson and his garrison of Yankees had moved from Fort Moultrie on the shore
to the tiny Sumter, well out in the water. Despite his Southern sympathies, President Buchanan staunchly determined that Fort
Sumter would not be abandoned to the South Carolina militia.

A few whispers of the trouble to come lay scattered around other locales. On the day Jefferson Davis was inaugurated, Bvt.
Maj. Gen. David E. Twiggs, commanding the Military Department of Texas, surrendered military posts to the state militia. Twiggs
was a senior general in the U.S. Army whose Georgia birth and proslavery sentiment were no secret. Even though he claimed
to have surrendered at San Antonio under heavy pressure from state forces, authorities in Washington would have no part of
his explanation and labeled him a treasonist. He would defect from the U.S. Army the day after his surrender, be dismissed
by the army on March 1, and subsequently become a Confederate general officer.

L
IKE
his Montgomery brethren, Howell Cobb was well educated as a lawyer. He had married a wealthy plantation owner’s daughter,
Mary Ann Lamar, and settled in Athens, Georgia. Elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1843, Cobb had served as state governor
before being reelected to the House, in 1855. A close associate of all the Washington Democrats, he had been appointed secretary
of the treasury by James Buchanan in 1857 before resigning during the secession crisis.

Cobb was a burly man, heavyset, with drooping eyes, a furrowed face, wiry hair that flowed over the back of his head, and
a thick, gray beard. He looked and acted somewhat disheveled. Cobb was as furious a state rightist as you could meet, and
he had campaigned intensely to sway pro-Union Georgia politicians to secede from the United States. In accepting his presidency
of the Montgomery convention, which convened in the State House on February 4, Cobb had declared the separation from the old
Union was “perfect, complete, and perpetual.”
¹⁴
By serving as the leader of the meeting that led to the First Provisional Congress, Howell Cobb had been denied the presidency
of the Confederacy itself. Cobb’s brother Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb had accompanied him to the meeting and ended up contributing
to the draft of the Confederate Constitution.

The spirit of the emerging Confederacy was intense. “I feel utterly unwilling ever again to live under a common government
with the free-soil states,” a friend wrote Cobb. “Our pride is enlisted to prove to them and to the world that the South is
not so poor, weak and destitute of resources as to be unable to hold her own in the great community of nations.”
¹⁵

For his part Cobb was willing to paint a shining picture of the new Confederacy to his old chief, President James Buchanan.
“So far our movements in establishing the Confederate States upon a firm and lasting basis have been eminently successful,”
he penned. “Our people are not only content but joyous and happy, and blessed beyond all calculation with prosperity in every
department of business. Providence has smiled upon us, and with grateful hearts we go on our way rejoicing. This is not the
picture which you had looked for as the result of disunion, and I confess, with all my sanguine feeling, it promises to surpass
even my hopes and expectations.”
¹⁶

On the day of the inauguration, Cobb wrote, “There is no compromise that the seceded States would accept. There is not a single
member of our Congress in favor of reconstruction upon any terms. . . . The idea of going back to the Union is ridiculed.”
¹⁷

“We are now in the midst of a revolution,” added Stephens. “That may be acted on as a fixed, immovable fact. It is bootless
to argue the causes that produced it, or whether it is a good or bad thing in itself. The former will be the task of the historian.
The latter is a problem that the future alone can solve. The wise man—the patriot and statesman in either section—will take
the fact as it exists, and do the best he can under circumstances as he finds them, for the good, the peace, welfare, and
happiness of his own country.”
¹⁸
The move had been made, and now it was up to the rest of the country to react.

As they sat on the State House platform, Stephens and Cobb listened attentively as Davis’s words, forced through his ragged
throat, promised the South glory.

T
HE
convention, by now called the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States, worked quickly to launch a new nation. It adopted
the Stars and Bars, designed by Nichola Marschall of Marion, Alabama, as a national flag. It determined that Federal laws
would remain in force until November 1861, unless they conflicted with the Confederate Constitution. It sent commissioners
to Britain, France, and other foreign powers to start diplomatic relations, and it dispatched agents to Washington to discuss
the status of Federal property in the South. Committees seemed to be forming everywhere—military committees, legal committees,
financial committees—nearly every book in Montgomery in danger of being grabbed by Congress for study.

Two major areas of concern confronted Davis, Stephens, and the Congress: money and troops. The most pressing matter was coming
up with the dollars to finance both a new nation and a looming war. Davis did not want to impose taxes immediately, so he
drew up plans for exorbitant loans. On the last day of February, the Confederate Congress issued $15 million worth of Treasury
bonds, which would be sold for 8 percent interest over twenty years. Not only could buyers grab these government bonds with
cash, which was in short supply, but they also could trade military supplies or farm goods for them. Other bond printings
and the issuance of Confederate currency would come shortly, too.