Dixie Betrayed (41 page)

And then, as soon as the carnage seemed to be unstoppable, it had ceased. The noise and patter on the streets had died away,
the screams and shrieks of tortured souls in the surrounding houses had calmed. Slowly, Richmonders had heard the songs and
cheers of Northern boys marching with a clatter along city streets and the clanking of bayonets—just as Worsham had remembered
from the battle of the Wilderness, only now, the martial sounds were heard in the place of his boyhood upbringing.

By evening Capitol Square had been transformed into a makeshift refugee camp for those who had lost their homes in the ordeal.
Tents were staked all over the area, and campfires burned not for Northern soldiers but for Southern women and children, heating
scraps of food, their first meal under Federal occupation. Yankee soldiers patrolled the streets. Quiet spread across the
city. Although Union soldiers would soon begin house-to-house searches for Confederate troops in hiding, there were none to
be found now. They were scurrying westward with the tattered remnants of Lee’s army on a rendezvous with surrender, which
would occur a week later in the tiny hamlet of Appomattox Court House.

Three or four days later, as the Worsham household held its collective breath—not knowing what would become of the city—the
doorbell had rung. On the step had stood three Yankee officers. At once fearful of what might happen to him and believing
he ought to tell the truth, Worsham had confessed he was a wounded Confederate soldier on leave for recovery. The soldiers
had hardly reacted, and Worsham had been momentarily relieved. Yet he had worried that the military valuables he kept throughout
the house would be stolen or confiscated; two swords were stuck in the lounge near his bed, and the three Yankees had sat
right down on the lounge.

The Federals had sat on squeaky springs and moved around in apparent discomfort, but without discovering the booty. Finally,
Worsham, unable to stand it, had told them about the hidden swords. All three officers had burst out laughing, and they had
advised him to keep the swords hidden and let them know at the headquarters nearby if he needed any further help. The incident
had marked a turning point in Worsham’s existence. The Yankees were not evil or anxious to persecute him. In fact they were
helpful.

A few days later the surviving parolees of the Army of Northern Virginia—many of them young boys and old men—had begun parading
back into the city. “As Lee came riding back into Richmond,” recalled Worsham, “his old followers immediately recognized him.
They formed in line and followed him to his home where, with uncovered heads, they saw him enter his door. Then they silently
dispersed.”
⁴
As the white-haired, grandfatherly figure had awaited the noted photographer Mathew Brady, who would come and photograph
the war celebrity Lee on the rear porch of his Franklin Street house, the South already was transforming. It was, at this
moment, already part of a new United States. And the former soldiers of Lee’s army were beginning to discover new lives that
they had never known.

Poverty is the great equalizer. With a ruined economy, wrecked buildings, neglected crops, and worthless currency and bonds,
the South offered impoverishment to one and all. Worsham recalled seeing a private and a colonel working in the field, side
by side, in their old army uniforms. Men who had amassed fortunes in Richmond’s financial district now were reduced to cleaning
the charred bricks in the burned district of the city.

Although he was just twenty-five at war’s end, John Worsham had matured beyond his years, a necessary outcome of the trauma
he had lived through. The same could not be said of all the Southern politicians and generals who survived the war. Few wanted
to face up to the fact that they had been a cause of the Confederacy’s ruin. “You are represented to have manifested surprise
that no citizen of the South had appealed to the Government in behalf of Mr. Davis,” Howell Cobb wrote the Union secretary
of state, William H. Seward, soon after the war ceased. Seward himself was recovering still from hideous injuries suffered
on the bloody night of murder in Washington the previous April, when President Lincoln had been killed. “You had evidently
inferred from this silence on the part of the people of the South that there existed among them—to say the least—a feeling
of indifference on the subject,” Cobb continued.

“My object is to disabuse your mind of such erroneous impression,” wrote the man who had served as first provisional president
of the Confederacy. He continued:

During the latter portion of the late struggle public opinion in reference to Mr. Davis and his administration was much divided.
There were those who fully approved the policy of his administration and as a matter of course gave it their unqualified support.
There were others who differed upon many points from his policy who still gave an earnest support to his administration from
a conviction that such a course alone promised success to the cause which they had so deeply at heart. There was another class
even more opposed to his policy and who believed that success under his lead was impracticable and therefore urged a change
of administration. Whilst there existed these differences of opinion there was one point upon which all were agreed, and that
was that Mr. Davis was true and faithful to the trust which had been reposed in him.
⁵

And so began the remaking of the war, the remolding of the words, the impression of deep unity, which continues in the way
many view the war to this day.

And this rewriting of history, this refighting battles on paper, this massaging of the political facts, was just taking hold.
Within the year, in force by the end of the century, the Confederacy’s politicians would become saints, its generals unsurpassed
heroes once again, thanks to the writers of Southern history.

The revisionism began at the top. From the papers of Burton Harrison, Jefferson Davis’s secretary, one finds ink notations—corrections—made
by the Confederate president. Davis changed the claim he had been “among the keenest and most sagacious of them all in his
endeavour to precipitate secession upon the country” to “in his assertion of the rights of the States under the Constitution
and of the right of Secession—although the records of Congress show that he cherished the utmost devotion to the Union and
consistently opposed extremists of all parties who were endeavouring to precipitate actual secession.” A uniter, not a divider.
In a passage touching on his address in Montgomery as Confederate president, he reworked “prophesying [
sic
] peace, but threatening that the enemies of the South would be compelled to ‘smell Southern powder, and feel Southern steel’”
to “expressing his desire for the maintenance of peaceful relations with the States which remained in the Union—asserted that
all that the seceding States desired was ‘to be let alone’—but announced that, if war should be forced upon them, they would
make the enemies of the South ‘smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.’”
⁶

Davis always appreciated how his revolution recalled the American Revolution of his generation’s grandfathers, how that echo
somehow ennobled the cause of Confederate independence. Diehard Confederates churned out such verses as “
Rebels
before / Our fathers of yore /
Rebel’s
the righteous name /
Washington
bore / Why, then, be ours the same.”
⁷

The Confederate president promoted this theme during the war and vigorously stoked it afterward. He also pushed the idea that
the Union victory was due to overwhelming odds, that the cleverer and more highly skilled soldiers of the South simply were
beaten down in the end by huge numbers of undesirable immigrant troops from the North and by the Union’s endless resources.
He downplayed or ignored the strategic and tactical victories of Yankee generals. But perhaps most significantly Davis tried
to weave a nostalgic view of how the Confederate troops, generals in the field, and politicians all got along. It was a utopia
that the Yankees swooped down upon and spoiled, and according to Davis, the world would have been a better place had it continued
without ruin from these wicked Northern aggressors.

Davis’s harmonic world was a dream—one that ignored the bitter squabbles of those who needed to cooperate the most in order
for the Confederacy to succeed. The roll call included Aleck Stephens, Robert Hunter, Henry Foote, Robert Rhett, Louis Wigfall,
and Bob Toombs, a gallery of men who held old-school principles—state rights and slavery—higher than the existence of their
own creation, the Confederacy.

T
HIS
romanticized version of the Confederacy took hold immediately after the war and never let go. Whereas Union military victors
had little to prove on paper, Southerners continued to fight the war, invoking numerous “what-ifs” to imagine what could have
been, downplaying the role of slavery in going to war, and constructing a new mythology of the Southern soldier. At the war’s
outset the popular myth had been, “One Southerner can lick ten Yankees.” That turned out not to be the case. Now a new mythology
arose: “The South lost, even though it fought better and with a superior class of soldiers, because of overwhelming Northern
manpower and war matériel.”

In the pages of many early Southern histories of the war, the Confederates seem to win practically every battle. The sarcastic
question that came later to many observers was, if the South won virtually all the battles, how could it have lost the war?

Americans love myths, and they love imagining what might have been, particularly for underdogs. The popularity of the underdog
myth was aided and abetted by the nonresponse from Northern participants, who were much less engaged in recounting the war’s
actions. The majority of Yankees felt they had won the war, it had been an enormous unwanted distraction, and they wanted
to get on with normal life again.

But Southerners great and small continued to fight on paper the war they had lost in reality. Some did it to salvage their
reputations; others simply to bolster their damaged sense of pride amid the wreckage of the New South, now experiencing the
early days of a painful Reconstruction. Others twisted the truth of what had happened to build a new sense of pride for their
children and grandchildren, so the stigma of having lost the war could be lifted as quickly as possible. In this mode of Southern
Reconstruction, the revisionists created a powerful Lost Cause mythology that downplayed the actual reasons for secession
and put forth the “overwhelming numbers” argument in all its glory.

Many early books published in the South shortly after the war carried the seeds of these themes, including virtually all the
general histories of the war published in the South. But the movement really took hold a few years after Appomattox, in Richmond,
with the formation of a new organization dedicated to remembering the war and its dead—the Southern Historical Society.

Founded by a group of ex-Confederate officers in 1869, the Southern Historical Society quickly became the preeminent organization
aiming to “set the record straight” with regard to the war history. “No Southern man who reads the very personal and partisan
chapters of the ‘Lost Cause,’ or the unjust and unreasonable history of the late war as compiled by Northern writers for the
deception of the world and its posterity, can be satisfied,” read an announcement for the society’s founding. (The book referred
to here is Richmond newspaper editor Edward Pollard’s
The Lost Cause,
which attacked the foolishness of many Confederate military decisions as well as Jefferson Davis’s ability as president.)

Soon after its formation the society began publishing a landmark set of journals collectively termed the
Southern Historical Society Papers.
Containing contributions by ex-officers who included the fiercely unreconstructed Jubal A. Early, Lee’s former field general,
the
Papers
set about to rewrite history. Their authors attempted to justify secession; promote the theory that overwhelming Union manpower
and supplies unjustly defeated a noble Southern band of brothers; suggest within the Confederacy that Virginia and Virginians
were the preeminent leaders of the South, the constant battlefield heroes; and—after his death, in 1870—push Robert E. Lee
as a new American cult hero. The conclusions put forth by the Virginians were helped to congeal into popular memory by the
fact that few other states or cities had organized societies with the ability to muster a wide-ranging publicity campaign
as did the Richmond group.

Moreover, most Northern writers were still racist by today’s standards (and would be for a long time to come), and so on all
sides of the equation, the moral aspect of the Civil War was downplayed significantly. Few Yankee writers wanted to go on
record to support the truth and get into the nitty-gritty details of slavery, and so they abetted the Southern version of
events by, in many cases, simply not responding to it.

While the upper class of the Confederate Army, the officers and Virginians, had its
Southern Historical Society Papers,
common soldiers also had a major outlet where they could publish wholesale fabrications of revisionist thought, though it
came along a little later. In 1893 the Nashville newspaperman S. A. Cunningham founded
Confederate Veteran,
a monthly journal published “in the interest of Confederate veterans and kindred topics.” This title joined
The Land We Love,
published by the former Confederate general D. H. Hill, as a hodgepodge of battle anecdotes, stories about the South, poetry,
reports on veterans’ activities, and apologia for secession.

Gradually, by attrition, Confederate writers discovered their power of persuasion. If you wrote something often enough, eventually
a lot of people would believe it.

And this perception still holds on to the American imagination today. Not just in the Southeast, but everywhere in the United
States, the romanticized version of the Confederacy is the one people predominantly believe in and hold out as fact. In the
South the perception has been fueled not only by bloodlines and the assumed correctness of anything an ancestor ever did,
but also by the adoption of these themes into the “official viewpoint” of such heritage groups as the United Confederate Veterans,
the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, fraternal organizations that still hold many
members. How could any member of the SCV possibly believe that the principle Southern politicians held most sacred, state
rights, would be the thing that killed it like a cancer from the inside?