Read Online Our One Common Country by James B. Conroy - Free Book Online

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    In a brilliant war of maneuver at the head of the Army of Tennessee, the badly outnumbered General Joseph E. Johnston had been making Sherman pay for every step toward Atlanta. At loggerheads with Johnston since West Point, Davis had replaced him in July with John BellHood, an old friend of Sherman’s whose useless left arm and missing right leg were badges of reckless bravery. Hood wasted lives in suicidal charges, then destroyed ammunition and supplies, abandoned Atlanta, and withdrew his broken army, shedding deserters along the way. Davis shrugged it off. His people knew better. Mary Chesnut was the wife of a former US senator from South Carolina. “No hope,” she told her diary, “we will try to have no fear.”
    On September 20, Davis left Richmond on a whistle-stop tour in an effort to rally his people. His rhetoric was delusional and stunningly indiscreet. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it “so damaging to the Rebel cause that attempts are being made to raise doubts as to its authenticity.”
    He spoke in Macon, Georgia, on September 23, openly appealing to deserters to return. “To the women, no appeal is necessary. They are like the Spartan mothers of old. I know of one who had lost all her sons, except one of eight years. She wrote me that she wanted me to reserve a place for him in the ranks.” On September 26, he proceeded from self-parody to self-destruction, revealing Hood’s plans to recapture Tennessee, giving Sherman time to thwart them. Three days later, Davis replied to the First Tennessee Infantry’s serenade in Palmetto, Georgia, with the mind-­boggling admission that “there are on the books of the war department at Richmond the names of a quarter of a million deserters, yet you, my brave soldiers, captains all, have remained true and steadfast.” When he visited Hood the next day, a chipper officer urged his men to give the president three cheers and a Rebel yell. “Give us Johnston,” they shouted. “Give us back our leader!”
    Davis addressed the Alabama legislature on September 29. He would have preferred a military role, he said. He had made some mistakes in the role thrust upon him. His earnestness made him rigid when he thought he was right. But if half of Hood’s deserters returned, they would drive Sherman back to his masters in a month. The more he thought about the war, the more confident he became. Victory was “the surest element of strength to a peace party.”
    Then he met with General Richard Taylor, President Zachary Taylor’s son, a Skull and Bones man at Yale. Hood’s army was in great spirits, Davis said. Taylor advised him that a leader should beware of being toldwhat he wanted to hear. Hood was incapable of reaching Tennessee, Taylor said. He could only hope to survive the winter. A letter from a captain of the 38th Alabama arrived at the Executive Mansion in Davis’s absence. Hood’s men had “a fixed, ineradicable distrust” of him, the captain said. Their morale could not be lower. Davis’s home state senator James Phelan wrote two days later. Mississippi was awash with deserters, some in armed bodies, intimidating politicians, defying arrest. The “infernal Hydra of Reconstruction is again stirring its envenomed head in our State.”
    At the Columbus, Georgia, depot, Davis belittled critics who cried for peace and kept their distance from the front. He assured an Augusta crowd that the South was stronger than when the war began. He would welcome negotiation, but there was no alternative to independence. An invincible ally gave him confidence. “I believe that a just God looks upon our cause as holy, and that of the enemy as iniquitous.” When he spoke in Columbia, South Carolina, schoolchildren were let out for the occasion. The South would prevail, he told them, and “every man who does not live to see his country free will see a