In the first place, they deferred the war until under the effect of foreign immigration the population of the north greatly outnumbered that of the south and had become almost unanimous against slavery; and until the south was almost entirely dependent upon her railroads and her river and ocean commerce. Had secession occurred because of the excitement over the application of Missouri for admission into the union with a slave constitution, there might have been a war, but it would have been short, the end being that every foot of the public domain admitting of profitable slave culture would have fallen to the south. Suppose a serious effort had been made in 1833 to collect the revenue in South Carolina, how long would the south have endured invasion of the little State and slaughter of its citizens? Even President Jackson would have soon forgotten his enmity to Calhoun and recognized that blood is thicker than water. The time was not then ripe, as the directors saw; and so they effected an adjustment of the controversy. It did not suit the directors to have the war commence in 1850, for there was at the time no general use of ironclads, and the railroad system was far from completion. Consider for a moment the advantage to the north of having gunboats and the disadvantage to the south of not having them. Fort Donelson really fell because of gunboats. Grant got re-enforcements in time to save him from disastrous defeat at Shiloh because of the command of the river by gunboats. The gunboats caused the fall of Vicksburg. And it was the holding of the James from its mouth to Fort Darling by gunboats which gave Grant such secure grip at Petersburg that Richmond had to fall at last, and with it the confederacy.
Now a word as to the southern railroads. Next to the navigable rivers they were the lines of easiest penetration to invaders. Remember how the British in 1898 advanced in Africa only as they completed their railroad behind them. Of course had the railroad been already made their advance would have been along it. How could Sherman have ever crossed the devastated tract from Dalton to Atlanta had he been without the railroad behind him? During his retreat Johnston kept the invading army between himself and the railroad without which it could not have been subsisted, and staid so close that Sherman had him constantly in view; conduct which is still lauded by some people in the south as masterly beyond compare.
To conceive more vividly the river and railroad situation which I am striving to explain, suppose that during the Revolutionary war the States had been as dependent as the south afterwards became upon rivers and railroads, and the British had and the Americans did not have iron-clad gunboats; as matters now look, our forefathers would have been beaten back to the foot of the throne. I believe that the railroads alone would have rendered their subjugation certain.
So much for the matchless judgment shown by the directors in deciding as to the time of the war. I shall now tell what I have long thought is most unmistakably their work in conducting that war.
As soon as secession was an accomplished fact, they deprived the better southern statesmanship of all guidance of the brothers’ war now inevitable and about to begin. In such a war a proper executive is of far more importance than good legislators and even good generals. Toombs was the man who stood forth head and shoulders above all others as the logical president of the southern confederacy. But the wily directors hypnotized the electors into believing that Davis, because of his military education, service in Mexico, and four years’ secretaryship of war, was the right man. It is generally believed in the south that the considerations just mentioned turned the scale in favor of Davis. But sometimes I think that the true explanation is different. Stephens has told how Toombs was got out of the way. When this narrative[111] was published, both Toombs and Davis, with many of the partisans of each were alive, and regard for them may have kept him silent as to a reported mischance to Toombs, which provoking opposition—as was whispered—from some of those who had been among his most earnest supporters, decided him to retire. A biographer writes: “There was a story, credited in some quarters, that Mr. Toombs’s convivial conduct at a dinner party in Montgomery estranged from him some of the more conservative delegates, who did not realize that a man like Toombs had versatile and reserved powers, and that Toombs at the banquet board was another sort of a man from Toombs in a deliberative body.”[112]
Something like that stated in the quotation just made did happen, as Stephens was wont to relate at Liberty Hall—the name which he gave his hospitable home at Crawfordville, Georgia. I was present more than once at such times.
Such could have been the work of the directors.
Georgia, being the pivotal State of the new federation, was by many conceded the presidency. Besides Toombs she had two other men, far abler statesmen than Davis and then as conspicuous in the public eye—A. H. Stephens and Howell Cobb. The election of either one of these would really have been the same almost as the election of Toombs, for the three were in complete accord, and Toombs was the natural and actual leader. So great was their fealty to him that neither one could have been induced to stand for the place after he had missed it. The directors saw to it that neither one of the three should be president of the Confederate States.
Suppose that Toombs—or that either Stephens or Cobb—had been made president, what a different conduct there would have been of the war. Besides being the foremost statesman of the south, Toombs was its very ablest man of affairs, and as far superior to Davis in practical and business talent as a trained and experienced man is to an untrained and inexperienced woman. Not intending to disparage the other great qualifications of Toombs, I must emphasize it that of all his contemporaries he alone evinced a clear understanding of the principles according to which the confederate currency could have been better managed than were the greenbacks by the other side. A letter of his during the war to Mr. James Gardner, of Augusta, Georgia, published at the time in the paper of which the latter was then editor, shows insight and grasp of the subject equal to Ricardo’s. Toombs as president of the confederacy would have had congress enact proper currency measures. When he was in place to advise and lead, his influence exceeded by far that of any other man that I ever knew.
But this, important as it is, is far from being the most important. He and Stephens were fully convinced at the very first of the overruling importance to the confederacy of these two things: (1) to make full use of cotton as a resource; (2) to prevent a blockade of the southern ports. I make these extracts following from a speech of Stephens’s at Crawfordville, Georgia, November 1, 1862: