Short Biographies of Some 19th Century Americans by Carole E. Scott |
The focus is on little known facts and people, the majority of whom are Southerners.
EDWARD C. ANDERSON - A former officer in the U.S. Navy, this prominent Georgia businessman and former mayor of Savannah was sent by the Confederacy to England to purchase supplies. Upon his return, he approached the Secretary of War, hoping to have his suggestions passed onto Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Discovering that this would not work because the two men were not on speaking terms, he paid a visit to the Secretary of the Navy to recommend that a flying squadron under John Newland Maffitt be created to convoy blockade runners. Resenting his interference, Navy Secretary Mallory dismissed him with obvious discourtesy. Disillusioned, Anderson, an army major, left his position in supply to join General Robert E. Lee's staff.
Anderson wasn't the only Georgian dissatisfied with Mallory's policy of breaking the Union's blockade of Southern ports by sending out raiders to prey on United States merchantmen and whalers, vainly hoping to lure the ships participating in the blockade away to defend them. The Confederacy's chief Naval purchasing agent in England, James Bulloch, "Teddy" Roosevelt's uncle, was also unhappy with this policy. Both Anderson and Bulloch also disagreed with the policy of depending on private shippers for the transport of government cargos.
The Federal naval blockade represented a reversal of the United States' traditional stance relative to blockades and did not fulfill the requirements of international law for blockades. However, the world's greatest sea power at that time, Great Britain, acquiesced to it because, as the nation which most often imposed naval blockades, it was in its ultimate interest to increase the rights of blockading nations.
One of the few Southerners to early voice doubts about Europe breaking the blockade was the Confederacy's vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, who correctly forecast that Jefferson Davis' attempt to create an artificial shortage of cotton in Europe would not be successful in pressuring it into breaking the blockade, but it would rob the South of vitally needed income. Stephens advocated that the Confederacy issue bonds and purchase with the proceeds the ships necessary to break the blockade. His views had little impact because he did not have Davis' ear, and early in the War he packed up and went home to his plantation in Crawfordsville, Georgia.
PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUTANT BEAUREGARD - By virtue of his name, P. T. G. Beauregard, said his biographer, T. Harry Williams, stood out like "pompano en papillote in a mess of turnip greens." Dashing, arrogant, and haughty, Beauregard was as colorful as the Confederate battle flag he designed--red field with diagonal blue bars displaying thirteen white stars. This controversial Louisiana Creole won the admiration of Southern men and the hearts of Southern women when troops under his command fired the first shots of the War and captured, without the loss of a single life, Charleston's Fort Sumter.
For both sides, Sumter was a statement; not an attempt to kill people. The North was showing that it meant business when it refused to recognize Confederate sovereignty, and the Confederate States were showing that they were deadly serious in claiming their sovereignty. In short, the North, which had abandoned its other installations, which, like Sumter, were indefensible, had drawn a line in the sand, and the South crossed it.
Beauregard was the victor at the War's first major engagement, First Manassas (called First Bull Run by the North). Prior to this Northern rout, Beauregard recommended to President Davis that the forces of Generals J. E. Johnston and Holmes be concentrated so that, as soon as Federal General McDowell was far enough away from Washington, Beauregard could attack him from the rear, coming between his forces and thus separating them and preventing a retreat to Arlington. If McDowell was defeated, this would ensure the crushing of the forces of Federal General Patterson and the liberation of Maryland and the capture of Washington. Davis rejected both this plan and his proposal to augment Confederate forces before Washington with troops from the then unthreatened coastal areas in order to attack the Federals before they could assemble, organize, and train a huge army. (Davis took the politically-popular route of trying to protect every part of the South.)
Like Robert E. Lee--and unlike Jefferson Davis--Beauregard was an outstanding student at West Point. He became a noted army engineer who for many years was engaged in constructing forts, buildings, and various river and harbor improvements. (Robert E. Lee was first in his class at West Point, while Beauregard was second in his class.) When he and Lee were in competitive situations, Beauregard came in second best, and this led him to be jealous of Lee. Like Lee--and unlike Davis--Beauregard made the army his career and compensated for West Point's failure to consider grand strategy in depth by reading (in French) the leading works on strategy. Like Lee, Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and many others who made names for themselves on one side or the other during the Civil War, Beauregard acquitted himself well in the Mexican War.
Beauregard had just been appointed superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point when the Southern States began leaving the Union. Resigning his commission, he became the Confederacy's first brigadier general, but, because Davis was unwilling to accept criticism--and Beauregard was a born critic--he soon fell from Davis' favor. Subsequently, Beauregard became the leader of the so-called "Western concentration bloc" of anti-Davis forces.
Some believe the marring of Beauregard's Confederate career was due to petty jealousy over his early successes; others lay much of the blame on his contentious, too quick to scurry into action, feet. Widely respected as a military theoretician, he believed that the Confederate leadership's crucial mistake was to allow Union General McClellan time to organize and discipline a huge army with which, under a series of inept generals, the North ultimately wore the South down.
The Confederacy lost, he said, because of the timid policy of its government, which ignored "strategy as a science and boldness of enterprise as its ally." It could not "view the whole theater of war as one subject, of which all points were but integral parts, or to hazard for the time points relatively unimportant for the purpose of gathering for an overwhelming and rapid stroke at some decisive point." A "passive defensive policy," he said, "may make a long agony, but can never win a war."
Beauregard would have been willing to lose Richmond, Virginia, the Confederacy's capital, temporarily in order to capture Washington. (In the East, the War was conducted pretty much like a chess game, with each nation's capital serving as a "King".) He believed that, when without an ally and the enemy as close as Washington is to Richmond, the more inferior a country is, the more bold and enterprising its use of resources must be. Success, he contended, lay in a "short, quick war of decisive blows" before the North, with its vast resources, could build up its forces. The Confederacy's forces needed to be concentrated; instead they were diffused. The North, following a policy of attrition, ground out one smaller Confederate force after another. The South became ever weaker and the North ever stronger. Only to protect Richmond were forces concentrated, and this was when the South had its greatest victories. "We needed," concluded Beauregard, "for President either a military man of a high order, or a politician of the first class without military pretensions, such as Howell Cobb."
Beauregard was far from being the only one who disapproved of Davis' war strategy. The Confederacy was less than six months old when Robert Barnwell Rhett's Charleston Mercury began attacking Davis' policy. Speedy action, it avowed, was to the South's benefit, while delay aided the North. Untrained Southerners would make better soldiers than untrained Yankees; so the North shouldn't be given time to train its soldiers. Time would enable the North to tap its larger number of potential troops. A defensive war would be hard on untrained troops; bring war to Southern soil; and prevent the concentration of forces essential to an out manned army. Davis, the Mercury accused, had moved the capital to Richmond and delayed inaugurating hostilities in hopes of entering successful negotiations to rejoin the Union.
Remarking on retrospectives of the War, Beauregard was critical of "the general readiness to accept a sentimental or ultra-dramatic explanation--a sorcery wrought by the delay or arrival of some force, or the death or coming of somebody, or any other single event--whereby history is easily caught, rather than to seek an understanding of that which is but the gradual result of the operation of many forces, both of opposing design and actual collision, modified more or less by the falls of chance."
After the War, this Napoleon in gray was offered, but turned down, command of the Romanian army. (As a youth, he was enrolled in a school in New York which was run by men who had fought with Napoleon, and Napoleon became his hero.) Because of his engineering skills, Beauregard had little difficulty obtaining employment after the War as a railroad engineer. (The demand for engineers was high in the South because its rail lines, engines, and cars had been destroyed during the War.) After the War, Beauregard probably did better financially than did any other Confederate general. (Although, like Lee, he was widely considered to be a man of honor, it is impossible to imagine Lee taking on the job of drawing numbers in the Louisiana lottery as Beauregard did.)
AUGUST BELMONT - A German-born, pre-war Wall Street banker and agent of the Rothschilds, at the suggestion of his father-in-law, U.S. Senator John Slidell of Louisiana, Belmont had contributed to the successful Pierce presidential campaign. Seeking from Pierce an appointment to a post abroad, he decided to tout what he could do to gain possession of Cuba for the United States.
Due to periodic unrest in Cuba, Spanish troops were frequently stationed there, and this unsettled people throughout the United States. Annexation would eliminate this concern. Support for annexation was strongest in the South because Cuba was a slave nation, and it was feared that its Spanish rulers would soon abolish slavery. A few Northerners favored annexation; not to preserve slavery, but to eliminate it. The U.S. Navy wanted Cuba for security reasons. Filibusters just wanted it. (Filibusters based in the United States, sometimes encouraged by the U.S. government, frequently invaded various central American countries during the Antebellum period. Although unsuccessful there, hey played a role in the annexation of Florida.)
Belmont believed Spain could be forced into giving up Cuba by inducing European holders of Spanish debt securities like the Rothschilds to threaten to dump them and thus weaken Spain's already poor credit rating. Then Spain would need the cash it could get by selling Cuba. Spain could be brought around, he claimed, by the threat of force and the lure of thus much needed cash. The Pierce administration was interested, and it gave Belmont the chargeship in The Hague and instructed its Minister to Spain, Pierre Soule, to attempt to obtain Cuba for the United States.
There was some support in Cuba for annexation. Encouraged by U.S. planters in Cuba, as early as 1840 some Creoles (a term then used to refer to American-born whites) favored annexation because of the harshness of Spanish rule and the fact that the U.S. was Cuba's largest trade partner. As a result, there was an uprising whose object was annexation. It failed, and General Narcisco Lopez, the leader of the uprising, escaped to the U.S. Subsequently he led several expeditions to Cuba from the U.S. which failed to topple the Spanish.
After Lopez was killed, other Cuban exiles convinced former Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman to organize an expedition which never got off the ground due to the intercession of the President. (President Pierce had initially promised to turn a blind eye to Quitman's filibustering, which violated the Neutrality Act, but after he was hit by the political fall out of his signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which enraged the North, he reversed course; thus dooming the scheme.) In 1868 there was another rebellion whose objective was annexation to the United States. However, President U.S. Grant provided no encouragement; much less any assistance, and, despite going on until 1877, it failed.
JUDAH P. BENJAMIN - A Sephardic Jew with a Mona Lisa smile, Benjamin was born in Saint Croix. His intelligence and pleasing personality ultimately propelled him into the U.S. Senate and Jefferson Davis' Cabinet. Benjamin became an American when he was two and his parents moved to Wilmington, North Carolina. After living for a while there and in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the Benjamin family settled down in Charleston.
Like many bright boys from families unable to afford to provide them with good educations, benefactors sent him to an excellent prep school and thereafter to Yale. Leaving Yale under a cloud, he moved to New Orleans, where he soon became a highly successful lawyer and was elected to the Louisiana legislature. He married the daughter of a wealthy, French-Catholic family who ran off with another man.
His political career was greatly enhanced when he became John Slidell's law partner. Slidell controlled a very powerful and none-too-savory Louisiana political machine and is said to have been the power behind the Buchanan administration. During the Civil War Slidell gained fame when he was abducted from the British steamer Trent along with another Confederate commissioner to Europe. Although his arrest was greatly applauded in the North, because it threatened to bring about a war with Great Britain, both he and the other commissioner (Mason of Virginia) were eventually released.
Long a dedicated Unionist with many friends in the North, Benjamin became a leader in Louisiana's Whig Party. Like other Southern Whigs when that party collapsed, both Benjamin and Slidell became Democrats. Said by some to swing in whichever way the political winds were blowing, when most Louisianans became secessionists, so did Benjamin. For several years trouble with his eyesight prevented Benjamin from pursuing his legal career, and he turned to sugar planting, at which he was very successful, and promoting railroads.
His friendship with fellow U.S. Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi began in a rather bizarre manner. It began when Benjamin challenged Davis to a duel over something Davis said about him on the floor of the Senate. No duel was fought because Davis apologized. Thereafter, they became friends, and Davis included him in the Confederacy's first cabinet as Attorney General. Subsequently he served briefly as Secretary of War, where he was merely Davis' front man, as Davis acted as his own Secretary of War. Soon he was shifted to the post of Secretary of State, a post he was better suited for.
Because the South at that time had next to no capacity to produce armaments, and, Benjamin thought, a huge amount of them would be needed, at one of the early Cabinet meetings he proposed that the Confederate government buy a huge amount of cotton and ship it to Europe to pay for arms and ammunition. Not believing the war would be either very long or very serious, his colleagues rejected his suggestion. Rejected, too, was his proposal that, rather than moving the Confederate capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond, Virginia, it be moved to Atlanta, Georgia instead because Richmond was too near Washington and the ocean, which the Union dominated.
At War's end, he became a fugitive. Unlike Jefferson Davis, he was able to give the Federals the slip and, after a perilous journey via Florida, Bimini, the Bahamas, and Havana, he made his way to England, where he spent the rest of his life as a highly successful and well respected lawyer--a respect enhanced by the fact that so late in life he had reeducated himself in another legal system.
JOHN WILKES BOOTH - Actor scion of a thespian family, he planned to kidnap Abraham Lincoln before his 1861 inauguration and spirit him South, but he did not carry out this plan. After Lee's surrender, he resurrected this plan, but ended up assassinating Lincoln instead. Some then and now believe that the Confederate government was involved in his plot.
Long after his death a manuscript written by his sister revealed that, like many Marylanders, Booth had always considered himself a Southerner. (The first Federal troops to pass through Baltimore were attacked by a huge mob, and, due to their Southern sympathies, Lincoln had members of Maryland's legislature arrested and new elections held.) Booth, who was a member of the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party, was enraged by Lincoln sending an army including large numbers of recent immigrants and ex-slaves against the South. Booth despised Republicans even though many of them were former anti-Catholic Know Nothings. (Immigrants, many of whom were Catholics, were concentrated in the Democratic Party.)
JAMES DUNWOODY BULLOCH - A Savannah, Georgia native, Bulloch enlisted in the United States Navy as a midshipman in 1839, remaining in the Navy and rising through the ranks until the War, when he resigned to became a commander in the Confederate Navy. Although he desired a line assignment, his talents were considered wasted there, and he was sent to England as a naval agent, where he provided the Confederacy with the Florida, Alabama, Savannah, and Stonewall--ships which almost drove the U.S. merchant and whaling fleets from the seas. He also assisted in diplomatic relations. Refused a pardon after the War, he spent the rest of his life in Liverpool, England. He was Theodore Roosevelt's Uncle--his Georgia mother's brother.
Because of the shortage in the Confederacy of the materials, mills, furnaces, machinery, and mechanics needed to construct ironclads, Secretary Mallory instructed Bulloch to have ironclads built in England. Believing this to be a very risky strategy, Bulloch recommended that wooden vessels be laid down at once in various Southern ports where timber was abundant, and that iron plates, rivets, bolts, and so forth be obtained abroad and shipped to the Confederacy and there be applied to these hulls.
After only a few ships were built for the Confederacy and, by subterfuge, sailed out of England, the United States persuaded the British government to bring a halt to this activity. With two rams which the Confederacy failed to get from France, Bulloch believed that the Confederacy might have swept "every sea-front of every harbour [sic] from the Capes of Virginia to Sabine Pass" and prevent anything like a "permanent and systematic interruption of our foreign trade". What's more, by sailing up the Potomac, they could make Washington indefensible. "Suppose," also, "our two ironclads should steam unannounced into the Portsmouth, New Hampshire harbor "some fine October morning and while one proceeded to demolish the navy yard and all it contained, the other should sent a flag of truce to the mayor, to say that if $1,000,000 in gold or $5,000,000 in greenbacks were not sent on board in four hours the city would be destroyed."
CLEMENT CLAIBORNE CLAY - Son of a governor of Alabama, after earning a bachelor's and a masters' degree from the University of Alabama and a law degree from the University of Virginia, he joined his father's law firm. Elected to Alabama's legislature in 1842, he served there until 1846, when he was appointed to the bench. A secessionist, he was elected to the United States Senate in 1852 and served there until Alabama left the Union. Elected to the first Confederate Senate, Clay lost his bid for reelection, supposedly because of his excessive loyalty to Jefferson Davis. A foreign policy advisor to Davis, despite his near invalid status, he was sent to Canada in 1864 as a diplomatic representative. There he directed the Confederacy's largely ineffective campaign of sabotage and insurrection in the North. Arrested along with Davis for alleged complicity in Lincoln's death, he was not released until 1866. Financially ruined by the War, Clay was never able to regain his pre-war economic status and gave up politics. After his death, his financially hard-pressed widow married an acquaintance, widower David Clopton.
Clay's sympathies are well illustrated by his cooperation after abolitionist John Brown's raid on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry with one of the three most celebrated Southern fire eaters, Virginia's Edmund Ruffin. Clay assisted Ruffin in obtaining and then sending to the governors of all the slave states, save Delaware, one of the pikes John Brown intended to arm slaves with as a way to dramatize the threat abolitionists posed to the South. (The other members of the fire-eating triumvirate were Alabama's South Carolina-born William Lowndes Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett, a South Carolinian who published pro-secession pieces by Ruffin in his influential Charleston Mercury.)
In February, 1860, Ruffin ventured into a new literary field: fiction. He published a novel entitled Anticipations of the Future in which he predicted William Henry Seward's election to the Presidency in 1860. Thereafter, he wrote, Congress, via constitutional amendment, abolished slavery, enacted a prohibitively high tariff, and passed other legislation obnoxious to the South. This led to the secession of the deep South states. Subsequent punitive action by the North drove the rest of the slave states to leave the Union. A disastrous war ensued which the South, hanging on by its fingertips, won due to the timely intervention of the West on the South's behalf. Thereafter, the South moved on to a bright future. Writing this work was, Ruffin said, the most pleasant labor of this kind that he had ever engaged in.
Southerners like Clay wanted the federal government to protect their right to hold property in the form of human beings. They valued this right because it reduced labor costs in the South. Northerners, on the other hand, wanted the federal government to boost their receipts by shielding them from foreign competition with tariffs and providing them with direct and indirect subsidies. Clay's attack on a bounty paid to fishermen--mainly New England cod fishers--typifies Southerners' attitude towards such demands for Federal largess. The bounty, he said, forced 25 states to pay tribute to a "pet nursling of the Government," the "codfish aristocracy" of New England. He labeled such taking of money from one group of citizens and giving it to another "not in consideration of public service, but in consideration of doing their own business," a form of government tyranny.
DAVID CLOPTON - Lawyer son of a Macon, Georgia banker-businessman- legislator-physician, Alford Clopton, as a young man he moved to Alabama. As Southern states began to leave the Union, he was sent to encourage Delaware to secede. He was not successful because Delaware was afraid to secede if Maryland did not; secessionists were not well organized; the formation of a central confederacy offered another, distracting option; many feared the State would become a battle ground; and Federal troops quickly occupied the State.
A secessionist Democrat, after a stint in the Confederate Army, he became a Congressman, serving on, among others, the Naval Affairs committee. A Davis supporter, he voted to let the government control all commerce, draft speculators, nationalize specie, and arm the slaves. (The latter bill passed late in the War.) After the War Between the States he married Senator Clay's widow.
HOWELL COBB - A full time politician whenever it was possible and a lawyer when it wasn't, this son of a then wealthy planter who resided in Athens, Georgia was governor of Georgia, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and Secretary of the Treasury in the Buchanan administration.
Despite his success, Cobb's wife was unhappy with his career because, she said, "politics" is like a " filthy pool--now and then throwing up mud and slime from the bottom." Although Cobb was the product of a Protestant family and region, he defended the rights of Catholics against the attacks of the American Party (Know-Nothings). This Georgia Falstaff was President Buchanan's favorite, and, if political considerations had not interfered, he would have made Cobb his Secretary of State. Disappointed at failing to get this coveted post, the personally profligate Cobb nonetheless successfully dedicated himself to being a good Secretary of the Treasury.
Cheerful, gregarious, and a talented jester addicted to talking, Cobb's fondness for fine food and wine was revealed by his physique. However, behind his jolly-fat man facade lay a shrewd and very ambitious politician who was one of several men hoping to be elected president of the U.S. in 1860. Because he often took positions popular among Northern Democrats, his opponents called him a Southern man with Northern principles. A Jacksonian Democrat, he had opposed nullification (a state's right to nullify a federal law) and its leading proponent, South Carolina's Senator John C. Calhoun. Like most Southern politicians other than Calhoun, Cobb believed that the best way to protect slavery was for Southerners to gain power in national parties and, playing on Northerners' desire for gaining national power, supporting their programs in exchange for a hands-off attitude towards what Calhoun labeled the South's "peculiar institution". (Radicals like Edmund Ruffin had nothing but scorn for this plan.)
Being a Jacksonian was very much a mainstream position in the South. But, unlike most Georgians, Cobb was able to swallow Jackson's hand-picked successor, New Yorker Martin VanBuren and his running mate, who lived openly with a mulatto woman by whom he had two children. (Cobb reportedly had some one-night stands with slave girls as a youth.)
In 1850s Southern Democrats and Whigs split over the issue of secession, and two new parties were formed, both of which included former Democrats and Whigs. Cobb became a leader in the Unionist Party, which was opposed by a secession-favoring Southern Rights Party, which was recognized at the national level by the Democratic party. (Cobb was eventually successful in getting the Democratic Party to accept Unionists, too, as Democratic convention delegates.) These parties where short-lived, and most Unionists who, like Cobb, had been Democrats returned to the fold, as did Cobb. Unlike Northern Whigs, Southern Whigs did not defect to the new anti-slavery Republican Party. Instead, Southern Whigs became Democrats.
Like many other Unionists, Cobb was propelled into the Secessionist camp by the steady rise in the popularity in the North of the Republicans, the nation's first sectional party. It was at this time that it became clear that the South was destined to become a minority in the Senate as well as the House. Some believe that Cobb's pro-secession stance was purely opportunistic, and that he was not really convinced that the South's position with Lincoln in the presidency was hopeless. To Southern Unionists dismay, Cobb resigned his post in the Buchanan administration shortly before its conclusion and returned home to campaign for secession.
His resignation did not much impress those who had long advocated disunion because they believed he should have joined hands with them years earlier. According to Clement Clay, if Cobb had resigned in 1859, instead of merely publicly dissenting from Buchanan's tariff policy, "he would have done more to reinstate himself with the Southern Rights Democracy than by any act since his defection in '50-51." Cobb's excuse was that his personal attachment for "Old Buck", as he called Buchanan, is what deterred him from resigning earlier when more radical Southerners gave up on Buchanan.
Southern opposition to the presidential candidacy of Illinois' Stephen A. Douglas at the 1860 Democratic convention led to a Southern walkout and the nomination by these delegates of a second, rival Democratic candidate, Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky. The presence in the 1860 race of two Democratic candidates plus a Constitutional Union Party candidate made possible the election of the nation's first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, with a minority of the popular vote. Almost immediately the states of the deep South, which had voted for Breckinridge, declared their independence and arranged for a convention at which they would form a new confederacy. Border states, which had voted for the Constitutional Union candidate, John Bell, remained in the Union until Lincoln declared that he was going to use force against the seceded states.
At the first meeting of the Confederacy's provisional Congress in Montgomery, Alabama Cobb, by obtaining votes of both Unionists and Southern Rightists, was elected its president. His fellow Georgian and--periodically--political ally, ex-Whig Alexander H. Stephens, observed in surprise, that this legislative-selected group was the "ablest, most intelligent, and conservative body I was ever in." Edmund Ruffin, who disdained the generally demagogic types selected by voters, probably was not surprised, but he was probably disturbed by the fact that almost half the delegates at the Montgomery convention were Cooperationists or Unionists, rather than radicals who had long preached secession.
Firebrands like Alabama's Yancey and South Carolina's Rhett brought about secession, but they were deemed to be too radical to entrust the Confederacy's fortunes too; so two vastly more conservative men, former U.S. Senator Jefferson Davis and Representative Alexander H. Stephens were elected president and vice president. Stephens', who had voted against secession, only significant role during the War was a fruitless meeting with Lincoln seeking a compromise which would end the War. One of his proposals to his old friend Lincoln was rapprochement via a uniting of the North and South in a campaign to expel the regime Napoleon III had imposed on Mexico.
Because Texas' delegates arrived late, Davis and Stephens were elected by the forty-three delegates representing the other six states which had left the Union by that time. Because their meetings were secret, there are conflicting stories about why Davis was selected. All agree that Cobb was considered for the presidency. Based on Cobb's correspondence, it seems that he let it be known he did not want the office. After the convention Cobb, for the first time in his life, gave up politics in order to become a general in the Confederate army. Financially ruined by his pre-war debts and loss of property during the war, he died in 1868 while visiting New York.
COBB, THOMAS R. R. - Howell Cobb's brother and, like him, a University of Georgia graduate who choose law for his profession, he and Congressman John B. Lamar, Howell's brother-in-law, were Howell's closest advisers. (John B. Lamar managed seven plantations with 800 slaves which he and Cobb owned. Lamar was killed fighting for the Confederacy in Maryland during the War.) An outstanding lawyer most widely known before the War for having codified Georgia's laws and authoring "An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery," Thomas R. R. was a delegate to Georgia's secession convention and a member of the provisional Confederate Congress. Refusing civil office, he entered the army and, before being killed in action in December, 1862, he made a name for himself as the commander of "Cobb's Legion".
JEFFERSON DAVIS - John Addison Cobb, Howell's son, said that the elevation of Davis to the Confederate Presidency was a mistake equaled only by the election of Joseph E. Brown as Georgia's governor. Reportedly a compromise candidate for the post, Davis was elected the new Confederacy's provisional president on 9 February, 1861. On 6 November, 1861 he was elected by the Confederacy's voters to a six-year term. Although a talented man, he was not particularly well suited to this post, and it was not the post he preferred. His desire was to serve the Confederacy as a military leader, and upon his resignation from the U.S. Senate in 1861, he was given the rank of major general and command of Mississippi's forces.
Davis' flaws included standing by his friends long after their incompetence should have caused him to remove them and spreading himself too thin trying to micro-manage every aspect of the government and the War. He believed that his special expertise was in military affairs and, unlike Lincoln, he kept his generals on a tight leash. His autocratic ways and feuds with Generals P. G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston led to the creation of a large and well-organized anti-Davis faction centered in the Confederate Senate. His popularity was low when the war ended, but sympathy engendered by what was seen as his unjustified and vindictive imprisonment by the North and his symbolic value as a representative of a much venerated and romanticized lost cause ultimately gave him a post-war popularity greater than he ever enjoyed during the War. He never asked to have his U.S. citizenship restored, and it was not restored until Georgian Jimmy Carter became President of the United States.
A native of Kentucky and an 1828 graduate of West Point, Davis resigned from the Army in 1835 to become a planter in Mississippi. Depressed by the death of his first wife, Zackery Taylor's daughter, he was a recluse for several years. The poor health which was to plague him through the rest of his life had by this time appeared. He did not enter politics until after he married his second wife. Elected as a Democrat to Congress, he served from 1845 to 1847.
After serving with distinction in the Mexican War, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate, which he held until President Pierce made him Secretary of War. After John C. Calhoun's death, Davis became the Senate's leading defender of slavery. His service in as Secretary of War is most often remembered for his introduction of camels for use by the Army the desert Southwest. Once Davis was freed from imprisonment after the War, Pierce invited the Davises to spend some time at his home.
JAMES DUNWOODY BROWNSON DEBOW - A native of Charleston, as a young man DeBow moved to New Orleans, where he founded the popular DeBow's Review, a business-oriented publication which he tried to keep above politics. In 1848, DeBow was named a professor of political economy at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane). From 1853 to 1855 he was superintendent of the Census Bureau. He was the author of a path-breaking work in economic statistics, the Statistical View of the United States. DeBow feared that the South, with its prolific black population, would become a black region unless the territory in which slavery could expand was increased, and, because slavery was profitable in the tropics, he advocated the creation of new slave states south of the border.
In 1860, with a population of 168,675, DeBow's New Orleans was the largest city in the deep South. Atlanta had less than 10,000 citizens, but was growing very rapidly. Charleston had 40,522, which was over 3,000 more than Richmond had. Mobile had 29,258. Memphis had 22,600. Savannah had 22,292. Baltimore, a border-state city, had 212,418.
During the War DeBow supported the Davis administration in his publication and continued his long established policy of encouraging Southern manufacturing. Some claimed that what mainly motivated DeBow and others who encouraged Southerners to cease confining themselves to growing cotton and diversify into manufacturing, financing, insuring, and shipping their cotton rather than depending upon the North and Great Britain for these things was facilitating Southern independence.
In 1857 DeBow was elected president of one of the many conventions held during this period to encourage Southern economic diversification and railroad building. (Northern reporters branded these conventions secessionist meetings in disguise.) In his speech to this convention, DeBow forecast that the federal government would ultimately declare a universal and unconditional emancipation and asked Southerners whether they were ready to give up their slave labor "to the theorists, the pseudo philanthropists, the socialists, agrarians, and their selfish, unscrupulous, or deluded followers." Secession, he claimed, provided slavery better protection than did supporting the national Democratic Party. Adopted at this convention were resolutions demanding the repeal of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 between the United States and Great Britain, which pledged the United States to maintaining a naval squadron off the West African coast to suppress the slave trade and granted the U.S. hegemony over Central America.
One of the many pro-slavery authors whose works he published was Edmund Ruffin. Wrong-headed though Ruffin's views on race were, he has been unfairly depicted as simply a dotty old man driven to suicide by the South's defeat. An advocate of scientific farming and the avid secessionist who was given the privilege of firing the first shot at Fort Sumter, Ruffin claimed that the conquest of the mongrel and semi-barbarous societies of Central America by a "civilized power" would benefit both Central America and the world.
Ruffin's views on slavery grew out of his research into the chief problem facing Southern agriculture: the wearing out of the land that forced Southerners to constantly seek new, previously uncultivated lands in the West. Ruffin--becoming the father of soil chemistry in the U.S. in the process--proved that the near-desert-like state that Tidewater Virginia produced by past farming practices could be reversed by the application of calcareous manures. As proof, twice he turned worn-out farms into highly productive ones.
Ruffin's chief work, Essay on Calcareous Manures, is, even today, considered a masterpiece. A follower of the theories of Thomas R. Malthus (population growth will outrun increases in agricultural output) and Adam Smith (economic growth is maximized by free trade), Ruffin believed that unless slavery was preserved, disaster loomed. Only through slavery could the labor necessary to save the land be obtained, and, unless the land was saved, the growth of the white and black populations in the South would ultimately lead to starvation.
Ruffin shared the view of many that, because other options were open to them, and they were less physically suited to such labor than were tropically-evolved blacks, white men simply would not take jobs as field hands on a Southern plantation. He justified the enslavement of blacks by claiming they were unwilling to work without coercion; their supposed intellectual inferiority as a whole to whites; and the dismal conditions in Haiti and in the American-sponsored Liberian colony in Africa. Unlike many Southerners, he did not turn to the Bible for support of the peculiar institution.
JOHN CHARLES FREMONT - The Republican Party's first presidential candidate was born in Savannah, Georgia to a French emigre dancing master and the Richmond, Virginia housewife he had eloped with. Said to be mercurial, headstrong, and unstable, John C. Fremont's career initially soared; then stalled and collapsed. Although he was expelled from Charleston College, he obtained an appointment in the United State Army's topographical engineers. From 1842 until the Mexican War began he led several important expeditions through the Western territories, playing an important role in the conquest of California. Found guilty of mutiny and insubordination, he resigned from the Army in 1848. Six years after he was elected by the new State of California to the U.S. Senate, he was nominated in 1856 for the presidency by the newly-formed Republican party, receiving 1,300,000 votes to Buchanan's 1,800,000.
Appointed a major general by Lincoln, he was placed in command of the ill-defined Department of the West--it then being uncertain which Western states would stay in the Union. Under his command much of Missouri was lost, and Lincoln sacked him when he refused to rescind an order freeing secessionists' slaves. In June, 1864 he resigned from the service. Nominated by a coalition of Radicals, Missouri Germans, and War Democrats (Democrats in favor of the War) to run against Lincoln, he withdrew from the race in return for the ouster of a conservative, Montgomery Blair, from Lincoln's cabinet. After the War he was supported by the literary efforts of his wife, a senator's daughter, until he was appointed governor of the Territory of Arizona.
JOSIAH GORGAS - Although a native of the North, Gorgas married the daughter of an ex-governor of Alabama and sympathized with the South; so when War broke out, he resigned from the U.S. Army to become the Confederacy's chief of ordnance. Among his responsibilities was providing the Confederacy with powder, shells, and arms. When the War began, Gorgas had insufficient machinery; later he had enough machines, but not enough qualified workers. His efforts to break the blockade and establish facilities to manufacture ordnance in the South made its war effort possible.
It subtracts nothing from his reputation as an organizational genius to observe that he was fortunate to have men like George Washington Rains, a former professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at West Point, working with him. Starting with nothing, Rains built powder mills in Augusta, Georgia which turned out 2,750,000 pounds of gunpowder. Rains' brother, Gabriel James, planned the torpedo protection of the Confederacy's ports and invented the underground mine. After the War, Gorgas was named President of the University of Alabama, and Rains became a professor at the University of Georgia. Gorgas' noted son became surgeon general of the United States.
ROSE O'NEAL GREENHOW - A Marylander related to a host of prominent families and the widow of Dr. Robert Greenhow, a scholarly lawyer, linguist, and State Department official, anybody she didn't know, didn't count. An ardent secessionist, as a young woman she nursed her idol, John C. Calhoun, a boarder in her mother's boarding house, in his final illness. (Ironically, she was later imprisoned in the very room where the great statesman died.) No longer young when the War broke out, this intriguer and influence peddler could still captivate the dominant sex. Possibly the Capital's first hostess with the mostest, her centrally-located home was a center of Washington social life, and President Buchanan was a frequently late-departing visitor.
In a surviving fragment of a letter, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts declares his love for her. Knowledge of her relationship with Wilson is what caused Thomas Jordan to recruit Mrs. Greenhow as a Confederate spy. Her most significant achievement for the Confederacy was a warning which prevented Federal General McDowell from preventing Confederate General Johnston from reinforcing General Beauregard. Messages to and from Confederate spies in Washington like Mrs. Greenhow were sent through John H. Surratt. Later they were transmitted through his son, John, Jr., who was convicted of being one of John Wilkes Booth's accomplices. Arrested for her spying, Mrs. Greenhow was sent South. Dispatched to England to arouse support for the South, she wrote a well-received book about her adventures. Returning to the South with dispatches, she was drowned while trying to evade capture.
WILLIAM GREGG - One of the South's leading early cotton mill magnates, Gregg began his business career as a prosperous Charleston jeweler. In the Antebellum South most non-natives like Gregg were highly skilled Northern immigrants engaged either in industry or employed in railroading. Gregg was most well known for his Graniteville Mill, which was located in South Carolina only a few miles from a major Southern center of cotton textile production, Augusta, Georgia. Although some mills used slave labor, Gregg employed only whites. He also published a book and articles in newspapers and in DeBow's Review and served briefly in the South Carolina legislature. A vocal advocate of Professor Carey's free trade views, Gregg both spoke and wrote in favor of the industrialization of the South with white labor.
White labor was relatively scarce in the South because after the Revolutionary War almost all immigrants settled either in the cities of the North or the farmlands of the West. Gregg sought to change this by supporting the encouragement European immigration of to the South. However, presumably because potential immigrants feared competing with slave labor, attempts to encourage immigration had little success, and immigrants and the children of immigrants were absolutely and relatively rare in the South.
The reverse was true of the North. Residing in 1860 in what were to become the Confederate States were only 233,650 foreign-born persons; while in the North there were 3,903,672. Half the nation's foreign born population in 1860 had emigrated to the U.S. since 1850, when the South, prodded by South Carolina, first seriously considered, but rejected, secession. Thus, it seems that the claim of South Carolina's James Henry Hammond, a friend of Edmund Ruffin, that the South's opportune moment for secession was 1850 may have been valid.
Hammond, a very large slave owner who served South Carolina as its governor and represented it in Congress, well illustrates an aspect of slavery Southerners made no public comments about: interracial sexual relations. In his diary, which was published long after his death, he confesses to having fathered children by two slave women, one the mother of the other. (He was also guilty of at least some impropriety with his wife's white nieces, the daughters of Confederate General and post-war Governor of South Carolina, Wade Hampton.) Hammond's consorting with black women was highly unacceptable behavior, but, like men patronizing prostitutes, it was looked upon as something which was going to happen. The same was not true of relationships between white women and black men, whom white Southerners were convinced were both brutal and lusted after white women. However, while their men were away in the army during the Civil War, some white women and children remained on isolated plantations with their slaves in heavily black areas and were not molested.) Senator Clay's wife stayed with Hammond while Sherman marched through Georgia.
HANNIBAL HAMLIN - A radical Maine Republican lawyer, he was elected Abraham Lincoln's Vice President in 1860. He did not know Lincoln before he was put on the Republican ticket to provide balance to the moderate Lincoln. Although his family was much better off than was Lincoln's, he, too, had not gone to college. Because Lincoln's chances of being reelected looked slim, he replaced Hamlin in 1864 with a moderate, Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Senator who, like many East Tennesseans, remained loyal to the Union. (In 1862 the Republican's majority in the House had shrunk to 18 and the Democrats had swept New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.)
Hamlin continually pressed Lincoln to free the slaves, and the day after the Federal defeat at Bull Run (First Manassas), he and Senators Chandler and Sumner asked President Lincoln to free and arm the slaves. Earlier Chandler had urged Lincoln to arrest Senators John C. Breckinridge (Kentucky) and Louis T. Wigfall (Texas), and other "traitors" making disloyal speeches in Congress, and Breckinridge, Buchanan's vice president, was expelled from the Senate in 1861. He then became a Confederate general and organized a provisional Confederate government in Kentucky.
Lincoln was afraid to free the slaves in 1861 because it might cause more slave states to secede. However, in 1863, hoping to gain support for the War effort, he freed the slaves in the seceded states. This elicited scathing comments from Britain's Lord Palmerson and the London Spectator, which quoted him as saying, "the government liberates the enemy's slaves as it would the enemy's cattle, simply to weaken them in the...conflict...The principle is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States." (Yet, the British did the same thing during the Revolutionary War!) During the War Lincoln offered to compensate Southerners for the slaves he had declared free if the South returned to the Union, but by this time an angry President Davis would settle for nothing less than the South's independence.
Palmerson, Britain's prime minister, was greatly angered by the seizure of Slidell and Mason from the British steamer Trent, and Historian James A. Rawley believes that, had Prince Albert died less than a month sooner, Palmerson might have sent an ultimatum that would have left the U.S. no room for retreat. Believing that a distracting foreign war would be helpful, Lincoln's Secretary of State Seward favored war with Great Britain over its demand that Slidell and Mason be released, but Lincoln ordered Slidell and Mason released.
THOMAS H. HINES - Hines was a Confederate cavalryman from Kentucky who began his Confederate career with John Hunt Morgan's raiders--the scourges of the North. Clement Clay and the two others Davis sent to Canada to launch raids into the North from this generally pro-Southern British colony put Captain Hines in charge of these operations. (Northern-inspired invasions of Canada with the intent of annexing it to the United States and the presence of there of the descendants of numerous Americans loyal to the British during the Revolutionary War who had been forced to flee to Canada possibly predisposed Canadians to root for the Confederacy.) Raids were supposed to give Northerners a taste of what Southerners were experiencing and to foment revolt in the West.
Hines was probably the most competent of a generally inept bunch.. Poor planning, poor execution, Northern counterspies, informers, bad luck, and faint-hearted Northern co-conspirators--particularly as the South's fortunes waned--derailed most of the raiders' efforts. One of the more well-known raids conducted from Canada was the largely unsuccessful attempt to burn New York City in retaliation for Sherman's infamous and highly destructive march through Georgia. After depositing "Greek Fire"--phosphorus dissolved in sulphuret of carbon--in New York hotel rooms, the arsonists had closed windows and doors; thus depriving their fires of the oxygen they needed to spread.
New York's governor Horatio Seymour's secretary conveyed to the raiders the information that the Governor considered himself a neutral. Seymour stance was due to the fact that he opposed abolition and was convinced that Lincoln and his fellow Republicans planned to use the War to cement their power, and he believed that the preservation of states' rights was the only way to prevent the emergence of a tyrannically- controlled central government. In 1868 Seymour became the Democrats' presidential candidate.
Hines' former commander and fellow Kentuckian, John Hunt Morgan, was the Confederacy's best guerrilla. Once he captured a Federal telegraph station and countermanded all the orders which had been issued for his pursuit. Typical of his operations was rolling flaming boxcars into a railroad tunnel, causing it to collapse and putting the railroad out of business once the timbers supporting its roof burned through. Entering Kentucky for a raid with 900 men, he returned with 1,200. Once, he almost captured General Grant.
For dash, Morgan had real competition in Tennessee's Nathan Bedford Forrest. Stigmatized by his skimpy education and slave-trader past, the six-foot-two Forrest turned out to be a natural military genius. Forrest didn't smoke, drink, or chew tobacco--but he did cuss. Known for saying that the way to win is to get there first with the most men (Beauregard's view, too), by the end of the war he had been wounded four times; had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him; and personally killed thirty Yankees. Like Morgan, he excelled in operating behind enemy lines.
JOSEPH EGGLESTON JOHNSTON - Rated by some as being more capable than Robert E. Lee, petty differences over rank and military etiquette frequently robbed the Confederacy of his services. A West Point graduate, he was the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to resign in order to serve the Confederacy. At the time of his resignation, he was quartermaster general. A veteran of the Mexican and Seminole Wars, he did not resign until after his native state, Virginia, left the Union. Although senior to Beauregard, he let him direct the battle of First Manassas because of his greater knowledge of the terrain. Like Beauregard, he was critical of supply problems which both men believed prevented a march on Washington after First Manassas.
Relations between Johnston and Davis began to deteriorate when Johnston was ranked behind Samuel Cooper, who performed poorly in the post (Chief of Staff) given him by his old friend Davis; Albert Sidney Johnston; and Robert E. Lee. When the War began, many believed that West-Point-graduate Albert Sidney Johnston was the nation's finest soldier. A general in Texas's revolutionary army and the Republic of Texas' Secretary of War, he failed to live up to their expectations. Assigned a command in the Western theater, where historians believe, due to the lack of anyone in overall command, the Confederacy lost the War, he ignored a wound he received at Shiloh, Mississippi and bled to death.
After being wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines, Joseph E. Johnston was replaced as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia by Robert E. Lee, who would thereafter lead and make legendary this Army. (In 1862 Lee had been recalled from supervising the improvement of coastal defenses to serve as Davis' advisor and was present along with Davis when Johnston was wounded.) When Johnston recovered, he was made commander of the new Department of the West. (This was after the disastrous defeat of Davis's favorite, General Braxton Bragg, at Chattanooga.) Thereafter, Johnston conducted a masterful delaying campaign against General William T. Sherman, but, irritated by his constant withdrawals before Sherman's much larger army, which constantly flanked his, Davis replaced him with General John B. Hood, who, at Atlanta, stood, fought, and lost to Sherman. Subsequently regaining his command, Johnston was ultimately forced to surrender the Confederacy's last major army.
Historians rate Joe Johnston as having been one of the Confederacy's most effective generals when not hindered by directives from Davis. After the War he served in Congress and as a federal railroad commissioner. He died of a cold caught while attending the funeral of General William T. Sherman, a friend from the "old service".
DUNCAN FARRAR KENNER - Before the War Kenner was one of the more prominent men in several states conspiring with Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman to send filibusters to Cuba with the ultimate objective of annexing it to the U.S. as a slave state. Even though he owned more slaves than did any other member of the Confederate Congress, during the War he was an early proponent of freeing the slaves in order to gain foreign recognition of the Confederacy. Only a handful of Confederate Congressmen were members of the planter elite like Kenner, but most of them owned slaves, a distinction only about ten percent of the South's families enjoyed. (A few free blacks were slaveholders.)
A handful of blacks served in the Confederate Army. Some with light skins who were, presumably, assumed to be white, served in the ranks, and others served as musicians. The War ended before slave units organized after it was decided to arm slaves could be utilized at the front. Most blacks who aided the Confederate military did so involuntarily as servants, cooks, and laborers. Blacks in the service of the U.S. Army vastly outnumbered those of the Confederacy. Possibly as many as 86,000--most of whom were freed slaves--enlisted in the United States' forces. However, only about 6,000, saw service as combat troops, and in the few engagements they fought in their ranks were decimated. Yet, because these men did not turn and run, they proved what some Southerners feared that they would have proven if they were allowed to serve the Confederacy; namely, that the justification for enslaving them: their supposed inferiority, was untrue.
Via New York City, Louisianian Keener was sent abroad incognito by President Davis late in 1864 to see if freeing the slaves would gain recognition. Kenner was told both by France's Napoleon III and British Prime Minister Henry Palmerson that slavery had never been a barrier to recognition. However, many historians doubt that this was true because, while they believe that the upper classes in both England and France were largely sympathetic to the South, the masses, because of their abhorrence of slavery, were not.
GAZAWAY BUGG LAMAR - Among Augusta, Georgia native Gazaway Lamar's accomplishments was the introduction in 1834 of the nation's first iron steam ship. By then a well-to-do Augusta and Savannah, businessman and banker, in the early 1850s Lamar moved to New York City, where he founded and headed the Bank of the Republic, which was heavily involved in the Southern trade.
Lamar's relatives, associates, and friends reads like a Who's Who in the Antebellum South. Among his cousins were Howell Cobb's wife and her brother, John B. Lamar of Macon, Georgia, who was one of Cobb's closest advisers. Cobb frequency relied on Gazaway for advice and assistance both in his public and private life. In addition to the fact that Gazaway's own family included a large number of the South's important politicians and businessmen, his second wife's father was an influential banker in Virginia who included among his friends and associates Albert Gallatin, one of the nation's most important bankers.
Gazaway provided financial assistance to his cousin, Mirabeau Bonanparte Lamar, the President of the Republic of Texas. Although Gazaway's son was involved in the New-York-centered revival of the slave trade in the late 1850s, like Howell Cobb, Gazaway disapproved of this activity. An opponent of secession, Gazaway advised like-mined Alexander H. Stephens and Georgia Governor Herschel V. Johnson.
When the Southern states began leaving the Union, Gazaway remained in New York for a short while, serving as a secret agent for the Confederacy by arranging with Georgia's Governor Joseph E. Brown for the purchase of ten thousand muskets and their shipment to Georgia and the printing of millions of dollars in Confederate bonds. Threatened by mobs, he sold many of his Northern assets, depositing the proceeds in a Canadian bank. Upon his return to Georgia, he became President of the Bank of Commerce in Savannah.
During the War he operated a fleet of blockade runners and advised President Davis and both Secretaries of the Treasury Memminger and Trenholm. In 1863, a letter he allegedly sent to Fernando Wood, who served several terms as New York's mayor and Congressional representative, in which he proposed a blockade-running partnership created a nasty stir when it was intercepted and published in a New York newspaper.
Gazaway opposed President Davis' embargo on cotton exports, believing it to be unwise and uneconomical as well as depriving cotton speculators of large profits which could be made by shipping cotton to cotton-starved European textile manufacturers. Free trade in cotton, he told Howell Cobb, would carry the "Confederacy beyond all precedent in the world if properly managed." If cotton was not to be exported in large quantities, foreigners, he advised, should be induced to buy and store it in the Confederacy.
Export duties, he said, should be increased, and import duties should be decreased. Like Stephens, he believed that heavy taxes should be levied directly on the people. (Confederate taxes represented one percent of income, while taxes in the United States, which, nonetheless, borrowed heavily, equaled twenty-three percent.) Lamar disapproved of how most war expenditures were financed: borrowing and printing money. (Both the North and the South issued excessive amounts of money, and, as a result, both experienced substantial inflation, but it was much worse in the South than in the North.) Inexperienced in military affairs, he advocated a strictly defensive military posture.
Although he offered political advice to those of his relatives, friends, and associates who held political office, they seem to have paid the most attention to his financial advice. For example, when Howell Cobb was appointed to investigate the pre-war assault by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks on Massachusetts' Charles Sumner, he advised Cobb to recommend Brooks be expelled because "the assault was unjustifiable, unmanly, ill timed, ill advised, injudicious to the cause of the South, and totally indefensible as to time, place and manner." Instead, Cobb authored a minority report advocating taking no action against Brooks. However, Cobb took Lamar's advice and turned down President Pierce's 1854 offer to appoint him minister to Spain, where he would replace Pierre Soule of Louisiana, who had botched the attempt to buy Cuba from Spain. Gazaway also warned Cobb that Pierce's was a doomed administration which had "kilt everybody they touch."
Gazaway did not fare well after the War. Although pardoned early on, he was later accused of being involved in the assassination of President Lincoln and arrested. Released without any charges ever being pressed against him, he was rearrested for purportedly lying and stealing in his efforts to regain property seized by the U.S. government. Although convicted, he was soon released by order of President Johnson. Thereafter he was embroiled in a number of suits against the federal government as he sought to regain his property. (One of his lawyers was former Federal General Benjamin Butler, who, while in command of occupied New Orleans, gained the nickname, Beast, for decreeing that Yankee-hating women who insulted his officers would be treated as women of the night. Butler's image in the South is best illustrated by observing that his likeness appeared in the bottom of urinals.) For a number of years Lamar continued to serve as President of Savannah's Bank of Commerce. He died at his daughter's home while on a business trip to New York in 1874. He left $100,000 for the construction in Savannah of a home for aged and infirm Negroes.
LUCIS QUINTUS CINCINNATUS LAMAR - L.Q.C. was Another of Gazaway Lamar's influential relatives. Like Gazaway and Mirabeau, he was born in Georgia. Like the latter and many others born in the Old South, he emigrated to the New. A lawyer, planter, and college professor--at different times, a professor of mathematics of ethics and metaphysics at the University of Mississippi--after serving in the Georgia legislature, he represented Mississippi in the United States House of Representatives until 1860.
The principle author of Mississippi's ordinance of secession, like Howell Cobb, in politics he was a pragmatist. His service in the Confederate Army cut short by ill health, he became a diplomat, serving as a Confederate negotiator in London. After the War he was Mississippi's first post-Reconstruction Congressman and served as Secretary of the Interior in President Cleveland's cabinet. An advocate of the "New South", he plead for reconciliation between the North and the South and between whites and blacks. In 1888, he became an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.
JOSEPH LECONTE - A scientist and educator like his brother John, who was to become President of the University of California, this Georgia native left his post as a professor at South Carolina College to become a chemist at the Confederate medical laboratory in Columbia, South Carolina. (John was chief of the Confederacy's Niter and Mining Bureau.) Like many talented Southerners, after the war the LeConte brothers left the devastated South. Among the nation's foremost scientists of their day, both brothers migrated to California, where Joseph became a professor at the University of California.
ROBERT EDWARD LEE - Son of a Revolutionary War hero who left the country to escape his creditors, at the age of 53, after 31 years in the Army, Robert E. Lee was a lieutenant colonel with at least 22 men standing between him and the rank of brigadier general. He supported his large family and invalid wife on a yearly salary of $1,205 a year--not much even back in those days. Because of his refusal to curry favor and his outspoken defense of unpopular officers he believed to be in the right, he had been passed over for promotion in favor of officers with lesser records of achievement. An outstanding student at West Point, he was an also outstanding soldier in both peace and war. Like Beauregard, much of his service was in the Corps of Engineers.
Fellow Virginian General Winfield Scott, believed him to be the nation's most skilled officer. Lee turned down an offer from him to command of the Union forces because he was unwilling to draw his sword on his own people. Considerate, honest, highly intelligent, and modest, his behavior was beyond reproach. Like Forrest, he neither drank nor smoked. Unlike him, he didn't cuss. Though an inviting target of revisionist historians, no one has been able to besmirch his character. Lee's place in history is that of one the world's greatest generals, and to this day he is idolized in the South. However, had the Civil War not taken place, few, if any, would today be aware of him.
Late in the War Davis considered transferring him to the West, where the War was going badly. Highly successful in turning back the North's repeated "on to Richmond" drives, his two invasions of the North failed, and some attribute the South's failure to gain recognition by Great Britain and France to his defeat at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
NATHANIEL LYON - For the North, Connecticut Yankee Lyon was the right man at the right place at the right time. Commander of the St. Louis arsenal when the Confederacy was formed, he did more than any other man to save Missouri for the Union. A West Pointer, Lyon--though he was no abolitionist--became a strong Unionist during his service in Kansas during the "bleeding Kansas" period when pro- and anti-slavery forces in these states fought a mini-war.
Rather than turning over the arms in the United States arsenal in St. Louis to Missouri's pro-Southern militia as was demanded by Missouri's pro-Confederate governor, he captured the pro-Confederate militiamen gathered to seize the them. (In other places, pro-Southern U.S. Army officers turned over the military supplies under their control to the Confederacy.) Subsequently, he attempted to drive pro- Confederate forces from the State, but failed, losing his life in the process. (Some believe he was abandoned by his commander, John C. Fremont.) The bulk of his locally-recruited, pro-Union forces were recent German immigrants living in the St. Louis area.
BERIAH MAGOFFIN - As Governor of Kentucky, he led a drive to take Kentucky out of the Union. According to Abraham Lincoln, who is said to have remarked that, "to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game," Magoffin's success or failure was crucial to the fate of the Union. Southern sentiment was strong in Kentucky, whose borders held more slaves than did three of the states which did leave the Union. Kentucky refused to answer Lincoln's call for troops after the firing on Fort Sumter.
Both due to the size of their population, which was over half that of the eleven states which left the Union, and in terms of their location, obtaining the allegiance of all the border slave states save tiny Delaware was vital to the Confederacy. Working against it was the fact that in both Kentucky and Missouri even some slave owners opposed secession because disunion, they believed, would result in the loss of these states' slaves because they would flee to adjoining free states which would not return them. Of all the border states, pro-Southern sentiment was strongest in Kentucky. (Lincoln received only one percent of Kentucky's vote in 1860.)
A variety of tactics were used by the Lincoln administration to hold border areas--each of which contained large numbers of people who were pro-Union. Military force was used to detach the Western portion of Virginia and to hold Missouri. In Maryland, secessionist members of the legislature were arrested; provost marshals kept anti-Unionsts from the polls; and U.S. soldiers were furloughed to go home and vote. Though Lincoln deemed it to be as illegitimate as secession, Kentucky's declaration of neutrality was tolerated, but arms were sent to Kentucky pro-Unionists.
CHRISTOPHER GUSTAUS MEMMINGER - Taken to Charleston, South Carolina from his native Germany by his widowed mother, he was orphaned at an early age. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Memminger rose to become one of South Carolina's most prominent men, serving for many years in its legislature. One of the issues he was most known for was his opposition to the state-owned bank, which, like the Federal Reserve Banks today vis-a-vis the federal government, served as the State of South Carolina's bank of deposit and fiscal agent. (Unlike the Federal Reserve Banks, it also engaged in commercial banking in competition with privately-owned banks.)
An opponent of nullification, he was a Unionist delegate to a Southern rights convention held in 1852 at which secessionists were routed. However, later events converted him to the secessionist cause, and in 1860 he went to Virginia to try to convince that state to secede. He was a delegate to the South Carolina secession convention, where he supported secession. Davis appointed him Secretary of the Confederate Treasury in 1861, and he served in that post until 1864, when he resigned because he saw no way to remedy the sad state of Confederate finances. He opposed the embargo of cotton shipments designed to force foreign recognition of the Confederacy because he realized it destroyed the Confederacy's credit worthiness. After the War, he was known for his advocacy of education for both white and black children.
His moderate position on race was not a post-war affectation. Prior to the War, he had fought the bill to exclude black seamen from South Carolina ports and had opposed the expulsion from the State of free blacks and Northern schoolteachers. Because many of the State's few free blacks owned slaves, Memminger believed they provided vital support for the maintenance of the "peculiar" institution. Particularly helpful were those black slave owners who had white relatives with whom they had good relations, as most of them believed themselves to be members of a separate and superior caste relative to other blacks and sought to ally themselves with the whites. (When the Civil War began a group of Charleston mulattoes offered their support to the Confederacy.)
JOHN STITH PEMBERTON - Most famous for concocting Coca Cola, Pemberton was a Georgia born, physician-surgeon, businessman, and analytical chemist whose Columbus, Georgia laboratory at his wholesale-drug business was, when the War began, unequaled for chemical analysis in the South. (More well known is the Villa Rica/Atlanta druggist, Asa Candler, who bought Pemberton's drink before it became very well known.)
After service in the Confederate Army, Pemberton returned to the drug business and moved to Atlanta. Prior to developing Coca Cola, Pemberton produced Pemberton's French Wine Coca. This drink contained the extract of Peruvian coca (cocaine), wine, and Kola nut. (The nineteenth century, when there were no restrictions on the sale and use of drugs, was the hay day of the patent medicine industry, and these medicines often contained opium or cocaine.)
STERLING PRICE - Born in Virginia, he attended Hampden-Sidney College and studied law the way most did in those days: by "reading law" in a lawyer's office. Settling on a plantation in Missouri, he was elected to the Missouri house. After several terms, he became its speaker. As a (Stephen) Douglas Democrat, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. He resigned from the House in order to fight as a brigadier general in the Mexican War, and he later served as the military governor of New Mexico. Returning to Missouri, he was elected governor. After stepping down as governor, Price devoted himself to his tobacco business and promoting railroads. He became president of the board of directors of the North Missouri Railroad and a state bank commissioner.
Before the war Price was very opposed to the rise of the sectional, "Black" Republican Party, which he viewed as a threat to peace and harmony. Although he did not believe a state had the right either to nullify a federal law or secede, like the Founding Fathers, he believed in the right of revolution. Until Federal troops began trying to take control of Missouri, Price sought to hold Missouri in the Union. After Federal troops took over St. Louis, with Price at the head of the State's militia, a mini civil war ensued in Missouri which ultimately devastated and depopulated entire counties. Many rural Missourians were driven into the arms of the Confederacy by their hatred of German Union troops, many of whom were from St. Louis.
Missouri's new governor, Clairborne F. Jackson, however, was not reluctant to leave the Union, for like Kentucky's governor, he was an ardent secessionist. In his inaugural address, Jackson blamed the Republican Party for the crisis, which, he said, was created by emissaries of fanaticism (abolitionists) in London. Jackson refused Lincoln's call upon Missouri for troops to enforce federal law in the seceded states, calling it "illogical, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman and diabolical."
Despite having been a Unionist before Lincoln's election, Price was elected president of the Missouri secession convention. Thereafter, he became a Confederate brigadier general, participating in the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, and several lesser engagements. In late 1864, he attempted to retake Missouri for the Confederacy, but failed. Like Beauregard, he was out of favor in Richmond. The end of the war found him in Texas. Refusing to surrender, he traveled to Mexico, where he attempted to establish a colony of ex-Confederates. Disillusioned and impoverished, he returned to the United States where he died in St. Louis in 1867 at the age of 57.
Symbolically Missouri and Kentucky were Confederate states. Two of the stars on the Confederate flag represent these states. Both supplied a number of troops to the Confederacy, but both largely remained in Union hands throughout the war, and they supplied a large number of troops to the Union cause. The South's loss of these two states was, in large part, the result of Confederate ineptitude. For example, two militia officers that Jackson dispatched to Montgomery found that only Judah Benjamin expressed any interest in the problems of Missouri. Later, E. C. Cabell, Jackson's personal emissary to Richmond, got little support when he argued that the safety of Arkansas, Tennessee, and the whole Mississippi Valley would be assured if Missouri could be held for the Confederacy because Lincoln then could not send a force down the Mississippi for fear of an attack from Missouri. But, while, according to historian Steven E. Woodworth, "Union leaders, from Lincoln through the local commanders in Missouri, realized the urgency of the situation and took the necessary steps regardless of their propriety...Confederate and state officials remained stifled by a self-imposed rigidity resulting from their inflexible adherence to form and principles."
Kentucky might have fallen into the Confederate camp if its former Episcopal bishop turned general, Leonidas Polk, had not violated Kentucky's neutrality and taken Columbus, Kentucky. This offset Kentuckians' outrage with the Union cause because Federal General John Charles Fremont had declared that their slaves were now free men and had ordered Columbus, Kentucky seized. (Federal troops already occupied a Missouri town just across the river from Columbus.) Forced to retreat from Columbus, the Confederacy gained nothing militarily from its occupation, but lost much sympathy from Kentuckians.
The first significant Union victories were in the West, where the defeat of the Confederacy began with the capture of the Confederate forts blocking passage down the Mississippi River. The roots of these losses can be traced to the failure to bring Missouri and Kentucky into the Confederacy, as the success of Winfield Scott's Anaconda Plan for splitting and strangling the Confederacy depended upon Union gaining control of the Mississippi River. In addition to cutting off the Western Confederate states from their Eastern sisters, this plan included the taking of the port of New Orleans, which, as the Midwest's most economical route to the sea, was vital to the economic health of the United States. If New Orleans had not been taken early in the war, Confederate ironclads under construction there when it was captured could have been completed, and this could have played havoc with the Federal Navy, which played a central role in gaining control of the Mississippi.
JOHN SLIDELL - A native New Yorker most well known today because he was one of the two Confederate commissioners illegally removed from the British steamer Trent, Slidell was a graduate of Columbia College, who removed to New Orleans after the business he inherited from his father failed, and he was involved in a duel over an actress. A member of the New York bar, he became a lawyer in New Orleans and was very successful. From 1828 to 1833 he served there as U.S. district attorney, and later he served both in the Louisiana legislature and both the U.S. House and Senate. In 1845, he was appointed U.S. minister to Mexico. An enemy of Stephen Douglas, he was a States' Right Democrat who abandoned Buchanan to support secession.
As the Confederacy's commissioner to France, he was unable to obtain that country's recognition of the Confederacy, but he did negotiate a large French loan for the Confederacy. He became deeply involved in Napoleon III's intrusion into Mexico. Electing after the War to remain in France, he was not offered, nor did he seek, a U.S. pardon. His wife was a French Creole, and his daughter married a Frenchman during the War. He died in England in 1871.
PIERRE SOULE - Born in France, Soule was exiled for conspiring against the Bourbons. After spending a year as a shepherd in the Pyrenees, he returned to France, where he became a journalist. Imprisoned for his writings, he escaped to England. From there he went to Haiti, from which he immigrated to the U.S., where he worked as a gardener while learning English and studying American law. Eventually, he settled in New Orleans, where he became a successful lawyer and ally of John Slidell. After serving in the Louisiana Senate, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, serving there from 1847 until he resigned in 1853 in order to become the U. S. minister to Spain. His expansionist views were in general agreement with those of Jefferson Davis, J. D. B. DeBow, and General John A. Quitman.
A contemporary described Soule as "of swarthy complexion, black flashing eyes, and Frenchified dress and speech...artificial--brilliant in repartee, yet subject to fits of melancholy; impetuous, yet reserved; proud, but polite--in one word, such a contradiction as Victor Hugo, with a vast fund of knowledge, and a deposit of vanity which was never exhausted." Preston Moore and other historians believe that the flamboyant Soule's failure to obtain the annexation of Cuba--first by offering Spain money; them by veiled threats--in 1854 was due to his excess zeal and imprudence.
After the Cuban fiasco, Soule continued to be active in the South's attempt to gain influence and territory in Latin America. Such an interest in Latin America was hardly surprising for a New Orleans businessman because New Orleans had extensive trading connections with
Central America, and many filibustering expeditions were launched from there to areas either where either slavery did or could profitably exist. Officially-sanctioned attempts to add more Latin American territory to the United States were brought to a halt during the Pierce administration by the rise of the Republican party for, outraged over the addition to the Union of several slave states as a result of the Louisiana purchase and the acquisition of Florida and Texas, its Northern membership drew a line against any further expansion of territory friendly to slavery.
Soule was a friend of and provided support to William Walker, a filibuster who briefly ruled Nicaragua. Walker received considerable help from citizens of New Orleans, and P. T. G. Beauregard seriously considered resigning his commission and joining Walker's army. Walker planned to establish a Central American federation and conquer Cuba.
Soule was the attorney and counsel for one of two Southern-owned companies proposing to build a Central American canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Because he owned a Central American railroad which linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, their endeavors were opposed by Cornelius Vanderbilt of New York. (John Slidell was also involved in Southern-led attempts to build a canal across Central America--an endeavor in which Mexico figured prominently.)
Soule was arrested in 1862 by Federal troops in New Orleans. General Benjamin Butler considered him so dangerous he wanted him shot. Escaping to Charleston, he joined the staff of General P. G. T. Beauregard and lobbied for the so-called Beauregard block in Richmond.
Soule traveled abroad in 1864 in an attempt to recruit a foreign legion to fight for the Confederacy. After the War he moved to Havana and was part of a scheme to settle Confederate veterans in Mexico. He died in New Orleans in 1870.
EDWIN MCMASTERS STANTON - Although he was a Democrat, he served in Lincoln's cabinet as Secretary of War. A native of Ohio, both his grandfathers were Virginia slave owners. However, one of them directed in his will that, if it was legal, his slaves were to be freed. Considered to be Pennsylvania's finest lawyer, his extensive practice before the Supreme Court led Edwin to move to Washington in 1857. When, in 1860, Buchanan's Attorney General replaced Lewis Cass as Secretary of State, Edwin Stanton was named Attorney General. Despite being an anti-slave man, he believed that the Constitution permitted it. Thus, Southerners considered him a neutral.
CHARLES P. STONE - At the request of General Winfield Scott, Commander- in-Chief of the U.S. Army, Stone was commissioned by President Buchanan Inspector-General of the District of Columbia in January, 1861; thus becoming the first citizen called into military service as a result of the secession crisis and gaining the responsibility of guarding Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration. The problem facing Stone, who had opposed Lincoln's election, was that Washington was a Southern city filled with many Southern sympathizers and very few clearly loyal troops.
In December, 1860 the U.S. Army was composed of only 16,367 officers and men, most of whom Secretary of War Floyd, who was to become a Confederate, had posted to the far West. The only troops near the Capital were three or four hundred Marines, three Army officers and 53 men stationed at the Washington arsenal, and a few hundred men in volunteer military groups. Besides the problem posed by the fact that an unknown number of these men were Southern sympathizers, Stone had to deal with the temporary cutting off by Southern forces shortly before Lincoln's inauguration of Washington's telegraph and railroad connections with the North. Great concern was generated in Washington when newspapers in Richmond called for the capture of Washington before the arrival of reinforcements from New York. Also, threats against Lincoln were widespread.
Not knowing of Stone's appointment, a Captain Schaeffer, an employee of the Interior Department and a member of a Washington militia group, the National Rifles, told Stone that he would soon be defending Maryland against the Yankees. Therefore, when the overly talkative Schaeffer subsequently requested additional arms and ammunition for his men, Stone denied the request and removed Schaeffer from his post. Detectives working for Stone then learned that a group calling themselves the National Volunteers planned to seize the capital. Stone denied them weapons too.
Because Washington's District Attorney Robert Ould had advised against it, saying they would use them against each other, President Buchanan refused to arm members of neighborhood volunteer fire departments. (In this period volunteer fire groups were often more intent on beating each other to fires than fighting them and sometimes fought with each other.) Stone convinced the President to ignore Ould's advice. (Ould became a Confederate).
After the North's defeat at Bull Run, when scapegoats were in great demand, Stone was arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason and imprisoned. After a few months, he was released and no charges were never brought against him. Subsequently, he briefly rejoined the Federal Army. In an article written long after the War, Stone contended that if more troops had not been obtained, Lincoln would have been killed before his inauguration. In this article, Stone also revealed that the lieutenant-colonel who served as General Scott's secretary and who wrote out the orders regarding the disposition of the forces guarding Abraham Lincoln at the inauguration ceremony resigned his commission that night and left to join the Confederate Army.
Captain Thomas Jordan, a member of the staff of the U.S. Army's elderly, corpulent commanding officer, General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War, remained in Washington longer did Scott's secretary; tarrying there for a month after Fort Sumter was fired on in order to set up a spy ring which reached into the upper echelons of the Federal government. Thomas was the man who recruited the South's most famous and successful female spy, the Rebel Rose, Mrs. Greenhow.
Another Confederate agent who remained in the City was Thomas N. Conrad. A lay Methodist minister, he was the principal of a private school in Georgetown when the War broke out. Arrested and released in a spy scare which swept Washington after Fort Sumter was fired upon, he remained for two more months, apparently planning, until Richmond called him off, to assassinate his fellow Virginian, General Scott.
Appointed a Confederate Army chaplain, he soon quit this post to return to spying, making numerous trips into Washington to make contact with various Rebel spies. During the Second Battle of Manassas (Second Bull Run) he learned that Washington was protected by only a skeleton force. Unfortunately for the Confederacy, this golden opportunity to capture the Federal Capital was lost because he could not find Confederate Cavalry General Jeb Stuart to rely this information to. Stuart told him later that if he had gotten this information, he could have ridden in and made the White House his headquarters. During the Gettysburg campaign a similar opportunity was lost.
Once when he was arrested, Conrad managed to escape by pretending to have smallpox. He was arrested again in Maryland during the search for John Wilkes Booth because he had altered his hair and mustache so that he looked like Booth. Some historians today who have returned to the original theory that Booth was part of a plan by the Confederate government to kidnap or kill Lincoln doubt that his looking like Booth was an accident. They believe he was a decoy. The motivation for this plot might have been an unsuccessful raid on Richmond by Union Colonel Ulric Dahlgren in March, 1864 the Confederacy suspected was an attempt by the Federal government to kill the Confederacy's top officials.
ROBERT BROOKE TANEY - Born in 1777, this Marylander was to become the fifth Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Appointed to the Court by Andrew Jackson, Taney was opposed to slavery and freed the slaves he inherited. However, as a judge, he felt bound by the Constitution's recognition of slavery's legitimacy in Article I, sections 2 and 9, and Article IV, section 2. He initially refused to consider whether or not slavery could be banned in the territories and resisted abolitionist pressure to consider the Dred Scott case. But, under pressure from President Pierce and President-elect Buchanan to settle the issue, he finally agreed to take the Scott case. Against his better judgment, the 80-year-old Taney wrote the majority opinion refusing Scott his freedom.
He further damned himself in Northern eyes in 1861 by writing the majority decision which declared that President Lincoln had erred in suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln considered arresting Taney before deciding simply to ignore the Court's decision, which he could get away with because the Dred Scott decision had destroyed the Court's influence in the North. Taney died in October, 1864.
One of several long-time colleagues of Taney's on what was called the "Southern Court" was James Moore Wayne, a native of Savannah and its former mayor. As a Georgia Congressman, Wayne was a strong supporter of President Jackson, and Jackson appointed him to the Court. Wayne stuck with the Union, dying in Washington shortly after the close of the War.
ROBERT AUGUSTUS TOOMBS - Georgia's three most important politicians in 1860 were Howell Cobb, Alexander Hamilton (Little Alex) Stephens, and Robert (Bob) Toombs. Stephens and Toombs began their political careers as Whigs and were close friends. Stephens said that Toombs "has the greatest mind I ever came in contact with. Its operations, even in its errors, remind me of a mighty waste of waters." According to Stephens' biographer Thomas E. Schott, Cobb was a fickle friend of Stephens. Like Cobb and Stephens, the rotund Toombs was very hostile to the Know Nothings, saying that the American flag was big enough to enfold all the world's peoples.
Because Toombs' father died when he was only five, he grew up under a guardian's care. That guardian was Congressman Thomas W. Cobb, Howell Cobb's cousin. After leaving the University of Georgia under a cloud, Toombs graduated from Union College and studied law at the University of Virginia. Returning to Georgia, he became a successful lawyer, planter, and politician. Active in politics even before he was old enough to run for office, he served in the Georgia legislature and in both houses of the United States Congress; moving from the Whig Party to the new Constitutional Union Party before becoming a Democrat. Like Cobb, he supported the Compromise of 1850 and Kentucky's John C. Breckinridge for president in 1860.
Before the Montgomery Convention, the potential for a Georgian to win the presidency appeared great because it boasted several of the South's most respected statesmen and was, in terms of population and wealth, the largest state represented at the Montgomery Convention. A delegate to the Montgomery Convention, the frequently tobacco-stained Toombs actively sought to become the Confederacy's president. Some believe that the failure of the Georgia delegation to coalesce around one of their own to push his candidacy reduced the chances of a Georgian gaining the presidency.
Along with Leroy P. Walker (Confederate Postmaster General), Toombs opposed Davis and others who believed that Fort Sumter, a fort in Charleston's harbor which, first, Buchanan and, then, Lincoln refused to vacate, should be attacked. Toombs accepted the post of Secretary of State, but he was unhappy in this position and--appropriately for a critic of those seeking "bombproof positions"--he resigned and joined the Army, where he commanded a brigade in Virginia despite the fact that his only previous military experience was commanding a company of Georgia volunteers in the Creek War. Although he had some success, his tenure was stormy, and, after he was refused promotion, he resigned. Toombs' opinion of he Davis administration is indicated by a January, 1864 letter he wrote to Stephens in which he said that there was "a lamentable lack of brains and good common sense" in Richmond."
After his resignation as Secretary of State, there was some talk of making him Secretary of War, but he squashed that by saying that he would not be "Mr. Davis' chief clerk," which was all the person who filled this post would ever be. Later, after failing in his bid for a Senate seat, he became inspector-general of the Georgia militia. Learning after the War ended that he was to be arrested for treason, he fled to Cuba. He lived in London until 1867, when charges against him were dropped, and he returned to Georgia. He never asked for a pardon.
Toombs complained that Georgia's Governor Joe Brown, an irascible, chameleon-like, pre-populist populist, "had" --thanks to his having Gazaway Lamar obtain them--"more guns than the whole Confederacy." 0He urged the Confederate government to send cotton to England for arms and ammunition. Every pound of cotton should, Toombs said, have been shipped to England and France for the purchase of the aid of the army and navy. Ninety percent of war was, he said, business, and the nation must organize for victory, rather than depend on fighting alone. The War, he claimed, could have been won in the first 60 days. He complained that it was handled in a haphazard way from the start and that only miraculous valor kept the Confederacy going.
Toombs' scorn for Davis' cotton policy was not something he developed in retrospect. In a debate in the Confederate Senate, the renown orator declared that "we have been told that Cotton is King, that he will find his way to the vaults of the bankers of the Old World; that he can march up to the thrones of mighty potentates, and drag from the arsenals of armed nations the dogs of war; that he can open our closed ports, and fly our young flag upon all the seas. And yet, before the first autumnal frost has blighted a leaf upon his coronet, he comes to this hall a trembling mendicant, and says, 'Give me drink, Titinius, or I perish'"
GEORGE ALFRED TRENHOLM - Son of a Charleston shipper, he became a partner in a firm known as Fraser, Trenholm, and Company. By 1853, he was its principal owner. A shipper of sea-island cotton, his various companies had unlimited credit abroad. One of the richest men in the South, he had interests in steamships, hotels, cotton presses, wharves, plantations and slaves, banks, and railroads. His influence in Charleston business circles was tremendous. (Typically the very wealthy in those days had wide-ranging investments.)
A Democrat like the great majority of South Carolinians throughout the Antebellum period, Trenholm served in the South Carolina legislature from 1852 to 1856. A secessionist, he put his financial and business knowledge at the disposal of the Confederacy and helped shape its fiscal policy. Through the Liverpool branch of his firm, he acted as the Confederacy's financial agent abroad. He became Secretary of the Confederate Treasury on 18 July, 1864. He believed foreign recognition and support could be obtained by the South ceasing to export cotton. The South's greatest enemy, he claimed, was the selfishness and apathy of its people. If the Confederacy had won the War, he would have become its prime transatlantic shipper.
Shortly after Fort Sumter was captured, Trenholm proposed to General Beauregard that the Confederate government purchase steamships for the export of cotton to England in exchange for war supplies. Beauregard's poor relationship with Jefferson Davis, some claim, originated when he took this plan to him, and he rejected it. Like Gazaway Lamar, Trenholm made a great deal of money running the blockade, whose effectiveness, both early and late in the War, was not as great as was claimed, as more often than not, throughout the War steam-powered vessels were successful in running the blockade.
Blockade runners received little help from the minuscule navy created from scratch by the Confederacy. A few, not-very-successful attempts were made, using iron clads, and, once, the world's first submarine, to destroy blockading ships. Vastly more effective were the raiders like the Alabama, which nearly drove the American merchant marine from the world's seas, but did not benefit the Confederacy.
CLEMENT LAIRD VALLANDIGHAM - A prominent Ohio politician and leader of the anti-war Democrats labeled "Copperheads", Vallandigham has received the same kind of treatment dealt out to Edmund Ruffin, that is, he is typically portrayed as a fanatical simpleton. As his biographer, Frank L. Klement observed:
Civil War dissenters--and here Vallandigham stands at the head of the list--have also been treated critically by the historians. During the postwar years, especially in the 1885-1900 era, a nationalistic revival swept the United States. Nationalism became a religion; even Walt Whitman defined the nation as a living organism and the instrument through which citizens could best realize and express their divine sense of fellowship. Nationalism underwrote the big navy policy, fostered the setting for the Columbian Exposition of 1892-1893, and laid the base for Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis." It also promoted the apostrophizing of Lincoln and helped Americans accept Republican opinions and contentions of Civil War days as fact. Copperheads, consequently, emerged as men whose hearts were black, whose blood was yellow, and whose minds were blank.
Many Republicans who had manufactured political propaganda during the Civil War put their partisan views into print as "history" in the postwar years. Whitelaw Reid, who edited the Cincinnati Gazette and accused Vallandigham of disloyalty, wrote a two-volume work, Ohio in the War, which became the standard text on wartime politics for half a century.
After losing his seat in Congress, he ran for governor of Ohio on the Democratic ticket. In a campaign speech he criticized Lincoln for having declared Ohio a military department and placing it under the command of General Ambrose T. Burnside. Burnside, considering this treason, caused soldiers to break down his door, drag him out of bed, and arrest him. Outrage over this act led to a riot in Dayton and it being placed under martial law. The publication of a newspaper which had supported Vallandigham was suspended and its editor arrested. Illegally tried before a military tribunal, for violating Burnside's order against declaring sympathy for the enemy, Vallandigham was
was imprisoned in Boston. Eventually outrage over his treatment forced Lincoln to commute his sentence and send him, under flag of truce, into the Confederacy. After a sojourn in Canada, he slipped back into Ohio, where his presence was tolerated. Subsequently, he was soundly defeated--partly because Ohio troops voted against him 20 to 1--in his bid for the governorship in a vicious campaign in which there was little that his Republican opponents did not stoop to. After the War he returned to his law practice and never held public office again, although at the time of his accidental death he was again a candidate.
During the war, approximately 13,000 persons, including Washington, D.C.'s mayor, suffered the fate of Vallandigham and this editor. Perhaps, relative to the outcome of the war, the most significant of these arrests was the arrest of the majority of the members of the Maryland legislature in September, 1861 because Lincoln feared that the Maryland legislature would soon meet and pass an ordinance of secession. Many, their homes surrounded by Federal troops, were arrested in the middle of the night and imprisoned without trail. Others were arrested on their way to the Maryland statehouse. Subsequently, "free" elections in which those who voted had to first swear an oath of allegiance to the Union in the presence of armed, Federal troops were held to elect a new Maryland legislature
Despite being a close friend of such Southerners as L. Q. C. Lamar and John C. Breckinridge, Vallandigham was morally opposed to slavery. However, he believed that it was sanctioned by the Constitution. Like Southerners, he believed that New England's industry had received too much tariff protection, and that the Northeast had brought about the economic ills of the West, which, like the South, he believed was being exploited by this region. In Charleston during the disastrous 1860 Democratic Convention, he forecast that if the Party split that the Union would be dissolved and the nation thrust into "one of the bloodiest civil wars on record." This war, he believed, would result in the ascendancy of New England and the triumph of industrialization. In both these forecasts he was, of course, quite right.
A vociferous opponent of the sectional Republican party, he blamed abolitionism for the crisis and judged war an irrational means to achieve an end. Peace and compromise, Vallandigham avowed, were the means to reunion and the preservation of the people's civil rights. Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus; declaration of a blockade of Southern ports; and his calling of troops he believed to be unconstitutional. While in Congress, he accused Lincoln of "executive usurpation" and criticized the "illegal arrests" made by military authorities of dissenters. Lincoln, he claimed, was turning the republic into a dictatorship. (Chief Justice Taney said that Lincoln had assumed "more regal and absolute power over the liberty of the citizens than the people of England would have thought it safe to intrust to the Crown.")
Unfortunately, the anti-war effort of his party was tainted with racism. For example, one Democrat declared, "The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Niggers where they are." In 1862, there were race riots in two Ohio cities. Providing the backbone of the anti-war Democrats were Irish Catholics--who detested abolition, New England, Catholic Germans--and so-called "Butternuts"--Midwesterners of Southern origin. Both the Irish and the Germans, explained a foreign newspaper correspondent, were jealous of the free Negro.
WILLIAM MORRILL WADLEY - A Georgia railroader, he was known as a self-made man of immense intelligence. A railroad troubleshooter born in the North, when the War began he was one of the leading railroad men in the South, having headed Georgia's State-owned Western and Atlantic Railroad and the privately-owned Central of Georgia before moving on to a Louisiana railroad. (Of five through routes serving ten Southern states, three of them passed through Atlanta. Georgia had more railroad track per capita than did any other deep South state.) Wadley was named military superintendent of all Confederate railroads in 1862, but he later left this post because he was not approved by the Confederate Congress. Wadley believed that the Confederate government needed to exercise more control over the railroads. (After First Manassas, Beauregard quite justifiably complained bitterly about poor rail service.)
Ironically, the States Rights that the Southern states left the Union to preserve hindered the Confederacy's war effort. In endeavor after endeavor the Confederacy was plagued, at the least, by lack of coordination and, at worst, with defiance. Wadley's predecessor was one of the first, but hardly the last, to be defied by Georgia's Governor Joseph E. Brown, who refused to allow the Confederate government the use of some of the engines and cars of the Western and Atlantic Railroad.
LOUIS TREZEVANT WIGFALL - The Wigfalls and, even more so, his mother's family, the Trezevants, who were of French Huguenot stock, were South Carolina aristocrats. Orphaned at an early age, this stormy petrel inherited enough money to give him a good start in life, but he had not been out of college long before he went bankrupt. Always ready to fight, the hard-drinking, black-bearded, and bushy-haired Wigfall intimidated many. Yet, even his critics admitted he was a man of enormous talent. Clearly a born rebel, Wigfall was never able to stay out of trouble long. A graduate of an incubator of secession, South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) and the University of Virginia's law school, the love of his life was politics, and he intended to become a successful South Carolina politician. He practiced law only because he had to if he ever hoped to pay his debts, which he was often unable to do.
Aggressive and quick to anger, he fought several duels, including one with Preston Brooks. Another man, fearing that Wigfall was going to attack him, pulled a gun on him. Wigfall reacted by pulling out his own pistol and killing him. Although he was not indicted for murder, this killing and his declaring bankruptcy forced him to emigrate to Texas, where, a year later, he was elected to the Texas House. Considered a radical even in South Carolina, he was well out of the mainstream in Texas until John Brown moved the mainstream and, thus, propelled Wigfall into the United States Senate. There he took delight in baiting "Black" Republicans. Unlike his colleagues from other Southern states, he did not leave the Senate after hearing that, two days before Lincoln's inauguration, Texas had voted to leave the Union. Presumably because the Republicans insisted that a state could not leave the Union, he was not forced to leave, although, because some of his speeches were viewed as being treasonous, expelling him was considered.
There were several possible reasons for him staying in Washington. That he planned to kidnap President Buchanan is a motive some historians question because kidnapping the soon to be replaced president doesn't seem to make sense. Unquestioned is that he spied for the Confederacy; recruited Baltimore men for the Confederate army; and purchased and shipped arms to the Confederacy. Reportedly, he was also involved with organizing an armed, pro-Southern group in Washington.
Temporarily leaving his daughters with their Grandmother in Boston, he and his wife left Washington in time to witness the taking of Fort Sumter. As volunteer aide on Beauregard's staff, he took it on himself to have a private row him, under fire, out to Fort Sumter to demand its surrender; an event which led many in the North who had been willing to let the South leave in peace to change their minds. A member of the Confederacy's provisional Congress, Wigfall had set his sights on serving the Confederacy in its army, and once enough Texans arrived in Virginia to form a battalion, he was made their commander. In order to take the seat in the permanent Confederate Congress he was elected to, Wigfall resigned his army commission as a brigadier general. (His young son, however, did fight under dashing Jeb Stuart.)
Surprisingly for a strong states righter, he introduced American's first conscription bill, which, despite strong opposition, passed. Thereafter he showed a consistent willingness to compromise his states' rights views in the interest of defeating the North, and very quickly the army came to consider him its champion. Like Beauregard, he blamed President Davis and his incompetent commissary general, Lucius B. Northrop, for the failure to take Washington after First Manassas.
By 1862 he was probably regretting having advised Robert Barnwell Rhett to vote for Davis, as he was contemptuously reporting to Clement Clay that instead of taking pressure off Virginia by invading Maryland, Davis was probably off somewhere praying. Also, like Beauregard and Joe Johnston, he opposed Davis' policy of holding territory rather than concentrating the Confederacy's smaller forces. He was also critical of Davis' favorite, Lee.
CHATHAM ROBERDEAU WHEAT - Son of a Virginia Episcopal clergyman who removed his family to New Orleans when he was only an infant, after graduating from the University of Nashville, he began the study of law in Memphis. Enlisting as a Lieutenant of dragoons when the War with Mexico began, he ended up as the captain commanding General Winfield Scott's bodyguard. After the war he returned to New Orleans and completed his legal studies; began the practice of law; and was elected to the State legislature.
As a colonel in the 1850s he fought in an unsuccessful war for Cuban independence. He also enlisted in the called-off attempt headed by John A. Quitman, a former governor, Congressman, and Mexican War general, to invade Cuba and, with the help of Creole revolutionaries, make it an independent republic which would nullify Spanish laws aimed at eliminating slavery before annexing it to the United States as a slave state. After the Cuban venture, he served as a general of artillery in the Mexican army. Then he fought with Garibaldi in the Italian war for independence. When Louisiana left the Union, he raised a 500-man-strong battalion of cavalry known as the Louisiana Tigers. After recovering from a severe wound inflicted at First Manassas, he rejoined his battalion and was assigned to Stonewall Jackson's command. He was killed in the Battle of Gaines' Mill near Richmond on 27 June, 1862. Just before he died, he cried, "Bury me on the field, boys!"
LEROY M. WILEY - A multi-millionaire, bachelor Georgia financier about whom little is known, he began his career in Milledgeville, Georgia (then Georgia's capital--Atlanta not assuming this status until after the War). He soon moved on to more prosperous Macon, Georgia, where he and his partners ran a bank agency. An investor in various Georgia enterprises, including several banks, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina and became a director of the Bank of Charleston, that state's largest bank and one of the nation's larger banks.
Like the typical Southerner who made money in business or the professions, he also invested in plantations and slaves. Typical, too, was the fact that his business partners were often kin by blood or marriage. Prior to the War, Wiley was living in New York City at the Astor Hotel and running a business in New York which had an excellent credit rating. (Located across from New York's city hall, the Astor was the City's finest hotel.)
Leroy's brother, Dr. Jack Wiley of Macon, was married to David Clopton's sister. A brother-in-law who was also one of his business partners, was Thomas Baxter, an Athens, Georgia manufacturer. Well written letters Wiley wrote to Baxter about a trip he made to Europe show that he was an intelligent and keen observer of everything around him. One of Wiley's associates, Ker Boyce, who died before the War Between the States, was a politician-businessman who was President of the Bank of Charleston and a major stockholder in Gregg's Graniteville Mill. Wiley died, still a multimillionaire, in 1868. His niece married into the Lamar family.
THOMAS WOODROW WILSON - This son of an Ohio-born Presbyterian minister who served as a chaplain in the Confederate Army, Wilson was an uncompromising moralist and idealist and, thus, perhaps, not the best type of person to go into politics. However, he believed he had one characteristic which made him eminently qualified him for a political career, and that was his Scotch-Irish ancestry, which, he boasted, he shared in common with everybody who had ever amounted to anything in American politics. (His father was born in Ulster, and his mother's father was from Scotland.) One of many examples of the unrealistic positions his idealism led him to assume was his demand that German submarines surface--which would make them sitting ducks--before attacking surface ships.
Born in Staunton, Virginia, Wilson spent his formative years in Augusta, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina. As a child he suffered from dyslexia. As an adult he suffered from progressive cerebral vascular disease, experiencing his first stroke at age 39 while a professor at Princeton University and his last as president of the United States. Determined to become a statesman, after graduating from Princeton, he entered the Law School at the University of Virginia. Poor health forced him to return home. After studying at home, he opened a law office in Atlanta.
Failing to prosper as a lawyer, he entered Johns Hopkins University in order to prepare himself to be a teacher. After many years as a successful professor at several colleges, he became president of Princeton. Subsequently, he became governor of New Jersey and the second Democrat to become president of the United States since the Civil War. (Cleveland was the first.) The failure of the United States to become a member of the League of Nations--organized largely as a result of his efforts--and a debilitating stroke left him, in his second term, a bitter and broken man.
During his first administration, relations with Mexico were one of his major problems. By 1917, when the infamous Zimmermann telegram sent by Germany's ambassador in Washington to his counterpart in Mexico was intercepted, the United States Army had gone into Mexico with its guns blazing twice in the previous three years, and General Pershing was there again in 1917 with 12,000 troops.
The Zimmermann telegram instructed Germany's Mexican ambassador to offer to support a combined offensive against the United States by Mexico and Japan for the purpose of wresting from the United States the vast territory--Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Colorado--it had taken from Mexico over the years. This fizzled, but prior to our declaration of war with Germany, because of our selling war materials to the Allies, German agents planned and sometimes carried out sabotage operations within the United States.
At that time Japan was just beginning to achieve its version of "Manifest Destiny". A successful war with China had given it Formosa. A war with Russia had given it Korea and territory in Manchuria. Japanese resentment against the U.S. was high because they believed that the peace treaty the United States had brokered between them and the Russians had denied them some of the fruits of their victory. Also, they found humiliating limitations on Japanese immigration to the U.S. and a California law forbidding Japanese from owning property in that state.
In 1914 Mexico leased port facilities at Magdalena Bay to a Japanese fishing company. The United States Navy observed Japanese cruisers and other warships there, and, responding to reports by Arizona Indians about the presence of Japanese troops, an Army officer discovered scraps of paper covered with Japanese writing and Japanese ideographs scrawled on rocks. Like the Germans, the Japanese were arming Mexican revolutionaries and Washington objected to this.
HENRY ALEXANDER WISE - Scion of an old Virginia family orphaned as a child, Wise practiced law in Tennessee before returning to his native state in 1830, where, three years later, he was elected to the House of Representatives. Although he was originally a Jacksonian Democrat, he later became one of the founders of the Whig Party in Virginia. From 1844 to 1847, he was President Polk's minister to Brazil. From 1856 to 1860 he was governor of Virginia. Like Howell Cobb, he had many friends in the North, including New York Mayor Fernando Wood.
Wise, who had presidential ambitions, could not be counted on to take the position on an issue which would make him the most popular with Virginia voters. He opposed, for example, the Lecompton Constitution written by the pro-slavery territorial government in Kansas. Almost unanimously, the Virginia General Assembly took the opposite position, and none of Virginia's Congressional delegation supported Wise's position. (Howell Cobb and President Buchanan this Constitution.)
Although considered by some to be a fiery supporter of slavery, Wise had real doubts about the propriety of owning slaves and acted on these doubts. As a result of interviews with John Brown after his effort to arm the slaves was foiled, Wise came to admire Brown's moral courage. In his interviews with John Brown after his effort to arm the slaves was foiled, Wise came to admire Brown's moral courage. He said that Brown "is a fanatic, vain and garrulous, but firm, truthful, and intelligent." (Escorted by Robert E. Lee, Congressman Clement Vallandigham also interviewed Brown.) Brown, who had slaughtered five pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, came from a New England abolitionist family, several of whose members were insane.
Virginia's secession convention was dominated by opponents of secession until Fort Sumter was fired upon, and Virginia and other border states tried to talk Lincoln into a compromise. After Fort Sumter was fired upon and the appeal to Lincoln for compromise failed, Wise led his state from the Union and was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate Army.
FERNANDO WOOD - A flamboyant leader of questionable character of a faction of New York City's Democratic Party, Wood was mayor of the City from 1855 to 1858 and from 1861 to 1862. Seemingly a refined and
scholarly man, with his hair and mustache dyed black, he cut an elegant figure. Never, it is claimed, did he lose his temper. Despite the impressive competition for the title, he became New York's most infamous mayor. Though courtly in his behavior, many of his supporters were quite the reverse for, despite having once been a member of the nativist Know Nothing Party, after he became a Democrat his chief support came from immigrants, many of whom were Irish toughs. (In 1860, New York, half of whose citizens were foreign born, was the world's largest Irish city.)
Under Wood the City's police force became deeply involved with Tammany Hall politics. Some policemen, too, allied themselves with street gangs and other criminals. As a result, some of New York's streets were unsafe even during the day. This led the Republican- controlled state legislature to strip control over the police force from the City and form a new police force for the City. Prominent New Yorker George Templeton Strong claimed that all that this meant was that the policemen had been taken from the "King of Scoundrels" and put into the hands of other scoundrels in Albany. The threat of violence between the police force that Wood continued to maintain and the state force led to the calling in of the National Guard. Then Wood backed off.
In 1859, he wrote a letter to Governor Wise of Virginia recommending that John Brown not be hanged because there was a great deal of sympathy for him in the North and hanging him would hurt the South in the long run. During the height of the secession crisis, he suggested that the City break its ties with both the State and the Union and become an independent city. In this radical position he was hardly without support. Among those supporting the idea were Congressmen James E. Kerrigan and Daniel Sickles. United States Marshall Isaiah Rynders also supported it. (At the time they joined the Union, both the States of New York and Virginia specifically reserved the right to withdraw from it.)
Before the War he and his brother, Benjamin, had a lottery concession in Louisiana. Benjamin Wood published The New York Daily News, one of the most virulent anti-Lincoln newspapers in the North and one which is credited with helping fan the hatred of the whites who participated a huge anti-black, anti-draft riot in which a large number of people lost their lives. He accomplished this by claiming that ex-slaves would take the jobs of those drafted into the Army. The paper's editor, a former New Orleans lawyer and plantation owner, was given $25,000 by the Confederacy for printing such stories. The News also picked up "personals" from the Richmond papers that the Confederacy and its spies and agents in Canada used to communicate with each other. As Congressmen, both these brothers voted against the Thirteenth Amendment.
Before the War, most New Yorkers supported slavery, and the City was segregated. Because of their heavy investment in the South and their dependence on cotton--the nation's chief export--commercial and financial interests in New York City led in opposing the War. Various important New Yorkers counseled compromise, and newspaper editor Horace Greely--though opposed to Wood's secession proposal--originally wanted to let the South go in peace. New York's Governor also urged moderation. Undoubtedly playing a role in creating this attitude was the fact that much of New York's wealth was a product of Southern slavery and out of it operated so-called "blackbirds"-- the label attached to illegal slave importers, who operated out of New York with little hindrance because District Attorney James I. Roosevelt believed that the public no longer considered these men pirates; thus, the death penalty for their crime could not be supported.
During the War a large number of blockade runners operated out of the City. Much of this trade with the South was conducted through Matamoros, Mexico, which was being fought over during much of the War by indigenous forces and those supporting Mexico's French-backed ruler, Maximillian. During the War, Governor Milton of Florida, who opposed the export of cotton, complained that there was a co-partnership composed of merchants in New Orleans, Havana, and New York which carried on trade with the Confederacy with the knowledge of the blockading fleet. (It has been estimated that in 1864 87 percent of the ships which attempted to run it were successful, and in 1865 94 percent were. By that time, of course, New Orleans, the South's largest port, was in Federal hands.)
In sharp contrast to Boston, even some religious groups in New York supported slavery, as did some prominent church members whose pastors did not, such as Samuel F. B. Morse. It was, in short, a Copperhead city, and its politics, according to one modern researcher, fed "on the downtrodden and the corrupt, its philosophy a mixture of states' rights, appeasement, and outright support for the South." However, it did not, as was expected, suffer as a result of the War and the loss of Southern trade. Nonetheless, Lincoln failed to carry New York City both in 1860 and 1864. In 1864, the Democratic candidate for President, General George McClellan, carried the City by 73,716 to 36,687.
DAVID LEVY YULEE - One of those advocating secession in 1850, Yulee was born in St. Thomas, West Indies, as David Levy. His grandfather, who was of Portuguese extraction, reportedly had been an official in Morocco granted a Moorish title of Yulee. Driven from Morocco by a revolution, his grandfather fled with his wife, the former Miss Levy, to her native land, England. After receiving a university education, his son, David's father, removed to Puerto Rica before settling in the West Indies.
As a child, he was sent to school in Virginia, but was forced to cut short his education when his father, a religious socialist, refused him further support. Settling on one of his father's Florida plantations, he read law in a lawyer's office in St. Augustine and was admitted to the bar. One of Florida's first United States senators, he first served from 1845 to 1851. Subsequently he served from 1855 to 1861.
One of the South's earliest railroad promoters, in 1853 he incorporated the Atlantic & Gulf Railroad. To it and his plantation he devoted his attention during the War. Yulee was married to Judah Benjamin's cousin and, like Benjamin, was a non-practicing Jew of Sephardic ancestry. After the War he was imprisoned in Fort Pulaski (outside Savannah) until, upon the intervention of General Grant, he was released. He died in New York.
Copyrighted by Carole E. Scott, 1997--Do not copy without her permission.