The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The night they drove Old Dixie down. It took several nights, actually, as Lyman Resnick accompanied Jefferson Davis on his flight from Richmond and the clutches of General Grant's army. General Lee may have surrendered at Appomattox, but President Davis remained defiant, if delusional, that the struggle could yet be maintained against the Yankee horde. Meanwhile, President Lincoln rode a nag into the Capital of the Confederacy after its capture and was hailed as a Messiah by the liberated slaves.

XXXI

Lyman "Haw Haw" Resnick was attending Sunday service at the St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, Capital of the Confederacy, when the service was interrupted by an officer in grey. President Jefferson Davis was sitting in his customary pew when the minister had finished quoting the passage:

My goodness, and my fortress, my high tower, and my deliver; my shield, and he in whom I trust, who subdueth my people under me. (Psalms 144:2)

Amen.

Jefferson Davis read a message from General Lee. I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight, it read. The officer looked deeply anxious. Your Excellency, we must leave now, he said. The Yankees have broken through. The fall of the city is imminent! There were gasps across the church, which was filled with the Virginian elite. It was true. After nine months of incessant trench warfare, General Grant's army had broken through and was rolling up the Confederate lines towards the Capital.

Lyman Resnick had a keen sense he was witnessing a disastrous moment in history. He had been a war correspondent for the better part of the war for the Richmond Enquirer. He immediately withdrew his notepad and received permission to accompany President Davis as the government fled the Capital.

President Davis rushed to his office, sending couriers across the city to gather the Cabinet. This was difficult on a Sunday. They were to gather the archives and burn what they could not take. The government treasury of a half million in gold nuggets, silver bars and Mexican specie was to be crated for the journey. The government was leaving at eight o' clock aboard the Danville train. Anyone not aboard by that time was being left behind. Mrs. Davis had already been sent ahead to Charlotte. The President had pressed a pistol into his wife Varina's hand and taught her how to load and fire it. Then he hugged his son Jeff and daughter Maggie. It was a tearful moment of parting.

General Lee's army was in full retreat. Withdrawing Confederate troops marched through the capital burning warehouses and stores in its wake. The fires spread. Civilians were streaming in mournful droves across the James River bridges. Others remained and looted the stores searching for bread. In a final flight of fantasy, the maddened elite who remained held 'starvation balls' with rapturous music and dishes mockingly plated with cotton. Meanwhile the horizon strobed ominously in the fading light, and the boom of closing gunfire shook the plaster and rattled the windows. Soldiers from General Spoons Butler's command were fast approaching.

When President Lincoln rode his horse into the city the next morning behind his victorious army, it had been gutted by fire and was spinning long plumes of smoke into the April sky. He was embarrassed when he was praised by a throng of liberated slaves, who lifted their hands to touch the Messiah. When he entered the White House of the Confederacy, he stood out on the balcony and requested a band play Dixie, remarking how he always liked the tune. Mr. Lincoln seemed pensive and starry-eyed, as though he had accomplished the great purpose of his lifetime.

General Grant did not give up the hunt now that he had the fox on the run. General Lee's disheveled army was streaming west along the roads towards Danville chased by 150,000 federal soldiers. Once the Army of Northern Virginia could link up with the government they would continue south and combine with the Army of Tennessee, which was then in North Carolina. President Davis hoped they could carry the fight into the mountains where they could fight a guerilla war for years. This was not to be. General Grant had cut off Lee's retreat by the most strenuous exertions of marching. General Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia had laid down their arms at Appomattox.

Lyman Resnick was amazed and inspired to find Jefferson Davis as defiant as ever despite the most dire circumstances. He did not contemplate surrender in the least. Here was a man who embodied the Cause to its dying breath. President Davis met with Generals Joe Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard, who still had the Army of Tennessee near Raleigh, North Carolina. The situation did not look good. They had at most 25,000 men under arms to fight 350,000 Yankees under Generals Grant and Sherman. Mobile had just fallen. General Wilson was slashing his way across Alabama towards Columbus, Georgia, which was contemplated as the next Capital of the Confederacy.

Without the slightest hint of despondency, the President said they would fight on. They would prevail. Deserters will rally yet to the Cause and swell their numbers with patriots. The generals thought the President was utterly mad. They looked at each other, unsure of how to approach the deluded. General Johnston said tactfully to the President.

Your Excellency, I must represent that under such circumstances it would be the greatest of human crimes for us to attempt to continue the war.

Lyman Resnick, who was present, sympathized with the President but consented within himself that the Cause was indeed lost. The government continued south by horse, the Yankee cavalry having cut the railroads athwart their path. They made their way under a somber rain and through sucking mud. The wagons of the Confederate Treasury were flanked by stooped horsemen in oilcloth capes carrying carbines across their saddles. They were commanded by General Basil Duke, a distant cousin of Resnick. Lyman and most of the other civilians in the party slept in the wagons and boxcars and bundled nervously around fires, uncertain about their future. There were reports of Yankees everywhere. Then more bad news arrived.

First it was the news that President Lincoln had taken a bullet to the back of his head. President Davis thought this boded ill for the Southern people who may find the Yankees vengeful. Then came the news that General Johnston had surrendered the Army of Tennessee at Durham Station, North Carolina. There was not a field army left in the whole Confederacy now. Lyman Resnick chose to remain with the President, documenting this historical moment to its mournful finale. Jefferson Davis intended to continue his trek into exile. He had hoped to make it across the Mississippi, and thence into Mexico, which everyone knew was unlikely.

Renick was surprised when they entered villages and were greeted by citizens tossing flowers and cheering their defiant President. So it happened that none of these villages had been put to the torch by General Sherman. But the President remained magnanimous. He was all that was left of Old Dixie, and he maintained his poise before the public to cheer their spirits. Buoyed by this public display of patriotism, the President waxed again about gathering the fruits of further resistance. He said three thousand brave men were enough for a nucleus around which the whole people will rally. General Duke was speechless. He said his men would not fire another shot but to protect the President himself in his flight, but not to continue hostilities.

President Davis turned pale. Some time passed in awkward silence before he said all indeed is lost. There was a rampant desertion in the ranks of his escort, and there was concern over deserters attempting to loot the Treasury. So they paid the soldiers that remained and scattered the remaining Treasury funds into the countryside. The government of the Confederacy was henceforth disbanded. President Davis took an escort of ten men. Accompanied by Resnick, the President was reunited with his wife Varina and his children. It was a most heartfelt reunion.

It was cut short, however, by a patrol of federal cavalry who discovered and assailed the party. As President Davis fled into the woods he was threatened by a Yankee who drew his carbine upon him. His wife Varina threw her cloak and arms around her beloved husband.

Shoot me if you wish, she cried!

The Yankee pursed his lips and squinted down his sights.

I wouldn't mind a bit, the brute said.

They had the fugitive Jefferson Davis at last! Word had got around that the President was captured in woman's clothing, which Lyman Resnick vehemently denied was the truth. The Republican press lampooned Davis as effeminate and cowering. Resnick long resented these cruel accusations the rest of his life. What he sensed was that Old Dixie had forever receded into an immutable past. He witnessed its final moment when its last champion was captured and clasped in chains, resigned in the final defeat. In witnessing the admirable defiance of Jefferson Davis, Lyman Resnick was inspired in his later years to peddle his Lost Cause that would be the ideological cornerstone of Limestone County's Jim Crowe.

So the Yankees may have driven Old Dixie down, but the South, Lyman Resnick would write, will rise again!

XXX

One of the great rivalries of the Nickajack was that between Lyman "Haw Haw" Resnick, editor of the Limestone Democrat, and the improbably named Wilbur "Whip" Masters, editor of the Limestone Whig.

 
Lyman Resnick had been a war correspondent with the Richmond Enquirer. He had been there at the end when they drove old Dixie down, and he used his column to pen out weekly hagiographies of Confederate heroes and missives about the Cause. He was incredibly handsome, a real patrician of judicious manners. The ladies gossiped favorably about his relations to the Dukes of North Carolina, and his dry, witty sarcasms. The Republicans chided him as "Haw Haw" for his imperious snigger. There was great frustration by Bourbon George over what he considered Resnick's drolling style. He wanted an attack dog on his side. Dr. Licinius Prentiss, however, fawned over him, and the only time he would be seen to chuckle is in reading Resnick insult his rival in the most clever and scintillating manner. Dr. Prentiss would keep the best clippings in a scrapbook and touch them unnaturally.

 
Wilbur "Whip" Masters, on the other hand, was an outright carpetbagging muckraker. An abolitionist from Greenwich Village, New York, he wore a silk bowtie and ruffled cuffs below a velvet stovepipe hat. Compared to the intellectual and circumspect style of Haw Haw Resnick, Whip Masters was profane, vulgar and bombastic. He loved to whip up furor and indignation among the Republican constituency he held in thrall with the most outrageous claims. A peddler of sinister conspiracies, he would lambaste the Democrats as racists and traitors to America who planned to take away guns and usurp power over the state government.

 
Knowing most of his readership couldn't even read, he told them nonetheless how it was. He would slant news from a clapboard podium in Strangetown, accepting cash in exchange for adverting plugs on stuff like snake oil and other quackery. But Whip Masters was not stupid. He was a graduate of Hillsdale College and read Schopenhauer and Marx. He had written for The Nation. He had a very careful understanding of the power of oratory, something not seen among many journalists.

 
Barry Hogan, Chairman of the Limestone County Republican Party, was grateful to have such an attack dog on his side. Barry knew he could round up the black vote with the aide of Maw Possum. What he needed was buy in from skeptical white voters. Whip Masters had enormous influence among the Whig yeomanry who were resentful of the Greeks, despite his queer Yankee ways. He was also wildly popular among the poor white trash, who loved his lewd and blustering style. Most Democrats were so disgusted with the man that they wondered why someone hadn't shot the sunnabitch.

 
At length someone did. It was just a flesh wound, and the would-be assassin was killed in a shootout with Sheriff Royal Bill at a farm near Pettusville. He bore the ring of Adelphon Kuklos and was traced to the Pulaski Klan. When he returned to the podium, Whip Masters was more irascible than ever, accusing the Democrats of trying to silence the voice of the free people of Strangetown. He successfully stumped for the election of James Thomas Rapier, who was called "Jimmy Dickel" for his love of drinking and throwing dice in his youth.

 
When James Thomas Rapier became the first negro elected to the United States Congress for the Nickajack, Whip Masters was insufferable. He invited the Republican Congressman to speak at his podium while Barry Hogan passed out sweets and liquor. Crowds would stretch all across the boardwalks that lined the creekside of the Strangetown while Haw Haw Resnick would sneer and rebut from his office on Washington Street. He would never dare to step down into Strangetown.

Haw Haw Resnick approached what he perceived as the racial and Christian paradox of black suffrage with the basic truism that the negro was unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom. It was a seductive premise to embrace for former Confederates who wished to avoid charges of sedition or treason after having so recently been enfranchised again. And so Haw Haw wrote lengthy epistles cementing this premise to the original tenets of the old Cause to create a new post-war ideolog. He called it the Lost Cause. It was genius. For a war that evolved into the great crusade of liberation from human bondage, the Lost Cause rebranded secession as a heroic act to preserve self-determination and a paternalistic order of the human race. It was a compelling argument to white veterans who lost everything, even for some of the whites who lived among the blacks in Strangetown.

 
And so six o' clock would come around in Athens, and the Democrat's evening post would hit the stands with Haw Haw Resnick's latest encyclical while Whip Masters would straighten his bowtie, clear his throat, and open his mouth in gesticulating philippic behind his podium in Strangetown. It was the daily battle for the mind soul of Limestone County.