Dixie Betrayed Read Free

and you can’t understand us. . . . We have no cities—we don’t want them. We have no literature—we
     don’t need any yet. . . . As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase
     all we want.” 10
    Wigfall was a product of his generation in time and space, as were other intellectuals of the Southern cause. They were deeply
     conservative, privileged, and among the first families of their respective states. They often married each other’s cousins,
     so many became interrelated. They lived among farming or plantation lands. Many were slave owners or had slave owners in their
     families. They were wealthy, having received large inheritances and having been given significant “pocket monies,” even as
     youths. They were considerable spenders. For the middle period of his life, for example, Wigfall was solvent for only weeks
     at a time.
    The cream of Southern secessionists consisted of socially prominent aristocrats, most of whom were lawyers (like Wigfall)
     or judges. They drank and smoked cigars and gambled and fought and had affairs. They were well educated, despite spotty behavioral
     records marked with episodes of arrogance; Wigfall, for one, was described in school as “a nightmare to faculty slumbers”
     and acquired a reputation for insurgency. 11 These men were dominated by a sense of honor and slight. Over one period of five months, Wigfall was in a fistfight, two
     duels, three near-duels, and one shooting—leaving one dead and two, himself included, wounded. They felt they could get away
     with anything. They held slavery as the summum bonum, the height of morality. And they were willing to follow causes to the
     neglect of both family and fortune—the greatest cause, the one they had been indoctrinated with all their lives, being state
     rights.
    As a result the Confederacy was in trouble right out of the gate. But for a long time, only a relatively small group realized
     that. Confederate nationalism was doomed. The situation grew worse as resources dwindled and all parties pushed their conflicting
     agendas, nearly none of which could be granted. Squabbles spread all across the war front. Congress argued with the president.
     The vice president argued with the president. Governors argued with the president. Generals argued with the president. Military
     bureau chiefs in Richmond argued with generals and with the president. The press bitterly criticized the president. The Southern
     government became a mess at all levels, and with a cast of thousands of players, resolution seemed unlikely.
    And yet the Confederacy found itself wrapped in a strange paradox. For all its practical troubles, the Southern nation was
     able to create and sustain a deep passion for the
dream
of a Confederate nation. This passion for an independent South burned so brightly in the hearts and minds of Rebels that
     it outlived the protonation, in fact, and still has a hold on the descendants of Confederate soldiers—in some cases more strongly
     than it did on postwar Confederates themselves. The persistent belief that the South should have won the war grew out of this
     postwar love affair, and many Southern writers continued to fight the war with ink on paper in the decades following Appomattox.
     The myth building of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart, and the persistent suspicion of federal governments that is part
     of the human condition, gave birth to and nurtured this dream. The David versus Goliath syndrome, the American fascination
     with the underdog, the anomaly, captured the fascination of many Southerners.
    But more importantly this passion came from the influence of Confederate propagandists who, with noble cause at heart, tried
     their best to help Jefferson Davis and the young Confederate nation thwart their betrayers. It was a struggle that would turn
     ugly and play itself out both in the hallways and chambers of the Richmond government and on the