Review - "The Confederate Resurgence of 1864" by William Marvel

[The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 by William Marvel (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). Hardcover, 10 maps, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,231/336. ISBN:978-0-8071-8243-7. $49.95]

During the harsh winter of 1863-64, Confederate national morale found itself standing at yet another crossroads moment between confidence and despair. For southern armies and the home front they defended, 1863 was a tough year to say the least. In the West, the costly Confederate victory at Chickamauga in September 1863 briefly revived spirits dampened by the drawn-out catastrophe of Vicksburg, but all of that shaky optimism was dashed by the end of the year following defeat at Knoxville and the utter rout of the main body of the Army of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Across the Mississippi River, federal amphibious forces ranged up and down the Texas coast with impunity, and in Arkansas a bloody repulse at Helena was followed by Union occupation of the length of the Arkansas River Valley, including the state capital at Little Rock. In the East, national elation following the unlikely triumph at Chancellorsville (though that joy was tempered by the loss of Stonewall Jackson and heavy casualties incurred overall) was followed that summer by terrible defeat and more irreplaceable losses in Pennsylvania at Gettysburg. Even though the heavily depleted Army of Northern Virginia retained its confidence in commander Robert E. Lee and stymied Gettysburg's victors for the remainder of the year, some deemed that army's 1863 losses, particularly in officers, so crippling as to seriously impair its prospects for the coming year. Bad news also extended to the North Carolina front, which was reinforced early in the year at some strategic risk. There, the manner in which the failed attack on New Bern was bungled raised serious questions over whether anything could be accomplished toward regaining cities and territory lost in the region the previous year. Amidst all that doom and gloom, everyone in the Confederacy knew that there would be no let up in pressure by the enemy. So what steeled the Confederacy's badly shaken supporters for the even greater challenges and sacrifices that 1864 would undoubtedly bring? Seeking the answer to that question, or at least a significant part of it, is the most probing theme of William Marvel's new book The Confederate Resurgence of 1864.

It is Marvel's view, strongly developed throughout this study, that the string of Confederate military victories on land and water over a roughly ten-week period from February 20 to April 30 provided such a significant boost to both the home and fighting fronts that it sustained them through the horrendous casualties and steady loss of national territory produced by the fierce fighting between the main armies in Georgia and Virginia. Perhaps more controversially, Marvel even goes so far as to say that the widespread injection of fresh optimism into flagging spirits provided by that late-winter and early-spring "resurgence" was instrumental in sustaining Confederate resistance into the following year.

Marvel sets the stage by recounting the depths to which army confidence in eventual victory had sunk by the onset of the winter of 1863-64, which was exceptionally cold in places. That increasing despair led to a widespread surge in desertion, even in areas far from the main action. Many of those who abandoned southern ranks, both individually and in groups, took advantage of President Lincoln's shrewdly conceived amnesty proposal. Of course, the Confederacy had experienced ups and downs in national prospects and morale before, but things seemed different as 1864 arrived. Hopelessness started to pervade Confederate society, currency values approached complete worthlessness, total economic collapse seemed impending, and supplies of clothing and shoes for the army were increasingly inadequate (with little to no prospect for improvement). General Sherman's February 1864 Meridian Expedition, which started at Vicksburg and drove inland into the Mississippi heartland with near impunity, only furthered the perception that Confederate defenses were now a hollow shell. The Confederate resurgence arrived just in the nick of time.

Fine overviews of the sequence of military events large and small that form the basis of Marvel's argument and analysis, with map support, are offered. Covered are the Union expedition in Florida that suffered defeat at the Battle of Olustee, the cavalry clashes between Nathan Bedford Forrest and Sooy Smith in North Mississippi, the confrontation at Rocky Face Ridge/Mill Creek Gap in North Georgia, the abortive Butler/Wistar raid on Richmond in early February (stopped at Bottom's Bridge) and accompanying diversionary operation from the Army of the Potomac, the infamous Kilpatrick/Dahlgren Raid on Richmond, the Red River Campaign and Camden Expedition, Forrest's raids on widely separated points across western Tennessee and Kentucky (especially at Union City, Paducah, and Fort Pillow), and the Confederate recapture of Plymouth, North Carolina. These Confederate successes are discussed in both isolation and in cumulative effect. Certainly other factors were involved in sustaining hope within Confederate ranks through the rest of 1864, not least of which were having Lee in the East and replacing Bragg with Johnston in the West (the latter overwhelmingly perceived as a major upgrade), but Marvel, through surveying a wide range of contemporary primary sources, builds a strong case that the string of victories listed above produced a noticeably powerful boost to Confederate national morale and determination.

Even events that were damaging on the face of it could be widely seen as having a silver lining. In Charleston harbor, the sinking of the USS Housatonic, even though it also resulted in the loss of the attacking submersible CSS Hunley, nevertheless increased hopes that further blows could be struck against the ever tightening blockade of the southern coastline. While the relatively weak response to Sherman's incursion into the heart of Mississippi and the level of destruction wrought there was disheartening to Confederate supporters, Marvel notes that the public morale effect was largely mitigated by Forrest's manhandling of Sooy Smith's cavalry wing. Not recognizing that Sherman had already turned back by the time Forrest confronted Smith and harried him into retreat, it was inaccurately assumed by a great many within the Confederate military leadership and among the general populace that stopping Smith had compelled Sherman to give up plans for further advances toward either Selma or Mobile. Likewise, to the north, the successful Confederate defensive action at Dalton was widely perceived as repulsing a major enemy advance rather than the mostly diversionary action it really was.

According to Marvel, the period under consideration in his book also had a major political component in that it represented an interval that delivered key blows to Lincoln's presidential reconstruction plans. The administration's political initiative was an utter failure in Florida and, with Steele stripping much of his occupation forces from the Arkansas River Valley in support of his Camden Expedition, the pro-Union political position in Arkansas started to deteriorate. Abject defeat in the Red River Valley also meant that reconstruction could not be carried from New Orleans into the heart of Louisiana.

As Marvel outlines, the early-1864 Confederate resurgence also contributed to a corresponding stumble in Union self-assurance. Since modern observers lack scientific opinion data for the Civil War period, fluctuations in the value of paper currency relative to gold prices are commonly used to gauge northern confidence in the war effort and economy at a given time, and Marvel points to several events during the book's ten-week interlude that corresponded with spikes in gold demand/prices and greenback depreciation.

Drawing support from a variety of primary source materials, the quality of Marvel's main argument is vigorously developed and presented to the reader in his own inimitable writing style and tone. What's most open for debate is just how much of the strength of Confederate resistance revealed throughout the rest of 1864 can be directly attributed to that early-year window of successive battlefield victories. The least convincing part of the argument is the attempt to draw an analogy between the Confederate national mood at the beginnings of years 1864 and 1865. Marvel's suggestion that the first six months of the latter witnessed a widespread and rapid collapse because it lacked anything like the previous year's boosting victories has some merit, but one can't help but feel that much more of a gulf in military and home front starting conditions existed between the respective winters of 1863-64 and 1864-65 than Marvel concedes. Regardless, one is still able to fully appreciate the thought-provoking power behind Marvel's central thesis without necessarily agreeing with all of his conclusions associated with it.

As he readily admits in his introduction, Marvel is not the first scholar to raise the matter of this dramatic early spring revival of Confederate fortunes, but he certainly is the first author to both descriptively recount the period in comprehensive fashion and analyze the full impact of its significance. The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 offers fresh thinking and a powerful new way to assess the events of that pivotal Civil War year and beyond.