A “Repentant Rebel” Pleads for Re-Union

In October 1863, in the aftermath of staggering losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Brigadier General E. W. Gantt, once commander of a secessionist regiment he raised himself, told a group of Union sympathizers in Little Rock, AK, that his former brothers-in-arms should lay down their guns because the Confederate cause was lost.  

This repentance proved singular at the time and as one might expect, there was wide speculation about his motives. To most northern Unionists he was a southerner caught up in the passions of 1860 and 1861 who had, through experience and considered reflection, come to his senses. Fellow Confederates dared not think he could be right about slavery or the rapidly diminishing chances for southern independence so they pointed to his troubled past with the Confederate hierarchy and accused him of only scurrilous motives.

Gantt’s evolution from Rebel general to Republican celebrity and Confederate pariah remains a unique path, although it began in a typical way. Like many young men on the make in the first half of the 19^th century, Gantt migrated west, from Tennessee to western Arkansas where he began his subsequent rise as a lawyer and politician. In the six years prior to secession Gantt had been the prosecutor for Hempstead County with its county seat of Washington, Arkansas. He owned a few slaves and had a prosperous legal practice. In 1860, however, his prospects were buoyed when he joined with a group of politicians challenging the prevailing machine of Arkansas Democratic politics known as “The Family.” Gantt ran for the party nomination to the House of Representatives for the 2^nd District of Arkansas and won election to the U.S. Congress. Like most of the Arkansas delegation in 1861, though, he chose not to take his seat.

Gantt encouraged, and even helped lead, his fellow Arkansans to secede. He raised a regiment of infantry, became its colonel despite his relative youth at age 32, and saw battle in Missouri and Tennessee. As Union troops advanced he found himself in command of an ad hoc brigade with a field promotion to Acting Brigadier General on Island No. 10 in the Mississippi, cut off from other Confederate support. Thanks to innovative maneuvers by Union forces in that corner of Missouri, Confederate regiments including Gantt’s were captured without exacting any toll upon the U. S. In keeping with the ideals of honor and leadership of the day, Gantt turned down a chance for personal escape and surrendered with most of his troops. He endured several months of confinement in Fort Warren prison at Boston before being exchanged in August, 1862.

When Gantt returned home, he hoped to be returned to command and he actively sought a new regiment. For reasons that remain unclear, the Confederate War Department did not see fit to give him a second regiment. Either because of the debacle at Island No. 10 or due to the political divisions with the Confederate military and government (Gantt’s patrons, such as P.G.T. Beauregard, did not enjoy favor with the Richmond leaders), he was passed over.

Then, unexpectedly, on June 3 of 1863 Gantt surrendered himself to General Ulysses S. Grant at the Union lines besieging the garrison at Vicksburg, Mississippi. He is believed to have been the highest-ranking Confederate officer to change sides during the Civil War. Union authorities whisked him to Memphis and debriefed him on CSA defenses.  Later that summer he traveled to Washington, where he met President Lincoln. By the time he returned to the Mississippi Valley, Union forces had taken control of Little Rock and the state’s Confederate government had fled to Gantt’s hometown of Washington. As part of his efforts to hasten reconciliation between confederate Arkansans and the Union, he gave his rousing speech at Little Rock on October 7, 1863.  It is not clear whether the speech persuaded any Arkansans to revert to the Union, but the speech made Gantt momentarily famous and helped earn him a full pardon for treason from President Lincoln in December, 1863.

Gantt’s speech runs 9,300 words in length. While other native southerners became renowned for advocating the Union, such as Parson Brownlow of Tennessee or Arkansas’s own Unionist Isaac Murphy, Gantt is a much rarer figure: a secessionist and Confederate combat veteran who changed his allegiance back to the Union. Early in the speech Gantt related his secessionist and Confederate credentials. He identified with his audience of seceded southerners. Then he decried the loss of freedom under the Confederate government, denounced southern leaders, and proclaimed slavery a dead institution. In fact, Gantt’s view of the history of slavery and its centrality as a cause for secession sound like they could have been written by a historian a century later. He exclaimed: “I thought that the Government was divided, and Negro slavery established forever. I erred. The Government was stronger than slavery. Re-union is certain, but not more certain than the downfall of slavery.” If that is not clear enough he put it more plainly later, “We fought for Negro slavery. We have lost.”

Gantt obviously harbored an enmity toward some state-level Confederate leaders and Jefferson Davis, exclaiming that, “After nearly two years of strife, we awaken, from a fearful baptism of blood, to the terrible truth that the shadow of the despotism which we fled from, under Mr. Lincoln, dissolves into nothingness compared to the awful reign of tyranny that we have groaned under at the hands of Jefferson Davis and his minions.” But if his plea identified enemies of the people, it also offered heroes, such as Arkansan Augustus Garland and even some CSA military figures such as Joe Johnston, both of whom has served with integrity and intelligence in Gantt’s estimation. He also pointed the way forward by endorsing Lincoln’s lenient plan for Reconstruction. Rhetorically, his oration was leavened with heroes, villains and the great mass of men caught between them.

Gantt attempted to persuade those still adhering to secession and hope in Confederate military success to give those ideas up as vain. He said this several times and in different turns of phrase throughout his address.  Neither guerilla warfare nor regular armies would save the South now, he said, for “we are whipped — fairly beaten.” To fail to see the certainty of that defeat only made things worse as “anguish and sorrow and desolation meet us wherever we turn. The longer the struggle the more of it.” At the concluding portion of the speech, he offered a straight-forward appeal: “The sooner we lay down our arms and quit this hopeless struggle, the sooner our days of prosperity will return.”

Gantt’s speech appeared in both newspapers and pamphlets. The first pamphlet appeared in print in October of 1863 and its distribution led to widespread dissemination of his message. A copy of it remains in Abraham Lincoln’s papers at the Library of Congress. Newspaper reports of the speech ranged from Arkansas, to Pennsylvania, Iowa and Wisconsin. At least 26 different newspapers, including the New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Herald and the Liberator attended to the Gantt story.  The headlines of the reprints are revealing as they indicate the media frame of his speech. The Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed it “A Repentant Rebel’s Appeal to the South.”  The New York Times called it a “Curious Document” and published extensive verbatim passages from the pamphlet. The Cleveland Daily Herald named it a “Significant Document.” The Journal American of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania dubbed it “A Cheering Sign.”

By early 1864 it is fair to say that Gantt had achieved genuine fame in the Union as the repentant secessionist. The unexpected notoriety resulting from his first address led to many speeches and to a second meeting with President Lincoln in Washington to discuss re-organizing and restoring Arkansas to the Union. In his speeches he spoke to throngs in New York, New Hampshire, and Ohio and addressed the Pennsylvania legislature. His lectures and even arrivals in cities were treated as front-page news. He used his pulpit to further Lincoln’s forgiving approach to Reconstruction, to call southerners back to the Union, to denounce Copperheads, and to support the Lincoln administration’s prosecution of the war. The 1864 election was a major contextual feature to Gantt’s speeches even though Lincoln’s Democratic opponent was months away from being nominated at the time. While Gantt used his oratorical skills, which were considerable, to support Lincoln, his own agenda was to promote a speedy end to the war and the rapid reincorporation of Arkansas and the southern states into the Union. In this regard Gantt remained on message in public from that fateful October speech through the end of the war.

Further evidence of Gantt’s change of heart came in 1865 when he became the first supervisor for the Southwest Arkansas District of the Freedmen’s Bureau, based in his hometown of Washington. As a one-time small slaveholder (he owned six slaves in 1860) Gantt now worked hard to see that former slaves received impartial treatment in economic and civil life. He constantly prodded his staff of Bureau agents to attend to their duties and to defuse volatile situations between Freedmen and area whites. At the conclusion of a year’s service to the Freedmen’s Bureau, Gantt relocated to Little Rock, where he practiced law, supported Republican politics and was elected county prosecutor in 1868. His fame (or ignominy, to many former Confederates) led him to be cautious lest he become a victim of the violence rampant during Reconstruction. Even so, he suffered a severe physical beating at the hands of political enemies on the streets of Little Rock in the early 1870s.

Gantt’s legal career reached its apogee just before his death in 1874, when he successfully fulfilled a commission from the state legislature to publish the first digest of laws for Arkansas. His completion of this daunting work of legal scholarship shows the esteem he enjoyed among Reconstruction legislators. Gantt’s Digest served the bar of Arkansas for more than a generation. 

Then and now, the question of motive persists. Why would an ardent secessionist and brother in arms such as Gantt turn traitor? At the time people presumed to understand his motives very well. To Confederates he was either “insane,” an alcoholic, or doing it for money. Still others believed disappointment in his advancement within the Confederate States Army lay at the root of his decision. T. B. Hanly, a member of the Confederate House of Representatives, expressed that view to a colleague writing “he applied for the appointment of Brig. Genl. But it was no go. His conduct now must be prompted by a feeling of resentment.”

Not all northern opinion viewed Gantt’s change of heart charitably, either. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a Democratic paper, opined that they would not accept Gantt’s opinion on his fellow Arkansans. They required instead “a better authority than the man who, after betraying his own country now betrays his traitorous companions.”

Although others ascribed single motives to Gantt’s change of sides, today’s readers might assume that his motives were mixed and that his own words reflected at least some of his reasons. There is reason to think that his stymied military career played a role. However, Gantt made a largely accurate case that the South was buckling under the strain of war, governmental weakness, and overwhelming Union advantages.  As a result, he, a once ardent secessionist, slaveholder, and Confederate officer, had changed his stance on Lincoln, the Confederacy, Secession, and abolition. It is unsurprising that former friends wanted rough justice for him. It is no less surprising that Union loyalists could be so welcoming. It gave emotional succor to the fatigued and worried Union supporters.  They hoped that in Gantt they were seeing the first in an avalanche of repentant southerners. It is enormously appealing, after all, for our enemies or opponents to come to us and say: “You were right and I was wrong.”

Sources: E. W. Gantt, "Address of Brigadier General E. W. Gantt, C.S.A.," (Little Rock, AR, 1863);Randy Finley, ""This Dreadful Whirlpool" of Civil War: Edward W. Gantt and The Quest for Distinction," in The Southern Elite and Social Change, ed. Randy Finley and Thomas A. DeBlack (Fayetteville: Univeristy of Arkansas Press, 2002; Edward W. Gantt, A Digest of the Statues of Arkansas Embracing All Laws of General and Permanent Character (Little Rock, 1874); Willard E. Wight, “The Letters of Thomas B. Hanly, Arkansas Hisotircal Quarterly (15, 1956) 161-171; Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

James Tuten