Dixie Betrayed by David J. Eicher Page B

proto-Confederacy existed; Toombs had to invent it
     piecemeal as he went along. Before long the Georgian became irritated at being the foreign minister of a nation with no foreign
     relations. It was Toombs who, when a visitor to Montgomery asked him where the State Department was, famously replied, “in
     my hat,” as he withdrew some papers from it. As springtime ebbed across the Southern landscape, Toombs increasingly turned
     his attention to military matters, becoming bored with the affairs of state.
    In addition to everything else, Toombs was a realist. Once summer approached he wrote his friend Stephens with worries over
     the coming war:
    The North is acting with wild and reckless vigour . . . They act as tho’ they believe they will be impotent after the first
     effort (which I believe is true) and seem determined to make that overwhelming and effective. . . . [Winfield] Scott has near
     eighty thousand threatening Virginia and full command of the bay, rivers, and inlets. The prospect ahead looks very gloomy.
     It will take courage and energy to avert great disaster and we have far too little of the latter for the crisis. 1
    Later he fretted to Stephens over the scant money available to the Confederacy. “Men will not see that the revolution must
     rest on the treasury,” he wrote, “without it,
it must fail.
” 2
    The treasury secretary, Christopher Gustavus Memminger, was an old South Carolina aristocrat. He was a distinguished-looking
     fellow, a well-dressed, detail-oriented man, with silvery hair that waved over his ears, a fit, erect bearing, a prominent
     nose, and small, penetrating eyes that exuded a sense of confidence and precision. Nearing his sixties, Memminger had been
     born in Nayhingen, Württemberg, in what is now southern Germany, and was brought to the United States as an orphan at age
     three. Raised in a Charleston orphanage, Memminger eventually was taken into the home of a trustee, Thomas Bennett, who adopted
     him. (Bennett later became governor of the state.) Memminger thereby was grafted into South Carolina society from complete
     anonymity. He was a hardworking, deeply religious young man. Studying law, as many upper-class young men attempted to do,
     Memminger was admitted to the bar in 1824. Well known as a leading light in his state by the time war clouds approached, Memminger
     served as director of a variety of professional companies in and around Charleston and owned a large plantation house and
     property in excess of more than $200,000. He also held titles to fifteen slaves.
    Memminger had spent a good portion of his youth admiring the Federal Union, but his support for a central government slowly
     dissipated. By the time of John Brown’s raid into Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 (which scared the daylights out of slave
     owners as they imagined a mass uprising of ax-wielding former servants), Memminger had solidified himself with the secessionists.
     As a leading attorney and one of the wealthiest men in Charleston, he was selected to go to the Montgomery convention, where
     he wasted no time divining thoughts on the proto-Confederacy. Memminger had a treatise printed up, “Plan of a Provisional
     Government for the Southern Confederacy,” and, like Benjamin, stood out as calm and intellectual amid the hyperemotion.
    Davis’s appointment of Memminger as secretary of the treasury had been a little startling, as the two were not known to each
     other. The original plan, according to Mary Boykin Chesnut, was that Davis wanted to make the politician Robert W. Barnwell
     secretary of state and Toombs secretary of the treasury. Barnwell refused, and so the plan was altered, bringing the dark
     horse Memminger in as a second choice, as recommended by various members of the South Carolina delegation.
    The choice to head the Navy Department was also made on political grounds. A significant factor in the selection of Stephen
     Russell Mallory as secretary of the navy was his