Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  This missive reached Davis while he was suffering another attack of illness, a recurrence of his old malarial fever, which no doubt sharpened the asperity of his reply. He acknowledged receiving Johnston’s letter: “Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one-sided; and its insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming.”39 That was it; no response to Johnston’s arguments, no explanation of the reason for the ranking. Johnston’s grade as a line officer in the old army was lieutenant colonel, while the three men ranked above him had been full colonels. His brigadier generalship was in a staff position, while his arm of service in the Confederacy was as a line officer, so under the terms of the law his prewar grade was below the others’. Even if Davis had bothered to explain all this to Johnston, the general would not have been satisfied. The insult to his honor, as he believed it to be, rankled him for the rest of his life. But he dropped the matter for now, and neither he nor Davis mentioned it to each other again.

  After all, Davis and Johnston and Beauregard had a war to fight against the Yankees that was more important than a war among themselves. Their relations during strategy discussions that fall were professionally correct, if not warm. These discussions took place against the backdrop of a growing clamor from the press and public for an offensive. “The idea of waiting for blows, instead of striking them, is altogether unsuited to the genius of our people,” declared the Richmond Examiner. “The aggressive policy is the truly defensive one. A column pushed forward into Ohio or Pennsylvania is worth more to us, as a defensive measure, than a whole tier of seacoast batteries from Norfolk to the Rio Grande.”40

  Davis agreed, for he too thought the best defense was a good offense. But he was also painfully aware of the shortages of arms and logistical capacity that precluded offensive operations in the fall of 1861. An anti-Davis faction centered on the Examiner and the Charleston Mercury began to form on this issue. The victory at Manassas, for which they credited Beauregard, convinced them that Confederate forces had the Yankees at their mercy and could go anywhere they liked. It was Davis, they charged, who held Beauregard back. “The continued attacks of the Mercury,” observed a South Carolina friend of the president’s, “are making something of a party against him. . . . The policy which prevents forward movements by our army does not meet the approval of this party, and they, far removed from the seat of the war and ignorant of what reasons prevent a forward movement, deem themselves far more competent to judge of what is proper to be done than those who, bearing the brunt and seeing everything, are.”41

  Davis chafed at this censure. But “I have borne reproach in silence,” he explained privately, “because to reply by an exact statement of facts would have exposed our weakness to the enemy.” His critics, Davis added, “seem to have fallen into the not uncommon mistake of supposing that I have chosen to carry on the war upon a ‘purely defensive’ system.” Nothing could be more wrong; “the advantage of selecting the time and place of attack was too apparent to have been overlooked.” But there were not enough men and guns to take the offensive. “The country has supposed our armies more numerous than they were, and our munitions of war more extensive than they have been. . . . Without military stores, without the workshops to create them, without the power to import them, necessity not choice has compelled us to occupy strong positions and everywhere to confront the enemy without reserves.”42

  On September 30, 1861, Davis traveled from Richmond to the Confederate front lines near Centreville to confer with Johnston, Beauregard, and Maj. Gen. Gustavus W. Smith, a native Kentuckian who had recently committed to the Confederacy and was given a high position in the army. The four men met for several hours on October 1 to thrash out strategic options. The generals wanted to launch an offensive across the Potomac to flank Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Union Army of the Potomac out of its position at Alexandria and fight it in Maryland. Davis was all for the strategy. He had even brought maps of the Potomac fords. The president had been funneling newly organized regiments to the army; in the absence of strength reports from Johnston, he assumed that the army was substantially larger than it had been at Manassas. He was shocked to learn that, to the contrary, because of illness the number of effective troops was only about forty thousand.

  Davis asked how many additional men would be necessary for the contemplated offensive. Another twenty thousand, the generals responded, and they must be well-trained troops, not raw recruits. Where would they come from? wondered the commander in chief as he reflected on his responsibility for the whole Confederacy, not just Virginia. From the southern Atlantic coast, from Pensacola, perhaps some from Tennessee, suggested Smith. “Can you not,” he asked, “by stripping other points to the last they will bear, and, even risking defeat at all other places, put us in a condition to move forward? Success here at this time saves everything; defeat here loses all.” No, he could not, answered Davis. He was already under fire from several governors for neglecting the defense of their states. To take more men from those states was impossible.43

  The conference broke up on an unhappy note. There would be no Confederate offensive that fall. Nor would there be a Union offensive, for McClellan estimated Confederate strength at more than twice its actual numbers. Both armies went into winter quarters. And well before they emerged in the spring, the scene of action had shifted to the southern Atlantic coast and to the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers in the West.

  2.

  WINTER OF DISCONTENT

  Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky and returned there twice to attend school at St. Thomas College and Transylvania University before going on to West Point. Like his fellow Kentucky native Abraham Lincoln, the Confederate president was acutely aware of the state’s strategic importance in the Civil War. Bordered by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, with the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers flowing through it, Kentucky was both a buffer between North and South and a route of invasion. Heir to the nationalism of Henry Clay, the state had a pro-Confederate governor in 1861, but a majority of its legislature was Unionist. Divided in the allegiances of its people, Kentucky declared its neutrality at the beginning of the war and sought to mediate between the two sides. Davis and Lincoln both decided to respect this neutrality and refrained from sending troops into the state, for it was clear that whichever side did so first would drive the state into the arms of the other.

  But pro-Confederate Kentuckians organized “state guard” regiments and Unionists formed “home guards.” They were armed with weapons smuggled into the state, whose neutrality was becoming increasingly fragile. Confederate troops in Tennessee near the Kentucky border were commanded by Davis’s longtime friend Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk, who had left the United States Army after graduating from West Point to become an Episcopal priest and eventually a bishop. He donned a uniform again when the war began. Union troops at Cairo, Illinois, across the Ohio River from Kentucky, were commanded by Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Fearing that Grant intended to seize the strategic heights overlooking the Mississippi River at Columbus, Kentucky, Polk decided to act first. He occupied Columbus on September 3, 1861.

  Leonidas Polk

  Polk’s fears were well founded and his movement was militarily sound. But it was a political blunder. Kentucky’s legislature denounced the Confederate “invaders.” The governor of Tennessee immediately wired Davis that Polk’s action would “injure our cause” in Kentucky and urged the president to order Polk to withdraw his troops. Davis had the secretary of war send a withdrawal order, but this telegram crossed with one from Polk explaining the reasons for his action. In response, Davis became indecisive. He telegraphed Polk that “the necessity must justify the action,” by which he may have meant that Polk should provide a fuller explanation before receiving presidential approval. But Polk interpreted the message itself as approval. He replied that Davis’s telegram “gives great relief. The military necessity is fully verified and justified” by Grant’
s subsequent occupation of Paducah and Smithland in Kentucky, where the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers flowed into the Ohio. Grant’s action, of course, came in response to Polk’s, and was endorsed by the Kentucky legislature. The governor of Tennessee continued to insist that the Confederate cause had suffered a setback in Kentucky, and most historians agree. But Davis came around to Polk’s position that military necessity trumped political considerations.1

  On September 15 Davis sent General Albert Sidney Johnston to take charge in Kentucky. His command embraced the Confederacy’s largest military department, stretching from eastern Kentucky all the way across the Mississippi River to include Missouri and Arkansas. Confederate troops had invaded Missouri and had won the Battles of Wilson’s Creek in August and Lexington in September. Although the official state governments of both Kentucky and Missouri remained loyal to the Union, pro-Confederate minorities established their own governments and were admitted to full representation in the Confederate Congress. But Union forces retained military and political control of most of both states during most of the war.

  Five years older than Davis, Albert Sidney Johnston had been a mentor and friend when they both attended Transylvania University and the United States Military Academy in the 1820s. Johnston had remained Davis’s idol ever since. Also a native of Kentucky, Johnston had become an adoptive Texan, fought in that republic’s war of independence in 1836, and returned to the American army when Texas entered the Union. He was commanding the Department of the Pacific when the Civil War broke out. Johnston turned down a high command in the Union army, submitted his resignation, accepted a commission as the second-ranking full general in the Confederate army, made his way across the Southwest dodging Union patrols and Apache raiders, and in September arrived at Richmond, where Davis immediately assigned him to Kentucky.

  Johnston made his headquarters at Bowling Green, from where he surveyed his huge department with despair. He had only forty thousand men to defend a line that stretched five hundred miles from the Cumberland Gap to southwest Missouri. Many of these men were raw recruits with inadequate arms and accoutrements. Johnston pleaded with Davis for reinforcements. In January 1862 he sent a staff officer to Richmond to appeal personally to Davis. The officer found the president “careworn and irritable” as he handed him a letter from Johnston suggesting that he strip other theaters to send men to Kentucky. “My God!” Davis exclaimed. “Why did General Johnston send you to me for arms and reinforcements, when he must know that I have neither. He has plenty of men in Tennessee, and they must have arms of some kind—shotguns, rifles, even pikes could be used.” By the next day Davis had calmed down, but he still instructed the officer: “Tell my friend, General Johnston, that I can do nothing for him; that he must rely on his own resources.”2

  Although Johnston was short of men, he had plenty of ingenuity. He leaked disinformation that greatly puffed up the size of his army. These rumors and reports found their way into Union lines, where they were swallowed without skepticism. The Union commander in Kentucky, Brig. Gen. William T. Sherman, expressed alarm at the reported buildup of Confederate forces. Sherman became so upset that the press began calling him insane, and he was replaced by Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell. Johnston managed gradually to increase his force and arm many of his men with better weapons than shotguns and pikes. He also received a significant reinforcement from Virginia: Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had sought transfer from an unsatisfactory position as second in command to Joseph Johnston but was willing to accept the same position under Sidney Johnston. Davis was quite happy to see Beauregard leave Virginia.

  Meanwhile, Grant had been preparing to attack Johnston’s defenses at their most vulnerable points, Forts Henry and Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers just south of the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Union naval power on the rivers gave its army a considerable advantage over the Confederates, who had virtually no navy on these waters. On February 6 the Yankee river ironclads captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River. Two “timberclad” gunboats steamed all the way up the river to the rapids at Florence, Alabama, wreaking much damage along the way. They burned the railroad bridge that connected Johnston’s two main Kentucky forces at Columbus and Bowling Green, while Grant’s army prepared to march against Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River.

  Albert Sidney Johnston

  The fall of Fort Henry shocked Davis into taking the previously rejected step of divesting the Gulf Coast of troops to reinforce Johnston. On February 8 orders went out to Maj. Gen. Braxton Bragg at Pensacola and Maj. Gen. Mansfield Lovell at New Orleans to send seven or eight thousand men to Tennessee and Kentucky.3 A few days later Davis ordered Bragg to abandon Pensacola (which the Federals then occupied) and go personally with the rest of his troops to Tennessee. He also ordered the river defense fleet of Confederate gunboats at New Orleans to go up the Mississippi River.4 These actions enabled the Federals to capture New Orleans and gain control of the lower Mississippi River two months later—precisely the consequences Davis had warned against in his earlier refusals to concentrate most Confederate forces in Virginia and Tennessee.

  None of these reinforcements would reach Sidney Johnston in time to save Fort Donelson and Nashville. In an emergency meeting at Bowling Green on February 7, Johnston, Beauregard, and their staffs canvassed their strategic options. The grandiloquent Beauregard proposed one of his fanciful schemes to concentrate all available Confederate troops to “smash” Grant’s and Buell’s armies in turn. Johnston rejected this idea. He wanted to give up Kentucky and retreat to the Nashville-Memphis line, leaving only a token force at Fort Donelson to delay Grant and concentrating the rest of the army to fight under more favorable conditions. But for some unexplained reason, Johnston changed his mind and decided to make a real stand at Fort Donelson—perhaps because its loss would lay Nashville open to the Union river navy. Instead of taking his whole force to Fort Donelson, however, he sent twelve thousand men (increasing the total garrison to seventeen thousand) and retreated with the rest to Nashville.

  The first- and second-ranking commanders at Fort Donelson—John B. Floyd and Gideon Pillow—belonged to that fraternity known as “political generals.” Floyd was a former governor of Virginia and secretary of war in the Buchanan administration; Pillow was a prominent Tennessee politician. Both Davis and Lincoln found it necessary as part of the mobilization of their polities for the war effort to appoint influential political leaders to military office. Some 30 percent of the general officers Davis named in 1861 belonged to this category.5 It was the Confederacy’s bad luck that two of them were in charge at Fort Donelson, where they faced two of the Union’s best professionals, General Ulysses S. Grant and naval Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote. After an ineffective defense, Floyd and Pillow fled the scene and left the lone Confederate professional, Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, to surrender thirteen thousand troops to Grant on February 16. Nashville fell a week later.

  A shower of recriminations fell on the heads of Johnston and Davis. The Confederate Congress appointed an investigating committee. Tennessee’s representatives and senators called for Johnston’s removal. So did a delegation from the Tennessee legislature. To the latter, Davis responded: “If Sidney Johnston is not a general, we had better give up the war, for we have no general.”6 Privately, however, Davis admitted that the criticisms “have been painful to me, and injurious to us both . . . and damaged our cause.” Attorney General Thomas Bragg noted that Davis “seems a good deal depressed—and though he holds up bravely, it is but too evident that he is greatly troubled.”7

  Johnston acknowledged in a letter to Davis that the loss of Fort Donelson “was most disastrous and almost without remedy.” He understood the reasons for the clamor against him, and implied a willingness to resign if Davis wished it. “The test of merit in my profession, with the people, is success,” he acknowledged. “It is a hard rule, but I think it right.” Davis replied with an expression of reas
surance. “My confidence in you has never wavered,” he told Johnston. “I hope the public will soon give me credit for judgment rather than continue to arraign me for obstinacy.”8 Davis showed no such magnanimity to Floyd and Pillow; he unceremoniously relieved them, and neither got another field command.9

  The loss of Kentucky and much of Tennessee was not the full extent of Confederate woes in February 1862. A Union task force of warships and army brigades attacked and carried Roanoke Island, key to control of Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds in North Carolina. From there the Federals occupied much of the state’s coastline, captured New Bern and Beaufort, and shut down all blockade running in and out of North Carolina ports except Wilmington. More than 2,500 Confederate soldiers surrendered at Roanoke Island. The son of Henry Wise, another influential political general, was killed in the battle there. North Carolinians had pleaded in vain with the Davis administration for more men and arms to defend their coast, but Secretary of War Judah Benjamin told them that he had none to send.