Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  “Our President has lost the confidence of the country” was one of the milder comments of Virginia and North Carolina newspapers. “Davis’s incapacity was lamentable,” wrote the powerful Georgia politico and political general Robert Toombs, who had been a disappointed candidate for Davis’s office a year earlier.10 But most of the blame for the North Carolina defeats fell on Benjamin, who had been for months an unpopular secretary of war. Davis and Benjamin decided that the secretary should endure in silence the censure of a congressional investigating committee rather than reveal the Confederacy’s weaknesses to the enemy by testifying to the lack of arms and men that had made it impossible to reinforce Roanoke Island. Benjamin resigned as secretary of war; Davis replaced him with Virginian George Wythe Randolph, a grandson of Thomas Jefferson and a veteran of the prewar United States Navy and of the Confederate army in 1861–62. He was a popular choice; less popular was Davis’s appointment of Benjamin as secretary of state, a post in which he became one of the president’s closest advisers and confidants.11

  In the midst of these troubles, Davis was inaugurated for a full six-year term as president of the Confederate States of America on February 22. Until then he had been provisional president, elected by the same convention that created the Confederacy and adopted its Constitution a year earlier. Under that Constitution an election for president and Congress was held in November 1861. Davis and his vice-presidential running mate, Alexander H. Stephens, had no opposition in the election; most candidates for Congress also ran unopposed. This show of unity was misleading, however, and by the time of Davis’s inauguration the seeds of an inchoate opposition were beginning to sprout as he became the target of reproach for Confederate setbacks.

  Judah P. Benjamin

  In his inaugural address, which he delivered outdoors in a pouring rain, the president took note of the altered mood of the public. “After a series of successes and victories, which covered our arms with glory, we have recently met with serious disasters,” he acknowledged. But the same was true of their forebears in the American Revolution. Southerners must “renew such sacrifices as our fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty. . . . To show ourselves worthy of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the patriots of the Revolution, we must emulate that heroic devotion which made reverses to them but the crucible in which their patriotism was refined.” Although “the tide for the moment is against us, the final result in our favor is not doubtful. . . . It was, perhaps, in the ordination of Providence that we were to be taught the value of our liberties by the price which we pay for them.”12

  Eloquent and inspiring words, but could they be matched by deeds? Davis hoped that a change from the strategy of a dispersed defense to one of concentration would accomplish that purpose. “I acknowledge the error of my attempt to defend all of the frontier, seaboard and inland,” he wrote privately. In a cabinet meeting on February 19, the president said that “the time had come for diminishing the extent of our lines—that we had not the men in the field to hold them and we must fall back.”13 Six days later Davis told Congress that “in the effort to protect by our arms the whole of the territory of the Confederate States” the government “had attempted more than it had power successfully to achieve.” He announced that “strenuous efforts have been made to throw forward reinforcements” to the main armies in Mississippi and Virginia.14

  Sidney Johnston was concentrating all of his forces at the rail junction of Corinth in northern Mississippi. There he faced a threat from Grant’s army moving up the Tennessee River and Buell’s army marching overland to join Grant in a combined thrust to capture Corinth. Polk received orders to abandon his huge fortifications at Columbus, Kentucky, and bring his men to Corinth. In Arkansas, Maj. Gen. Earl Van Dorn, who had fought and lost the Battle of Pea Ridge on March 7–8, also received orders to cross the Mississippi and join Johnston, abandoning Missouri and northern Arkansas to the enemy. Davis and Johnston intended to risk all on a counteroffensive to strike Grant at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, twenty miles from Corinth, before Buell could join him. It would be the Confederacy’s first significant cast of the dice in a strategy of the offensive-defensive.15

  After delays caused by the inexperience of the men and their officers, Johnston’s forty thousand soldiers finally attacked Grant’s thirty-five thousand on the morning of April 6 near a small log church called Shiloh. The initial Confederate assaults drove the unprepared Federals back with heavy losses to both sides. In midafternoon Johnston was hit in the leg by a bullet that severed an artery. He bled to death before his aides realized the seriousness of the wound. Beauregard took over and called a halt to the attack near dusk as Grant’s final line stiffened and reinforcements from Buell’s army began to arrive. That night Beauregard sent a telegram to Davis announcing “a complete victory driving the enemy from every position.” Davis’s face no doubt lit up when he read these words, but his shoulders sagged as he reached the concluding line announcing Johnston’s death. Nevertheless, the president sent Congress a message on April 8 informing it of a “glorious and decisive victory” and a retreating enemy.16 Unknown to Davis at that moment, however, it was the Confederates who were retreating in disarray to Corinth after Grant and Buell counterattacked on April 7.

  Davis was crushed by this news when it reached Richmond on April 10. Johnston’s death turned out to have been in vain. Davis wept privately for the loss of his friend, which he pronounced “the greatest the country could suffer from. . . . The cause could have spared a whole State better than that great soldier.”17 To the end of his life Davis believed that Beauregard had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by not pressing the attack on the evening of April 6—a conviction shared by some but not all modern historians of the battle.

  In response to Beauregard’s telegram announcing his retreat to Corinth, Davis uncharacteristically pushed the panic button. He wired the governors of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana to send all the men and arms they could spare to Beauregard “to meet the vast accumulation of the enemy before him.” The governors scraped together a few thousand troops; Joseph Brown of Georgia also offered to send a thousand pikes and knives. Davis replied: “Pikes and knives will be acceptable. Please send them.”18

  Other reinforcements also reached Beauregard at Corinth, including nearly fifteen thousand men from Arkansas with General Earl Van Dorn, who had not arrived in time for the Battle of Shiloh. Beauregard vowed to hold Corinth “to the last extremity.”19 He faced a Union force composed of troops from the three armies of Grant, Buell, and Maj. Gen. John Pope, now united under the command of Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, the senior Union officer in the Western theater. Halleck advanced at a snail’s pace during May, threatening to envelop Corinth in a siege. Outnumbered almost two to one, with thousands of his troops on the sick list, Beauregard decided to pull out before he was surrounded. He did so skillfully on May 30, and retreated fifty miles south to Tupelo. Left isolated, with its rail connections to the east now severed, Memphis surrendered on June 6 to Union gunboats that had destroyed the Confederate Mississippi River fleet that day.

  Beauregard wired Richmond that his “retreat was a most brilliant and successful one.” Davis was shocked and disgusted by this “brilliant” flight. He compared Beauregard to a man “who can only walk a log when it is near the ground.” He “has been placed too high for his mental strength, as he does not exhibit the ability manifested on smaller fields.”20 The president sent one of his aides, the son of deceased General Albert Sidney Johnston, with a series of written questions for Beauregard that signified his dissatisfaction with the general: Why did he not establish a stronger defensive position at Corinth? Why did he not attack the enemy’s communications? How much equipment did he lose in the retreat? What were his plans for future operations, “and what prospect [is there] of the recovery of the territory that has been yielded?”21

  Before h
e could receive any answers, Davis learned that Beauregard had taken a leave of absence from the army, without permission or even notification of the government. The general had been in ill health for months, and he obtained a surgeon’s certification that he needed a rest of a week or ten days at a spa near Mobile. For Davis, this behavior was the last straw. He notified Beauregard that he was relieved of command and named Braxton Bragg as his successor.22

  Beauregard got a much longer rest than he wanted. But because of the general’s popularity among segments of the press and public, Davis knew that he could not keep him on the shelf indefinitely. In September he gave Beauregard command of the defenses of Charleston, where he did an effective job of warding off Union attacks during the next year and a half. Beauregard remained bitter toward the president, however, calling him (in private) a “living specimen of gall & hatred . . . either demented or a traitor to his high trust. . . . If he were to die to-day, the whole country would rejoice at it, whereas, I believe, if the same thing were to happen to me, they would regret it.”23

  • • •

  THESE REVERSES IN THE WINTER AND SPRING OF 1862 CAME IN the midst of a crisis in army organization and recruitment. About half of all Confederate soldiers had enlisted for one year in 1861—despite Davis’s urging that Congress require three-year commitments. Their times would begin to expire in early 1862, creating the prospect that the armies would melt away just as the Yankees were advancing on all fronts. Congress tried to address this issue in December 1861 with a law offering one-year men who reenlisted a fifty-dollar bounty, a sixty-day furlough, and the opportunity to join new regiments and elect new officers if they did not like their old ones. This remedy was worse than the disease; it promised to disrupt the organization of many regiments more than expiring enlistments would have done. The various Southern states also had conflicting provisions for their militias, which created confusion when these troops were called into Confederate service. And in any case, few one-year men seemed to be reenlisting.

  By March 1862 the new secretary of war, George W. Randolph; General Robert E. Lee, who had just returned from a four-month stint commanding defenses on the southern Atlantic coast; and Davis himself had become convinced that conscription was the only feasible solution. Randolph drew up legislation for this purpose; on March 28 Davis sent Congress a special message recommending the adoption of a measure making all white male citizens eighteen to thirty-five years old eligible to be drafted for three years. Davis initially opposed a provision requiring one-year men to serve for two more years; this would be a breach of contract, he argued. But Randolph convinced the president that this requirement was a military necessity, and Davis finally came around.

  Opponents in Congress contended that conscription was a form of tyranny and coercion that Southern states had seceded to escape. But an overwhelming majority of the Senate and two-thirds of the House agreed with Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas, who warned his colleagues to “cease this child’s play. . . . The enemy are in some portions of almost every State in the Confederacy. . . . We need a large army. How are you going to get it? . . . No man has any individual rights, which come into conflict with the welfare of the country.” Davis signed the bill into law on April 16.24

  The conscription law had some loopholes that stored up troubles for its enforcement: exemptions for some occupations crucial to war production (and some that were not); a provision that allowed a drafted man to hire a substitute; and confusion about which categories of state government officials and militia officers were exempt. Many of these issues would cross Davis’s desk in the next three years and cause him numerous headaches. The first—and most persistent—of those headaches was Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia, who denounced the draft as a “dangerous usurpation by Congress of the reserved rights of the States” and said that it was “at war with all the principles for which Georgia entered into the revolution.”25

  Davis plowed through Brown’s pamphlet-length letters condemning conscription and patiently replied, also at considerable length. The president explained the constitutional power of the Confederate government to draft men into the army. The Constitution authorized the government “to raise and support armies” and “to provide for the common defence.” It also contained another clause (likewise copied from the United States Constitution) empowering Congress to make all laws “necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” No one could doubt the necessity, wrote Davis, “when our very existence is threatened by armies vastly superior in numbers. . . . Congress has exercised only a plainly granted specific power in raising its armies by conscription. I cannot share the alarm and concern about State rights which you so evidently feel, but which seem to me quite unfounded.”26

  Brown remained unconvinced and unmollified. He continued to be a thorn in Davis’s side. But Georgia also sent its full quota of troops, and perhaps more, into Confederate armies. Meanwhile, another issue raised its head and furnished fodder for a nascent opposition to the Davis administration’s “despotic” violation of civil liberties. This matter became an embarrassment for Davis. In his inaugural address on February 22, he had contrasted the Confederacy’s refusal “to impair personal liberty or the freedom of speech, of thought, or of the press” with Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and imprisonment without trial of “civil officers, peaceful citizens, and gentlewomen” in vile “Bastilles.”27 Davis overlooked the suppression of civil liberties in parts of the Confederacy, especially East Tennessee, where several hundred Unionists languished in Southern “Bastilles.” Five days after Davis’s inaugural address, Congress authorized him to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in areas that were in “danger of attack by the enemy.”28

  Davis promptly declared martial law in several places, including Richmond. Provost marshals enforced a requirement of passes for travel, banned sales of liquor, and jailed several “disloyal” citizens, including two women and John Minor Botts, a prominent Virginia Unionist and former United States congressman. At the same time, however, Davis did curb the excessive enforcement of such measures by some of his generals who commanded military departments. And unlike Lincoln, who suspended the writ on his own authority, Davis acted only when Congress authorized him to do so—for a total of seventeen months on three different occasions during the war. Nevertheless, the leading historian of civil liberties during the Civil War, Mark Neely, has found records of four thousand political prisoners in the Confederacy. The records are incomplete, and there were surely several thousand more. “Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis acted alike as commanders in chief when it came to the rights of the civilian populace,” Neely concluded. “Both showed little sincere interest in constitutional restrictions on government authority in wartime. Both were obsessed with winning the war.”29

  • • •

  FOR DAVIS THAT OBSESSION TOOK ON A SHARPER EDGE AS the Confederacy seemed to be losing the war in the West and along its coastline and rivers. Even in Virginia the outlook was dire in early 1862. “Events have cast on our arms and our hopes the gloomiest shadows,” Davis lamented to General Joseph E. Johnston in February.30 The president summoned Johnston to a strategy conference with cabinet members on February 19 and 20. For many hours they discussed the vulnerability of Johnston’s army at Centreville to a flanking movement by McClellan’s large force via the Occoquan or Rappahannock River. They agreed that Johnston should pull back to a more defensible position south of the Rappahannock. But the wretched condition of roads caused by winter rains and the chaotic state of the railroads made a quick withdrawal impossible. Davis ordered Johnston to send his large guns, camp equipage, and huge stockpiles of meat and other supplies southward as transportation became available, and to prepare to retreat with the army when he received definite orders.

  In early March, however, Johnston began a precipitate withdrawal when his scouts detected Federal activity that he thought was the beginning of McClellan’s flanking mov
ement. Without informing Richmond (he feared a leak), Johnston fell back so quickly that he was compelled to leave behind or destroy his heavy guns, ammunition, and mounds of supplies, including 750 tons of meat and other foodstuffs. In Richmond Davis heard rumors of this destruction and retreat, but as he later told the general, “I was at a loss to believe it.” When he finally heard the truth from Johnston on March 15, the president’s distress at the losses the Confederacy could ill afford was acute.31

  Joseph E. Johnston

  Davis’s confidence in Johnston had been waning for some time. As things went from bad to worse during February and March, the president decided to recall Robert E. Lee from the southern Atlantic coast to become general-in-chief of all Confederate armies.32 Davis and Lee had known each other since their days at West Point (Davis graduated one year ahead of Lee). They had worked together cordially in the early months of the war when Lee served as a military adviser to the president after the government moved to Richmond. Davis used Lee as a sort of troubleshooter, sending him in July 1861 to western Virginia to regain control of the region from Union forces, and to South Carolina in November to reorganize coastal defense. For reasons largely beyond his control, Lee had failed to accomplish much in what became West Virginia and had met with partial success along the southern Atlantic coast only by withdrawing Confederate defenses inland beyond reach of Union gunboats.