Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Despite this mixed record, Davis retained his faith in Lee’s abilities and wanted him by his side. The president had his congressional allies introduce a bill to create the position of “Commanding General of the Armies of the Confederate States,” intending to name Lee to the post. But Davis’s critics in Congress, who blamed him for Confederate reverses, amended the bill to enable the “commanding general” to take direct control of any army in the field without authorization from the president. Davis believed that this provision would usurp his constitutional powers as commander in chief, and he vetoed the bill on March 14. A day earlier he had issued an order assigning Lee to duty in Richmond and charging him “with the conduct of military operations . . . under the direction of the President.”33

  Lee’s first task was to help Davis decide what to do about the situation in Virginia. From his desk in Richmond, Lee instructed Maj. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson to make diversionary attacks with his small army in the Shenandoah Valley to prevent the Federals from concentrating all of their troops against Richmond. During the next two months Jackson carried out these orders in spectacular fashion. Meanwhile, McClellan’s army began landing near Fort Monroe at the tip of the peninsula in Virginia formed by the James and York Rivers, seventy miles southeast of Richmond. When the Federals advanced toward the Confederate defenses held by Maj. Gen. John B. Magruder’s twelve thousand troops, Davis and Lee ordered Johnston to send part of his army from the Rappahannock to Magruder. As the Union buildup continued, they instructed him to bring his whole army to the peninsula. Johnston proceeded to do so, but after inspecting Magruder’s line at Yorktown, he recommended that the Confederates withdraw all the way back to Richmond, concentrate the Virginia forces there, and strip the Carolinas and Georgia of troops to fight the decisive battle of the war at Richmond. Winning there, they could then reoccupy the regions temporarily yielded to the enemy.

  Here was a bold suggestion for a high-risk strategy of concentration for an offensive-defensive of the kind later associated with Lee. But on this occasion Lee opposed the idea. In an all-day meeting of Davis, Lee, Johnston, and Secretary of War Randolph on April 14, Lee and Johnston discussed the matter at great length. Lee argued for making the fight at Yorktown, where the big guns at the Gloucester Narrows on the York River and the CSS Virginia on the James River would protect the army’s flanks. An old navy man, Randolph pointed out that pulling back from Yorktown would mean abandoning Norfolk with its Gosport Navy Yard, where the Virginia had been rebuilt from the captured USS Merrimack. Davis listened carefully to the arguments, took an active part in the discussion, and finally decided in Lee’s and Randolph’s favor. The Confederates would make their stand at Yorktown, where Johnston took command of 60,000 troops facing McClellan with 110,000.34

  Instead of attacking, McClellan dug in his siege artillery and prepared to pulverize the Confederate defenses. This preparation continued for several weeks while the armies skirmished but did little damage to each other. Despite having been overruled by Davis, Johnston still intended to evacuate the Yorktown line without a fight. He delayed that move until McClellan was ready to open with his heavy artillery. Johnston failed to keep Davis and Lee informed of his intention until the last minute on May 1, when he told the president that he must pull out the next night. Davis was shocked. He replied that such a sudden retreat would mean the loss of Norfolk and possibly of the Virginia and other ships under construction there. Johnston consented to wait—for one more day. On the night of May 3–4 his army stealthily left the Yorktown line and began a retreat toward Richmond. The Confederates fought a rearguard battle with the cautiously pursuing Federals at Williamsburg, and continued to a new line behind the Chickahominy River twenty miles from Richmond. Norfolk fell to the enemy, and the Virginia’s crew had to blow her up because her draft was too great to get up the James River.35

  Davis was dismayed by these developments. A congressman reported that he found the president “greatly depressed in spirits.” Davis’s niece from Mississippi was visiting the Confederate White House at the time. She wrote to her mother that “Uncle Jeff. is miserable. . . . Our reverses distressed him so much. . . . Everybody looks drooping and sinking. . . . I am ready to sink with despair.”36 Davis and several cabinet members sent their families away from Richmond for safety. The secretary of war boxed up his archives ready for shipment before the capital fell. The Treasury Department loaded its specie reserves on a special train that kept steam up for an immediate departure.37

  Davis allowed his anguish to leak into a letter to Johnston lamenting “the drooping cause of our country.” The ostensible purpose of the letter was to prod Johnston into carrying out Davis’s orders to group regiments from the same state together in brigades as a boost to morale. “Some have expressed surprise at my patience with you when orders to you were not observed,” the president told his general. Johnston recognized this rebuke for what it was, an expression of exasperation with Johnston’s conduct of the campaign. If he had received such a letter from someone who could be “held to personal accountability,” Johnston told his wife, he would have challenged him to a duel.38

  In this time of troubles, Davis turned to religion. He had been attending St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and had grown friendly with its rector, the Reverend Charles Minnigerode. Davis could not remember whether he had been baptized as a child, so he asked Minnigerode to baptize him and confirm him as a member of the church on May 6.39 One of Davis’s newspaper tormentors, the Richmond Examiner, waxed sarcastic about this event: “When we find the President standing in a corner telling his beads, and relying on a miracle to save the country, instead of mounting his horse and putting forth every power of the Government to defeat the enemy, the effect is depressing in the extreme.”40

  But Davis was in fact mounting his horse and exerting all of his energy to try to defeat the enemy. A fine horseman, Davis was in the habit of riding out in the afternoon for exercise and diversion. He used these occasions to visit army headquarters on the Chickahominy and the batteries placed at Drewry’s Bluff on the James River seven miles from Richmond to stop the Union navy. Those guns did indeed drive back Northern warships, including the Monitor, on May 15, saving Richmond from the fate of New Orleans three weeks earlier, when the city had surrendered with naval guns trained on its streets.

  But Richmond still seemed in great danger from General McClellan’s large army approaching the capital at a snail’s pace. Although Johnston chose not to reveal his plans to Davis (or Lee), the president expected him to defend the line of the Chickahominy and even to launch a counterattack if he stopped McClellan along that sluggish stream. Davis still had not lost entire faith in Johnston, despite his previous disappointments. “As on all former occasions,” he told the general on May 17, “my design is to suggest not to direct, recognizing the impossibility of any one to decide in advance and reposing confidently as well on your ability as your zeal it is my wish to leave you with the fullest powers to exercise your judgment.”41

  Unknown to Davis, Johnston had already decided to withdraw to a new position just three or four miles east of Richmond. When the president rode out the next day to visit Johnston on the Chickahominy, he was taken aback when he encountered the army before he had ridden more than a few miles. Davis confronted Johnston and asked why he had pulled back so close to the capital. The general replied that the ground was so swampy and the drinking water so bad in the Chickahominy lowlands that he had moved to better ground and a safer supply of water. Davis was unnerved. Do you intend to give up Richmond without a battle? he asked. Johnston’s reply was equivocal. The president responded with asperity. He told Johnston, according to one of Davis’s aides who was present, “that if he was not going to give battle, he would appoint someone to the command who would.”42

  Davis rode back to Richmond and summoned his cabinet and General Lee to a meeting the following day. He also asked Johnston to attend, so that everyo
ne could learn his intentions. The afternoon of the meeting, Davis wrote to his wife: “I have been waiting all day for [Johnston] to communicate his plans. . . . We are uncertain of everything except that a battle must be near at hand.”43 Johnston never showed up, but Davis went ahead with the conference, where he expressed his anxiety about the fate of Richmond. According to Postmaster General John Reagan, Lee became emotional. “Richmond must not be given up,” he declared. “It shall not be given up.” As Lee spoke, Reagan recalled, “tears ran down his cheeks. I have seen him on many occasions and at times when the very fate of the Confederacy hung in the balance, but I never saw him show equally deep emotion.”44

  The next day Davis assured a delegation from the Virginia legislature that Richmond would indeed be defended. “A thrill of joy electrifies every heart,” wrote the diary-keeping War Department clerk John B. Jones. “A smile of triumph is on every lip.”45 Johnston finally seemed to get the message. He discovered that McClellan had crossed to the southwest bank of the Chickahominy with part of his army, leaving the rest on the other side. Johnston informed Lee that he intended to cross the stream with three divisions and attack the force on the northeast bank on May 22. Davis had earlier discussed precisely such a tactical operation with Lee, so he approved Johnston’s plan. On the twenty-second the president rode out to the bluff overlooking the Chickahominy, then down to the river itself, to “see the action commence,” as he wrote to his wife. But he found nothing happening and no one to tell him why the attack had been called off. Only later did General Gustavus Smith, whose division was to lead the attack, tell Davis that a local citizen had informed him that the enemy was strongly posted behind Beaver Dam Creek, so he had decided not to attack. This was not the first time that Smith had frozen under pressure. Davis was disconsolate. “Thus ended the offensive-defensive programme,” he wrote, “from which Lee expected much, and of which I was hopeful.”46

  Almost the same scenario repeated itself exactly a week later, on May 29. Once again Johnston planned to attack McClellan’s right flank north of the Chickahominy, and once again he called it off without informing Davis. The president discovered the cancellation only after riding out to the river on another futile mission.47 Johnston had changed his mind and decided to assault the two corps south of the Chickahominy and nearest Richmond. The general later explained that he did not tell Davis of this change “because it seemed to me that to do so would be to transfer my responsibilities to his shoulders. I could not consult him without adopting the course he might advise, so that to ask his advice would have been, in my opinion, to ask him to command for me.”48

  Johnston’s peculiar notion of the correct relationship with his commander in chief meant that Davis first learned of the general’s changed plan of attack when he heard artillery firing on the afternoon of May 31. He quickly left his office, mounted his horse, and rode toward the sound of the guns. When he arrived near the village of Seven Pines (which gave its name to the battle), he saw Johnston riding away toward the front. Davis’s aides were convinced that the general left to avoid the president. The battle was going badly for the Confederates. Maj. Gen. James Longstreet’s division had taken the wrong road and blocked the advance of other divisions. The attack started late, and although it initially succeeded in routing one Union corps, reinforcements streamed across an almost flooded bridge over the Chickahominy and drove the Confederates back.

  Davis came under artillery and musket fire as he and his aides tried to rally retreating soldiers. A reporter for a Memphis newspaper described the president “sitting on his ‘battle horse’ immediately behind our line of battle. . . . I was much struck with the calm, impassive expression of his countenance and his proud bearing as he sat erect and motionless, intently gazing at the enemy. . . . Bullets whistled plentifully around, but he never bootled his eye for them.”49

  Davis issued orders and sent couriers for reinforcements, but as dusk approached it was clear that the Confederate attack had ground to a halt. At that moment, stretcher bearers passed the president’s party carrying a seriously wounded Johnston to the rear. All animosity forgotten, Davis rushed to Johnston’s side and spoke to him with genuine concern. “The old fellow bore his suffering most heroically,” Davis wrote to his wife. It was obvious that Johnston would be out of action for several months. As Davis and Lee rode together back to Richmond that night, the president told him that he was now the commander of what Lee would soon designate the Army of Northern Virginia. A new era would dawn with that army’s new name and new commander. “God will I trust give us wisdom to see and valor to execute the measures necessary to vindicate the just cause,” wrote Davis as he entered into his new command relationship with Lee.50

  3.

  WAR SO GIGANTIC

  Although Confederate armies were driven back on all fronts in the spring of 1862, some voices continued to call for an invasion of the North. Even as the War Department and Treasury Department packed archives and gold reserves for possible evacuation, the Richmond Dispatch declared that the public favored “an advance into the enemy’s territory. Will the voice of the people again be denied?” The Charleston Mercury denounced the government’s “defensive policy” and urged that “two powerful columns . . . be put in motion toward the banks of the Ohio and the Susquehanna.”1 Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia, normally insistent on retaining troops for local protection, unexpectedly offered Davis men from the state’s coastal defenses to help form an army “to liberate Tennessee, penetrate Kentucky, and menace Cincinnati. . . . Let us invade their Territory, and fight where there are plenty of provisions.” Virtually besieged in Richmond, Davis no doubt considered these entreaties delusional. But he thanked Brown for the offer, assured him that “such campaign as you suggest has long been desired,” and that “its adoption is a question of power, not of will.”2

  With a like-minded general now in command of the newly named Army of Northern Virginia, Davis could contemplate at least a limited offensive to relieve the threat to Richmond. Stonewall Jackson’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley had temporarily reduced enemy pressure from that direction. Lee proposed to reinforce Jackson for a raid into Maryland and possibly even Pennsylvania, which he hoped “would call all the enemy from our Southern coast & liberate those states.” Davis concurred, and sent three brigades toward the valley. But even with these reinforcements Jackson would not be strong enough for a real invasion. Lee decided instead to carry out a plan originally suggested by Davis to bring Jackson from the valley to combine with Lee in a strike against the Union flank and rear north of the Chickahominy—similar to Johnston’s aborted maneuvers on May 22 and 29, with the added factor of Jackson’s cooperation.3

  Brig. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart’s famous cavalry expedition that resulted in a ride completely around the Army of the Potomac (June 12–15) revealed that McClellan’s right flank was vulnerable to such an attack. To enable part of the Army of Northern Virginia to hold the line south of the Chickahominy so that the rest could take part in the flank attack, Lee ordered his troops to dig miles of trenches and build formidable earthworks. Complaining that they had enlisted to fight and not to work like slaves (in fact, actual slaves did much of this work), many soldiers and their allies in the press derisively labeled Lee the “King of Spades.”

  Davis fully backed his general. He deplored the “politicians, newspapers, and uneducated officers” who “created such a prejudice in our army against labor that it will be difficult until taught by sad experience to induce our troops to work efficiently. ” McClellan was digging his way toward Richmond, noted Davis, and Confederates must neutralize his works. “If we succeed in rendering his works useless,” Davis explained to his wife, who was in North Carolina, “I will endeavor by movements which are not without great hazard to countervail the Enemys policy” by attacking his open flank. “I have much confidence in our ability to give him a complete defeat, and then it may be possible to teach him the pains of invasion and to feed ou
r army on his territory.”4

  A skirmish south of the Chickahominy provoked by a Union reconnaissance on June 25 became, in retrospect, the first of what was subsequently named the Seven Days’ Battles. The following day Lee put in motion the operations north of the river to attack the enemy flank at Beaver Dam Creek. Once again the commander in chief rode out to observe his army in battle; once again it began to appear that there would be no battle. Lee’s plan called for Maj. Gen. A. P. Hill’s division to attack when Jackson notified Hill that he was in position on the Union flank. As the hours ticked away, the silence grew oppressive among the Confederate officers with Lee and Davis waiting for the action to begin. In late afternoon Hill’s guns finally opened up, but Lee soon learned that Jackson was nowhere to be found, and Hill had grown tired of waiting. Slowed by felled trees over the roads, faulty maps, and the fatigue of his men and himself, Jackson was miles away.

  Once Hill went in, it was too late to call off an attack that seemed headed toward bloody failure. Irritated and embarrassed, Lee noticed that Davis and an entourage that included aides, assorted politicians, and the secretaries of war and the navy had come under enemy artillery fire. Lee rode over to Davis and asked, with an edge to his voice, “Who are all this army of people, and what are they doing here?” Taken aback, Davis replied: “It is not my army, General.” “It is certainly not my army, Mr. President,” Lee responded, “and this is no place for it. . . . Any exposure of a life like yours is wrong.” Davis said meekly, “Well General, if I withdraw, perhaps they will follow me.” Suiting action to words, Davis turned his horse and moved away. As he did so, a soldier nearby was killed by an enemy shell. Davis rode only as far as a line of bushes along a stream that concealed him from Lee, then stopped, still within range of Union guns, to watch the backwash of Hill’s attack, which was repulsed with heavy loss by Federals dug in behind Beaver Dam Creek.5