Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  But from the moment he heard about the fall of Vicksburg, Davis understood full well its meaning. On July 14 he portrayed himself “in the depth of the gloom in which the disasters on the Missi River have shrouded our cause.” He craved to know whether the calamity had resulted from “mismanagement, or it may have been that [victory] was unattainable.” He was convinced that he had done all possible to give his commanders on the scene the means to defeat Grant. In one sense, he was right. He had done all he could, short of voluntarily giving up Tennessee and the central South along with the Trans-Mississippi. From his viewpoint, the latter course would mean suicide for his country. And that action he neither could nor would take.61

  But then he had personally given Pemberton and Johnston their commands. They did not do well for him, though each performed in character. Never having previously directed an active campaign, Pemberton, inexperienced and of limited ability, contrasted strongly with his formidable opponent. Davis, impressed with the heroism of the Confederates withstanding Grant’s siege, always emphasized Pemberton’s bravery. Pemberton was undoubtedly brave, but bravery alone never won a battle. Exculpating Pemberton and himself left Johnston as the villain. There was certainly much responsibility for the official commanding general to absorb. He had done practically nothing with what he had, even after admitting he confronted a grave crisis. The supremely cautious and self-protective Johnston proved once again that he was no Lee. Davis wanted a court of inquiry, which he believed would indict Johnston’s performance. One was called, but it never met. For the beleaguered Confederates, the press of war did not permit such luxuries.62

  There were also problems equally as fundamental as personal traits. No one really perceived what Grant was doing. Johnston had the best sense, but would never act. Pemberton was clueless and Davis held tenaciously to the idea of Johnston as malefactor, never recognizing or admitting that Grant had no supply lines to cut. Numbers also posed a basic difficulty. Grant initially crossed the Mississippi with only 23,000 men, but his strength quickly went up to 40,000, and by July he had 70,000 investing Vicksburg. Pemberton’s force numbered but 31,000, and Johnston reinforced never had more than 25,000, discounting the garrison at Port Hudson. Neither Smith nor Bragg could ever furnish sufficient troops to equalize the two sides in Mississippi. Used together under vigorous, imaginative leadership, Pemberton’s and Johnston’s forces might not have been able to defeat Grant, but they could have given him a contest. No such Confederate generalship was available in Mississippi in May and June of 1863.63

  Even as he fought despair generated by Vicksburg, Davis focused on public opinion in his state. Though aware the loss of Vicksburg could sap morale, he prayed for the reverse—that the heel of the invader would engender a renewed surge of spirit and resistance. He would not waver. “In proportion as our difficulties increase,” he declared, “so must we all cling together, judge charitably of each other, and strive to bear, and forbear, however great may be the sacrifice, and bitter the trial.” In his bleakness, he became almost fatalistic: “it is not for man to command success, he should strive to deserve it, and leave the rest to Him who governs all things, and disposes for the best, though to our short vision the Justice may not be visible.”64

  Confederate battlefield reverses in Pennsylvania and Mississippi were matched by rebuffs on the diplomatic front, making for a barren summer. In early June when prospects seemed much brighter, Vice President Alexander Stephens, from his home in Crawfordville, Georgia, wrote the president suggesting the time might be right for peace overtures to the Lincoln government. Stephens was especially concerned about the breakdown in exchanging prisoners of war caused in part by the Confederate reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation. He worried that captives faced increasingly barbaric treatment. Stephens proposed that he undertake a mission to Washington to discuss prisoner policy, with the “hope that indirectly I could now turn attention to a general adjustment upon such basis as might ultimately be acceptable to both parties,” and end the war. Stephens made clear that he “entertain[ed] but one idea of the basis of final settlement or adjustment; that is, the recognition of the sovereignty of the States and the right of each in its sovereign capacity to determine its own destiny.” Thus, the states that had chosen to enter the Confederacy could remain there. At this point Stephens was not scheming to undo Jefferson Davis’s great cause.65

  At about the same time, Davis heard from General Lee on the peace issue. Lee hoped the Confederacy, particularly through his offensive, could encourage division in the North, emboldening those who favored peace, even if with reunion. He did not advocate reunion, however. Instead, he envisioned it as a possible negotiating ploy; specific terms, he said, could wait for an actual peace proposal.66

  President Davis responded positively, bringing Stephens to Richmond and discussing “very fully” with him the administration’s policy. Davis also brought the enterprise before the cabinet, which provided its assent. President and vice president agreed on the substance of their proposition, but not on the means of delivering it. Davis wanted Stephens to join Lee and arrive in the North with the might of a successful army at hand. Stephens envisioned a purely diplomatic approach. He got his way, for the advent of wet weather made road travel difficult.

  On July 3, Stephens took a ship for the trip down the James River to the Union lines at Norfolk, and thence, he anticipated, up the Chesapeake and the Potomac to Washington. He carried formal instructions from President Davis authorizing him to negotiate prisoner exchanges and other procedures. Whether he had any informal powers to discuss a cease-fire or peace negotiations is not known. His ship made contact with a vessel of the Union navy on the fourth; Stephens communicated his mission and requested safe passage. This message reached Washington along with the news from Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Lincoln curtly refused. Stephens could only return to Richmond.67

  Across the Atlantic, Confederate fortunes fared no better. Repeated attempts to get Britain to reconsider its policy on intervention or recognition failed. Davis finally concluded that maintaining a diplomatic mission in the country was not only futile but embarrassing. At the beginning of August, he directed James Mason to leave London, breaking off efforts to establish official relations with Britain. The rejected envoy retreated across the English Channel to Paris. Revealing his unhappiness with the British, Davis two months later agreed with Benjamin on the necessity of expelling the remaining British consular agents in the Confederacy. The stated cause was their interference with Confederate sovereignty by advising soldiers who claimed British citizenship to disregard Confederate laws. At the end of the year in his message to Congress, Davis condemned Britain’s so-called neutrality, which he asserted really helped the United States and injured the Confederate States. But having done so, he admitted, “we are without adequate remedy against the injustice under which we suffer.”68

  In this season of debilitating illness and setbacks, both domestic and foreign, President Davis in mid-August sat for his only portrait painted during the war. In contrast to vivid word pictures graphically describing a worn but still vital man, the Baltimore artist John R. Robertson did not present realistically the individual before him. In Robertson’s painting one sees a man composed by the artist. Davis’s eyes have no flash and look more serene than saddened. Showing but flecks of gray, his hair and chin whiskers basically retain their color. His cheeks are not at all sunken nor his brow pleated with care. The broad brow and sensitive mouth are those of a noble and idealized leader.69

  Throughout these torturous months President Davis faced political opposition. Shrill invective continued to spew from his bitterest personal enemies. Always at the forefront, Robert Barnwell Rhett ranted about a “silly and disastrous” president who had brought the country to the verge of ruin. His fellow South Carolinian James H. Hammond condemned Davis as “a Marplot always.” Matching this scathing language, Robert Toombs damned the chief executive as a “stupid, malignant wretch.” The vice president’s broth
er Linton imagined action, fantasizing that “perhaps” only a Brutus could save the Confederacy from the “little, conceited, dogged knave and fool.”70

  This band of viciously hostile critics remained small. They never managed to stir up formidable personal animosity toward the president, a failure that angered them. Across the Confederacy, Davis’s dominant image was that of a patriot striving to secure the great goal—independence. Legislatures, patriotic groups, and military units all adopted resolutions of support, which buoyed him. After traveling through much of the South, an English visitor concluded, “People speak of any misfortune happening to [the president] as an irreparable evil too dreadful to contemplate.”71

  Jefferson Davis, 1863 (painting by John Robertson).

  Museum of the Confederacy (photo credit i13.1)

  While Davis escaped widespread personal hostility, however, considerable opposition was building to components of his war policy. Hostility to conscription lay at the heart of this anti-administration sentiment. From the initial law enacted in the spring of 1862, some defined enforced service as despotism, a perception that intensified with the new statute passed the following fall. This act raised the upper age limit of eligibility to forty-five but, most important, added a controversial new exemption, one white man on every plantation with twenty or more slaves. This feature, coupled with the substitution provision retained from the original bill, led to cries of a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.

  Yet what became known as the Twenty Negro Law had another side. Powerful economic and social forces demanded that exemption. Slavery was about the control of a race whites considered inferior. With so many white males from farms and plantations in uniform, the issue of regulation in the countryside became acute. Compounding the problem was the sexual dimension of the southern social ethic, which dictated that white men must protect white women from supposedly predatory black men. But in many regions of the Confederacy, white women had to deal directly with black males, without the presence of white male authority. Moreover, slaves provided the labor critical for the production of foodstuffs essential for the war effort. Without white men to oversee and guarantee that work, food production could suffer. War had not changed the social and economic realities of slavery, only exacerbated them.

  Although Jefferson Davis was certainly aware of the complexities arising from slavery, he had them repeatedly accented. Governor John Milton of Florida did not mince words when he asserted that without the exemption for overseers “the result will probably be insubordination and insurrection.” A South Carolina merchant wrote the president that agricultural production in his area could not be maintained without the exception. Weighing both social and economic considerations, Howell Cobb informed Davis that altering the provision “will be attended with the most serious injury.” “The negroes have thus far generally behaved pretty well,” judged an old Mississippi associate, “but now that the men are all gone it is very doubtful how long they will continue in a state of subordination.” “If all the efficient white men are taken away,” this friend foreboded, “our whole system of slave labor will fail us and general want will come upon the country—and possibly general massacre of women and children.”72

  At the same time, news detailing the deleterious impact of the Twenty Negro Law reached Davis’s desk. As early as December 1862, a close political ally, a Confederate senator from Mississippi, stated to the president, “never did a law meet with more universal odium.” He described its effect upon the poor as “calamitous.” A Georgian called the provision a “poison [that] is being infused in the minds of the poor, and is being carried to the army by the poor conscripts,” where “insubordination may result.” Davis was also informed that “demagogues” used this specific exemption to urge people “to believe that it is a war for the defence of the institution of slavery, an institution in which they have no personal interest.…”73

  President Davis confronted a terrible dilemma, aware that both views contained fundamental truth. He knew that white authority in the countryside was an absolute necessity, but as a veteran of antebellum Mississippi politics he also understood the political cost of even seeming to favor the rich. He had always preached the Confederate gospel in which he deeply believed—the cause meant a mighty battle for liberty for all whites, never a crusade for slaveholders. Yet it was simply impossible to maintain social control and agricultural production and simultaneously satisfy cries of class favoritism. Davis could only hold course, leaving many unhappy, from those who desired more overseers exempted to those who wanted none.74

  The practice of substitution also fomented divisiveness and class resentment among Confederates. Davis’s correspondents catalogued the negative consequences of wealthier citizens hiring substitutes while poorer men could not take advantage of that alternative to service: “It is shocking and shameful to see the crowds of young men—below 40—aye, even below 30—who are lounging about the country.” Joseph Davis called on his brother to have substitution as well as exemption repealed. By 1863, two sides really did not exist on this issue. The president admitted that “the measure of substitution has done much harm and has been prolific of crime.” Yet he wishfully declared that new regulations issued by the War Department eliminated the worst abuses. Outcries continued until, at the beginning of its next session in December, Congress, with presidential support, abolished substitution and also made the men who had purchased proxies liable for conscription.75

  By the second half of 1863 the course of the war had added two serious liabilities to the Confederate war effort: desertion and hunger. Both derived from the same cause. The ferocity of the war and the deepening Union penetration into Confederate territory wreaked havoc on the home front, disrupting traditional social organization as well as normal production and distribution patterns. Parents and wives left behind as sons and fathers went off to fight could no longer protect their homes and provide for their families. Confederate soldiers had gone to war to protect liberty, and to defend home and family. Yet with home and family often undefended and uncared for while facing social disorganization, privation, and advancing Federals, many soldiers rethought their primary duty. Desertion afflicted every army, including Lee’s, and the number who simply walked away kept increasing. Some returned to the colors; others did not. This redefining of patriotism presented a growing problem to Confederate authorities, who watched their armies lose men while their enemy became stronger and stronger.

  The desertion question was well known to Davis. All his commanders talked about it, and he worried about filling the ranks in his armies. But he also understood the primary motive behind the soldiers’ decision to leave their posts. He personally read letters detailing the need: citizens petitioned for the discharge of a native son because the county no longer had a competent miller; a father, with three sons in the army, asked for one to be discharged because illness made it impossible to run his farm; a mother needed her son to come home and manage the family farm; a woman “out of Employment … very nearly out of bread, out of spirits” wanted to draw her boy’s pay, a private now a prisoner of war. Even Joseph wrote requesting the discharge of the son of a friend, who had already lost two in the war, and was now too sick to run his plantation. Davis was not impervious to these pleas, which were amplified when he examined files of men sentenced to death for desertion. A cabinet member related the case of a soldier who left his unit upon being told the enemy had driven his wife and children from their home. All were sick and destitute, and one child had already died. This husband and father departed without permission, though he did return, whereupon a court-martial convicted him of desertion. Upon reading this record, Davis said that under similar circumstances he would have done precisely as this soldier did. The president set aside the sentence and ordered the man restored to the ranks.76

  Understanding and empathy did not fill battle lines, however. In August, Davis issued a proclamation promising “amnesty and pardon” to all who returned to “their pro
per posts of duty” within twenty days. Although he included several reasons why men might have gone absent without leave, he excluded any wish “to escape from the sacrifices required by patriotism.” In contrast, he praised the “courage and fortitude” demonstrated by Confederates in more than two years of frightful combat. In his words, the terrible war had become even more monstrous because of the enemy “design to incite servile insurrection and light the fires of incendiarism wherever they can reach your homes.…” The Federals took that barbarous route because “of their inability to prevail by legitimate warfare.…” “Fellow-citizens,” Davis cried, “no alternative is left you but victory or subjugation, slavery, and the utter ruin of yourselves, your families, and your country.” “The victory is within your reach,” he exclaimed. All that was required to ensure Confederate success was for those “called to the field by every motive that can move the human heart” to join their comrades now facing the foe. Before closing he focused on a critical group, calling upon his “countrywomen, the wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters of the Confederacy” to employ “their all-powerful influence … and take care that none who owe service in the field shall be sheltered at home from the disgrace of having deserted their duty to their families, to their country, and to their God.” Davis’s appeal pointed directly to the core of his problem: thousands of Confederate soldiers were placing their families first.77

  By 1863 many Confederate civilians experienced real want. The combination of runaway inflation pushing prices to astronomical levels—early in 1863, seven dollars were required to buy what one dollar had bought in 1861, for the war inflation was stratospheric—and the breakdown of the transportation system caused serious food shortages, especially in urban areas where people had to buy basic foodstuffs. This deplorable situation led to riots in several cities, notably Richmond in April 1863. In the capital city, overcrowding meant even greater demand for shrinking supplies. Led by women from poorer neighborhoods, a crowd of around 1,000 gathered, marched to Capitol Square and the Governor’s Mansion, then moved into the business district, smashing windows and doors and grabbing what they could. A full-scale riot was underway. The mayor, the governor, and the president all appeared and strove to quell the mob. Although accounts differ on which official took the lead, the evidence overwhelmingly points to the governor, who ultimately threatened to have the Public Guard fire upon the rioters unless they disbanded. Davis is recorded as addressing the crowd, or more likely part of it, in a quiet, moving tone that was not threatening. Before blood was shed, the rioters dispersed. Disaster was averted, but the Richmond Bread Riot underscored the plight of many impoverished Confederates.78