Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Varina Davis

  On his way to the Confederate capital, Davis gave twenty-five whistle-stop speeches. While he publicly expressed hopes that his new government would remain at peace with the United States, he told Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina that he believed “a peaceful solution of our difficulties was not to be anticipated, and therefore my thoughts have been directed to the manner of rendering force effective.”2 One such means was to threaten the North with invasion if it dared to make war on the Confederacy. “There will be no war in our territory,” he told a cheering crowd in Jackson, Mississippi, on February 12. “It will be carried into the enemy’s territory.” At Stevenson, Alabama, two days later, Davis vowed to extend war “where food for the sword and torch await the armies. . . . Grass will grow in the northern cities where pavements have been worn off by the tread of commerce.”3 When he arrived at the railroad station in Montgomery on February 16, he pledged to the waiting crowd that if the North tried to coerce the Confederate states back into the Union, the Confederates would make the Northerners “smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.” More soberly, in his brief inaugural address on February 18, Davis referred five times to the possibility of war and the need to create an army and a navy to meet the challenge. If “passion or lust for dominion” should cause the United States to wage war on the Confederacy, “we must prepare to meet the emergency and maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position which we have assumed among the nations of the earth.”4

  Davis and the convention delegates, who reconstituted themselves as a provisional Congress, suited action to words. On February 26 the new president signed a law creating the infrastructure of a Confederate army: Ordnance, Quartermaster, Medical, and other staff departments modeled on those of the regular United States Army, with which Davis was familiar from his years as secretary of war. Subsequent legislation provided for the enlistment of volunteers to serve one year in the provisional army. They were to be organized into regiments by states, with company and sometimes regimental officers elected by the men and appointed by governors. Brigadier generals would be appointed by the president. Under this legislation a small army and even a navy began to take shape.

  In this process Davis played a hands-on role, with every aspect of military organization passing across his desk and receiving his approval or disapproval. At this stage of his tenure as commander in chief, such micromanagement was a virtue because the Confederacy was inventing itself from scratch and Davis knew more about organizing and administering an army than any other Southerner. It was also a necessity because his initial choice as secretary of war, Leroy P. Walker of Alabama, was a poor administrator and was soon overwhelmed by the task. Davis had selected him mainly for reasons of political geography: Each of his six cabinet members came from one of the original seven Confederate states (including Texas when it soon joined the Confederacy), with Davis himself from the seventh. The president assigned Florida’s cabinet post to Stephen R. Mallory as secretary of the navy. Mallory turned out to be an excellent choice, for he created a navy out of virtually nothing. Under his leadership it pioneered in such technological innovations as ironclads, torpedoes (mines), and even a primitive submarine.

  Armed forces need not only men; they also need arms and ammunition, shoes and clothing, all the accoutrements of soldiers and the capacity to transport them where needed to sustain hundreds of thousands of men who are removed from the production and transport of this matériel by their presence in the armed forces. Slavery gave the Confederacy one advantage in this respect: The slaves constituted a large percentage of the labor force in the Confederate states, and by staying on the job they freed white men for the army. But the slaves worked mainly in agriculture growing cotton and other staple crops primarily for export. In the production of the potential matériel of war, the seven Confederate states began life at a huge disadvantage. Even with the secession of four more slave states after the firing on Fort Sumter (to be discussed below), the Confederacy would possess only 12 percent as much industrial capacity as the Union states. In certain industries vital to military production, Northern superiority was even more decisive. According to the 1860 census, Union states had eleven times as many ships and boats as the Confederacy and produced fifteen times as much iron, seventeen times as many textile goods, twenty-four times as many locomotives, and thirty-two times as many firearms. The Union had more than twice the density of railroad mileage per square mile and several times the amount of rolling stock.

  From his experience as secretary of war and chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs in the 1850s, Davis was acutely aware of these statistics. He also knew that the state arsenals seized by Southern militias contained mostly old and out-of-repair weapons. Despite his boast that Confederates would make Northerners smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel if they tried to subjugate the Confederacy, Davis knew that he had little powder and less steel. Three days after his inauguration as Confederate president, he sent Raphael Semmes of Alabama to the North to buy weapons and arms-making machinery.5 A veteran of almost thirty years in the United States Navy who would soon become the Confederacy’s most dashing sea captain, Semmes also proved adept at this initial assignment that Davis gave him. But the onset of war two months later soon overwhelmed the limited matériel that Semmes was able to acquire. For the first year of the war—and often thereafter—Davis’s strategic options as commander in chief would be severely constrained by persistent deficiencies in arms, accoutrements, transportation, and industrial capacity. Fast steamships carrying war matériel and trying to evade the ever-tightening Union blockade, and a crash program to build up war industries in the South, would only partly remedy these deficiencies.

  • • •

  WHILE SEMMES WAS IN THE NORTH BUYING ARMS, DAVIS was confronting his first crucial decision as commander in chief: what to do about the two principal forts in Confederate harbors still held by soldiers of the United States Army. When South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, the commander of the army garrison at Fort Moultrie, Maj. Robert Anderson, grew apprehensive that the hotheaded Charleston militia would attack this obsolete fort. On the night of December 26, Anderson secretly moved the garrison to the uncompleted but immensely strong Fort Sumter on an artificial island at the entrance to the harbor. The outraged Carolinians denounced this movement as a violation of their sovereignty, and sent commissioners to President James Buchanan in Washington to demand that the fort be turned over to the state. The previously pliable Buchanan surprised them by saying no. His administration even sent an unarmed merchant steamer, the Star of the West, with reinforcements for Fort Sumter, but it was turned back by South Carolina artillery.

  Meanwhile, when Florida seceded in January her militia seized two outdated forts on the mainland at Pensacola. But the stronger Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island controlling the entrance to the harbor remained in Union hands. Tense standoffs at both Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens had persisted for several weeks when the Confederate government organized itself and Davis became president in February. The Congress in Montgomery instructed him to obtain control of these forts by negotiations if possible or by force if necessary. Davis sent commissioners to Washington to negotiate. He also named Pierre G. T. Beauregard and Braxton Bragg as the Confederacy’s first two brigadier generals and sent them to Charleston and Pensacola to take over the state militias, absorb them into the new Confederate army, and prepare to attack the forts if required.6

  Montgomery, Alabama: The first capital of the Confederacy

  The incoming Lincoln administration refused to meet officially with the Confederate commissioners. But Secretary of State William H. Seward, who expected to be the “premier” of the administration, informed them through an intermediary that he was working to get the troops removed from Fort Sumter in the interest of preserving peace. Seward hoped that such a gesture of conciliation might be a fi
rst step in a gradual process of wooing the seceded states back into the Union. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott of the United States Army supported Seward’s position, as did a majority of Lincoln’s cabinet at first.

  Jefferson Davis would have been quite happy if Seward had succeeded in his efforts to get the garrison out of Sumter. But he repudiated any notion that this gesture might lead to reunion; on the contrary, he would have seen it as a recognition of Confederate sovereignty. That is how Abraham Lincoln saw it too. Fort Sumter had become the symbol of competing claims of sovereignty. So long as the American flag flew over the fort, the Confederate claim to be an independent nation was invalid. The same was true of Fort Pickens, and Davis instructed General Bragg to prepare to attack it if and when an actual attack order came.7

  But no such order ever went to Bragg. The standoff at Sumter eclipsed the situation at Pensacola in the eyes of both Northerners and Southerners. When Lincoln informed South Carolina governor Francis Pickens of his intent to resupply the garrison at Fort Sumter, he forced Davis’s hand. If the Confederates allowed the supplies to go in, they would lose face in this symbolic battle of sovereignties. If they fired on the relief boats or on the fort, they would stand convicted of starting a war, thereby uniting a divided North. But Davis had reason to believe that an actual shooting war would bring more slave states into the Confederacy to stand with their Southern brethren against Yankee “coercion.” In any case, he was convinced that he could not yield his demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter without in effect yielding the Confederate claim to nationhood. At a tense meeting of the Confederate cabinet on April 8, a majority (evidently excepting only Secretary of State Robert Toombs) agreed with Davis. From Montgomery went a telegram to General Beauregard: Demand the evacuation of Sumter, and if it was refused, open fire. Beauregard sent his ultimatum; it was rejected; Confederate guns began shooting at 4:30 A.M. on April 12; the American flag was lowered in surrender two days later; and the war came.8

  Lincoln’s call for troops to suppress a rebellion prompted four more slave states, led by Virginia, to join the Confederacy. Neither Lincoln nor Davis could foresee the huge and destructive scale of the war that ensued. But neither shared the opinions widespread among their respective publics that it would be a short war and an easy victory for their own side. “The people here are all in fine spirits,” wrote the wife of a Texas member of the provisional Congress two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter. “No one doubts our success.”9 Davis tried to discourage such optimism. “We must prepare for a long war” and perhaps “unmerciful reverses at first,” he said to one overconfident friend. Davis scotched the notion that one Southerner could lick three Yankees. “Only fools doubted the courage of the Yankees to fight,” he declared, “and now we have stung their pride—we have roused them till they will fight like devils.”10

  The original bill in Congress to create a Confederate army had authorized enlistments for six months. Davis had objected, insisting that it took at least that long to train a soldier, and urged a three-year term. Congress balked, and they finally compromised on one year. After Fort Sumter, Davis pressed Congress to enlarge the army and to require three-year terms for new recruits. As administered, this law allowed enlistees who supplied their own arms and equipment to sign up for one year; those who were equipped by the government would serve three years.11

  As this recruitment policy suggests, a shortage of weapons and accoutrements plagued the rapidly growing Confederate army in 1861. The capture of the Norfolk navy yard on April 20 provided a windfall of 1,200 cannon, many of which were soon on their way to the dozens of forts already existing or under construction across the South. The army also could obtain plenty of horses and mules for transportation. Effective small arms and field artillery, however, were in woefully short supply. By July 1 the Confederacy had at least one hundred thousand men in its armies, many of them armed with shotguns and squirrel rifles. The War Department could have accepted thousands more had it been able to equip them.

  What were these soldiers expected to do? In his message on April 29 to a special session of the provisional Congress, Davis said no more about carrying the war into the North. Instead, he announced a defensive national strategy: “We seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone.” But if the United States “attempt our subjugation by arms . . . we will . . . resist to the direst extremity.”12

  Davis’s pledge to seek no conquest was somewhat disingenuous. He meant no aggrandizement or conquest of free states. Four border slave states had not seceded. Davis hoped that at least three of them—Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—would join the Confederacy. And when it became possible, he was prepared to invade them to make it happen. As early as April 23 he approved the shipment of four pieces of artillery (in boxes labeled “marble”) to pro-Confederate governor Claiborne Jackson of Missouri to enable his secessionist militia to capture the St. Louis arsenal.13 That effort did not work out, but later in the summer Confederate troops invaded Missouri and occupied a substantial portion of Kentucky.

  The Confederacy was a slaveholding republic. The defense of bondage from the perceived threat to its long-term survival by the election of Abraham Lincoln had been the avowed reason for secession. Davis made this point at considerable length in the same message to Congress in which he said that all the South wanted was to be let alone. In recent years, he declared, Republicans in the United States Congress had advocated “a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States . . . for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves . . . and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority.” In 1860 a party came to power vowing “to legislate to the prejudice, detriment, or discouragement of the owners of that species of property” and to use “its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain.” This policy would result in “annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars” and “rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless.”14

  One man whose property, Davis feared, might become comparatively worthless was Jefferson Davis. His 113 slaves were probably worth about $80,000 in 1860—the equivalent of several million dollars today. Another was his brother Joseph, twenty-four years older than Jefferson and something of a father figure who had helped Jefferson get his start as a planter twenty-five years earlier. Although the Davises were benign masters who treated their chattels with a degree of liberality, they were also proslavery partisans of the John C. Calhoun school. As a United States senator, Jefferson Davis had opposed the admission of California as a free state because he thought slavery could take root there. He wanted to annex Cuba in order to add a large new slave state to the Union. In an 1848 speech challenging antislavery senators, he declared that “if this is to be made the centre from which civil war is to radiate, here let the conflict begin.” During the election campaign of 1860, Davis told the people of Vicksburg that if an abolitionist president (Lincoln) was elected, he “would rather appeal to the God of Battles at once” and “welcome the invader to the harvest of death . . . than attempt to live longer in such a Union.”15

  Davis’s conviction that slavery gave “the planting states” a “common interest of such magnitude” sustained his determination to eventually bring the border states into the Confederacy.16 But his first task was to devise a military strategy to defend the eleven states that constituted that entity in May 1861 from the buildup of Northern power to “subjugate” the South. Such a strategy would be grounded in an important reality, so obvious that its importance is often overlooked: The Confederacy began the war in firm military and political control of nearly all the territory in those eleven states. Such control is rarely the case in civil wars or revolutions, which typically require rebels or rev
olutionaries to fight to gain dominion over land or government or both. With a functioning government and an army already mobilized or mobilizing in May 1861, the Confederacy embraced more than 750,000 square miles in which not a single enemy soldier was to be found except at Fort Pickens and in Virginia at Fort Monroe and Alexandria across the Potomac River from Washington. All the Confederates had to do to “win” the war was to hold on to what they already had.

  To accomplish that, Davis’s army was spread around the perimeter of those 750,000 square miles in numerous detachments guarding key strategic points—and some that were less strategic militarily but important politically. Historians have applied various labels to this strategy: perimeter defense; dispersed defense; cordon defense; extended defense. Many of these historians are critical of the strategy because it seemed to violate the principle of concentration of force. Dispersal created the possibility that the enemy, superior in numbers, might break through this thin gray line somewhere, cutting off and perhaps capturing one or more of these small armies and penetrating as far into Confederate territory as if it had been left undefended. Davis recognized this danger. He hoped partly to offset it by using the Confederacy’s advantage of interior lines to concentrate forces at the point of a major attack before the enemy could break through. Sometimes that worked, as in the case of the Battle of Manassas in July 1861; sometimes it did not, as in the cases of Union penetration at several locations in early 1862.