Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Davis responded not by returning the troops but by sending Arkansan Thomas Hindman to command the Trans-Mississippi Department with his headquarters at Little Rock. A dynamo only five feet tall, Hindman declared martial law and ruthlessly enforced conscription. His methods aroused howls of protest, but he did create a new army in the state. The complaints caused Davis to send his old friend Theophilus Holmes, a North Carolinian who had proved ineffective as a division commander during the Seven Days’ Battles, to replace Hindman.25

  A genial but mediocre administrator, handicapped by near deafness, Holmes was soon whipsawed between the pressures of local defense and the demands for troops to help defend Vicksburg. In a command reshuffle to provide General Beauregard with a new position, Davis had promoted John C. Pemberton to lieutenant general and given him command at Vicksburg. Beauregard succeeded Pemberton in charge of the Charleston defenses. Pemberton had been unpopular in Charleston, in part because of his Pennsylvania birth. He had married a Virginian and had chosen to side with his wife’s state instead of his own. This allegiance by choice rather than nativity was proof to Davis of the firmness of his convictions, but not to the prideful Carolinians—nor to the Mississippians, who were suspicious of this “Yankee general” from the outset.

  Pemberton faced a two-pronged Union campaign against Vicksburg in December 1862: Grant with forty thousand men was advancing overland from West Tennessee, while William T. Sherman with thirty thousand moved down the Mississippi River supported by a powerful naval squadron. Outnumbered two to one, Pemberton needed all the help he could get. Davis repeatedly urged Holmes to send him reinforcements—ten thousand men or more if he could spare them. But the president did not put this request in the form of an order, and was reduced to pleading with his Trans-Mississippi commander. The best defense of Arkansas, Davis told Holmes, was to maintain control of the Mississippi River between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Louisiana. If Vicksburg was lost, the enemy “will be then free to concentrate his forces against your Dept., and ’though your valor may be relied upon to do all that human power can effect, it is not to be expected that you could make either long or successful resistance.”26

  Holmes resisted Davis’s logic. He responded that he did not have the number of troops in Arkansas that Davis thought he had; many of those he did have were on the sick list; others were hundreds of miles away and could not get to Vicksburg in time; and—most important—they would desert if sent east of the Mississippi, and the people of Arkansas would revolt. The governor backed Holmes’s arguments. “Soldiers do not enter the service to maintain the Southern Confederacy alone,” he lectured Davis, “but also to protect their property and defend their homes and families.”27

  In the end the matter became moot. A raid by Van Dorn’s cavalry on the Union supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi, forced Grant to turn back, and Pemberton’s troops repulsed Sherman’s attack at Chickasaw Bluffs on December 29. Davis acceded to Holmes’s resistance to his entreaties. “If you are correct as to the consequences which would follow,” the president acknowledged, “you have properly exercised the discretion which was intrusted to you.”28

  • • •

  THIS AFFAIR BECAME INTERTWINED WITH ANOTHER DEVELOPMENT that exposed flaws in Davis's leadership style. He buried himself in paperwork, spending long hours reviewing every kind of document that came into the War Department as well as his own office, sometimes as many as two hundred in a single day. Many of these papers concerned minutiae like the promotion of junior officers, bake ovens for soldiers in camp, details of army administration, and similar “little trash which ought to be dispatched by clerks in the adjutant general’s office,” according to the chief administrator of the War Department. One of those clerks noted that “the President sent a hundred papers to the department to-day, which he has been diligently poring over, as his pencil marks bear ample evidence. They were nearly all applications for office, and this business constitutes much of his labor. . . . He works incessantly, sick or well.”29

  As an administrator, Davis simply could not bring himself to delegate authority. His obsessive concern with military matters “induces his desire to mingle in them all and to control them,” complained Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory. “This desire is augmented by the fear that details may be wrongly managed, without his constant supervision.” This same absorption in details spilled over into meetings with his generals, which occasionally lasted late into the night. He met with individual cabinet members almost daily, and held two or three sessions weekly with the full cabinet. “These meetings occupied from two to five hours, far longer than was required,” wrote Mallory. “From his uncontrollable tendency to digression,—to slide away from the chief points to episodical questions, the amount of business accomplished bore but little relation to the time consumed; and frequently a Cabinet meeting would exhaust four or five hours without determining anything, while the desk of every chief of a Department was covered with papers demanding his attention.”30

  Davis was far more preoccupied with army matters than with the navy; consequently, he granted much greater autonomy to Mallory than to the secretary of war. Mallory served during the entire conflict; five different men (not including one brief interim appointment) occupied the office of secretary of war. In effect, Davis was his own secretary of war much of the time. George Wythe Randolph became increasingly restive under these circumstances. In almost identical language, two War Department officials wrote that Davis reduced Randolph to the “humble capacity” of “a mere clerk.” The president “issued orders, planning campaigns, as in East Tennessee, which he neither consulted the Secretary about nor apprised him of. He appointed general officers, sending their names to the A[djutant] G[eneral]’s office without consultation, the first information the Secretary received being that the commissions were brought to him to sign.”31

  Stephen R. Mallory

  In September 1862, Randolph told a friend that he had made up his mind to resign “because of the arrogance to which he was constantly subjected by the President.”32 A dispute concerning General Holmes’s troops in Arkansas provided the occasion for his resignation in mid-November. Without consulting the president, Randolph authorized Holmes to cross the Mississippi and join Pemberton for a campaign against Grant. This plan was different from Davis’s own efforts to persuade Holmes to send part of his force to Pemberton but to remain personally in Arkansas with the rest of them. Davis rebuked Randolph for not checking with him before issuing the orders to Holmes. Randolph immediately submitted his resignation. With an expression of irritation, Davis accepted it.33

  “A profound sensation has been produced in the outside world” by Randolph’s resignation, wrote the diary-keeping War Department clerk John B. Jones. “Most of the people and the press seem inclined to denounce the President, for they know not what.”34 Some editors and politicians who professed to resent what they considered Davis’s hauteur seized on the Randolph case to condemn the president. Too busy—and disdainful—to reply to his critics, Davis appointed another Virginian, James Seddon, as secretary of war. The two men were acquaintances of long standing. Although Seddon once complained that Davis was “the most difficult man to get along with he had ever seen,” the secretary usually managed the relationship with tact and patience.35 Seddon remained in his job for more than two years, the longest tenure of any of the five secretaries of war.

  James Seddon

  • • •

  DAVIS CONFRONTED ADDITIONAL AWKWARD PERSONNEL issues in November 1862. Having recovered from his wounds, General Joseph E. Johnston reported himself fit for duty. But what duty? Johnston would have preferred reassignment to his old command, now the Army of Northern Virginia. But Robert E. Lee had made that army his own, and even Johnston recognized that reality. More problematic than what to do with Johnston were the loud rumblings of discontent with Braxton Bragg in the Army of Tennessee. Two of Bragg’s
principal subordinates—Generals Leonidas Polk and William Hardee—plus General Edmund Kirby Smith, whose Army of East Tennessee had operated jointly with Bragg’s army in the invasion of Kentucky, blamed Bragg for the failure of that campaign. In truth, they were motivated in part by a desire to deflect well-deserved blame from themselves.

  These early signs of dysfunctional command relations in the Army of Tennessee had deep roots. Part of the problem was Bragg’s personality, which contemporaries described with a remarkable litany of adjectives: disputatious, cantankerous, irascible, austere, severe, stern, saturnine. But Davis had admired Bragg ever since his volunteer Mississippi regiment had fought beside Bragg’s artillery regulars at the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. Bragg’s organizational and disciplinary skills had molded the best corps in the army that fought at Shiloh. When Davis decided to relieve Beauregard for taking an unauthorized leave after Shiloh, Bragg was a natural choice to replace him. Almost immediately, however, Beauregard’s supporters in the press and Congress, who formed the beginnings of an anti-Davis faction, began beating the drums for Beauregard’s reappointment—which required them to denigrate Bragg. “You have the misfortune of being regarded as my personal friend,” Davis wrote to the general in August 1862, “and are pursued therefore with malignant censure, by men regardless of truth and whose want of principle to guide their conduct renders them incapable of conceiving that you are trusted because of your known fitness for command.”36

  Davis was therefore predisposed to take Bragg’s side in the finger-pointing about who was responsible for the failure of the Kentucky campaign. But that position was complicated by his long-standing friendship with Polk, who was the main figure in the anti-Bragg cabal. The Kentucky lobby in Richmond, which included Davis’s aide William Preston Johnston, also resented Bragg because of his outspoken criticism of the Kentuckians’ reluctance to come to his support during the invasion. Davis summoned Bragg, Polk, and Kirby Smith separately to Richmond and tried to smooth over their conflicts. He acknowledged that “another Genl. might excite more enthusiasm, but as all have their defects I have not seen how to make a change with advantage.” Beauregard would not do. He “was tried as commander of the Army of the West and left it without leave when the troops were demoralized and the country he was sent to protect was threatened with conquest.”37 Davis urged Polk and Kirby Smith to give Bragg their cordial support for the good of the cause, and rewarded (bribed?) them in advance with promotions to lieutenant general.

  Recognizing that these moves might not accomplish the purpose, Davis attempted to resolve both of his personnel problems by appointing Johnston commander of the new Department of the West embracing all of the territory between the Mississippi River and the Appalachian Mountains. Johnston’s mission would be to coordinate the actions of the three main Confederate armies in this vast region: Bragg’s Army of Tennessee, Kirby Smith’s Army of East Tennesee, and Pemberton’s Army of Mississippi. Johnston thought that this command should also include Holmes’s Trans-Mississippi Department so that Holmes could be ordered to cooperate with Pemberton in the defense of Vicksburg. Although Davis favored such cooperation, he decided—perhaps unwisely—to keep the Trans-Mississippi separate.

  On paper, Johnston’s new assignment appeared to be the largest and most important of the war. But he began to complain almost from the first that his real authority was minimal. Davis’s requirement that all three army commanders should continue to report directly to Richmond as well as to Johnston seemed to lend substance to this complaint. Nevertheless, Johnston could have made more of this command if he had chosen resolutely to do so.38

  To sort out some of these issues and to rally flagging Southern spirits, Davis decided to make a trip to Johnston’s new theater, accompanied part of the time by the general. Leaving Richmond on December 9, Davis went first to Bragg’s headquarters at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He reviewed the army and found it in better condition and less threatened by the enemy than he expected. Indeed, Davis thought that Pemberton was more vulnerable than Bragg, and wanted to send a large division of nine thousand men from Murfreesboro to reinforce Pemberton. Both Bragg and Johnston protested that this detachment might fatally weaken Bragg and that Pemberton should be reinforced by troops from Holmes in Arkansas. Davis had of course already tried to get Holmes to send some of his men across the river, but without success. He overruled Johnston’s objections and ordered the division to Vicksburg. Part of it arrived in time to help repel Sherman’s attack at Chickasaw Bluffs on December 29. But Bragg would sorely miss the division in the Battle of Murfreesboro (called Stones River by the Federals) December 31–January 2, when its absence may have made the difference between victory and defeat.39

  Davis’s rejection of Johnston’s advice in this matter of reinforcing Pemberton seemed to confirm the general’s belief that his theater command was merely nominal. In any event, the two men went on to Mississippi to inspect Vicksburg’s defenses. At several places during this trip and during his return journey to Richmond, where he arrived January 4, Davis gave speeches intended to lift morale and support for the war effort. One of the purposes of the trip, as he had explained to General Lee before he departed, was “to arouse all classes to united and desperate resistance.”40

  The best way to do this, Davis believed, was to recite a long list of Yankee atrocities. He had used this rhetorical device since almost the beginning of the war. As early as July 1861 he had informed the Confederate Congress that the Federals were acting “with a savage ferocity unknown to modern civilization . . . committing arson and rapine, the destruction of private houses and property. . . . Mankind will shudder to hear the tales of outrages committed on defenseless females by soldiers of the United States” and of whispered words in the ears of slaves “to incite a servile insurrection in our midst.”41 In the war’s first year, however, Davis more often focused on themes of constitutional liberty, state sovereignty, and self-government as motives for fighting. But when his own government was compelled to enact conscription, suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and arrest opponents of the war, Davis came under attack for violating the very principles he professed to be fighting for. In consequence, his rhetoric shifted toward an emphasis on enemy atrocities as “a means to unite the southern people, strengthen their determination to resist, and prove the justice of the Confederate cause.”42

  This emphasis was much in evidence in Davis’s speeches during the western trip. In response to an invitation from the Mississippi legislature, he spoke to an overflow crowd in Jackson the day after Christmas. “The dirty Yankee invaders” were a “traditionless and homeless race” descended from English Puritans “gathered together by Cromwell from the bogs and fens” of Britain, Davis declared. “They persecuted Catholics in England, and they hung Quakers and witches in America.” Now they were waging a war “for conquest and your subjugation, with a malignant ferocity and with a disregard and a contempt for the usages of civilization.” Davis was just getting warmed up. When he arrived back in Richmond, he told a crowd gathered to greet him that “you fight against the offscourings of the earth.—(Applause.) . . . By showing themselves so utterly disgraced that if the question was proposed to you whether you would combine with hyenas or Yankees, I trust every Virginian would say, give us the hyenas.—(Cries of ‘Good! good!’ and applause.)”43

  While in Mississippi, Davis had taken time out from his consultations with Johnston and Pemberton to issue a proclamation branding Union general Benjamin Butler “an outlaw” and a “felon deserving capital punishment.” Butler had commanded the Union troops occupying New Orleans and southern Louisiana. He executed a Southern civilian for tearing down the American flag from the U.S. Mint, plundered property, seized slaves, and even armed them “for servile war—a war in its nature far exceeding in horrors the most merciless atrocities of the savages.” If captured, Butler should be “immediately executed by hanging” and all commissioned officers serving under him should be
treated as “robbers and criminals, deserving death; and that they and each of them be, whenever captured, reserved for execution.”44

  By the time Davis returned to Richmond, Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which included a provision stating that freed slaves would be accepted into the armed services of the United States. In a message to his Congress, Davis denounced Lincoln’s proclamation as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” It was the last straw among every conceivable atrocity committed by the armed forces of the United States. It was the “fullest vindication” of the South’s decision to secede in 1861, because it provided “the complete and crowning proof of the true nature” of Northern designs to abolish slavery. Davis announced an intention to “deliver to the several State authorities all commissioned officers of the United States that may hereafter be captured by our forces in any of the States embraced by the proclamation” to be punished as “criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection”—for which the punishment was death.45

  Davis was particularly incensed by the Union plan to recruit former slaves as soldiers. When a raid by Confederate troops on Union-occupied St. Catherines Island off the coast of Georgia in November 1862 captured six black soldiers, the commanding general telegraphed Richmond for instructions on what to do with them. The new secretary of war, James Seddon, consulted Davis, who told him to make the following reply: “They cannot be recognized in any way as soldiers subject to the rules of war and to trial by military courts. . . . Summary execution must therefore be inflicted on those taken.”46

  Whether the six black men were actually executed is not known. And whether the Confederacy would carry out such a draconian policy remained to be seen. Perhaps the war would soon be over and the question would remain moot. Confederate victories at the Battles of Fredericksburg and Chickasaw Bluffs, and the drawn Battle of Stones River (Murfreesboro), which Davis considered a victory, had produced demoralization in the North. The antiwar Copperhead movement mushroomed in strength, giving rise to hope in the South that the Lincoln administration would be forced to negotiate peace. Davis faced the new year with reviving confidence. “It is not possible,” he told Mississippians at the end of 1862, “that a war of the dimensions that this one has assumed, of proportions so gigantic, can be very long protracted. The combatants must be soon exhausted. But it is impossible, with a cause like ours, we can be the first to cry, ‘Hold, enough.’”47