Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Thirteen brigadier generals and other officers in Cleburne’s division signed this paper. But officers in other units condemned the “monstrous proposition” as “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor.”32 One division commander was so upset that he went out of channels and sent a copy to Davis with a request that he crack down on “the further agitation of such sentiments and propositions,” which “would ruin the efficiency of our Army and involve our cause in ruin and disgrace.” The governor-in-exile of Tennessee urged Davis to “smother” the proposal so that it did not “gain publicity.”33 Davis agreed, and ordered Johnston to destroy all copies. “If it be kept out of the public journals,” he wrote, “its ill effects will be much lessened.” So successful was the “smothering” that Cleburne’s paper remained unknown outside a small circle until 1890, when one copy saved by a member of Cleburne’s staff turned up during the publication of the official records of the war.34

  The issue of slave soldiers remained muted during most of 1864. But the manpower crisis in the collapsing Confederacy revived it by November. Davis approached the matter gingerly in a message to Congress on November 7. He recommended the appropriation of funds (where the money would come from he did not say) for the purchase of forty thousand slaves to be employed in noncombat roles by the army and freed after “service faithfully rendered.” He did not think it “wise or advantageous” to arm them as soldiers, he said before inserting a bombshell sentence: “But should the alternative ever be presented of subjugation or of the employment of the slave as a soldier, there seems no reason to doubt what should then be our decision.”35

  No one missed the import of these words. “Can one credit it?” wrote a North Carolina woman who opposed the emancipation feature as well as the implied endorsement of black soldiers. “That a Southern man, one who knows the evils of free negro-ism, can be found willing to inflict such a curse on his country? . . . I consider such conduct undignified & unworthy of Mr. Davis, for that he really advocates the measure I cannot and will not believe.”36 The usual suspects among Davis’s most bitter critics, the Richmond Examiner and the Charleston Mercury, weighed in against the president’s proposal. “It adopts the whole theory of the abolitionist,” declared the Examiner. “The existence of a negro soldier is totally inconsistent with our political aim and with our social as well as political system. . . . If a negro is fit to be a soldier he is not fit to be a slave. . . . It would be a confession, not only of weakness, but of absolute inability to secure the object for which we undertook the war.” The Mercury branded Davis’s proposition as “inconsistent, unsound, and suicidal. . . . It would give the lie to our professions and surrender the strength and power of our position.”37

  Congress did not act on Davis’s recommendation to buy and free 40,000 slaves “after service faithfully rendered.” But as the Confederacy’s prospects grew worse over the winter of 1864–65, the idea of arming the slaves would not die. A planter in North Carolina who owned 125 slaves offered 50 of them to Davis for the army. “I will pledge my word and judgment they will fight as well as the neg[ro] in the northern army. . . . We are on the verge of ruin unless this last resort is brought to bear.” A Georgia planter who had lost two sons in the war believed the time had come to enlist black soldiers. “We should away with pride of opinion—away with false pride,” he wrote to Davis. “The enemy fights us with the negro—and they will do very well to fight the yankees. . . . We are reduced to the last resort.”38

  By February 1865 Davis was willing to commit openly to the last resort. In a letter to the editor of the influential Mobile Advertiser and Register, which supported this policy, the president expressed approval of “employing for the defence of our Country all the able-bodied men we have without distinction of color. . . . We are reduced to choosing whether the negroes shall fight for or against us.”39

  Howell Cobb

  As the balance of opinion seemed to shift toward this position, the opposition became more shrill. “No question has arisen during the war that has given me so much concern,” Senator David Yulee of Florida told Davis. “This is a White Man’s government. To associate the colors in camp is to unsettle castes; and when thereby the distinction of color and caste is so far obliterated that the relation of fellow soldier is accepted, the mixture of races, and toleration of equality, is commenced.” Howell Cobb let the president know his opinion that “the proposition to make soldiers of our slaves [is] the most pernicious idea that has been suggested since the war began. . . . If slaves will make good soldiers—our whole theory of slavery is wrong.”40 Some white Southerners apparently preferred to lose the war than to win it with the help of black men. “Victory itself would be robbed of its glory if shared with slaves,” declared a Mississippi congressman. President Davis’s chief nemesis, Senator Louis Wigfall, said that he “wanted to live in no country in which the man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal.”41

  A bill introduced in Congress on February 10 for black enlistments therefore faced rough sledding in spite of Davis’s support—perhaps in part because of that support. Sponsored by Representative Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi (whose brother had been killed at Gettysburg), it authorized the president to requisition a quota of black soldiers from each state, with consent of their owners, but said nothing about freeing them. The House passed this measure by a vote of 40–37, but the Senate defeated it by one vote, 11–10, with both Virginia senators voting no. Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee came out publicly for the bill. Lee had earlier told a Virginia state senator in private that he favored the use of slaves as soldiers. On February 18 he made public his belief that such a policy was “not only expedient but necessary. . . . The negroes, under proper circumstances, will make efficient soldiers. I think we could do at least as well with them as the enemy, and he attaches great importance to their assistance. . . . Those who are employed should be freed. It would be neither just nor wise . . . to require them to serve as slaves.”42

  Lee’s intervention proved decisive. The Virginia legislature instructed the state’s senators to change their votes to yes. They did so reluctantly, enabling the bill to pass by a vote of 9–8 (with nine abstentions and absences). Davis quickly signed it into law on March 13. The measure did not confer freedom on those who enlisted. But Davis ordered the War Department to issue regulations that ensured them “the rights of a freedman.”43 The president tried to jump-start the recruitment of black regiments. But the effort was too little and too late. Two companies began organizing in Richmond, but before this process got very far, the city fell on April 2 and the war was soon over.44

  While the glare of publicity focused on the controversy over black soldiers, Davis and Secretary of State Judah Benjamin inaugurated a secret diplomatic mission to offer gradual abolition of slavery in return for British and French recognition of the Confederacy. The initiative for this mission came from Duncan F. Kenner, a wealthy sugar planter from Louisiana and a prominent member of the Confederate Congress. Kenner had been convinced since the fall of New Orleans in 1862 that slavery was a millstone around the Confederacy’s neck. He had urged Davis to consider an emancipationist diplomacy, but he made no headway until December 1864, when the president asked him to undertake such a mission. Davis of course could not commit Congress to an abolition policy, nor could Congress commit the states. But perhaps the Europeans would overlook these technicalities. Judah Benjamin convinced Davis that he could invoke his war powers to proclaim emancipation as a military necessity for national survival. When Lincoln had justified his Emancipation Proclamation on similar grounds in January 1863, Davis had denounced it as “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” But that was then, and this was now.45

  Kenner’s difficulties in getting to Europe foretokened the failure of his mission. Because of the fall of Fort Fisher, he could not take a blockade runner from Wilmington. He traveled incognito to New York a
nd boarded a ship to France, where Louis Napoleon gave him a cold shoulder. His experience in Britain was no better. On March 14 Lord Palmerston informed Kenner and the Confederate envoy James Mason, who had accompanied him to London, that the British government could not recognize a nation that had not firmly established its existence. “As affairs now stood,” Mason reported to Benjamin, “our seaports given up, the comparatively unobstructed march of Sherman, etc., rather increased than diminished previous objections.”46

  • • •

  BY MARCH 1865 THE CONFEDERACY WAS FALLING APART. The railroads had broken down and could scarcely move the little freight that the inflation-ravaged economy produced. Deserters roamed the countryside and robbed civilians of what little sustenance they had preserved. Government officials, including President Davis, sent their families away from Richmond because of the prospect of its imminent fall. A clerical worker in the War Department wrote in her diary on March 10: “Fearful orders have been given in the offices to keep the papers packed, except such as we are working on. The packed boxes remain in the front room. . . . As we walk in every morning, all eyes are turned to the boxes to see if any have been removed, and we breathe more freely when we find them still there.”47

  J. C. Breckinridge

  When John C. Breckinridge became secretary of war in February, he ordered a survey of Confederate resources available to carry on the war. The results were shocking: no money; no credit; shortages of food, clothing, forage, munitions, animals, and men; no more foreign imports because of the fall of Wilmington. Breckinridge and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell were convinced that the war was lost and that the government should negotiate a peace even with reunion while it still had leverage to salvage something from the ruin. They approached Lee, who agreed that matters were almost hopeless. But Lee—and for that matter Breckinridge—refused to defy the president so long as Davis was determined to fight on. Lee emerged from a meeting with Davis impressed by his “remarkable faith” in the cause and his “unconquerable will power.” The general told a Virginia congressman that as long as the war continued he would fight “to the last extremity.”48

  In Davis’s mind, that last extremity had not arrived. “There are no vital points on the preservation of which the continued existence of the Confederacy depends,” he had told Congress in November 1864. “Not the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington, nor Charleston, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor of all combined, can save the enemy from the constant and exhaustive drain of blood and treasure which must continue until he shall discover that no peace is attainable unless based on the recognition of our indefeasible rights.”49

  By the beginning of March 1865 three of those cities had fallen and the other two would soon follow. A Senate committee asked Davis what he intended to do. According to the committee’s report, the president told them that he meant “to continue the war as long as we were able to maintain it. . . . The existence of the Confederate Government was a fact, and that he was placed in office to defend and preserve it, that he had power to negotiate for the continued existence of the Government, but none whatever for its destruction.”50

  Davis liked to cite the example of Frederick the Great, who faced a powerful coalition that greatly outnumbered him in the Seven Years’ War but attacked and defeated his enemies in detail and saved Silesia for Prussia. He had this example in mind when he wrote to Braxton Bragg on April 1 that “our condition is that in which great Generals have shown their value to a struggling state. Boldness of conception and rapidity of execution has often rendered the smaller force victorious. To fight the Enemy in detail it is necessary to outmarch him and to surprise him.”51

  It was not to be. While attending Sunday service at St. Paul’s Church the next day, Davis was handed an urgent message from Lee. The enemy had broken the lines at Petersburg, and the capital must be evacuated. That night Davis and his cabinet boarded the last train from Richmond as the city, its warehouses set afire by departing Confederate troops, began to burn behind them. Davis’s destination was Danville, Virginia, the new Confederate capital. From there on April 4 he issued a proclamation to the Southern people urging them to continue the struggle. “Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points,” he declared, the army would be “free to move from point to point, and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating in the interior of our own country, where supplies are accessible. . . . Nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain, but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free.”52

  Petersburg, Virginia: Dead Confederate soldiers in the trenches of Fort Mahone

  Because of the breakdown in communications, few people read this appeal and fewer heeded it. After a week in Danville the cabinet learned of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. They hastily fled south to Greensboro, North Carolina. Joseph Johnston’s small army was still in the field, near Raleigh, and Davis hoped to use it as a nucleus to build up a larger force to continue the war. “We must redouble our efforts to meet present disaster,” he told North Carolina’s governor, Zebulon Vance. “An army holding its position with determination to fight on and manifest ability to maintain the struggle will attract all the scattered soldiers and daily and rapidly gather strength.”53

  Richmond, Virginia: Ruins on Carey Street

  Davis had gone from a state of unreality to one of fantasy. “Poor President,” commented a Confederate soldier. “He is unwilling to see what all around him see. He cannot bring himself to believe that after four years of glorious struggle we are to be crushed into submission.”54 Johnston’s army surrendered to Sherman on April 26. Davis continued south, two steps ahead of Union cavalry scouring the countryside looking for him. One by one his cabinet members resigned, but he hoped to make his way across the Mississippi River to join Edmund Kirby Smith’s troops, who had not yet surrendered. On May 10, however, Union cavalry caught up with his small party, including his family, near Irwinville, Georgia.

  The long ordeal of civil war was over. For Davis there began a new ordeal of imprisonment for two years awaiting a trial for treason that never came. Twenty-four years of a long life remained during which he never recanted the cause for which he had fought and lost.

  CODA

  Where could we get a better or a wiser man” than Jefferson Davis for commander in chief? wondered Josiah Gorgas in 1865. There was of course no right or wrong answer to that question. Nobody can say whether Robert Toombs, Howell Cobb, or any other potential Confederate president would have been more successful. What we do know about those gentlemen elicits skepticism. Most delegates to the Montgomery convention in 1861 believed Davis to be the best man for the job, and no clear evidence exists that they were wrong. The fact that the Confederacy lost the war does not prove that it could have been won with a different commander in chief. And under Davis’s leadership, the South appeared to be on the cusp of success on at least three occasions when Confederate victories had caused deep demoralization in the North: the summer of 1862, the winter and spring of 1863, and the summer of 1864. But Union victories at Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Atlanta blunted Southern momentum and revived Northern determination to fight through to ultimate triumph.

  Could Jefferson Davis have done anything different on those three occasions or at any other time during the war to produce Confederate victory? That question too is ultimately unanswerable, but this has not stopped historians from speculating. Such speculation focuses mainly on two subjects: military strategy and military commanders. Would a different strategy have brought Confederate success? The political necessity to defend all frontiers of the Confederacy produced a strategy of dispersed defense in 1861. Davis would have preferred a strategy of concentration for an offensive-defensive campaign (as he termed it), but demands from state governors and other officials required dispersion. The initial poverty of we
apons and logistical capacity precluded large offensives.

  Union success in breaking through the thin gray lines of dispersed defenses in 1862 forced a revision of Confederate strategy. With new commanders of the two principal Southern armies, Robert E. Lee and Braxton Bragg, the Confederates embarked on their most ambitious offensive-defensive campaigns in the late summer of 1862, with a reprise in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863. After experiencing initial success, these campaigns ultimately failed. Subsequent Union offensives compelled the Confederacy to fall back to an essentially defensive strategy for the rest of the war.

  The two principal exceptions to that defensive strategy were Jubal Early’s raid to the outskirts of Washington in July 1864 and John Bell Hood’s invasion of Tennessee in November. They resulted in the virtual destruction of these two Southern armies in the Shenandoah Valley in October and at Nashville in December. These two campaigns were clearly beyond the Confederates’ capacity to execute by that stage of the war. Lee’s prosecution of offensive-defensive operations in 1862 and 1863 may have represented the Confederacy’s best chance for victory, but Hood’s effort to repeat that strategy in 1864 was wrongheaded, and Davis’s approval of that invasion may have been his worst strategic mistake.

  Two other options were available to the Confederacy. The first was a “Fabian” strategy of yielding territory to the enemy until the moment came to strike at his most vulnerable tentacles. Like the Roman general Quintus Fabius in the Second Punic War, or George Washington in the American Revolution, or the Russian general Mikhail Kutuzov in 1812, Confederate commanders could have traded space for time, kept the army concentrated and ready to strike enemy detachments dangling deep in Southern territory, and above all avoided destruction of their armies. Such a Fabian defensive strategy, so the argument goes, might have worn out the will or capacity of the Union to continue fighting, as the Americans and Russians had done to the British and French in 1781 and 1812–13. To a considerable degree, this was Joseph Johnston’s apparent strategy in Virginia in 1862 and especially in Georgia in 1864. But Johnston seemed prepared to yield Richmond and Atlanta rather than risk his army—and he did stand by while Vicksburg fell. To Davis this was a strategy of surrender that would have had fatal consequences for the Confederacy. He was probably right. In the end the strategy of the offensive-defensive did not work either, but as practiced by Robert E. Lee it probably came closest to success.