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Jefferson Davis

Some argue that Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was not a good leader. Attributes such as being rigid and austere were attributed to him and he struggled to manage his subordinates and generals. However, the military ability and knowledge were Davis’s power and strength, but at the same time his weaknesses, because he focused more on military management and did not give finance, politics, diplomacy, and supply during the war the attention they deserved.

Another argument is that Davis’ relationship with his generals is another reason for the Confederates’ defeat. The relations with Johanston, Beauregard, and favoritism toward Generals Bell Hood and Braxton Bragg, or the failure to sustain Bragg and his fatal refusal to jettison Lieutenant General Leonid as Polk are all described as the major reasons or causes of disasters in the Western theatre, where the Confederacy lost the war. Conversely, Davis’s reaction to General Robert E. Lee is perhaps one argument to explain the Confederate’s relative success in the Eastern theater.

Jefferson Davis, the only President of the Confederate States of America, was born June 3, 1808, in Christian (now Todd) County, southwestern Kentucky. He became a student at Transylvania College, Kentucky, and in 1824 a cadet at West Point, having been appointed by President Monroe. For seven years after his graduation from the Military Academy he held the commission of lieutenant, and was assigned to frontier duty. During thjs time he served in the Black Hawk war.

Having married the daughter of General Taylor shortly after his resignation from the military service in 1835, he settled as a cotton-planter near Vicksburg, Mississippi. His political prominence dates from his election, on the Democratic ticket, in 1844, to membership in the electoral college, which was to ballot on Polk and Dallas for the Presidency. A year later he became the Representative of his district in Congress.

In 1846, upon the outbreak of the Mexican War, was chosen the colonel of a Mississippi regiment of volunteers. He promptly resigned his seat, and led his regiment to join the army of General Taylor in the valley of the Rio Grande. Having rendered gallant service in the battles of Monterey and Buena Vista, being severely wounded in the latter, he was offered by President Polk a brigadier-generalship. This he declined, on the ground that a "military appointment by a Federal executive is unconstitutional." In accord with the theories to maintenance of which he devoted his life, he, in this case, avowed it to be the right of the state alone to issue commissions in the volunteer service.

The war over, Jefferson Davis returned to his home, and he was appointed at once, by Governor Brown, to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. This appointment received the confirmation of the legislature early in 1848, and in 1850 he was returned for a full term. While he was in the Senate he held the office of chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, and in debate was known as the champion of domestic and states' rights. Nothing in his Senatorial career is indicative of overt ill faith toward the maintenance of the Union, although his doctrine of the sovereignty of the state, and its right of withdrawal from a voluntary compact - the constitution - ultimately meant, in view of the attitude of the government toward the institution of slavery, advocacy of secession. With his leader, Calhoun, he held for constitutional obligation upon the government to respect and protect the property right of slavery, because it existed prior to the constitution.

Resigning his seat in the Senate in 1851, he devoted him self to campaign work in Mississippi, having been nominated for the governorship on the Democratic ticket. He was the defeated nominee in a close election. In 1852 he assisted in the election of Franklin Pierce, by whom he was appointed Secretary of War, in which capacity he introduced in the army the Mini rifle, iron gun-carriages and other improvements. In 1857 he re-entered the Senate, becoming the Democratic leader of the Thirty-sixth Congress. Here he opposed the French spoliation bill and the "popular sovereignty " doctrine, but favored the passage of the Kansas conference bill. It is noteworthy that in a speech in 1860 he discriminated between independence, which had been dearly bought, and the Union, which had cost "little time, little money, and no blood." Later, being appointed on the Senate committee to examine into the condition of the country, he reluctantly consented to serve, and made an address, in which he affirmed his willingness to do anything to avert the impending struggle.

When Mississippi seceded from the Union, Jan. 9, 1861, Mr. Davis resigned his seat, and at once assumed command of the military forces of his state. On Feb. 18, 1861, he was elected President of the Confederate States by the provisional Confederate convention in session at Montgomery, Alabama. He formed his Cabinet, and in his first message to the provisional Confederate Congress commended the attack on Fort Sumter, and characterized President Lincoln's action in calling for volunteers as unconstitutional and absurd, saying, "All we ask is to be let alone."

The history of the Presidency of Jefferson Davis is, from the Confederate standpoint, the history of the war. Its beginning was the beginning of warlike preparations for the defense of the Confederacy, signalized by the bombardment of Fort Sumter; its end, the end of Southern resistance to the Union. On Feb. 22, 1862, Mr. Davis was re-elected President for a term of six years. Soon after the defeats at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, trouble arose in the Cabinet, hitherto submissive to the will of the executive. The Secretary of the Treasury resigned, and financial ruin threatened the Confederacy.

The year 1864 opened favorably for the Southern army, but by the middle of July the tide had turned. The Southern peace party was gaining in numbers, and Mr. Davis sent three commissioners to treat for peace with the United States. The meeting took place on a steamer in Hampton Roads, but no good resulted. On the return and report of the commissioners, meetings were held and attempts made to revive popular enthusiasm, but Sherman had gained the sea, Grant was drawing his lines closer about Richmond, and Mr. Lincoln was re-elected President. The Confederale Congress began to grow uneasy and to show lack of confidence in the administration, and the Secretary of War resigned his portfolio.

Mr. Davis's last message was dated March 13, 1865, and in it he confessed the gravity of the situation, yet asserted, that there were ample means for bringing things to a successful termination. Twenty days later he left Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant. Mr. Davis went to Danville, then to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he conferred with Generals Johnston and Beauregard; thence to Charlotte. At Irwinsville, Georgia, May loth, he was captured by a company of Union soldiers under LieutenantColonel Pritchard, while attempting to escape arrest. He was taken to Fortress Monroe and confined for two years, while the authorities at Washington were deciding what should be done with him. He was indicted for treason in 1866. On May 13, 1867, Mr. Davis was brought into court at Richmond and admitted to bail. He was never brought to trial, but was included in the general amnesty declared in December, 1868, although he steadfastly refused to take the necessary steps to have his political disabilities removed.

After regaining his freedom, Mr. Davis was received enthusiastically in the South. In a speech made in the summer of 1871, he declared himself still in favor of states' rights, and affirmed that he did not "accept the situation."

Jefferson Davis was a man of marked inflexibility, of thorough conviction, of exceptional executive ability, and of extreme pride. Scornful of the methods of the average contemporary politician, he was fearlessly frank, and a speaker whose utterances never failed of clearness, nor lacked in power. He was an absolutely frank, direct and positive man; he never paltered in any double sense with any one; he made himself thoroughly and perfectly understood; he consented or refused to do with entire frankness, so that no one ever justly left him with a doubtful impression as to what his views were or what would be his conduct. He was veracious in the highest sense of that phrase, - not merely truthful in the narration of past occurrences or accurate in his utterances, but of the highest integrity of thought and act and life; and this was, of course, accompanied with the most intrepid courage, for superb veracity of character is based on dauntless courage-that universal courage which is sometimes separated and called physical or mental or moral; his pervaded every quality of his nature. He never knew what it was to fear an adversary in any arena.

Davis did not belong to the rank of the very greatest intellects; that those who followed him had fair ground to claim that he did, will be granted readily by those who studied most closely what he did rather than merely what he uttered. For while Mr. Davis was an orator of high rank, a debater of unusual power and a writer of pure and forcible English, he will perhaps hereafter rank higher as an executive officer and as a man of action than as an orator or writer.

No man of modern times has been more diversely estimated both by his contemporaries and by those who have come later than has Davis. Yet with these varying estimates, Schuckburgh's statement concerning Cicero, in his preface to the Letters, is equally applicable to the Confederate President: "Though he will still, as he did in his lifetime, excite vehement disapproval as well as strong admiration, he will never, I think, appear to any one dull or uninteresting." James Redpath, who was an abolitionist and a lifelong political opponent, but who knew him well personally, and was familiar with his history, writes of him: "There are two Jefferson Davises in American history,-one is a conspirator, a rebel, a traitor, and the 'Fiend of Andersonville,' - he is a myth evolved from the hell smoke of cruel war-as purely imaginary a personage as Mephistopheles or the Hebrew Devil; the other was a statesman with clean hands and pure heart, who served his people faithfully from budding manhood to hoary age, without thought of self, with unbending integrity, and to the best of his great ability; - he was a man of whom all his countrymen who knew him personally, without distinction of creed political, are proud and proud that he was their countryman."

This diversity of opinion, which has existed among some of the people whom he governed, and among many who opposed him in the struggle between the sections, is illustrated primarily in the former case by the two biographies of him written by Southern authors immediately after the war. That of Alfriend, published in 1868, is partisan in its commendation, and represents the extreme views of those who were Davis's warmest friends and admirers. Pollard's Life, with its sub-title, A Secret History of the Confederacy, published in 1869, is a chronique scandaleuse, which, while conceding to its subject both patriotism and courage, charges him with favoritism, exaggerated self-esteem, and gross incompetency, and holds him personally responsible for the failure of the Confederacy.

P.G.T. Beauregard later wrote, "I was, however, not the only one of the highest military rank with whom Mr. Davis's relations were habitually unwholesome. It is an extraordinary fact that during the four years of war Mr. Davis did not call the five Generals together into conference with a view to determining the best military policy or settling upon a decisive plan of operations involving the whole theater of war, though there was often ample opportunity for it. We needed for President either a military man of a high order, or a politician of the first class (such as Howell Cobb) without military pretensions. The South did not fall crushed by the mere weight of the North ; but it was nibbled away at all sides and ends because its executive head never gathered and wielded its great strength under the ready advantages that greatly reduced or neutralized its adversary's naked physical superiority. It is but another of the many proofs that timid direction may readily go with physical courage, and that the passive defensive policy may make a long agony, but can never win a war."

The charge made most often against him is, that his imperious will and his obstinate and unyielding disposition and his inflexible purpose made him too much the Commander-in-chief, and hampered with unnecessary, if not improper restrictions the commanding generals in the field. There was nothing negative or indifferent in his character. Extreme both in his attachments and in his antagonisms, he was a profoundly loyal friend and a relentless enemy. Out of these extremes of opinion and feeling sprung his most obvious faults. He was severe in his judgment of those whom he disliked, and slow to perceive or to suspect a fault in those he loved and trusted. If once his confidence was shaken, however, from whatever cause - well-grounded or imaginary - he was prone to pass to the other extreme, that of entire distrust. In the expression of his opinion, even to those whom he believed he had ground for condemning, he was unhesitating and relentless to a degree that sometimes bore the appearance of arrogance.

But with all his directness of speech and sternness of criticism, he was innately courteous and considerate of the feelings of others, and his readiness to acknowledge himself in the wrong when convinced of it marked a high moral courage. At no time did he retreat from the attitude maintained by him throughout, nor did apology ever escape him. His attitude of irreconciliation to the Union was maintained until the end. Of more than average height, gaunt in feature and erect in stature, his personal appearance was not impressive. For many years he was an intense sufferer from neuralgia, but did not permit his physical condition to interfere with his official duties. During his retirement at Beauvoir, Mississippi, where the last twenty years of his life were spent, he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, a work which aroused much adverse comment from those military officers of the Confederacy with whom his relations had not always been amicable. He died Dec. 6, 1889.