Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back Read online

  The new President of the Confederacy was no longer the young-old man of beautiful manners and the poetic glance noted by Varina Howell in her letter to her mother. Nor was he the decisive colonel, not yet forty, who had sprung the lethal trap at Buena Vista. He was now past fifty, erect but even more gaunt-cheeked, blind in one eye, racked by murderous neuralgia, certainly neurotic in some undiagnosable way (perhaps suffering from an inner struggle of values), given to irritability that could break through his iron mask of will. Though he was capable of tact (sometimes tact in the face of severe provocation), and even of occasional humor, he lacked the indefinable sense for “handling” men, the intuitive understanding of others, and, ultimately, perhaps, self-confidence. He was incapable of catching the public imagination. He could sometimes inspire devotion, but his enclosed personality sometimes made him seem “cold as a lizard,” as Sam Houston put it. Houston also called him as “ambitious as Lucifer.” Set a thief to catch a thief! Ambitious, with little doubt, Davis was, but in no such simple, though cunning, way as Houston himself. There are many kinds of ambition, ranging from the trivial vanity of strut and preen, with no relation to accomplishment, to that fuelling, depersonalizing devotion to an objective endeavor, the locale of which may be a poet’s desk or a soldier’s battlefield. And what are we to say about Lincoln, whose ambition, according to William Herndon, his law partner and intimate, “was a little engine that knew no rest,” and who, Herndon also said, “had an idea that he was equal to, if not superior to, all things”? We can say that Lincoln’s engine of ambition was drawn into a complex of depersonalizing values. And what of the ambition of that ambiguous hero of liberalism Justice Holmes? What are we to make of the letter of William James (to Henry) analyzing the character of that old friend of his youth—it was later that he became Justice—and describing him as “a powerful battery, formed like a planing machine to gouge a deep and self-beneficial groove through life”? In any case, not simple ambition or the desire for a self-beneficial groove through life, any more than naked energy, maintained Davis for the four gruelling years. Iron will, self-denial, self-discipline, devotion to principle were certainly there—and, it may be safely hazarded, his conception of honor. But we can ultimately only guess about Davis. The historian who called him the Sphinx of the Confederacy was right.

  There is, however, the simple fact of age and health. Though Lincoln was less than a year younger than Davis, his extraordinary physical strength and his health—no doubt conserved, in spite of his own dark moments of spirit, by patience, humor, and self-confidence—made him seem a generation younger. And this fact reminds one of another, more demonstrable fact. Grant was some fifteen years younger than Lee, and the significance of this fact has been emphasized by historians, who have compared the number of days lost from indisposition by the two commanders. In fact, during most of the war Lee was suffering from heart trouble, diagnosed as rheumatism until his death. As for Sherman, he was forty-one when the war began.

  From the beginning, the North enjoyed obvious advantages, and Davis had to struggle against them. The disparity in population was tremendous; in addition, the North could draw on an almost inexhaustible reservoir of foreign recruits. At the very beginning of the war, General Winfield Scott had formulated the throttling “Anaconda” plan, which underlay later strategy, since a superior, more flexible military organization, allowing for variation and modification, could basically retain it. Although the largely improvised Confederate Navy and privateers did vast damage to Northern shipping, the control of inland waterways by gunboat, the capture of Southern ports, and the embargo, however imperfect, gave the North a tremendous edge. Agriculture in the North was already somewhat mechanized and was directed to food production. General education in the North was much superior, there was much greater acquaintance with mechanics, and business organization was more highly developed, as was the industrial plant. In 1864, in his annual message to Congress, Lincoln summed up the increased prosperity brought to the North by the Civil War: “It is of noteworthy interest that the steady expansion of population, improvement, and governmental institutions over the new and unoccupied portion of our country have scarcely been checked . . . that we have more men now than we had when the war began; that we are not exhausted, nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength. . . . Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever.” He mentioned, in passing, the construction of the Pacific railroad and the increasing exploitation of gold, silver, and mercury in the West. In other words, the North was getting richer from the war. Another important factor working for Lincoln was that in spite of his avowed racism (which may have contributed to his general popularity) he knew how to exploit the superior moral position of emancipation. And, most important, Lincoln, in the words of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, raised the idea of the Union “to the sublimity of religious mysticism”—and managed to make himself the recognized embodiment of that mysticism.

  The main idea that Davis was officially committed to defend (however much he may have vacillated on the issue for reasons of expediency) was the doctrine of states’ rights. But this doctrine involved a suicidal paradox. In “Why the North Won the Civil War,” Richard N. Current writes, “A Confederacy formed by particularist politicians could hardly be expected to adopt promptly those centralist policies. . . which victory demanded.” The crucial doctrine left no way for Davis—certainly for a man of his temperament—to deal with such governors as Joseph Emerson Brown, of Georgia, and Zebulon Baird Vance, of North Carolina, who, for all practical purposes, were doctrinaire to the point of mania or treason in withholding men and supplies from the central government. In fact, as the first Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Pope Walker, pointed out, in the early days of the war two hundred thousand volunteers could not be armed, because the doctrine of states’ rights allowed individual states to withhold equipment. Frank L. Owsley, in “State Rights in the Confederacy,” summed up the paradox when he wrote that the epitaph on the tombstone of the incipient nation should have read “Died of State Rights.”

  Davis and the South also faced other problems involving paradox. The great Confederate hope for recognition abroad lay in the power of King Cotton. The South assumed that British mills had to have cotton, and Yankee shipping as well as Yankee mills had to have it. But the gamble on cotton backfired. France was sympathetic but would not act without England. The British, though they were divided in their sympathies (with even the liberal Gladstone at one time, ironically, sympathetic to the Confederate cause), quickly found that the war was God’s blessing to them. First, there was no immediate pressure on them, because they had a good store of cotton on hand, and soon there began to be cotton from India. Second, the seas were being swept of their great rival, the large and expertly designed American merchant marine (the Confederate privateers and their effects on shipping-insurance rates ably abetting Divine Providence). Third, the munitions business—the British dealt with both sides—was a true bonanza. There was indeed strong sentiment against slavery, but the British millworkers’ love of freedom has apparently been overadvertised, and many a millworker would apparently swell a demonstration on one side one day (for a fee, of course) and swell an opposing one the next day—grayback or Yankee, who cared. Anyway, the millworker could not vote, and those who ran the country were in no mood to strangle their own prosperity. Besides, if the Confederacy should be recognized, war with the United States would be almost inevitable (Lincoln and William Henry Seward, his Secretary of State, could be very tough in their dealings with the Court of St. James’s), and Canada might well be lost.

  It is true that in France as well as in England there was strong sentiment against slavery, but when the idea of offering emancipation as a bribe for recognition was finally beginning to be put forward in the Confederacy it was too late to be of any use, besides striking paradoxically at a necessary, if not sufficient, reason for the war: slavery. And a parallel instance appeared when
the idea of enlisting blacks for Confederate armies (with the implied promise of freedom) was successfully brought forward—a paradox best formulated by the politician Howell Cobb, of Georgia, who opposed the idea: “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Actually, some blacks were enlisted and wore the gray, but only toward the end of the war.

  So, with states’ rights obviously bringing on disaster, King Cotton dethroned, and blacks wearing Confederate gray, little was left of the ideas that had made the Confederacy—only secession, in fact. But with the armies of Sherman and Grant closing in and defeatism stalking the land, what would become of that notion—a notion that for many eminent Southerners, including Davis and Lee, had been from the first dubious or rueful? Merely some notion of Southern identity remained, however hazy or fuddled; it was not until after Appomattox that the conception of Southern identity truly bloomed—a mystical conception, vague but bright, floating high beyond the criticism of brutal circumstances.

  WHAT should Davis have done? He might have insisted on a military reorganization to remedy the cumbersomeness of the departmental system, under which large-scale flexible planning was not readily feasible. Perhaps some action might have been taken—in the face of intransigent Southern personalities and principles—to connect the fatally unconnected rail systems (some even had different gauges of rails), in order to exploit the geographical advantage of interior lines and to distribute food and military supplies where they were needed instead of letting rifles rust and food rot. Perhaps more attention to internal problems, to questions of finance, and, more important, to morale. Perhaps, even with the departmental system, more attention to the crucial West, especially to Vicksburg. Perhaps less favoritism, especially to West Point commanders. Perhaps a change in the conscription law that made the owner of twenty slaves exempt from military service—a change that would at least have defanged the poisonous witticism that the bloodshed was “a rich man’s war and a pore man’s fight.” Perhaps a capital farther away than Richmond from the frontier (Montgomery, say), to free Southern forces for maneuver. Perhaps the risk of a pursuit into Washington itself on the heels of an army in panic and total disorder after the First Battle of Manassas. In any case, an abandonment of the policy of maintaining a defensive posture and waiting for European recognition, and an assumption of greater and more immediate military initiative—as Robert Toombs, Secretary of State of the Confederacy in 1861, and later a brigadier general, had urged from the beginning. But each of these proposals presented difficulties.

  Davis was what he was, and he was caught in the complications of the world he lived in—a world in which virtues could sometimes turn into liabilities. One way to approach the question of the suitability of Davis as a war President is to ask who among those available in 1861 would have made a better President.

  By and large, underlying many of the particular problems were fundamental difficulties built into the very nature of the Confederacy. It can even be argued that the factor underlying all other factors was a state of mind that existed in the North but not in the South. Though the Northern philosophy was unformulated, we can recognize it in the context of thought that led William James, in the end, to his doctrine of pragmatism. This was the state of mind that saw history not in terms of abstract, fixed principles but as a wavering flow of shifting values and contingencies, each to be confronted on the terms of its context. Both Calhoun and Davis (with thousands of others) saw the Constitution as equivalent to the tablets that Moses delivered from Sinai, in contrast to Lincoln, who apparently regarded it in some such evolutionary sense as that of Justice Holmes when Holmes wrote of the development of law.

  This Northern bias toward experience was definitely related to the successful conduct of the war. To begin with, once Lincoln had passed the early period of inaction he had no compunction about brushing aside legal technicalities. Without a shadow of legal justification, he had hordes of Northern citizens seized on the merest suspicion, or the slightest and most prejudiced hearsay, and held them incommunicado, ignoring the right of habeas corpus and the Supreme Court. In the same spirit, he ordered telegraph offices raided en masse for copies of messages, and, with no shadow of legal authority, he reached into the Treasury for what sums he deemed requisite. Lincoln did make a sort of bow to the Constitution by implying that in violating it he was saving it. (It may be recalled that early in life he had replaced the Deity with his own notion of evolution in nature and man.) Lincoln had proclaimed, at Cooper Union, on February 27, 1860, that “right makes might,” and certainly, except in his darkest and most skeptical meditations, he would not have agreed with Justice Holmes’s pragmatic avowal that the “good” is what results from “force majeure” and that every society “rests on the death of men.” But he obviously did believe that society could rest on the illegal jailing of men, and that law and the Constitution depended ultimately on need, preference, and cold-blooded power.

  More than a contrast between Lincoln and Davis is involved. The contrast lay in the two societies—one embracing antique values, the other in the process of developing new ones. To take a small but symbolic military matter, the Confederate notion of leadership was to lead—personally. At Gettysburg, for instance, Brigadier General William Barksdale swept over the battery at the Peach Orchard well ahead of his men, and—hatless, white hair flying, sword pointing up Cemetery Ridge—continued to lead until his conspicuous valor invited a Union officer to detail a whole company of riflemen to get that man. Forrest is not a perfect example, for he rose from private to general, but, main à main, he slew twenty-nine adversaries in his lifetime and had thirty horses shot from under him—three at Fort Pillow alone. This is not to say that when occasion demanded, Federal officers, too, did not coolly expose themselves to enemy fire—Grant, for example, at Vicks-burg—but the code was very different. The outmoded chivalric gesture, according to Douglas Southall Freeman’s analysis, seriously reduced the numbers of the Confederate officer corps.

  An even more fundamental contrast between the antagonists lay in their views of the nature of war. It is true that at the beginning men of influence on both sides tended to accept the old-fashioned notion of chivalric war. At Fort Sumter, throngs of Southern onlookers cheered when, after a pause that suggested surrender, Robert Anderson’s defending guns again answered the overwhelming bombardment; and when surrender finally occurred Anderson was presented with the shot-torn flag as a trophy—which he said he would treasure to become his shroud. And when the boat brought him from Sumter to the dock, the Southern spectators received him with the respect due a hero. Another instance, more theoretical, appears in General George B. McClellan’s early statement that his philosophy forbade war on civilians and the confiscation of property. When General George Gordon Meade—long before he was victor at Gettysburg—was ordered to seize the property of a Confederate sympathizer, he held that the North should behave like “the afflicted parent who is compelled to chasten his erring child and who performs his duty with a sad heart.” And, later, the gallant young Colonel Robert Gould Shaw—who eventually died vainly leading his black regiment up the shifting sands on the slopes of Fort Wagner, at Charleston—wrote his wife that if he should be executed for insubordination it would be because he could not again follow such an order as he had recently followed: to destroy “the unoffending little town of Darien, Georgia.”

  But General Quincy Gillmore, unable to subdue the forts at Charleston, was moved by no such chivalry. One of the new breed, he set up a great gun in the swamps outside the city—the Swamp Angel, it was called, and its name became the title of a poem by Melville—which, with shells of the fiercely inflammatory Greek fire, carried war to the civilian population. It was just as well for Colonel Shaw that the duty had not been assigned to him.

  Sherman is, of course, the most widely advertised of the new men—the inventors of total war. In the beginning, he was not “modern,” but he ruthlessly followed the logic of experience to the concept that we
now accept as normal. The enemy is not only a “hostile army” but a “hostile people.” Terror, Sherman said, is a “weapon,” and “war is not popularity-seeking.” There is a straight line of logic leading from Sherman’s theory to Coventry, buzz bombs on London, the Dresden fire raid, the Tokyo fire raid, and Hiroshima. War was hell, and Sherman strove to make it so, but once the logical end was accomplished he could write that the suffering of the South was “beyond comprehension.”

  As for Grant, he was a modern man, too, and not only in his later worship of wealth, fat cigars, and big businessmen. Though he flinched from the sight of blood and could eat only overdone meat (and then only the meat of large animals), he learned to become “Grant the butcher.” Once face to face with Lee, unconquerable at the chessboard of war, he fought a war of swap-out, knowing that only the balance sheet of blood could insure victory. He had an incalculable amount of blood to swap. And, to make certain that the swap system worked to the utmost, he refused after a battle any truce for the burial of the dead and the succor of the wounded. By the same token, he refused exchanges of prisoners; his theory was that a man could as well serve his country starving in Andersonville as standing in the battle line. Unremitting pressure, at any cost, was the policy of a man who loathed the sight of blood but had come face to face with reality. He was purely logical, and after the war he stated the theory he had developed: “The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.” A perfect theory, if you can pay what the then soldier (later Justice) Holmes called, in a letter to his father, “the butcher’s bill.” And there was one more factor, of a different order, that made Grant a “modern” man in his military attitude: as T. Harry Williams has pointed out, Grant developed the relationship between military thinking and political thinking. He and Lincoln understood each other.