Abstract
The relationship between Jefferson Davis and Braxton Bragg presents the inverse of the Davis–Johnston dysfunction examined in the preceding study. Where Davis withheld trust from a capable general he disliked, he extended sustained support to a general whose capacity for army command was in serious doubt and who had lost the confidence of nearly all his senior subordinates. This paper examines that loyalty: its sources, its mechanics, and its costs. It argues that Davis’s support for Bragg, far from being inexplicable favoritism, followed a coherent logic, Bragg was loyal, hardworking, deferential to the president’s authority, and willing to do the unglamorous work of organization, qualities Davis valued precisely because they were so absent in his relations with Johnston and Beauregard. The tragedy was that these were not the qualities most needed in the commander of the Confederacy’s principal Western army. The paper traces the relationship through the army’s internal revolt after Chickamauga, Davis’s extraordinary personal visit to the army in October 1863, the disaster at Missionary Ridge that followed, and Bragg’s subsequent service as the president’s military adviser in Richmond, and it weighs what the dyad reveals about the difference between the loyalty a president desires and the competence a war requires.
Introduction
The conventional charge against Jefferson Davis as a manager of generals contains two apparently contradictory elements. He is accused of driving away the able, the indictment built on Johnston and Beauregard, and, in the same breath, of clinging to the inadequate, the indictment built almost entirely on Braxton Bragg. The contradiction is only apparent, and resolving it is the work of this paper. The same temperament that disposed Davis to distrust a proud and reticent general disposed him to value a loyal and deferential one, and the two dispositions are aspects of a single set of priorities. Davis prized in a subordinate exactly the qualities Bragg displayed and Johnston withheld: candor with the president, deference to civil authority, administrative diligence, and personal loyalty. That these qualities did not add up to fitness for independent army command is the heart of the matter.[^1]
The argument advanced here is that Davis’s support for Bragg was rational on its own premises and disastrous in its results, and that the gap between the two is the lesson of the case. Davis was not blind to Bragg’s difficulties; he visited the army to confront them directly. He was, rather, applying a theory of what made a good subordinate that valued the wrong things, or at least valued the right things in the wrong proportion, in a commander whose army had lost faith in him. The dyad thus illuminates a failure mode distinct from the one documented in the Johnston study. There, distrust corroded a relationship that might have worked; here, loyalty sustained a relationship that ought to have ended, and the cost in both cases was paid in the Western theater.[^2]
Bragg’s Qualities and Davis’s Esteem
To understand Davis’s loyalty one must first understand what Bragg offered. Bragg was, by the testimony of his contemporaries and the record of his service, a gifted organizer and disciplinarian. He took the Western army in hand, imposed order on it, and forged it into a more disciplined instrument than he had received.[^3] He was tireless in administration, attentive to the unglamorous logistics of supply and training, and scrupulously loyal to the Confederate government and to Davis personally. He did not intrigue against the administration, did not leak grievances to the press, and did not, in the manner of Johnston, hold his plans aloof from his president. In his correspondence with Richmond he was forthcoming and respectful.[^4]
These were precisely the qualities Davis found wanting elsewhere, and his esteem for Bragg must be read against the frustration the other relationships produced. A president who had endured Johnston’s silences and Beauregard’s appetite for publicity found in Bragg a commander who told him what he intended and deferred to his authority. From Davis’s vantage, Bragg was the model of what a general’s relationship to his government ought to be, and that model counted heavily in the president’s judgment of him.[^5]
Bragg’s defects, however, lay in the domain where they mattered most: the command of men in the field. He was combative, harsh, and quarrelsome with his own officers; he quarreled bitterly with subordinates, held grudges, and inspired in many of his generals not the confidence a commander requires but active resentment.[^6] His battlefield record was a study in incomplete success, victories that were not consolidated, advantages that were not pressed, retreats that followed hard-won openings. The very rigor that made him an effective organizer made him an abrasive leader, and the army he had disciplined into shape did not love him and, after a time, did not trust him to lead it to victory.[^7]
The Revolt After Chickamauga
The crisis of the relationship came in the autumn of 1863. In September, Bragg won at Chickamauga the most complete Confederate battlefield victory of the Western war, driving the Union army of William Rosecrans from the field and back into Chattanooga. But Bragg failed to convert the tactical victory into a decisive result; the beaten Union army was not destroyed, escaped into Chattanooga, and there entrenched.[^8] To Bragg’s senior subordinates, the failure to reap the fruits of Chickamauga was the final proof of a fundamental unfitness, and they moved against him.
What followed was extraordinary in the annals of the Confederate army. A group of Bragg’s principal generals, including some of the most prominent officers in the Western theater, effectively petitioned for his removal, communicating to Richmond, through formal and informal channels, their conviction that the army could not succeed under his command.[^9] This was not the ordinary friction of a difficult commander; it was a collective declaration by the army’s senior leadership that they had lost confidence in their chief. A commander whose corps and division commanders have, as a body, ceased to believe in him has lost an essential condition of effective command, whatever his other merits.
Davis’s response to this revolt is the defining act of the relationship and the central exhibit of this paper. Rather than removing Bragg, as the petitioning generals urged and as the gravity of the revolt might seem to have demanded, Davis traveled personally to the army in October 1863 to assess the situation and, in the event, to sustain his commander.[^10]
The Personal Visit of October 1863
Davis’s journey to the Army of Tennessee was a remarkable assertion of presidential involvement in a command crisis. Arriving at Bragg’s headquarters, the president undertook to hear the grievances of the dissatisfied generals, an undertaking conducted, by the surviving accounts, in the awkward presence of Bragg himself, so that the subordinates were invited to state their want of confidence in their commander with that commander standing by.[^11] The scene, whatever Davis intended by it, was humiliating to all parties and resolved nothing in Bragg’s favor in the eyes of the generals.
Having heard the complaints, Davis nonetheless decided to retain Bragg in command. The reasons were several and reflect the logic of the relationship. Davis had no obvious superior replacement at hand whom he trusted, the available alternatives, including Johnston, were men in whom Davis had little confidence or active distrust. He valued Bragg’s loyalty and administrative competence and was reluctant to reward what he may have regarded as a cabal of insubordinate generals by yielding to their demand. And he retained, despite the evidence, a personal confidence in Bragg that the revolt had not shaken.[^12] The decision was not irrational; each of its components had a logic. But its cumulative effect was to return to command, over an army that had repudiated him, a general now further weakened by the open knowledge that his subordinates had sought his removal and failed only because the president had overruled them.
The aftermath of the visit compounded the damage. In its wake, Bragg moved against several of the officers who had opposed him, and the army’s senior ranks were disrupted by the reshuffling and departure of generals in the weeks before a major battle.[^13] An army already short of confidence in its commander now entered a crisis with its leadership unsettled and its internal divisions raw. Davis’s loyalty to Bragg had not restored the army’s cohesion; it had preserved a commander at the price of the command’s stability.
Missionary Ridge and Its Aftermath
The vindication of the petitioning generals, and the refutation of Davis’s loyalty, came swiftly. In late November 1863, Union forces under Grant, now reinforced and resupplied at Chattanooga, assaulted Bragg’s besieging army on the heights above the city. At Missionary Ridge on November 25, Bragg’s army, holding what should have been a formidable defensive position, broke under assault and fled in a rout that astonished both sides.[^14] The collapse was among the most complete suffered by a Confederate army in a major engagement, and it forced the abandonment of the siege of Chattanooga and the withdrawal of the army into Georgia.
The disaster at Missionary Ridge made Bragg’s position untenable at last. Even Davis’s loyalty could not survive a rout of that magnitude, and Bragg, recognizing the inevitable, asked to be relieved. Davis accepted his resignation of the command at the end of November 1863.[^15] The loyalty that had weathered the revolt of the generals could not weather catastrophe in the field, and the relationship’s first phase ended with the very removal Davis had refused to order a month earlier, now compelled by events.
It is essential to the balance of this study to note what Missionary Ridge did and did not prove. It proved that the generals’ want of confidence in Bragg had real foundation and that Davis’s decision to override them had been costly. It did not prove that every element of Davis’s October reasoning had been baseless, the difficulty of finding a trusted replacement was genuine, and the danger of yielding to insubordinate subordinates was not imaginary. The fairest verdict is that Davis weighed real considerations and weighed them wrongly, allowing his esteem for Bragg’s loyalty and his distrust of the alternatives to outweigh the plain evidence that the army could no longer succeed under its commander.[^16]
The Second Act: Bragg as Military Adviser
The relationship did not end with Bragg’s removal from field command. In a development that has struck many observers as the strangest turn in the whole affair, Davis in early 1864 brought Bragg to Richmond and assigned him to duty supervising the conduct of the military operations of the Confederate armies, in effect making the recently failed army commander the president’s principal military adviser.[^17]
This second act confirms the thesis of the paper. Davis had concluded, plausibly, that Bragg’s gifts were administrative and organizational rather than those of a field commander, and that in a staff capacity at Richmond those gifts could serve the cause without exposing them to the test Bragg had repeatedly failed. The qualities Davis valued in Bragg, diligence, loyalty, administrative grasp, were real and were better suited to the adviser’s desk than to the army’s saddle.[^18] In this Davis showed a degree of discernment: he had correctly identified what Bragg was good at, even if he had been slow to recognize what Bragg was not good at. The adviser’s role placed Bragg where his strengths could operate and his weaknesses could do less harm.
Yet the appointment also exposed the same loyalty that had sustained Bragg too long in the field. To elevate to a position of central strategic influence a general who had just been routed and repudiated by his own army was, whatever its administrative logic, an act that disregarded the judgment of the Western officer corps and the verdict of Missionary Ridge. Davis’s confidence in Bragg the man survived the failure of Bragg the army commander, and that surviving confidence is the through-line of the entire relationship, the thing to be explained, and the thing this study has tried to render intelligible without excusing.[^19]
The Source Problem
The evidentiary discipline of this volume bears on the Bragg relationship with a particular complication: Bragg has been, in the historiography, perhaps the most thoroughly maligned of all Confederate commanders, and the picture of him as an irascible incompetent owes much to the memoirs and partisan accounts of the very subordinates who sought his removal. The hostile testimony of officers who had quarreled with Bragg, preserved and amplified in postwar writing, has shaped the durable image of him, and that testimony is interested testimony, the recollections of men with reputations of their own to defend and grudges of their own to settle.[^20]
The method applied throughout these studies requires reading such accounts critically rather than adopting them. The contemporary record, Bragg’s own dispatches, the orders and correspondence of the Official Records, the campaign reports, supports a more measured picture than the caricature: a genuinely capable organizer and a genuinely flawed field commander, abrasive and unlucky in roughly equal measure, whose failures were real but whose vilification was sharpened by the partisan needs of his enemies.[^21] The fullest modern treatment, Grady McWhiney’s biography, undertook precisely this rebalancing, presenting Bragg as a more complex and more sympathetic figure than the tradition allowed while not denying the substance of his shortcomings.[^22] This paper follows that lead: it neither rehabilitates Bragg into a misunderstood master nor accepts the hostile caricature, and it locates Davis’s loyalty as a response to qualities in Bragg that were real even as they were insufficient.
Significance
The Davis–Bragg dyad earns its place in this volume as the principal evidence for a failure mode opposite to the one documented in the Johnston study, and the two together define the range of Davis’s command relations. With Johnston, Davis withheld trust from competence; with Bragg, he extended loyalty to insufficiency. The symmetry is instructive. Both failures flowed from the same set of presidential priorities, a high valuation of loyalty, deference, and candor toward the civil power, applied in the one case to deny support to a general who lacked those traits, and in the other to sustain a general who possessed them but lacked the field competence the traits could not supply.[^23]
The relationship also demonstrates the danger of confusing the qualities of a good subordinate with the qualities of a good commander. Bragg was, by Davis’s lights, an exemplary subordinate, and Davis was not wrong to value what Bragg offered. The error lay in allowing those genuine virtues to outweigh the evidence, mounting from the field and from the army’s own officers, that Bragg could not lead the Western army to victory. A president who selects and retains commanders on the basis of their relationship to himself rather than their effect upon their armies will retain the loyal and the deferential past the point of usefulness, and the Confederacy paid for that tendency at Missionary Ridge.[^24]
Conclusion
Jefferson Davis’s loyalty to Braxton Bragg was neither inexplicable nor irrational; it was the consistent application of a theory of subordination that valued precisely the qualities Bragg possessed, loyalty, deference, candor, and administrative diligence, and discounted the field incompetence those qualities could not offset. Sustained through the revolt of Bragg’s own generals and the humiliating confrontation of October 1863, that loyalty failed at last only when Missionary Ridge made it untenable, and it reasserted itself afterward in the elevation of the failed commander to the president’s own council. Read against the Johnston study, the relationship completes a portrait of Davis’s command instincts in their two opposite expressions: a distrust that denied support to the able and a loyalty that extended it to the inadequate, both rooted in the same overvaluation of a subordinate’s bearing toward his president. The cost of the loyalty, like the cost of the distrust, was paid in the Western theater, where the Confederacy could least afford it, and the dyad stands as a study in the difference between the general a president finds congenial and the general a war requires.
Notes
[^1]: For the resolution of the apparent contradiction between Davis driving away the able and clinging to the inadequate, see Woodworth (1990) and McWhiney (1969).
[^2]: On the Bragg relationship as a distinct failure mode rooted in loyalty rather than distrust, see Woodworth (1990).
[^3]: On Bragg’s gifts as an organizer and disciplinarian, see McWhiney (1969) and Connelly (1971).
[^4]: On Bragg’s loyalty to the administration and his candor with Richmond, see Woodworth (1990) and McWhiney (1969).
[^5]: On Davis’s esteem for Bragg as a model of proper subordination, read against his frustration with other commanders, see Woodworth (1990).
[^6]: On Bragg’s combativeness with his own officers and the resentment it produced, see McWhiney (1969), Connelly (1971), and Hallock (1991).
[^7]: On the contrast between Bragg’s organizational rigor and his abrasive field leadership, see McWhiney (1969).
[^8]: On Chickamauga and Bragg’s failure to convert the victory, see Cozzens (1992) and Woodworth (1998).
[^9]: On the revolt of Bragg’s senior generals after Chickamauga, see Connelly (1971), McWhiney (1969), and Woodworth (1990).
[^10]: On Davis’s decision to travel to the army rather than remove Bragg, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^11]: On the conduct of Davis’s visit and the airing of grievances in Bragg’s presence, see Woodworth (1990) and Hallock (1991); the precise circumstances of these meetings should be verified against contemporary accounts before publication.
[^12]: On the reasons for Davis’s decision to retain Bragg, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^13]: On the disruption of the army’s senior command following the visit, see Connelly (1971) and Hallock (1991).
[^14]: On the rout at Missionary Ridge on November 25, 1863, see Cozzens (1994) and McWhiney (1969).
[^15]: On Bragg’s relief from command at the end of November 1863, see Hallock (1991) and Woodworth (1990).
[^16]: On the balanced assessment of Davis’s October decision in light of Missionary Ridge, see Woodworth (1990).
[^17]: On Bragg’s appointment as the president’s military adviser in early 1864, see Hallock (1991) and Cooper (2000).
[^18]: On the suitability of Bragg’s gifts to a staff and advisory role, see McWhiney (1969) and Hallock (1991).
[^19]: On the persistence of Davis’s confidence in Bragg as the defining feature of the relationship, see Woodworth (1990).
[^20]: On the role of hostile subordinate testimony in shaping the durable image of Bragg, see McWhiney (1969) and Hallock (1991).
[^21]: On the more measured picture supported by the contemporary record, see McWhiney (1969) and Woodworth (1990).
[^22]: McWhiney’s biography, completed in its second volume by Hallock, undertook the principal modern rebalancing of Bragg’s reputation; see McWhiney (1969) and Hallock (1991).
[^23]: On the symmetry between the Johnston and Bragg failures as expressions of the same presidential priorities, see Woodworth (1990); the Johnston dyad is examined in Paper 3 of this volume.
[^24]: On the danger of selecting commanders by their relationship to the president rather than their effect on their armies, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
References
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Cooper, W. J. (2000). Jefferson Davis, American. Alfred A. Knopf.
Cozzens, P. (1992). This terrible sound: The battle of Chickamauga. University of Illinois Press.
Cozzens, P. (1994). The shipwreck of their hopes: The battles for Chattanooga. University of Illinois Press.
Davis, J. (1881). The rise and fall of the Confederate government (Vols. 1–2). D. Appleton.
Hallock, J. W. (1991). Braxton Bragg and Confederate defeat: Volume II. University of Alabama Press.
McWhiney, G. (1969). Braxton Bragg and Confederate defeat: Volume I, field command. Columbia University Press.
Woodworth, S. E. (1990). Jefferson Davis and his generals: The failure of Confederate command in the West. University Press of Kansas.
Woodworth, S. E. (1998). Six armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga campaigns. University of Nebraska Press.
