Abstract
From March 1862 until the end of the war, the relationship between Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee functioned with a smoothness almost unique among Davis’s relations with his senior commanders. This paper treats that partnership as the control case for the present volume: the dysfunction documented elsewhere in these studies is legible as dysfunction only against a relationship in which a general and a president cooperated effectively over three years and a series of grave decisions. The argument is that the harmony was not accidental and not merely a byproduct of battlefield success, but was in large part the product of deliberate relationship management on Lee’s part, a sustained practice of deference on matters Davis valued, of keeping the president continuously informed, and of framing recommendations as options to be chosen rather than demands to be met. The paper reconstructs the working pattern from the contemporary correspondence, tests it against the war’s principal decisions, and closes by weighing a harder question the volume cannot avoid: whether the very closeness of the Davis–Lee partnership carried strategic costs for the Confederacy elsewhere, and whether the reverential historiography surrounding Lee has obscured them.
Introduction
The contrast at the heart of this volume is stark. The same president who quarreled with Joseph E. Johnston over a ranking, who clung to Braxton Bragg past the point of his subordinates’ open revolt, and who cooled toward P. G. T. Beauregard over a battle report, sustained with Robert E. Lee a working relationship of remarkable steadiness across the entire war. Lee commanded the Confederacy’s most important field army for three years; he was, for much of that period, the closest thing Davis had to a trusted strategic partner; and the documentary record of their cooperation contains nothing resembling the bitter exchanges that mark the other dyads.[^1]
The temptation is to explain this by reference to Lee’s character alone, to treat the partnership as the natural result of placing a great and modest soldier alongside a president who recognized his worth. That explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete, and incompleteness here is consequential, because if the partnership is read as the simple product of Lee’s nobility it teaches nothing transferable about command relations. The argument of this paper is that the harmony was, in significant measure, manufactured. Lee worked at the relationship with the same care he brought to a campaign, and the techniques he used are visible in the correspondence to anyone willing to read it as a record of management rather than as the effusions of mutual esteem the Lost Cause tradition later made of it.[^2]
A second argument runs beneath the first. A control case is meant to isolate a variable, and the variable this volume is testing is Davis. If the Davis–Lee partnership worked while the others failed, and if the principal difference lay in how the general handled the president, then the volume’s recurring charge against Davis, that he mismanaged his generals, requires a careful qualification. Davis could be managed. The question that follows, pursued in the synthesis, is whether the burden of managing the relationship should have fallen so heavily on the subordinate.
From Adviser to Army Commander
Lee entered the war without the early laurels that attached to Beauregard at Fort Sumter and Manassas or to the two Johnstons. His first field assignment, in western Virginia in the autumn of 1861, ended in failure and public criticism; a subsequent posting supervised coastal defenses in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, useful work that won no headlines.[^3] When Davis recalled him to Richmond in March 1862 and assigned him, by order, to duty charged with the conduct of the military operations of the Confederate armies under the direction of the president, Lee occupied an advisory position of uncertain authority, a chief of staff in function if not in name.[^4]
This early period, though brief, established the working habits that would define the partnership. Lee operated visibly under Davis’s direction, deferred to the president’s prerogatives, and made himself useful without making himself a rival. When the wounding of Joseph Johnston at Seven Pines on May 31, 1862, opened the command of the army defending Richmond, Davis turned to the officer at his elbow whose discretion he had spent two months observing. Lee took command on June 1, 1862, of the force he would rename the Army of Northern Virginia.[^5] The point worth marking is that Lee came to field command having already demonstrated to Davis that he could be trusted with latitude, an asset Joseph Johnston had squandered the previous September and never recovered.
The Mechanics of the Partnership
The working method that distinguishes the Davis–Lee correspondence from Davis’s other command relations can be reduced to a few consistent practices, each of them visible across the war’s dispatches.
The first was a steady flow of information. Lee wrote to Davis often, fully, and candidly, reporting his situation, his intentions, and his anxieties. Where Joseph Johnston’s silences left Davis to imagine the worst and to intervene in the dark, Lee’s openness left the president informed and therefore, paradoxically, less inclined to interfere.[^6] The mechanism is worth stating directly, because it recurs throughout the volume in its negative form: a commander who keeps his civilian superior informed purchases operational freedom with candor, while a commander who withholds information invites the very meddling he fears.
The second practice was deference on matters Davis valued and firmness only where it counted. Lee did not contest the president’s authority over appointments, organization, and the broad allocation of forces among theaters; he reserved his insistence for operational questions within his own sphere, and even there he pressed his views as recommendations rather than ultimatums.[^7] He understood, as Beauregard and Joseph Johnston apparently did not, that Davis’s sensitivity to any challenge to his authority could be disarmed by the simple expedient of not challenging it where challenge was unnecessary.
The third practice was a rhetoric of options. Lee characteristically laid out a situation, sketched the alternatives, stated his own preference with reasons, and left the decision formally with the president. This framing flattered Davis’s self-image as commander-in-chief while leaving Lee’s professional judgment the likeliest to prevail, since it arrived already reasoned and rarely met a counter-argument of equal weight from Richmond.[^8] The effect was that Lee generally got what he wanted without ever appearing to demand it, an outcome that escaped the more confrontational of his colleagues entirely.
None of this should be read as manipulation in any cynical sense. Lee’s deference was genuine; he held an authentic conviction about the proper subordination of the soldier to the civil power, and his courtesy was not a mask but an expression of character. The analytical point is that genuine character and effective technique here coincided, and that the coincidence produced a partnership the other dyads could not reproduce.
Tested by Decision: 1862–1863
The durability of the partnership is best measured against the grave decisions it had to absorb, several of which might have fractured a weaker relationship.
The decision to carry the war north into Maryland in September 1862, ending at Sharpsburg, was a gamble that failed in its larger objects, yet it produced no rupture between general and president; Lee had kept Davis informed of his reasoning, and the two absorbed the disappointment without recrimination.[^9] The pattern held the following summer in a far weightier matter. In the spring of 1863, with Vicksburg under mounting threat, the Confederate high command faced a strategic choice of the first order: whether to detach part of Lee’s army to reinforce the Western theater or to concentrate on a renewed offensive in the East. Lee argued, in a series of letters and in conference at Richmond, for the offensive that became the Pennsylvania campaign, contending that the best defense of the whole was a blow struck in the East.[^10] Davis and the cabinet accepted his view. The campaign ended at Gettysburg.
It is essential to the honesty of this case study to note that the harmony of the Davis–Lee partnership was itself a factor in that decision, and that the decision is among the most criticized of the war. Lee’s prestige and Davis’s confidence in him combined to give Lee’s preference for an Eastern concentration a weight that the advocates of reinforcing the West could not match. The partnership worked, in the narrow sense that president and general agreed and cooperated; whether what they agreed upon served the Confederacy is a separate question, and one the volume’s eighth paper, on the Western command problem, takes up directly. A control case that demonstrated only the virtues of harmony would be a poor control. This one demonstrates that harmony between a president and his most trusted general can also concentrate strategic judgment in too few hands.
The Resignation Letter of August 1863
The single sharpest test of the partnership came after Gettysburg. On August 8, 1863, Lee wrote to Davis a letter offering to step down from command, citing the public disappointment following the campaign, his own declining health, and the army’s need for a leader in whom confidence was undiminished.[^11] The letter is a model of the man, free of self-pity and addressed entirely to the good of the service.
Davis’s reply of August 11 is, for the purposes of this volume, one of the most revealing documents in the entire corpus of his command correspondence. Where his answer to Joseph Johnston’s protest of 1861 had been a few frigid lines of refusal, his answer to Lee was a warm and reasoned refusal, declining the resignation, affirming his confidence, and observing that to find a more capable commander was an impossibility he would not pretend to entertain.[^12] The contrast is the whole point. The same president, two years apart, met a general’s letter touching on his standing in two opposite registers. The difference lay partly in the two letters, Johnston had demanded vindication while Lee had offered to sacrifice himself, and partly in the two relationships, one built on grievance and the other on two years of accumulated trust. The Davis of August 1863 was capable of grace toward a general; the question the volume keeps returning to is why that capacity was so unevenly distributed.
The Late Elevation
For most of the war Lee’s authority remained confined to his own army; he was not made general-in-chief of all Confederate forces until the very end, when the Confederate Congress, in the winter of 1865, effectively compelled the creation of the office and Davis assented to Lee’s appointment to it.[^13] By then the war was nearly lost and the position carried little practical scope.
The lateness of this elevation is itself evidence about the partnership and about Davis. Davis valued Lee above any other soldier and trusted him as he trusted no one else, yet he resisted until forced the step of placing Lee in formal authority over the whole Confederate military effort. The most economical explanation is that Davis intended to remain his own general-in-chief and was reluctant to delegate that function to anyone, however esteemed. The partnership with Lee, in other words, operated within a boundary Davis was unwilling to cross even for Lee: the boundary of his own ultimate command. That the most successful command relationship of the Confederacy stopped short of formal strategic partnership until the final weeks is a fact the synthesis must weigh, for it suggests that the harmony, real as it was, had a ceiling fixed by the president’s conception of his own office.
The Source Problem
The evidentiary discipline this volume requires bears on the Davis–Lee partnership with particular force, because no relationship in Confederate history has been more thoroughly draped in reverence. The Lost Cause tradition elevated Lee to a figure of near-secular sainthood, and the monumental biography by Douglas Southall Freeman, for all its unmatched command of the sources, wrote within that tradition and rarely against it.[^14] To read the Davis–Lee correspondence through Freeman is to risk receiving a partnership of two great men cooperating in a noble cause, with the management, the maneuver, and the costs all dissolved into mutual nobility.
The corrective is the same one applied throughout these studies. The contemporary correspondence, gathered in the Official Records and in the modern editions of both men’s papers, is the reliable layer, and it shows a working relationship with visible mechanics: a general who managed his president with skill, and a president who could be managed. The postwar layer, Lee’s reticence and early death left him no apologia of his own, but Davis’s Rise and Fall and the vast hagiographic literature supplied the deficit, must be read as the construction of a legend rather than as a transcript of the partnership.[^15] Modern scholarship, above all Woodworth’s study of the two men at war and Emory Thomas’s biography of Lee, has done the necessary work of recovering the relationship as a human and political arrangement, and this paper follows their lead in treating the partnership as something Lee built and maintained, not something that simply existed by virtue of who the two men were.[^16]
Significance
The Davis–Lee partnership matters to this volume chiefly for what it proves about the variable the studies are testing. It proves that Davis was not constitutionally incapable of a productive command relationship, that he could extend trust, accept advice, refuse a resignation with warmth, and sustain cooperation across defeat as well as victory. The failures documented elsewhere, therefore, cannot be explained by a simple thesis that Davis was incapable of working with anyone; the evidence of Lee refutes it.
What the partnership equally proves, on closer reading, is that the burden of making the relationship work fell largely on the general. It was Lee who kept Davis informed, Lee who deferred, Lee who framed his judgments as the president’s choices, Lee who offered to resign rather than to fight for his standing. The harmony was real, but it was asymmetrically maintained, and that asymmetry is itself a finding about Davis. A president who can be managed, but who must be managed with such unremitting care, is a president whose relationships will succeed only with subordinates possessed of unusual tact, and will fail with the proud, the prickly, and the silent. That is, in effect, the pattern the rest of this volume documents.
Conclusion
The relationship between Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee was the most successful of the Confederate high command, and its success was earned rather than given. Lee built and maintained it through a steady practice of candor, deference, and the artful framing of advice as the president’s own decision, and the result was a partnership that absorbed Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, and a postwar’s worth of recrimination without fracture. Read as a control case, it establishes that Davis could be a workable partner, and thereby sharpens rather than dissolves the volume’s larger inquiry, for it shows that the failures elsewhere turned on the interaction between Davis’s temperament and the particular general, not on a blanket incapacity in the president. It also resists a reverential reading: the very closeness of the partnership concentrated strategic judgment, contributed to the contested Pennsylvania decision, and stopped short of formal strategic authority until the end. The partnership worked, and the price of its working, paid in the labor of the subordinate and in the costs of harmony itself, is part of what made it worth studying.
Notes
[^1]: For the overall steadiness of the Davis–Lee relationship against the background of Davis’s other command relations, see Woodworth (1995) and Cooper (2000).
[^2]: On reading the correspondence as a record of deliberate management rather than as mutual esteem alone, see Woodworth (1995) and Thomas (1995).
[^3]: On Lee’s western Virginia campaign and coastal-defense service in 1861–1862, see Freeman (1934–1935, Vol. 1) and Thomas (1995).
[^4]: On the March 1862 order assigning Lee to duty under the president’s direction, see U.S. War Department (1880–1901, Series I) and the discussion in Woodworth (1995). The exact wording of the assignment order should be verified against the Official Records before publication.
[^5]: On Johnston’s wounding at Seven Pines and Lee’s assumption of command on June 1, 1862, see Freeman (1934–1935, Vol. 2) and Thomas (1995).
[^6]: On the contrast between Lee’s candor and Johnston’s reticence as factors shaping Davis’s propensity to intervene, see Woodworth (1990, 1995).
[^7]: On Lee’s deference regarding appointments and force allocation, see Woodworth (1995) and Cooper (2000).
[^8]: On Lee’s characteristic practice of presenting alternatives and reserving the formal decision to the president, see Dowdey and Manarin (1961) and Woodworth (1995).
[^9]: On the Maryland campaign of 1862 and its aftermath in the Davis–Lee relationship, see Freeman (1934–1935, Vol. 2) and Woodworth (1995).
[^10]: On the spring 1863 strategic debate over reinforcing the West versus the Pennsylvania offensive, see Woodworth (1995) and Cooper (2000); the Western dimension of this decision is developed in Paper 8 of this volume.
[^11]: Lee’s letter offering to resign is dated August 8, 1863; see Dowdey and Manarin (1961) and Freeman (1934–1935, Vol. 3).
[^12]: Davis’s reply declining the resignation is dated August 11, 1863; see the text in U.S. War Department (1880–1901, Series I) and the discussion in Woodworth (1995). The characterization of the letter’s content here follows those sources; direct quotation should be checked against the original.
[^13]: On Lee’s appointment as general-in-chief in early 1865 and the congressional pressure that produced it, see Freeman (1934–1935, Vol. 4) and Cooper (2000).
[^14]: On Freeman’s reverential cast and its place in the Lost Cause tradition, see the historiographical discussion developed at length in Paper 9 of this volume; see also Thomas (1995).
[^15]: On Davis’s postwar account and the broader hagiographic construction of Lee, see Davis (1881) and the analysis in Woodworth (1995).
[^16]: For the recovery of the partnership as a human and political arrangement, see Woodworth (1995) and Thomas (1995).
References
Cooper, W. J. (2000). Jefferson Davis, American. Alfred A. Knopf.
Crist, L. L. (Ed.). (1992). The papers of Jefferson Davis: Vol. 7. 1861. Louisiana State University Press.
Davis, J. (1881). The rise and fall of the Confederate government (Vols. 1–2). D. Appleton.
Dowdey, C., & Manarin, L. H. (Eds.). (1961). The wartime papers of R. E. Lee. Little, Brown.
Freeman, D. S. (1934–1935). R. E. Lee: A biography (Vols. 1–4). Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Freeman, D. S. (1942–1944). Lee’s lieutenants: A study in command (Vols. 1–3). Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Thomas, E. M. (1995). Robert E. Lee: A biography. W. W. Norton.
U.S. War Department. (1880–1901). The war of the rebellion: A compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies (Series I–IV). Government Printing Office.
Woodworth, S. E. (1990). Jefferson Davis and his generals: The failure of Confederate command in the West. University Press of Kansas.
Woodworth, S. E. (1995). Davis and Lee at war. University Press of Kansas.
