Abstract
This concluding paper draws together the nine studies that precede it into a comparative assessment of Jefferson Davis as commander-in-chief. It proceeds by testing which patterns recur across the dyadic case studies and which were specific to particular relationships, and it incorporates the structural analysis of the department system and the source-critical discipline that the volume has developed. The paper argues that the recurring element across Davis’s command relationships was a single disposition expressed in several forms: a tendency to assess and value generals according to their personal relationship to him, their loyalty, their deference to his authority, their candor with him, rather than according to their demonstrated effect upon their armies. This disposition could produce a partnership of the first rank, as with Lee, who managed the relationship with unusual skill, and it could produce distrust, misplaced loyalty, estrangement, and catastrophic misjudgment, as with Johnston, Bragg, Beauregard, and Hood. The paper then weighs the enduring debate over Davis, whether he was a meddling micromanager, a conscientious executive failing within an impossible situation, or some combination, and concludes with the comparison to Abraham Lincoln. It argues that the contrast with Lincoln illuminates Davis’s central limitation: not a want of diligence or intelligence, both of which he possessed in abundance, but a relative inability to subordinate his own amour propre and his own judgment to the pragmatic requirements of getting the most from difficult men.
Introduction
The nine preceding studies have examined Jefferson Davis’s command relationships one at a time, treating each dyad as a unit of analysis and resisting, by design, the premature generalization that a synthetic account requires. The discipline of the case study has its reward in particularity: the Davis–Johnston relationship is shown to differ from the Davis–Bragg relationship, which differs again from the Davis–Beauregard and the Davis–Hood, and the differences are real and instructive. But a volume of case studies that never rose to synthesis would leave its central question unanswered. The question is not how Davis related to this general or that one, but what manner of commander-in-chief he was, and that question can be answered only by asking what, across the varied relationships, recurred.[^1]
This paper undertakes that synthesis. Its method is comparative across the volume’s own cases: it sets the dyads beside one another and asks which features appear in more than one, on the principle that a feature recurring across relationships with very different generals is more likely to reflect Davis himself than a feature appearing in only one, which may reflect the particular general or the particular circumstance. The synthesis then incorporates the two papers that stand apart from the dyadic series, the structural analysis of the department system and the source-critical examination of the evidence, for a full account of Davis as commander must situate his personal relationships within the structure they operated in and must rest on the disciplined use of sources the volume has defended. Finally, the paper places Davis in comparative relief against Abraham Lincoln, the contemporary against whom his performance as a war leader has most often been measured, not to render a simple verdict of superiority but to use the contrast to identify what was distinctive in Davis’s conduct of his office.[^2]
The Recurring Disposition
The single feature that recurs most consistently across Davis’s command relationships, and that the comparative method therefore most strongly attributes to Davis himself rather than to his generals, is a tendency to assess and to value generals according to their personal relationship to him rather than according to their demonstrated effect upon their armies. This disposition appears, in different forms, in nearly every dyad the volume has examined, and its recurrence across relationships with men as different as Johnston, Bragg, Beauregard, Hood, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Polk marks it as a characteristic of the president rather than an accident of any one case.[^3]
The disposition expressed itself positively in the qualities Davis prized. He valued loyalty, deference to his authority as commander-in-chief, candor in keeping him informed, and personal regard rooted in prior acquaintance, and he favored the generals who offered these things.[^4] Bragg was sustained past the evidence of his unfitness because he was loyal, diligent, and deferential; Albert Sidney Johnston and Polk were elevated on the strength of personal friendship and the bonds of West Point and the Mexican War; Hood was chosen in part because he had presented himself as the advocate of the aggressive spirit Davis wished to see. The disposition expressed itself negatively in the conduct Davis could not abide: Johnston’s reticence, read as the sullenness of an aggrieved subordinate, and Beauregard’s appetite for public credit, read as an unbecoming claim upon what belonged to the government.[^5] In each case, what governed Davis’s judgment was, in significant part, the general’s bearing toward him, the president, rather than the general’s performance in the field.
It is essential to state the disposition precisely, for stated carelessly it becomes the very caricature the volume has labored to refute. Davis was not indifferent to military performance; he was a serious student of war who cared intensely about the conduct of his armies and grieved their failures. The disposition was not that he ignored competence but that he weighted the personal relationship too heavily in his assessment of it, allowing a general’s loyalty or deference or friendship to color his judgment of the general’s fitness, and allowing a general’s reticence or vanity to color his judgment of the general’s capacity.[^6] The fault was one of proportion, not of total blindness, and recognizing this is what distinguishes the volume’s measured conclusion from the partisan indictment.
The Lee Exception and What It Proves
The strongest test of any claim about Davis’s disposition is the relationship that does not fit the pattern of failure, and the volume has placed the Davis–Lee partnership at the center of its argument precisely because it is that test. Lee succeeded with Davis where the others failed, and the synthesis must account for the exception or abandon the rule.[^7]
The account the volume has given is that Lee did not so much escape Davis’s disposition as satisfy it. Lee supplied, in abundance and by deliberate practice, exactly the qualities Davis prized: he kept the president fully and candidly informed, he deferred on the prerogatives Davis cared about, he framed his recommendations as the president’s decisions, and he never challenged Davis’s authority where challenge was unnecessary.[^8] Lee, in other words, gave Davis the bearing that Bragg gave him by temperament and that Johnston and Beauregard withheld, but Lee gave it while also possessing the field competence that Bragg lacked. The partnership succeeded because in Lee the qualities Davis valued in a subordinate coincided with the qualities the war required in a commander, a coincidence that obtained in no other major relationship of Davis’s war.
This is the crucial finding, and it both confirms the rule and reveals its danger. It confirms the rule because Lee’s success, no less than the others’ failures, turned on the personal disposition Davis brought to his relationships; Lee prospered by satisfying it. It reveals the danger because the coincidence of valued bearing and required competence was, on the evidence of the other dyads, rare, and Davis had no reliable means of telling the two apart. He valued in Lee the same deference he valued in Bragg, and he could not, from the bearing alone, distinguish the deferential general who was also able from the deferential general who was not.[^9] The disposition that rewarded Lee also rewarded Bragg, and the difference between the outcomes lay not in Davis’s judgment but in the men themselves. A commander-in-chief whose method of valuing generals cannot distinguish the able from the merely loyal is a commander-in-chief who will succeed when his loyal generals happen to be able and fail when they are not, and that, across the volume’s cases, is substantially what occurred.
The Burden of Management
A second pattern recurs across the dyads, visible most clearly when the Lee partnership is read against the failures: the burden of making a relationship with Davis work fell heavily upon the general. The volume’s study of Lee emphasized that the harmony of that partnership was actively maintained, and maintained chiefly by Lee, through an unremitting practice of candor, deference, and tactful framing.[^10] The failures, conversely, can be read as relationships in which the general did not, or could not, carry that burden: Johnston would not keep Davis informed, Beauregard would not subordinate his vanity, and the relationships corroded accordingly.
The synthesis draws from this contrast a finding about Davis that the individual studies could only imply. A president who can sustain a productive relationship only with a general willing and able to manage him with exceptional skill is a president whose relationships will succeed narrowly and fail broadly, for generals of Lee’s particular combination of competence and self-effacing tact are uncommon, and a war cannot be staffed exclusively with them.[^11] The proud, the prickly, the reticent, and the merely ordinary must also be commanded, and a commander-in-chief who cannot get the best from such men, who requires of his subordinates the management that Lee supplied before he will work well with them, has a limitation that will tell across the breadth of his command. This limitation is not a melodramatic flaw; it is a real and consequential constraint, and it recurs across the volume’s cases as the negative space around the Lee exception.
Structure and Disposition Together
The synthesis must incorporate the structural argument that the eighth paper advanced, for an account of Davis’s disposition that ignored the structure within which it operated would repeat the error that paper was written to correct. The Western command problem, that study argued, was overdetermined: the department system and the geography of the Western theater set conditions for failure that were real and substantially independent of any relationship, and Davis’s personal disposition then determined whether those conditions were mitigated or compounded.[^12]
Read together with the dyadic studies, the structural argument refines the synthesis in an important way. Davis’s disposition was most damaging precisely where the structure was most demanding. In the East, where a single dominant army in a compact theater largely spared the department system’s defects, the favorable structure and the favorable Lee relationship reinforced each other, and Davis’s disposition, satisfied by Lee, did little harm.[^13] In the West, where the dispersed armies and vast distances strained the structure to its limits and demanded the highest quality of coordinating leadership, Davis’s disposition compounded the difficulty: it produced the distrust of Johnston that wrecked the 1863 theater command, the loyalty to Bragg that prolonged a failing leadership, and the elevation of Hood that destroyed an army, all in the theater where sound command relationships mattered most and were hardest to sustain.[^14] The interaction of disposition and structure thus explains a feature the volume has noted throughout: that Davis’s command failures clustered in the West. They clustered there not by coincidence but because the West was where an unfavorable structure met an unfavorable disposition, each amplifying the other.
The Enduring Debate
The synthesis is now in a position to address the enduring debate over Davis as commander-in-chief, which has long oscillated among three positions: that Davis was a meddling micromanager who undermined his generals; that he was a conscientious executive failing within a situation no leader could have mastered; and that he was some combination of the two.[^15] The volume’s findings bear on each.
The micromanager thesis contains truth but is too simple. Davis did intervene, did retain central direction in his own hands, and was reluctant to delegate the coordinating authority the department system lacked; these tendencies were real and damaging.[^16] But the thesis as usually stated, derived substantially from the anti-Davis strand of the Lost Cause and the memoirs of Johnston and Beauregard, mistakes a disposition for a simple vice and ignores both the structural difficulties Davis faced and the genuine merits, the diligence, the seriousness, the capacity for a great partnership, that the Lee relationship demonstrates. The caricature of the meddling tyrant is one the volume’s source criticism has specifically identified as a postwar construction rather than a finding of the contemporary record.[^17]
The impossible-situation thesis also contains truth and is also incomplete. Davis faced a genuinely formidable task: a war against a more populous and far better-resourced adversary, a command structure inherited and strained by geography, a shortage of capable senior commanders, and a political requirement to defend territory that complicated every strategic concentration.[^18] A defender of Davis can fairly argue that no commander-in-chief would have found the Confederate situation easy and that much of what is charged against Davis reflects the difficulty of the situation rather than the failings of the man. But the thesis cannot account for the variation the volume has documented, for the fact that Davis succeeded with Lee and failed with others, that his failures clustered in patterns traceable to his own disposition, and that particular decisions, the elevation of Hood above all, reflected choices that a different temperament might have made differently. The situation was hard; it does not follow that Davis’s conduct of it was beyond criticism.[^19]
The combination thesis, properly specified, is the one the volume’s findings support, but it must be specified rather than left as a vague compromise. Davis was a conscientious, diligent, and intelligent executive who faced a genuinely difficult situation and who possessed real capacities, demonstrated in the Lee partnership, for sound command relationships. He was also a commander-in-chief whose disposition to value generals by their bearing toward him rather than their effect upon their armies, and whose corresponding inability to get the best from difficult men, recurred across his relationships and clustered most damagingly in the theater where command quality mattered most. The combination is not that Davis was half-tyrant and half-victim but that a real and recurring personal limitation operated within a real and formidable structural difficulty, and that the two together account for a record of command relationships that produced one great success and several consequential failures.[^20]
The Comparison with Lincoln
The comparison with Abraham Lincoln has shadowed the assessment of Davis since the war, and it is offered here in the spirit the volume’s method requires: not as a simple verdict of Lincoln’s superiority, which would flatten a complex contrast into a scorecard, but as a means of illuminating what was distinctive in Davis’s conduct of his office.[^21]
The conventional contrast notes that Lincoln, lacking Davis’s formal military background, the West Point education, the Mexican War command, the service as Secretary of War, nonetheless managed his generals with a flexibility and a results-oriented pragmatism that Davis did not consistently display. Lincoln endured the insubordination and the condescension of McClellan, the eccentricities and failures of a succession of commanders, and the personal frictions of his cabinet and his generals, with a notable capacity to subordinate his own amour propre to the single question of who could win.[^22] He retained Grant despite complaints and despite Grant’s reputation, on the ground that Grant fought and won, and he discarded generals who did not produce results regardless of their bearing toward him. The contrast with Davis is instructive precisely here: where Davis weighted the personal relationship heavily in his assessment of generals, Lincoln, on this reading, weighted results, and was willing to work with difficult and even disrespectful men if they delivered.[^23]
The contrast must be drawn carefully, for it is easily overstated and the volume’s method forbids the easy version. Lincoln’s situation differed from Davis’s in ways that favored the comparison: the Union’s superior resources allowed a margin for the trial and error of commanders that the Confederacy’s scarcity did not, so that Lincoln could afford to discard failing generals and try others in a way Davis, with fewer to choose from, could not. Lincoln also had longer to find his Grant, and the finding owed something to fortune as well as to judgment.[^24] A fair comparison acknowledges that some of the difference in outcomes reflects the difference in circumstances rather than the difference in the men. And it should be noted that the comparison’s framing itself derives in part from the historiographical traditions the volume’s ninth paper examined, traditions with their own purposes in elevating Lincoln and diminishing Davis or the reverse.
Yet when these cautions are entered, a residue of genuine contrast remains, and it points to the heart of the volume’s finding about Davis. The distinctive feature of Davis’s command, set against Lincoln’s, was not a want of diligence, intelligence, or military knowledge, in all of which Davis was at least Lincoln’s equal and in formal terms his superior, but a relative inability to subordinate his own judgment and his own sense of his authority to the pragmatic business of getting the most from the generals he had.[^25] Lincoln’s gift, on the comparative reading, was a kind of egoless instrumentalism toward his commanders, a willingness to be condescended to, contradicted, and personally slighted in exchange for victories; Davis’s limitation was the converse, a disposition that made the personal relationship a criterion in itself and that could not easily extend to a difficult general the latitude that results alone should have commanded. The comparison thus does not condemn Davis as incompetent; it locates his limitation with precision, in the domain of temperament and the management of men rather than in the domain of knowledge or effort, and in doing so it confirms the central finding the volume’s nine studies have assembled.
Conclusion
The dyadic studies gathered in this volume, examined together, yield a coherent portrait of Jefferson Davis as commander-in-chief. The feature that recurs across his relationships, and that the comparative method therefore attributes to the president rather than to his generals, was a disposition to value and assess commanders according to their bearing toward him, their loyalty, deference, candor, and friendship, rather than according to their effect upon their armies. This disposition produced his one great success, the partnership with Lee, who satisfied it while also possessing the competence the war required, and it produced his consequential failures, the distrust of Johnston, the misplaced loyalty to Bragg, the estrangement from Beauregard, and the catastrophic elevation of Hood, in each of which the personal criterion led the president astray. The disposition operated within a structural difficulty, the diffusing department system and the demanding geography of the West, that it compounded most damagingly in the theater where command quality mattered most, which is why Davis’s failures clustered there. The enduring debate over Davis is best resolved not by choosing among the micromanager, the victim of circumstance, and the combination, but by specifying the combination precisely: a diligent and capable executive, facing a formidable situation, limited by a recurring inability to get the best from difficult men. The comparison with Lincoln confirms the diagnosis, locating Davis’s limitation not in knowledge or effort but in the temperamental capacity to subordinate himself to the single question of who could win. Davis was not the tyrant of the hostile tradition nor the blameless martyr of the friendly one. He was an able and serious man whose particular limitation, magnified by a particular structure, shaped the command of a cause that needed from its leader precisely the gift he most lacked.
Notes
[^1]: On the necessity of synthesis beyond the individual case studies, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^2]: On the comparative method across the volume’s own cases and the use of the Lincoln comparison to illuminate rather than to score, see Woodworth (1990) and McPherson (2008).
[^3]: On the recurrence of the personal-relationship criterion across Davis’s command relations, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000); the individual cases are examined in Papers 3 through 7 of this volume.
[^4]: On the specific qualities Davis prized, see Woodworth (1990); the Bragg case is examined in Paper 4 and the favorites in Paper 6 of this volume.
[^5]: On the conduct Davis could not abide, see Woodworth (1990); the Johnston and Beauregard cases are examined in Papers 3 and 5 of this volume.
[^6]: On the disposition as a fault of proportion rather than total blindness, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^7]: On the Lee partnership as the central test of any claim about Davis’s disposition, see Woodworth (1995); the partnership is examined in Paper 2 of this volume.
[^8]: On Lee’s deliberate satisfaction of the qualities Davis valued, see Woodworth (1995) and Thomas (1995).
[^9]: On Davis’s inability to distinguish the able deferential general from the merely deferential one, see Woodworth (1990, 1995).
[^10]: On the active maintenance of the Lee partnership chiefly by Lee, see Woodworth (1995); see Paper 2 of this volume.
[^11]: On the implication that relationships requiring exceptional management will succeed narrowly and fail broadly, see Woodworth (1990, 1995).
[^12]: On the overdetermination of the Western command problem by structure and disposition together, see Woodworth (1990) and Connelly and Jones (1973); see Paper 8 of this volume.
[^13]: On the reinforcing favorable structure and relationship in the East, see Woodworth (1995) and Connelly and Jones (1973).
[^14]: On the clustering of Davis’s command failures in the West, see Woodworth (1990); the relevant cases are examined in Papers 3, 4, and 7 of this volume.
[^15]: On the three positions in the enduring debate, see Cooper (2000), Woodworth (1990), and Escott (1978).
[^16]: On the reality of Davis’s interventionist tendencies and reluctance to delegate, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^17]: On the micromanager caricature as a postwar construction, see the source-critical analysis in Paper 9 of this volume; see also Gallagher and Nolan (2000).
[^18]: On the formidable difficulty of the Confederate situation, see Hattaway and Jones (1983) and McPherson (1988).
[^19]: On the inability of the impossible-situation thesis to account for the documented variation, see Woodworth (1990).
[^20]: On the precisely specified combination thesis, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^21]: On the Lincoln comparison as illumination rather than verdict, see McPherson (2008) and Williams (1952).
[^22]: On Lincoln’s pragmatic and results-oriented management of his generals, see McPherson (2008), Williams (1952), and Donald (1995).
[^23]: On Lincoln’s retention of Grant on the ground of results, see McPherson (2008) and Simpson (2000).
[^24]: On the Union’s resource margin and the longer opportunity to find a winning commander, see McPherson (1988) and Hattaway and Jones (1983).
[^25]: On the location of Davis’s limitation in temperament and the management of men rather than in knowledge or effort, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
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