Abstract
The preceding studies examined relationships that failed through distrust, that were sustained too long through loyalty, or that were poisoned by wounded vanity. This paper turns to the obverse: the generals whom Jefferson Davis favored from the outset on grounds of personal friendship and prewar association, and what their elevations reveal about the criteria by which Davis filled high command. It pairs two men, Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk, because together they expose both faces of the same instinct. Johnston, whom Davis ranked second among the five full generals and regarded as the finest soldier living, justifies the case for trusting personal knowledge of a man; his early death at Shiloh foreclosed any test of whether that trust was warranted in field command. Polk, a West Point classmate turned Episcopal bishop given corps-level command, illustrates the cost of the same instinct: a general whose chief qualification was the president’s regard, whose unilateral occupation of Columbus helped end Kentucky’s neutrality, and whose performance never matched his place. The paper argues that Davis’s reliance on friendship and the networks of West Point and the Mexican War was neither simple nepotism nor sound judgment but a coherent method of assessing fitness through personal acquaintance, a method that worked only as well as the men it happened to select.
Introduction
Every executive who appoints to high office must solve a problem of knowledge: how to judge the fitness of men for responsibilities none of them has yet exercised at the required level. Jefferson Davis solved it, in large part, by relying on what he personally knew of a man, and what he knew came overwhelmingly from two institutions that had shaped his own life, the United States Military Academy at West Point and the officer corps of the Mexican War.[^1] Davis was himself a West Point graduate and a distinguished Mexican War colonel, and the men he trusted most were those he had known in those settings, whose characters he believed he had taken the measure of in the only laboratory he credited, that of personal acquaintance under arms.
This paper examines the method through its two clearest beneficiaries. The argument is that Davis’s reliance on friendship and prewar network was a rational response to the knowledge problem, that it had genuine merits, and that its merits and defects were inseparable, two expressions of a single instinct. To know a man personally is to have evidence about his character that no résumé supplies; it is also to be vulnerable to the warmth of regard, to mistake the qualities of a friend for the qualities of a commander, and to extend to the familiar a confidence the record might not support. Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk are paired here because they sit on opposite sides of that ledger. Johnston was, by most contemporary estimates, a genuinely able soldier whom Davis was right to prize, though his early death leaves the judgment forever incomplete. Polk was a man whose elevation is intelligible only through Davis’s affection, and whose service repeatedly demonstrated the gap between being the president’s friend and being fit for the command the friendship secured.[^2]
Albert Sidney Johnston: The Beloved Soldier
No officer stood higher in Davis’s esteem than Albert Sidney Johnston. The two had known each other since their West Point years and through the antebellum army, and Davis’s regard for Johnston was something close to reverence; the president is reported to have considered him the greatest soldier then living, an estimate he acted upon by ranking Johnston second among the five full generals, behind only the administrative figure of Cooper and ahead of Lee and Joseph Johnston.[^3] When Albert Sidney Johnston reached the Confederacy after a difficult overland journey from California, Davis entrusted him with the vast and vital command of the Western theater, the defense of the line stretching across Kentucky and Tennessee.
The case for Davis’s confidence was not merely sentimental. Albert Sidney Johnston had a long and creditable record in the armies of three republics, the United States, the Republic of Texas, and now the Confederacy, and his reputation among his contemporaries was high on grounds independent of Davis’s friendship.[^4] He was widely regarded as a soldier of presence, character, and command, and the confidence Davis placed in him was shared, at least initially, by much of the Confederacy. This is the strongest possible case for Davis’s method: here the man Davis knew personally and trusted was also the man others, on the public evidence, judged able. Friendship and merit appeared to coincide.
The difficulty is that the coincidence was never tested to a conclusion. Johnston’s Western command in late 1861 and early 1862 was beset by the structural problems that bedeviled all Confederate command in the West, an overextended line, inadequate forces, and the impossibility of being strong everywhere, and the line broke at its center with the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, a disaster that exposed the whole position and drew sharp public criticism of Johnston.[^5] Davis stood by his friend through the criticism, declining to remove him and reportedly remarking that if Johnston was not a general the Confederacy had none, a statement that captures both the depth of Davis’s confidence and its dependence on personal conviction rather than demonstrated result.[^6]
Johnston was concentrating his forces for a counterstroke when, on April 6, 1862, he was killed at Shiloh in the opening day of the battle he had launched, struck down at the moment of an apparent Confederate advantage.[^7] His death foreclosed the question his command had raised. Whether Albert Sidney Johnston would have proved, over the course of the war, the great soldier Davis believed him to be, or whether he would have joined the ranks of the Western commanders who could not master the theater’s impossible demands, cannot be known. The honest verdict is that Davis’s confidence in Johnston was reasonable on the available evidence and was never disproved, but also never vindicated by the sustained record of field success that alone could have settled it. Johnston is the favorite whose favoring cannot be condemned and cannot be cleared, the case that shows Davis’s method at its most defensible and least conclusive.[^8]
Leonidas Polk: The Bishop in Uniform
Leonidas Polk presents the method in its problematic form. Polk had been a West Point classmate of Davis, had left the army shortly after graduation, and had become an Episcopal bishop, spending the decades before the war as a churchman rather than a soldier.[^9] When the war came, Davis commissioned his old classmate directly into high command, making him a major general with responsibility in the Mississippi Valley, an elevation grounded almost entirely in the president’s personal knowledge and regard, since Polk’s military experience was decades stale and had never extended to command of troops in the field.
The defects of the appointment showed themselves almost immediately, and in a matter of strategic consequence. In September 1861, Polk, on his own authority, ordered Confederate forces to occupy Columbus, Kentucky, a commanding position on the Mississippi River.[^10] The difficulty was that Kentucky was at that moment maintaining a precarious neutrality that both the Union and the Confederacy had strong reasons to respect, each hoping to win the state without forcing it into the other’s arms. Polk’s occupation of Columbus violated that neutrality and handed the Union the pretext to move its own forces into the state, contributing to the collapse of Kentucky’s neutral posture and the loss of the state to the Confederate cause, a strategic setback of the first order.[^11]
The episode is a near-perfect illustration of the cost of appointment by friendship. Polk acted on his own initiative in a matter requiring the finest political judgment, and he acted wrongly, sacrificing a delicate strategic advantage for a local tactical position. A more experienced commander, or one more attuned to the political dimensions of the Kentucky question, might have grasped what Polk did not, that the value of Columbus was trivial beside the value of Kentucky’s neutrality.[^12] Davis, it should be noted, was unhappy with the occupation and recognized its cost, yet the larger consequence could not be undone, and the man whose inexperience had produced it remained in high command.
Polk’s subsequent service confirmed rather than dispelled the doubts his early action raised. He proved a recurring source of friction within the Western army, particularly as one of the principal figures in the revolt against Bragg examined in an earlier paper; his quarrels with Bragg were bitter and his record of obedience uneven.[^13] As a battlefield commander his performance was undistinguished, and his standing rested less on what he achieved than on the bishop’s dignity he brought to the army and the president’s continuing regard for him. He was killed in June 1864 during the Atlanta Campaign, struck by artillery fire while reconnoitering.[^14] Across the whole of his service, it is difficult to identify the contribution that justified his place in the high command, and easy to identify the cost, at Columbus and within the councils of the Western army, of an elevation that personal friendship rather than demonstrated fitness had secured.
The Logic of the Network
To call Davis’s reliance on friendship mere nepotism would be to misunderstand it, and the pairing of Johnston and Polk is meant to forestall that easy conclusion. Davis was not distributing commands as personal favors in the manner of a spoilsman; he was attempting to solve the knowledge problem by the only means he fully trusted. He believed that he could judge a man’s fitness for high responsibility from personal acquaintance with his character, and the laboratory in which he had formed his judgments of character was the shared experience of West Point and the Mexican War.[^15] The men he favored were, in his mind, not friends rewarded but characters known, men whose mettle he had observed and could vouch for.
The method had a real rationale. Personal knowledge does convey information about a man, his courage, his steadiness, his integrity, that no formal record captures, and in the chaos of organizing a new army at speed, with no Confederate track record to consult, a president had to rely on something, and the something most available to Davis was his own long acquaintance with the prewar officer corps.[^16] The trouble was twofold. First, the qualities personal acquaintance reveals, character, courage, loyalty, are not the same as the qualities high command requires, and a man may possess the former in full while lacking the latter, as Polk demonstrated. Second, personal regard distorts the very judgment it informs; Davis saw in his friends what he wished to see, extended to them a confidence their records had not earned, and stood by them, Johnston after Donelson, Polk after Columbus, with a loyalty rooted in affection rather than assessment.[^17]
The pairing reveals the method’s essential character: it was a gamble on the reliability of the president’s personal knowledge, and it paid off or failed according to whether the man he knew happened also to be the commander the war needed. With Albert Sidney Johnston the gamble was reasonable and its outcome undetermined; with Polk it was unreasonable and its outcome clear. The same instinct produced both, and that is the point. A method of selection that depends on the selector’s affection will be only as good as the selector’s friends, and no friendship, however warm, is evidence of fitness for a responsibility the friend has never exercised.[^18]
The Source Problem
The evidentiary discipline of this volume meets, in the two favorites, contrasting difficulties. Albert Sidney Johnston’s early death made him a martyr, and a martyr’s reputation is shaped by elegy rather than by the record of a full career; the laudatory tradition surrounding him, including the influential biography by his son, William Preston Johnston, presents a portrait of foreclosed greatness that the brevity of his command can neither confirm nor refute.[^19] The historian must resist both the elegiac inflation of Johnston’s promise and the contrary temptation to deflate it merely because it was untested; the honest position is that the evidence runs out before the verdict can be reached.
Polk presents the opposite difficulty. His dual standing as bishop and general, and his death in the field, lent him a posthumous dignity that has sometimes softened the assessment of his military shortcomings, while the partisan literature of the Bragg controversy, in which Polk was a central antagonist, renders his conduct through the lens of that quarrel.[^20] The method applied throughout these studies requires anchoring the assessment in the contemporary record, the Columbus correspondence, the orders and reports of the Official Records, the documentation of the Bragg controversy, and reading the laudatory and partisan traditions as evidence of reputation-making rather than as reliable measures of performance.[^21] Read this way, the contemporary record sustains the judgment offered here: a strategically costly early action, a record of friction and undistinguished field service, and an elevation explicable chiefly by the president’s regard. Charles Roland’s biography of Albert Sidney Johnston and the modern studies of the Western army supply the necessary balance, and this paper follows them in distinguishing the defensible confidence Davis placed in Johnston from the indefensible confidence he placed in Polk.[^22]
Significance
The favorites complete the volume’s account of Davis’s command criteria by exposing the positive principle that underlay the failures documented elsewhere. The Johnston study showed Davis denying trust to the able; the Bragg study, extending loyalty to the diligent but unfit; the Beauregard study, withholding scope from the capable. Beneath all three lay the same disposition that the present study isolates directly: a tendency to assess fitness through personal relation rather than demonstrated capacity, to trust the man he knew and doubt the man he did not.[^23] In the favorites this disposition appears in its constructive form, as the basis on which Davis chose his commanders, and the pairing of Johnston and Polk shows that the disposition was neither simply good nor simply bad but a method whose results depended entirely on the men it happened to select.
The study also sharpens the volume’s central thesis. If Davis’s command relations turned on the interaction between his temperament and the particular general, then the favorites reveal the temperament’s organizing principle: a reliance on personal knowledge that could elevate an Albert Sidney Johnston, whom the public evidence also supported, and an equal reliance that could elevate a Polk, whom nothing but the president’s affection supported. The interaction thesis requires that we understand not only how Davis responded to the generals he inherited but how he chose the generals he favored, and the answer, that he chose them through the lens of friendship and prewar network, is the foundation on which the rest of his command relations were built.[^24]
Conclusion
Jefferson Davis filled high command, in significant measure, by trusting what he personally knew of a man, and what he knew came from the shared world of West Point and the Mexican War. The method was a rational response to the genuine problem of judging untested men, and it was inseparable from its defects, for the personal knowledge it relied upon revealed character without revealing fitness, and the affection it rested upon distorted the judgment it was meant to inform. Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk display the two faces of that single instinct: in Johnston, a confidence reasonable on the evidence and left forever undetermined by an early death; in Polk, a confidence indefensible on any ground but friendship, repaid by the strategically costly loss of Kentucky’s neutrality and a career of friction and undistinguished service. Together they establish the organizing principle beneath the failures the other studies document, a reliance on the bonds of personal relation that could raise the able and the unable alike, according to no surer test than whether the president happened to have chosen well in his friends.
Notes
[^1]: On the centrality of West Point and the Mexican War to Davis’s judgments of men, see Cooper (2000) and Woodworth (1990).
[^2]: On the pairing of Albert Sidney Johnston and Polk as opposite outcomes of the same instinct, see Woodworth (1990) and Roland (1964).
[^3]: On Davis’s reverence for Albert Sidney Johnston and his ranking second among the full generals, see Roland (1964) and Crist (1992); the seniority ranking is examined in Paper 1 of this volume.
[^4]: On Johnston’s record in the service of three republics and his contemporary reputation, see Roland (1964).
[^5]: On the structural difficulties of Johnston’s Western command and the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862, see Cooper (1980), Woodworth (1990), and Roland (1964).
[^6]: On Davis’s defense of Johnston after Donelson and his reported remark, see Roland (1964) and Woodworth (1990); the exact wording of the remark is widely quoted in varying forms and should be verified against a primary source before publication.
[^7]: On Johnston’s death at Shiloh on April 6, 1862, see Roland (1964) and Daniel (1997).
[^8]: On the assessment that Davis’s confidence in Johnston was reasonable but never conclusively tested, see Woodworth (1990) and Roland (1964).
[^9]: On Polk’s West Point background, his career as an Episcopal bishop, and his direct commission to high command, see Parks (1962) and Woodworth (1990).
[^10]: On Polk’s occupation of Columbus, Kentucky, in September 1861, see Parks (1962) and Woodworth (1990).
[^11]: On the violation of Kentucky’s neutrality and its strategic consequences, see Woodworth (1990) and Harrison and Klotter (1997).
[^12]: On the assessment that the value of Columbus was slight beside the value of Kentucky’s neutrality, see Woodworth (1990).
[^13]: On Polk’s friction within the Western army and his role in the revolt against Bragg, see Connelly (1971) and Parks (1962); the Bragg controversy is examined in Paper 4 of this volume.
[^14]: On Polk’s death during the Atlanta Campaign in June 1864, see Parks (1962) and McMurry (2000).
[^15]: On Davis’s reliance on personal acquaintance as a method of solving the knowledge problem, see Cooper (2000) and Woodworth (1990).
[^16]: On the rationale for relying on personal knowledge in the absence of a Confederate track record, see Woodworth (1990).
[^17]: On the distortion of judgment by personal regard, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^18]: On the characterization of the method as a gamble on the reliability of the president’s personal knowledge, see Woodworth (1990).
[^19]: On the elegiac tradition surrounding Albert Sidney Johnston, including the biography by his son, see Johnston (1878) and the critical discussion in Roland (1964).
[^20]: On the posthumous dignity surrounding Polk and the partisan lens of the Bragg controversy, see Parks (1962) and Connelly (1971).
[^21]: On anchoring the assessment in the contemporary record, see the method established in Paper 1 of this volume.
[^22]: On the balanced modern assessment, see Roland (1964), Woodworth (1990), and Connelly (1971).
[^23]: On the favorites as exposing the positive principle beneath the failures documented elsewhere, see Woodworth (1990).
[^24]: On the favorites and the volume’s interaction thesis, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
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