Abstract
The eight case studies in this volume have repeatedly anchored their conclusions in a single methodological commitment: that contemporary correspondence must be privileged over the self-justifying memoirs of the principals, and that the later Lost Cause historiography must be analyzed as historiography rather than trusted as testimony. This paper makes that commitment explicit and defends it. It is not a narrative study of a relationship but a source-critical examination of the evidence on which all the narrative studies depend. It distinguishes three layers of evidence, the contemporary record, the postwar memoirs, and the later interpretive tradition, and assesses the reliability of each. It examines in turn the apologetic memoirs of Joseph Johnston, Jefferson Davis, John Bell Hood, and the Beauregard account produced under the general’s direction, identifying the characteristic distortions each introduces. It then analyzes the Lost Cause as an interpretive framework that shaped the entire subject, in particular the strand that magnified Davis’s failings as commander-in-chief as a way of explaining Confederate defeat without indicting the Confederate cause, and the contrary strand that defended Davis. The paper argues that the study of Davis and his generals has been distorted at its source by interested testimony and ideological framing, and that the discipline of reading the postwar layers against the contemporary record is not a methodological nicety but the precondition of any reliable account.
Introduction
Every historical subject is shaped by the character of its sources, but few are shaped as decisively as the relationship between Jefferson Davis and his generals. The principals were articulate, embittered, and possessed of both the leisure and the motive to write at length after the war; the cause they had served was lost, and the explanation of its loss became, for the defeated, a matter of urgent personal and collective concern. The result is a documentary record in which the most voluminous and accessible sources, the postwar memoirs, are also the least reliable, and in which a powerful interpretive tradition, the Lost Cause, organized the meaning of the whole before the professional historians arrived.[^1]
The argument of this paper is that the study of Davis and his generals cannot proceed responsibly without a disciplined source criticism, and that the discipline consists in distinguishing the layers of the evidence by reliability and in reading the less reliable layers against the more reliable. This is the method the preceding case studies have applied; the present paper defends it as method. The defense matters because the alternative, taking the memoirs and the Lost Cause tradition at their word, has produced much of the durable distortion in the subject, the caricatures of Davis as a meddling tyrant or as a blameless martyr, of Johnston as victim or as coward, of Bragg as monster, of Hood as butcher, that the case studies in this volume have labored to qualify.[^2] These caricatures did not arise from the contemporary record; they arose from the postwar effort to assign blame for defeat, and they persist because the sources that propagate them are precisely the sources most readily at hand.
The Three Layers of Evidence
The evidence bearing on Davis and his generals falls into three layers, distinguished by when it was produced and by the motives that shaped it, and the reliability of each declines as the distance from the events and the intensity of the apologetic motive increase.
The first and most reliable layer is the contemporary record: the orders, dispatches, letters, and reports produced during the war itself, in the moment, before the outcome was known and before the imperatives of postwar reputation had begun to operate. This layer is gathered above all in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, the vast contemporary documentary collection that remains the foundation of all serious work on the subject, supplemented by the modern scholarly editions of the principals’ papers.[^3] The contemporary record is not free of distortion, men shade their dispatches to favor themselves even in the moment, and the record is incomplete, but it was produced before the knowledge of defeat had reorganized memory, and its documents bear dates that fix them in the flow of events rather than in the reconstructions of hindsight. It is the layer against which the others must be tested.
The second layer comprises the postwar memoirs: the book-length accounts the principals produced in the years and decades after the war to explain, justify, and defend their conduct. This layer includes Johnston’s Narrative of Military Operations (1874), Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), Hood’s Advance and Retreat (1880), and the Beauregard account produced under the general’s direction and published under Alfred Roman’s name (1884), among many others.[^4] These works were written by defeated men with reputations to defend and blame to assign, and each is, to a greater or lesser degree, a brief for its author. They are valuable, but they are valuable chiefly as evidence of what their authors wished to be believed, and they are least reliable precisely where they are most emphatic about the questions of responsibility that animated their composition.
The third layer is the later interpretive tradition: the historiography, popular and professional, that organized the meaning of the war and assigned the roles in its drama. The dominant strand of this tradition for many decades was the Lost Cause, a body of interpretation that arose among former Confederates and their sympathizers to explain and ennoble the defeated cause, and that shaped the understanding of Davis and his generals in ways examined below.[^5] This layer is not testimony at all; it is interpretation, and it must be analyzed as such, as a set of frameworks that determined which facts were emphasized, which suppressed, and which roles the actors were assigned, rather than as a source of facts in its own right.
The Memoir of Joseph Johnston
Johnston’s Narrative of Military Operations, published in 1874, is among the most consequential of the apologetic memoirs, both for its content and for its influence on the subsequent tradition. The work is, in large measure, a sustained indictment of Davis, tracing the author’s wartime difficulties to the president’s hostility and presenting Johnston himself as the victim of an animus that began with the seniority dispute of 1861 and pursued him to the relief before Atlanta in 1864.[^6]
The characteristic distortion of the Narrative is its consistency of self-vindication. Across the disputes the volume’s case studies have examined, the seniority ranking, the Peninsula, the Vicksburg theater command, the Atlanta Campaign and the relief, Johnston’s account uniformly presents his own conduct as sound and his difficulties as the work of others, chiefly Davis.[^7] His chronic reticence, documented in the contemporary record as a real and consequential trait, is reframed as prudence; his defensive withdrawals are presented as wise generalship frustrated by an impatient president; the relief before Atlanta becomes the culmination of a persecution rather than the consequence of a pattern of conduct. The memoir is internally coherent, ably argued, and almost wholly committed to its author’s exoneration, and that very coherence is the sign of its character: it is a case made, not a record kept.
The method requires that the Narrative be read against the contemporary correspondence, and when it is, the contemporary record qualifies the memoir’s self-portrait at numerous points, restoring the reticence the memoir minimizes and the impatience the memoir attributes solely to Davis to its actual context of genuine uncertainty about the general’s intentions.[^8] The Narrative remains valuable, as evidence of how Johnston understood and wished others to understand his career, and as the source of the durable image of Davis-as-persecutor that the Lost Cause would amplify, but it is not a reliable account of the events it narrates, and the case studies in this volume have treated it accordingly.
The Memoir of Jefferson Davis
Davis’s The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in two substantial volumes in 1881, is the answering brief, and it exhibits the apologetic character of the genre from the opposite side. Where Johnston’s Narrative indicts Davis, Davis’s work defends his own conduct of the war and government, and where it touches on the quarrels with his generals, it presents the president’s decisions as sound and lawful and the difficulties as the faults of others, Johnston’s reticence and want of aggression foremost among them.[^9]
The characteristic distortion of the Rise and Fall is less personal vindictiveness, Davis’s tone is generally that of the statesman vindicating his administration rather than the soldier settling scores, than a comprehensive justification of the author’s every major decision, presented within a framework that defends the constitutional and political legitimacy of the Confederate cause as a whole.[^10] On the command disputes specifically, the work is reliable as a statement of Davis’s reasoning, of how he understood and justified his decisions, but unreliable as a neutral account of their wisdom or their consequences, since it was written precisely to defend them. The seniority dispute is presented as a matter of correct legal interpretation; the relief of Johnston as a regrettable necessity forced by the general’s conduct; the broader pattern of command difficulty as the misfortune of a president poorly served.
Read against the contemporary record, the Rise and Fall supplies the indispensable evidence of Davis’s own reasoning while requiring the same discount as Johnston’s Narrative for its apologetic purpose.[^11] The two memoirs, read together and against the documents, are most valuable precisely as a matched pair: each demonstrates the framework through which its author processed the relationship, and the contradiction between them, neither side accepting any substantial fault, is itself the clearest evidence of the mutual distrust the case studies have documented. The historian who adopts either memoir’s verdict has been captured by a brief; the historian who reads both against the record recovers the distrust both memoirs enact.
The Memoir of John Bell Hood
Hood’s Advance and Retreat, published posthumously in 1880, is among the most defensive of the Confederate memoirs, written in significant part to justify the author’s conduct of the Atlanta and Tennessee campaigns and to deflect responsibility for the destruction of the Army of Tennessee onto others.[^12] Its characteristic distortion is the systematic relocation of blame: the condition of the army is attributed to Johnston’s prior management, the failures of the Tennessee campaign to the shortcomings of subordinates and the misfortunes of circumstance, the disaster at Franklin to factors beyond the commander’s control.
The contemporary record, the orders, the casualty returns, the reports of the campaigns, qualifies this self-exculpation severely, restoring to Hood’s own decisions, above all the frontal assault at Franklin, the responsibility the memoir disperses.[^13] Advance and Retreat is therefore a particularly clear example of the memoir problem: a work whose explicit purpose is the shifting of blame, written by a defeated commander whose army’s destruction demanded explanation, and reliable only as evidence of the author’s preferred apportionment of fault rather than as an account of where the fault actually lay. The seventh paper in this volume treated it accordingly, weighing Hood’s execution against the contemporary record rather than against his own defense of it.
The Beauregard Account
The Beauregard case presents the memoir problem in a distinctive form, for the principal apologetic account of Beauregard’s operations was published not under his own name but under that of Alfred Roman, as The Military Operations of General Beauregard (1884), though it was in substance produced under Beauregard’s direction and reflects his account and his purposes.[^14] The third-person form lent the work an appearance of independent authority that its origins do not support; it is, in effect, an autobiography presented as a biography, and it must be read as the most interested of the Beauregard sources.
The characteristic distortion of the Roman account is the magnification of Beauregard’s strategic foresight and the attribution of his disappointments to the failures, jealousies, or hostility of others, Davis foremost among them.[^15] Beauregard’s grand strategic proposals are presented as prescient counsel ignored by a small-minded administration; his removals and sidelinings as the persecution of a great soldier; his battlefield controversies as vindications. The work shares with Johnston’s Narrative the presentation of Davis as the villain of the author’s career, and it contributed, alongside the Johnston memoir, to the Lost Cause image of Davis as the jealous executive who drove away his ablest generals. Read against the contemporary record, as the fifth paper in this volume read it, the Roman account’s self-magnification yields to a more balanced picture of a genuinely able and genuinely vain general whose estrangement from Davis was the fault of both.
The Lost Cause as Interpretive Framework
Above the individual memoirs stands the interpretive tradition that organized them into a coherent understanding of the war, and no element of that tradition shaped the study of Davis and his generals more than the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause was a body of interpretation that arose among former Confederates and their sympathizers in the decades after the war to explain the Confederate defeat in terms that preserved the honor of the cause and its soldiers, and it accomplished this in part by locating the causes of defeat in factors that did not impugn the rightness of the cause itself, overwhelming Union resources, the failures of particular leaders, the betrayals of particular subordinates.[^16]
For the study of command, the Lost Cause operated through two principal and opposing strands, and the case studies in this volume have had to navigate between them. One strand, associated particularly with the admirers of Lee and with the Virginia-centered interpretation of the war, tended to elevate Lee to a figure of near-perfection and to explain the Confederacy’s failures in other theaters, and the loss of the war as a whole, by reference to the shortcomings of others, including Davis and the Western commanders.[^17] A second and related strand, drawing on the memoirs of Johnston and Beauregard and on the resentments of the anti-Davis faction, magnified Davis’s failings as commander-in-chief specifically, presenting him as a meddling, jealous, and incompetent director of the war whose mismanagement of his generals was a principal cause of defeat. This strand served the larger Lost Cause purpose by locating the failure in a man rather than in the cause: if Davis lost the war through his command failures, the cause itself need not be questioned.[^18]
Against these stood a contrary strand of Davis partisanship, which defended the president and shifted blame onto the generals who had quarreled with him, Johnston above all. The historiography of Davis and his generals thus inherited from the postwar period not a neutral account but a set of contending briefs, organized around the assignment of blame for a defeat that all parties were anxious to explain in ways that spared themselves and, in most cases, the cause.[^19] The professional historian who approaches the subject inherits these framings whether or not she is aware of them, for they are built into the structure of the available sources and into the questions the tradition has taught the subject to ask.
The discipline this volume has applied is, at bottom, the discipline of recognizing these framings as framings, of treating the Lost Cause not as a body of received fact but as an interpretive tradition with identifiable purposes and distortions, and of returning, behind the tradition and the memoirs that fed it, to the contemporary record that the tradition organized.[^20] The modern scholarship has made this its central task; the recovery of a balanced account of Davis and his generals has proceeded precisely through the critical analysis of the Lost Cause and the disciplined use of the Official Records against the apologetic memoirs.
The Discipline Defended
It remains to defend the method against the objection that it privileges the contemporary record too absolutely, dismissing the memoirs and the tradition too readily. The objection has force and must be answered with precision, for the method does not hold that the memoirs are worthless or that the contemporary record is infallible.
The contemporary record has its own distortions, men shade their dispatches, suppress their errors, and angle for advantage even in the moment, and it is incomplete in ways that can mislead.[^21] The method does not treat the Official Records as a transparent window onto the truth; it treats them as the most reliable available layer, produced before the reorganization of memory by defeat, and therefore as the proper standard against which the later layers are tested. The memoirs, for their part, are not worthless; they are indispensable evidence of their authors’ reasoning, motives, and self-understanding, and they sometimes preserve information available nowhere else. The method does not discard them; it reads them critically, for what they reliably show, the author’s perspective and purpose, rather than for what they unreliably assert, the neutral truth of contested events.[^22]
The discipline, properly stated, is one of calibrated reliance: each layer is used for what it can reliably establish and discounted for what its character renders suspect, and the layers are read against one another so that the distortions of each are checked by the others. This is not a mechanical privileging of one source over all others but a critical practice of weighing sources by their character and their distance from the events. It is, in short, ordinary historical method applied with particular rigor to a subject whose sources are particularly compromised, and the rigor is warranted by the degree of the compromise. A subject whose most accessible sources are contending briefs, organized by an interpretive tradition with a stake in the verdict, demands exactly this care, and the absence of the care is the explanation for much of the distortion the subject has long carried.[^23]
Significance
This paper’s significance for the volume is foundational rather than additive. It does not contribute a further case study but defends the method on which all the case studies rest, and in doing so it discharges the deferrals the earlier papers have repeatedly made to it. The conclusions of the dyadic studies, that the Davis–Johnston relationship failed through mutual distrust, that Davis’s loyalty to Bragg outran the evidence, that the elevation of Hood was a joint failure of selection and execution, depend for their authority on the disciplined use of sources this paper defends; without that discipline, each conclusion would be merely one more brief among the contending briefs, and the volume would have added to the partisan literature rather than risen above it.[^24]
The paper also carries a significance beyond this volume, for it identifies why the study of Davis and his generals has been so persistently distorted and so resistant to balanced treatment. The distortion is structural, built into the character of the sources and the framing of the tradition, and it can be overcome only by the deliberate source criticism the paper describes. The caricatures the volume has labored to qualify, Davis the tyrant, Davis the martyr, Johnston the coward, Bragg the monster, Hood the butcher, are not random errors but the predictable products of a subject whose sources were composed to assign blame and whose tradition was organized to explain a defeat. To understand the relationships truly, one must first understand why they have been so consistently misunderstood, and that understanding is what this paper supplies.[^25]
Conclusion
The study of Jefferson Davis and his generals has been shaped at its source by interested testimony and ideological framing to a degree that few historical subjects equal. The principals, defeated and embittered, produced voluminous memoirs designed to assign the blame for defeat to one another, and an interpretive tradition, the Lost Cause, organized those memoirs into contending accounts that spared the cause by indicting its commanders. The result is a documentary record in which the most accessible sources are the least reliable and the framing most ready to hand is the most distorting. The discipline this volume has applied, distinguishing the contemporary record from the postwar memoirs and the later tradition, reading each layer for what it can reliably establish, and testing the apologetic layers against the contemporary documents that precede them, is not a methodological refinement but the precondition of any account that rises above the partisan briefs. The case studies of this volume stand or fall by that discipline, and this paper has defended it: not as a mechanical privileging of one source over others, but as the calibrated, critical weighing of compromised evidence that a compromised subject demands. Behind the memoirs and the tradition lies the contemporary record, and in the disciplined return to that record lies the only path to understanding the relationships this volume has set out to examine.
Notes
[^1]: On the decisive role of source character in shaping the subject, see Connelly and Bellows (1982) and Gallagher and Nolan (2000).
[^2]: On the persistence of command caricatures derived from the postwar literature rather than the contemporary record, see Woodworth (1990) and McWhiney (1969).
[^3]: On the Official Records as the foundation of serious work and the role of the modern scholarly editions, see U.S. War Department (1880–1901) and Crist (1992).
[^4]: On the principal postwar memoirs as a genre of apologetic literature, see Johnston (1874), Davis (1881), Hood (1880), and Roman (1884).
[^5]: On the Lost Cause as an interpretive tradition shaping the understanding of the war, see Gallagher and Nolan (2000), Connelly and Bellows (1982), and Foster (1987).
[^6]: On the indictment of Davis at the center of Johnston’s Narrative, see Symonds (1992) and Johnston (1874).
[^7]: On the consistent self-vindication across the disputes in Johnston’s memoir, see Symonds (1992).
[^8]: On reading the Narrative against the contemporary correspondence, see Woodworth (1990) and Symonds (1992); the relevant disputes are examined in Papers 1 and 3 of this volume.
[^9]: On the apologetic character and statesmanlike register of Davis’s Rise and Fall, see Cooper (2000) and Davis (1881).
[^10]: On the comprehensive justification framework of the Rise and Fall, see Cooper (2000).
[^11]: On reading the Rise and Fall against the contemporary record, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^12]: On the defensive purpose of Hood’s Advance and Retreat, see McMurry (1982) and Hood (1880).
[^13]: On the contemporary record qualifying Hood’s self-exculpation, see McMurry (1982) and Sword (1992); the Franklin assault is examined in Paper 7 of this volume.
[^14]: On the authorship and character of the Roman account, see Williams (1955) and Roman (1884).
[^15]: On the magnification of Beauregard’s foresight and the attribution of blame to others in the Roman account, see Williams (1955); the relationship is examined in Paper 5 of this volume.
[^16]: On the Lost Cause as an explanation of defeat preserving the honor of the cause, see Gallagher and Nolan (2000), Foster (1987), and Connelly and Bellows (1982).
[^17]: On the Lee-centered strand of the Lost Cause and its treatment of other commanders, see Connelly (1977) and Gallagher and Nolan (2000); the reverential historiography of Lee is also discussed in Paper 2 of this volume.
[^18]: On the strand magnifying Davis’s command failings to locate defeat in a man rather than the cause, see Woodworth (1990) and Cooper (2000).
[^19]: On the contending strands of blame assignment inherited from the postwar period, see Connelly and Bellows (1982) and Woodworth (1990).
[^20]: On the discipline of treating the Lost Cause as an interpretive tradition to be analyzed, see Gallagher and Nolan (2000) and the method established in Paper 1 of this volume.
[^21]: On the distortions and incompleteness of the contemporary record, see Woodworth (1990) and Hattaway and Jones (1983).
[^22]: On the calibrated use of memoirs for what they reliably establish, see Woodworth (1990) and Symonds (1992).
[^23]: On the warrant for particular rigor given the compromised character of the sources, see Connelly and Bellows (1982) and Woodworth (1990).
[^24]: On the dependence of the case studies’ conclusions on disciplined source use, see the method established and applied throughout Papers 1 through 8 of this volume.
[^25]: On the structural rather than random character of the subject’s distortions, see Connelly and Bellows (1982) and Gallagher and Nolan (2000).
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