The Life of Jefferson Davis

The small force at Manassas, when General Beauregard assumed command, was increased by subsequent accessions, until, by the middle of July, it numbered about twenty thousand men. His duties were a vigilant observation of the enemy and such defensive preparations as were necessary. The pivot of the campaign was elsewhere. If Patterson could successfully occupy Johnston until the crisis at Manassas was passed, the result was doubtful, at least; but if Johnston, at the required moment, could elude his adversary, and reinforce Beauregard, the probabilities were most promising to the Confederates. In the sequel, this proved a result far more easily attained than had been hoped for. The campaign thus became a series of maneuvres, with the Confederates in possession of the decided advantage of an interior line.

General Patterson, apparently imbecile or bewildered, committed a series of blunders, to be accounted for upon no possible hypothesis accrediting to him even ordinary acquaintance with the palpable principles of the science of war. What his repeated advances, retreats, and flank movements could have been designed to accomplish, it is difficult to imagine, as his situation plainly prevented his escape from Johnston and reinforcement of McDowell, before Johnston could reach Beauregard. General Patterson’s failure to attack Johnston preordained the disaster to McDowell on the 21st of July. Johnston, aided by the vigilance and daring of the “indefatigable” Stuart, was fully apprised of every movement of his adversary. With comparatively little difficulty he escaped from his front, and, in accordance with the plan previously indicated, reinforced Beauregard with the greater portion of his force.

With the details of the overwhelming disaster to the Federal arms, at Manassas, on the 21st of July, we are not here interested. Our aim has been to glance briefly at the relations sustained by President Davis to the preliminary campaign which culminated in success so brilliant and valuable. In accordance with his preconceived purpose to be present, if possible, at the consummation of plans in which he felt so profound an interest, President Davis left Richmond on Sunday morning, July 21st, for the scene of the expected battle. Reaching the battle-field while the struggle was still in progress, it was his privilege to witness the flight, in utter confusion and dismay, of the Federal hosts in their first serious conflict with the patriot army. His presence upon the field was the inspiration of unbounded enthusiasm among the troops, to whom his name and bearing were the symbols of victory. His dispatch from the battle-field, on Sunday night, will long be remembered by those who gathered from it their first intelligence of the great victory:

“Manassas Junction, Sunday Night.

“Night has closed upon a hard-fought field. Our forces were victorious. The enemy were routed, and precipitately fled, abandoning a large amount of arms, knapsacks, and baggage. The ground was strewn for miles with those killed, and the farmhouses and ground around were filled with the wounded. Pursuit was continued along several routes towards Leesburg and Centreville, until darkness covered the fugitives. We have captured many field batteries and stands of arms, and one of the United States flags. Many prisoners have been taken. Too high praise can not be bestowed, whether for the skill of the principal officers, or the gallantry of all our troops. The battle was mainly fought on our left. Our force was 15,000; that of the enemy estimated at 35,000.

“Jeff’n Davis.”

He remained at Manassas, in consultation with Generals Beauregard and Johnston, until the morning of Tuesday, July 23d. The return of the President to Richmond was the occasion of renewed patriotic rejoicings. An immense crowd awaited at the railroad depot, in expectancy of his arrival, and both there and at his hotel occurred most enthusiastic demonstrations of popular delight at the success of the army, and of public regard for himself.38 At night Mr. Davis addressed, with thrilling effect, an immense audience, from a window of the Spottswood Hotel, recounting some of the incidents of the battle, which he declared to be a decisive victory, if followed by energetic measures, and counseled moderation and forbearance in victory, with unrelaxed preparations for future trials. It was upon this occasion that he uttered the memorable injunction, “Never be haughty to the humble, or humble to the haughty.”

The immediate and palpable consequence of the victory of Manassas was the rescue of the Confederacy from the peril by which, for weeks, it had been threatened. The South was now plainly a power, capable of fighting ably and vigorously, and with greatly improved prospects of success, for the independence which it had asserted. Time was to develop a far greater value in this wonderful success than was then made available. A few days only were required to exhibit, what at first appeared merely a thorough repulse of the Federal army, as an overwhelming rout, capable of being followed to such results as might have changed even the fate of a nation. Not many weeks sufficed to convince the Southern people of the fact which must ever dwell among their saddest associations, that an opportunity, inestimable in value, and almost unparalleled in its flattering inducements to a people situated as they were, had been utterly unappreciated and irrevocably lost.

In the numerous accounts which have been written, representing all shades of opinion from different stand-points on both sides, and from the wide discussion which has resulted, history can be at no loss for material upon which to base an intelligent estimate of this battle, and of the extent to which the victors reaped the advantages of success. Differences of opinion have prevailed, and will, in all probability, continue to prevail, respecting the purely military questions involved in the discussion of the absence of such a vigorous, pertinacious, and unrelenting pursuit by the Confederates as was necessary to secure the fruits of a decisive victory. But the stubborn conviction, nevertheless, remains, and will never be eradicated from the Southern mind – that, barring the immediate security to the Confederate capital, Manassas was but a barren victory, where results of a most decisive character were within easy reach. Nor is this popular impression unsustained by such competent military authority, as will command respect for its judgment, upon those aspects of the question, upon which a military judgment is alone valuable.

So emphatic became the public condemnation of the inactivity of the army, and especially when, by subsequent information, was revealed the real condition of the enemy after his overwhelming disaster, that inquiry was naturally made as to the authorship of such an erroneous policy. The presence of President Davis, both during a portion of the battle and during the day following, was promptly seized upon as affording a clue to the mystery. For months he rested under the suspicion of having, by peremptory order, stopped the pursuit of the enemy, in the face of the protestations of his generals, who would have pressed it to the extent of attainable results.

How such an impression —so utterly in conflict with the facts– could have obtained, by whom, or for what purpose it was disseminated, it is now needless to inquire. The slander was, at length, after having been circulated to the injury of Mr. Davis throughout the country, so conclusively answered as to receive not even the pretense of belief, save from an unscrupulous partisanship, at all times deaf to facts which could not be perverted injuriously to the President. It nevertheless had served a purpose, in preparing the popular mind for those constantly iterated charges of “executive interference,” in the plans and dispositions of the armies of the Confederacy, which followed at subsequent stages of the war.

It may be asked, Why did Mr. Davis suffer this suspicion, when the proof of its injustice might have been so easily adduced? This inquiry would indicate an imperfect acquaintance with that devoted patriotism and knightly magnanimity which belong to his character. Any explanation acquitting himself, must have thrown the responsibility upon Generals Johnston and Beauregard, and he preferred rather to suffer an undeserved reproach, than to excite distrust of two officers, then enjoying the largest degree of popular confidence. With him, selfish considerations were never permitted to outweigh the interests of the country. Actuated by this impulse, he, in more than one instance, where the names of men high in public favor were used in his disparagement, refused, even in self-defense, that retaliation, which must have hurt the cause in proportion as it diminished confidence in its prominent representatives. Mr. Davis, with that decorum which has equally illustrated his public and private life, recognized the special propriety of a denial of these injurious rumors from other sources, fully apprized of their falsity, and from which such an acquittal of himself would have come with becoming candor and grace.

Justice, proverbially slow, has been tardy indeed in its awards to Mr. Davis; but in this instance, as it must inevitably in others, it has come time enough for his historical vindication. The reader, uninformed as to the merits of this question, will be content with a limited statement from the mass of testimony, which has ultimately acquitted Mr. Davis of having prevented the pursuit of the Federal army after its overthrow upon the field of Manasses. In a publication, presenting an elaborate indictment against Mr. Davis, as the main instrument of the downfall of the Confederacy, written since the war, is found the following admission: “As is known, he (President Davis) was at Manasses the evening of the 21st July, 1861. Until a late hour that night he was engaged with Generals Johnston and Beauregard, at the quarters of the latter, in discussing the momentous achievements of the day, the extent of which was not as yet recognized at all by him or his generals. Much gratified with known results, his bearing was eminently proper. He certainly expressed no opposition to any forward movement; nor at the time displayed a disposition to interpose his opinion or authority touching operations and plans of campaign.”39

General Johnston, in a communication published since the war, assumes the responsibility of the failure to pursue, and, with the advantage of retrospect, defends that course with cogent reasoning and an interesting statement of facts. Says General Johnston: “‘The substantial fruit’ of this victory was the preservation of the Confederacy. No more could have been hoped for. The pursuit of the enemy was not continued because our cavalry (a very small force) was driven back by the ‘solid resistance’ of the United States infantry. Its rearguard was an entire division, which had not been engaged, and was twelve or fifteen times more numerous than our two little bodies of cavalry. The infantry was not required to continue the pursuit, because it would have been harassing it to no purpose. It is well known that infantry, unencumbered by baggage trains, can easily escape pursuing cavalry.”

That no farther results were to be hoped for than the arrest of the Federal advance toward Richmond, he endeavors to demonstrate as follows: “A movement upon Washington was out of the question. We could not have carried the intrenchments by assault, and had none of the means to besiege them. Our assault would have been repulsed, and the enemy, then become the victorious party, would have resumed their march to Richmond; but if we had captured the intrenchments, a river, a mile wide, lay between them and Washington, commanded by the guns of a Federal fleet. If we had taken Alexandria, which stands on low and level ground, those guns would have driven us out in a few hours, at the same time killing our friends, the inhabitants. We could not cross the Potomac, and therefore it was impracticable to conquer the hostile capital, or emancipate oppressed Maryland.”

But these statements, ample, as far as they go, in the vindication of Mr. Davis, only partially tell the story of Manassas. They do not fully describe his real relation to the question, though we are far from imputing to General Johnston an intentional omission. A statement of Mr. Davis’ views was not necessarily germane to General Johnston’s explanation of his own conduct. His purpose is to establish the reasons which induced him to decline pursuit of the enemy, or rather, which, in his judgment, made pursuit impracticable. Nor is it germane to our purpose to discuss these reasons; to attempt either a demonstration of their fallacy or an argument in their support. They have not been accepted as conclusive either by the public, or by unanimous military judgment.

The great name of Stonewall Jackson, himself an actor in the most thrilling scenes of that wonderful triumph of Southern valor, and dating from that day his record upon the “bead-roll of fame,” is authoritatively given in opposition to the policy which General Johnston approves. In this connection, we can not forbear to quote the biographer of that illustrious man, in passages showing that wondrous intuition of great soldiership, more distinctive, perhaps, of Jackson, than of any commander of the present century, excepting only Napoleon. Professor Dabney says: “Jackson, describing the manifest rout of the enemy, remarked to the physicians, that he believed ‘with ten thousand fresh men he could go into the city of Washington.’” Again, after a most graphic picture of the condition of the Federal army, its demoralization, panic, and utter incapacity to meet an attack by the victorious Confederates, and an able statement of the inducements to a vigorous pursuit, the biographer of General Jackson makes this impressive statement: “With these views of the campaign, General Jackson earnestly concurred. His sense of official propriety sealed his lips; and when the more impatient spirits inquired, day after day, why they were not led after the enemy, his only answer was to say: ‘That is the affair of the commanding generals.’ But to his confidential friends he afterward declared, when no longer under the orders of those officers, that their inaction was a deplorable blunder; and this opinion he was subsequently accustomed to assert with a warmth and emphasis unusual in his guarded manner.”40

Mr. Davis was far from approving the inaction which followed Manassas. He confidently expected a different use of the victory. When called away by the pressing nature of his official duties at Richmond, he left the army with a heart elastic with hope, at what he considered the certainty of even more glorious and valuable achievements. His speech at the depot in Richmond, which we have given elsewhere, is evidence of his exultant anticipations. The speech at the Spottswood, entering more into details, still better authenticates his hopes of an immediate and successful advance.41 There could be no misinterpretation of the ardor with which, in glowing sentences, he predicted the immediate and consecutive triumphs of what he proudly termed the “gallant little army.”

Indeed, before leaving Manassas, President Davis favored the most vigorous pursuit practicable. On the evening of the battle, while the victory was assured, but by no means complete, he urged that the enemy, still on the field, (Heintzelman’s troops, as subsequently appeared,) be warmly pressed, as was successfully done. During the night following the engagement he made a disposition of a portion of the troops, with a view to an advance in the morning. These troops were removed, but not by himself, to meet an apprehended attack upon the head-quarters of the army. An advance on Monday, the 22d July, was out of the question, in consequence of the heavy rain.

It is not to be understood that President Davis fully appreciated, on Sunday night, the 21st, the overwhelming rout of the Federal army, nor that he advocated, as practicable, an immediate movement in pursuit, by the entire army. No one could have anticipated the utter disorganization attending the flight of the Federals. He had, too, positive evidence of the confusion prevailing among portions of the Southern troops. Summoned by a message from a youthful connection, who was mortally wounded, Mr. Davis rode over a large portion of the field, in a vain search for the regiment to which the young man was attached. Upon his return, he accidentally met an officer who directed him to the locality of the regiment, where he found the corpse of his relative. The evidences of disorganization, upon which General Johnston dwells with so much force and emphasis, were indeed palpable, but Mr. Davis confidently believed that an efficient pursuit might be made by such commands as were in comparatively good condition. Such were his impressions then, and that he contemplated immediate activity as the sequel of Manassas, is a matter of indisputable record.

That Mr. Davis did not insist upon the undeferred execution of his own views, is proof less of his approval of the course pursued, than of an absence of that pragmatic disposition with which he was afterwards so persistently charged. His subsequent hearty tributes to Beauregard and Johnston, and prompt recognition of their services, show how far he was elevated above that mean intolerance, which would have made him incapable of according merit to the opinions and actions of others, when averse to his own conclusions.

This determined spirit of misrepresentation of the motives and conduct of the President, beginning thus early – respecting the origin of which we shall have more to say hereafter – was to prove productive of the most serious embarrassments to the Confederate cause. The first great success in arms achieved by the South, was to originate questions tending to excite distrust in the capacity of the Executive, and subsequently distrust of his treatment of those who were under his authority. Misrepresentation was not to cease with the attempt already mentioned to impair public confidence in Mr. Davis. A pragmatic interference with the plans of his generals was persistently charged upon him. The almost uninterrupted inactivity of the main army in Virginia, following the battle of Manassas, by which the enemy was permitted, without molestation, to organize a new army – a subject of constant and exasperated censure by the public – was falsely attributed to Mr. Davis’ interference with Generals Johnston and Beauregard. It is a sad evidence of the license characteristic of a purely partisan criticism, that this falsely alleged interference has even been ascribed to the instigations of a mean envy of the popularity of those officers.

The purely personal differences of public men are not the proper subject-matter of historical discussion. In the prosecution of our endeavor to give an intelligent and candid narrative of the events of the war, in so far as President Davis was connected with them, we shall have occasion to dwell upon those differences between himself and others respecting important questions of policy which are known to have existed. We do not see that the personal relations of President Davis with Generals Johnston and Beauregard, are here a subject of appropriate inquiry. Nor are those minor questions of detail as to the organization of the army, which arose between them, of such significance as to justify elaborate discussion here. That President Davis chose to exercise those plain privileges with which the Constitution invested him; that he should have consulted that military knowledge which his education and service had taught him; that he should make available his valuable experience as Minister of War; and that he should have failed to interpret the acts of Congress agreeably to the tastes of generals in the field, rather than according to his own judgment, is certainly singular evidence upon which to base charges of “pragmatism,” “persecution,” and “envy” of those generals.42

While the main struggle in Virginia was yet undecided, the Confederate force, under General Garnett, in Western Virginia, had been disastrously defeated by the Federal army of General McClellan. The Confederate commander, a brave and promising officer, was killed, in a gallant endeavor to protect the retreat of his command. This achievement of General McClellan, though attributable mainly to his vastly superior force, was attended by evidences of skill, which indicated him as a prominent figure in the events of the immediate future. In the midst of the gloom and disappointment consequent upon the disaster at Manassas, General McClellan appeared to the Northern Government and masses to be an officer specially recommended, by his late success, for the important charge of the army designed to protect the capital. He was immediately summoned to Washington, and placed in charge of its defenses. With rare capacity for general military administration, and with especial aptitude for organization, General McClellan addressed himself with vigor and success to the work assigned him. Under his direction, the defenses of Washington were speedily put in admirable condition, and within a few months, he had created an army which, in discipline, organization, and equipment, would have compared favorably with the best armies of the world.

General McClellan was too sagacious and prudent a commander to repeat the errors of his predecessor. He was evidently determined not to undertake an aggressive campaign until his preparations were completed. During the progress of those preparations, he endeavored also to provide against those aggressive movements which he evidently anticipated from his adversaries. But the autumn and winter were to pass away without any serious demonstration by the Confederate commanders, and with but one important movement of the enemy.

In the early fall, Generals Johnston and Beauregard advanced to a position in close proximity to the Federal capital. Unable, however, to provoke an engagement with the Federal commander, whose present purposes were purely defensive and preparatory, the Confederate army withdrew from the front of Washington, and retired within its former lines about Manassas and Centreville.

In the latter part of October, an engagement of some importance occurred near Leesburg, occasioned by an attempt of General McClellan to throw a force across the Potomac, doubtless with the view of an advance on the Confederate left wing. The numbers engaged in this engagement were comparatively small, which rendered more remarkable its sanguinary character. Nearly the entire Federal force, though outnumbering more than two to one the Confederate force, was captured or destroyed. There was good reason to regard this movement as preliminary to a general advance of the Federal army. The battle of Leesburg was very dispiriting in its effects upon the North, and equally re-assuring to the Southern Government and people. No other operations of note occurred during the autumn and winter upon the lines of the Lower Potomac.

General Jackson, who by a circumstance which is now well known to the world, had acquired at Manassas the sobriquet of “Stonewall,” in September, 1861, was made a Major-General. Late in December, in charge of a considerable force, he executed, with indifferent success, a movement against detachments of the enemy in the neighborhood of Romney, and other points along the Upper Potomac.

The disasters sustained by the Confederates in Western Virginia, in the early summer, were not repaired by the transfer of General Lee to that quarter. A large and valuable section of country remained as the enemy’s trophy, almost undisputed at the termination of the campaign. The reputation of General Lee suffered severely from the absence of that success which was anticipated from his presence in command. It is a noteworthy circumstance that when, a few months afterward, the President placed Lee in command of the main army of Virginia, his ill-success in Western Virginia was alleged as conclusive evidence of his unfitness for the position to which “executive partiality” had assigned him.

In the meantime, upon the distant theatre of Missouri, the war had assumed a most interesting phase. Many months before the legally-elected legislature of that State adopted an ordinance of secession, Missouri was contributing valuable aid to the struggling Confederacy. Driven by the oppressive course of the Federal Government into resistance, in spite of their efforts to save their State from the destructive presence of war, the Southern men of Missouri organized under the leadership of General Sterling Price and Governor Jackson. Accessions of men from all portions of the State were constantly made to the patriot forces, and, within a few weeks, a large force was upon the southern border, animated by an enthusiastic desire to undertake the redemption of their homes.