The Life of Jefferson Davis

The safe arrival of General Albert Sidney Johnston, within the lines of the Confederacy, was greeted with a degree of public acclamation hardly less enthusiastic than would have signalized the intelligence of a great victory. It was known that the Federal authorities, anxious to prevent so distinguished and valuable an accession to the generalship of the South, were intent upon his capture. For weeks popular expectation had been strained, in eager gaze, for tidings of the distinguished commander, who, beset by innumerable perils and obstacles, was making his way across the continent, not less eager to join his countrymen, than were they to feel the weight of his noble blade in the unequal combat.

Few of the eminent soldiers, who had sought service under the banners of the Confederacy, had a more brilliant record of actual service; and to the advantages of reputation, General Johnston added those graces and distinctions of person with which the imagination invests the ideal commander. He was considerably past middle age; his height exceeded six feet, his frame was large and sinewy; his every movement and posture indicated vigorous and athletic manhood. The general expression of his striking face was grave and composed, but inviting rather than austere.

The arrival of General Johnston in Richmond, early in September, was a source of peculiar congratulation to President Davis. Between these illustrious men had existed, for many years, an endearment, born of close association, common trials and triumphs, and mutual confidence, which rendered most auspicious their coöperation in the cause of Southern independence.

“Albert Sidney Johnston,” says Professor Bledsoe, in a recent publication, “who, take him all in all, was the simplest, bravest, grandest man we have ever known, once said to the present writer: ‘There is no measuring such a man as Davis;’ and this high tribute had a fitting counterpart in that which Davis paid Johnston, when discussing, in the Federal Senate, the Utah expedition. Said he … ‘I hold that the country is indebted to the administration for having selected the man who is at the head of the expedition; who, as a soldier, has not a superior in the army or out of it; and whose judgment, whose art, whose knowledge is equal to this or any other emergency; a man of such decision, such resolution that his country’s honor can never be tarnished in his hands; a man of such calmness, such kindness, that a deluded people can never suffer by harshness from him.’”

President Davis immediately tendered to General Johnston the command of one of the two grand military divisions of the Confederacy, and he as promptly repaired to the scene of his duties.

The general features of General Johnston’s policy contemplated a line of defense running from the Mississippi through the region immediately covering Nashville to Cumberland Gap – the key to the defense of East Tennessee and South-western Virginia, and thus to the most vital line of communication in the South. It is easy to conceive the large force requisite for so important and difficult a task, against the immense armies of Grant and Buell, numbering, in the aggregate, more than one hundred thousand men. Despite the earnest appeals of General Johnston, and notwithstanding that upon the successful maintenance of his position depended the successful defense of the entire southern and south-western sections of the Confederacy, his force, at the last of January, 1862, did not exceed twenty-six thousand men. Informed of his perilous situation, the Confederate Government could do no more than second the appeals and remonstrances of General Johnston. Slight accessions were made to his force from the States which were menaced, but, as results speedily demonstrated, he was unable to meet the enemy with an adequate force at any one of the vital points of his defensive line.

In the immediate front of General Johnston’s position was the army of Buell, estimated at forty thousand men, which, during the entire winter, was in training for its meditated advance along the line of the railroad in the direction of Nashville. Under Grant, at Cairo, was an army of more than fifty thousand men, which, in coöperation with a formidable naval force, was designed to operate against Nashville, and, by securing possession of the line of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, to hold Kentucky and West Tennessee. General Johnston’s position was indeed a cruel dilemma, and was sufficiently explained in a letter to President Davis, representing the inadequacy of his force, for either front of attack, upon a line whose every point demanded ample defense. Only a self-denying patriotism could have induced General Johnston to occupy his false position before the public, which accredited to him an army ample even for aggressive warfare. With an almost certain prospect of disaster, he nevertheless resolved to make the supreme effort which alone could avert it.

His plan was to meet Grant’s attack upon Nashville with sixteen thousand men, hoping, in the meanwhile, by boldly confronting Buell with the residue of his forces, to hold in check the enemy in his immediate front. During the winter, by a skillful disposition of his forces and adroit maneuvers, he deceived the enemy as to his real strength, and thus deferred the threatened advance until the month of February.

The month of January, 1862, was to witness the first check to the arms of the Confederacy, after seven months of uninterrupted victory. The scene of the disaster was near Somerset, Kentucky. The forces engaged were inconsiderable as compared with the conflicts of a few weeks later, but the result was disheartening to the impatient temper of the South, not yet chastened by the severe trials of adversity. General Crittenden was badly defeated, though, as is probable, through no erroneous calculation or defective generalship on his part. A melancholy feature of the disaster was the death of General Zollicoffer. With the repulse and retreat of the Confederate forces after the battle of Fishing Creek, as the action was called, followed the virtual possession of South-eastern Kentucky by the Federal army. The Confederate line of defense in Kentucky was thus broken, and the value of other positions materially impaired.

Early in February the infantry columns of Grant and the gunboats of Commodore Foote commenced the ascent of the Tennessee River. The immediate object of assault was Fort Henry, an imperfectly constructed fortification, on the east bank of the river, near the dividing line of Kentucky and Tennessee. After a signal display of gallantry by its commander, General Tilghman, the fort was surrendered, the main body of the forces defending it having been previously sent to Fort Donelson, the principal defense of the Cumberland River. The capture of Fort Henry opened the Tennessee River, penetrating the States of Tennessee and Alabama, and navigable for steamers for more than two hundred miles, to the unchecked advance of the enemy.

General Grant promptly advanced to attack Fort Donelson. After a series of bloody engagements and a siege of several days, Fort Donelson was surrendered, with the garrison of more than nine thousand men. This result was indeed a heavy blow to the Confederacy, and produced a most alarming crisis in the military affairs of the Western Department. General Johnston was near Nashville, with the force which had lately held Bowling Green, the latter place having been evacuated during the progress of the fight at Fort Donelson. Nashville was immediately evacuated, and the remnant of General Johnston’s army retreated southward, first to Murfreesboro’, Tennessee, and afterwards crossed the Tennessee, at Decatur, Alabama.

In January, General Beauregard had been transferred from Virginia to Kentucky, and, at the time of the surrender of Nashville, was in command of the forces in the neighborhood of Columbus, Kentucky, which protected the passage of the Mississippi. The entire Confederate line of defense in Kentucky and Tennessee having been lost with the surrender of Forts Henry and Donelson, its various posts became untenable. In a subsequent portion of this narrative, we shall trace the results of the Confederate endeavor to establish a new line of defense in the West by a judicious and masterly combination of forces.

Meanwhile, the preparations of the enemy in the East were even more formidable and threatening than in the West. It was in Virginia that the “elastic spirit” of the North, as the Richmond Examiner termed the alacrity of the consecutive popular uprisings in favor of the war at the North, was chiefly ambitious and hopeful of decisive results in favor of the Union. Here was to be sought retrieval of the national honor lost at Manassas; here was the capital of the Confederacy, which, once taken, the “rebellion would collapse.” The energy and administrative ability of General McClellan had accomplished great results in the creation of a fine army and the security of the capital. But, with the opening of the season favorable to military operations, he was expected to accomplish far more decisive results – nothing less than the capture of Richmond, the expulsion of the Confederate authority from Virginia, and the destruction of the Confederate army at Manassas.

Until the opening of spring, military operations in Virginia were attended by no events of importance. But the East was not to be without its contribution to the unvarying tide of Confederate disaster. In the month of February, Roanoke Island, upon the sea-line of North Carolina, defended by General Wise, with a single brigade, was assaulted by a powerful combined naval and military expedition, under General Burnside, and surrendered, with its garrison. This success opened to the enemy the sounds and inlets of that region, with their tributary streams, and gave him easy access to a productive country and important communications.

It was not difficult to estimate correctly the serious nature of these successive reverses covering nearly every field of important operations. They were of a character alarming, indeed, in immediate consequences, and, necessarily, largely affecting the destiny of the war in its future stages. Retreat, evacuation, and surrender seemed the irremediable tendency of affairs every-where. Thousands of prisoners were in the hands of the enemy, the capital of the most important State in the West occupied, the Confederate centre was broken, the great water-avenues of the south-west open to the enemy, the campaign transferred from the heart of Kentucky to the northern borders of the Gulf States, and hardly an available line was left for the recovery of the lost territory.

Within a few weeks the extravagant hopes of the South were brought to the verge of extreme apprehension. The public mind was not to be soothed by the affected indifference of the press to calamities, the magnitude of which was too palpable, in the presence of actual invasion of nearly one half the Southern territory, and of imminent perils threatening the speedy culmination of adverse fortune to the Confederacy. Richmond, which, during the war, was at all times the reflex of the hopes and aspirations of the South, was the scene of gloom and despondency, in painful contrast with the ardent and gratulatory tone so lately prevalent.

Popular disappointment rarely fails in its search for scapegoats upon which to visit responsibility for misfortunes. A noticeable result of the Confederate reverses in the beginning of 1862 was the speedy evolution of an organized hostility to the administration of President Davis. The season was eminently propitious for outward demonstrations of feeling, heretofore suppressed, in consequence of the brilliant success, until recently, attending the movement for Southern independence. The universal and characteristic disposition of the masses to receive, with favor, censure of their rulers, and to charge public calamities to official failure and maladministration, was an inviting inducement, in this period of public gloom, to the indulgence of partisan aspirations and personal spleen.

To one familiar with the political history of the South during the decade previous to secession, there could be no difficulty in penetrating the various motives, instigating to union, for a common purpose, the heterogeneous elements of this opposition. Prominent among its leaders were men, the life-long opponents of the President, notorious for their want of adhesion to any principle or object for its own sake, and especially lukewarm, at all times, upon issues vitally affecting the safety of the South. These men could not forget, even when their allegiance had been avowed to the sacred cause of country and liberty, the rancor engendered in the old contests of party. Some, in addition to disappointed political ambition, arising from the failure of the President to tender them the foremost places in the Government, had personal resentments to gratify. Much the larger portion of the opposition, which continued, until the last moments of the Confederacy, to assail the Government, had its origin in these influences, and they speedily attracted all restless and impracticable characters – born Jacobins, malcontents by the decree of nature, and others of the class who are “never at home save in the attitude of contradiction.”

At first feeble in influence, this faction, by pertinacious and unscrupulous efforts, eventually became a source of embarrassment, and promoted the wide-spread division and distrust which, in the latter days of the Confederacy, were so ominous of the approaching catastrophe. Its earliest shafts were ostensibly not aimed at the President, since there was no evidence that the popular affection for Mr. Davis would brook assaults upon him, but assumed the shape of accusations against his constitutional advisers. A deliberate movement, cloaked in the disguise of respectful remonstrance and petition, sustained by demagogical speeches – which, though artfully designed, in many instances revealed the secret venom – was arranged, upon the assembling of the First Congress under the permanent Government, to revolutionize the cabinet of President Davis.

Mr. Benjamin, the Secretary of War, and Mr. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy, were the objects of especial and most envenomed assault. They were assailed in Congress, and by a portion of the Richmond press, as directly chargeable with the late reverses. Yet it should have been plain that the most serious of these disasters were attributable chiefly to the overwhelming naval preponderance of the enemy – an advantage not to have been obviated entirely by any degree of foresight on the part of the Confederate naval secretary – and by a deficiency of soldiers, for which the country itself, and not Mr. Benjamin, was to be censured.

The indisputable facts in the case were ample in the vindication of Mr. Mallory, as to the insufficient defenses of the Western rivers, now in Federal possession. The obvious dangers of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, as an avenue of access to the heart of the South, were not overlooked by the Government. The channels of these rivers are navigable during a large portion of the year, and the two streams gradually approach each other, as they pass from Tennessee into Kentucky, on their course to the Ohio, coming at one point within less than three miles of each other, and emptying their waters only ten miles apart. The facilities afforded by their proximity for combined military and naval operations, were necessarily apparent. The Government contemplated the defense of these streams by floating defenses the only means by which they could be debarred to the enemy. The Provisional Congress, however, by a most singular and fatal oversight of the recommendation of the Government, made no appropriation for floating defenses on the Tennessee and Cumberland, until the opportunity to prepare them had passed.

It authorized the President to cause to be constructed thirteen steam gunboats for sea-coast defense, and such floating defenses for the Mississippi River as he might deem best adapted to the purpose; but no provision was made for armed steamers on the large Western interior rivers until the month of January, 1862, when an act was approved appropriating one million of dollars, to be expended for this purpose, at the discretion of the President, by the Secretary of War, or of the Navy, as he might direct. This was less than four weeks before the actual advance of the Federal gunboats, and was, of course, too late for the needed armaments. The appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars, for equipment and repairs of vessels of the Confederate navy, hardly sufficed to enable the Secretary of that department to maintain a few frail steamers on the Tennessee, hastily prepared from commercial or passenger boats, and very imperfectly armed.

A congressional investigating committee censured Mr. Benjamin and General Huger as responsible for the capture of Roanoke Island and its garrison. The latter affair was indeed a disaster not to be lightly palliated, and was one of those inexplicable mishaps, which, upon retrospection, we see should have been avoided, though it is at least doubtful who is justly censurable. It is, however, only just to state that no view of the Roanoke Island disaster has ever been presented to the writer, which did not acquit General Wise of all blame. His exculpation was complete before every tribunal of opinion.

Whatever may have been the real merit of these issues made against Secretaries Mallory and Benjamin, it is very certain that those two gentlemen continued to be the objects of marked disfavor from those members of Congress, and that portion of the Richmond press known to be hostile to the administration of Mr. Davis. Popular prejudice is proverbially unreasoning, and it was indeed singular to note how promptly the public echoed the assaults of the hostile press against these officials, upon subsequent occasions, when they were held accountable for disasters with which they had no possible connection.43

This period of Confederate misfortunes gave the first verification of a fact which afterward had frequent illustration, that the resolution of the South, so indomitable in actual contest, staggered under the weight of reverses. The history of the war was a record of the variations of the Southern mind between extreme elation and immoderate depression. Extravagant exultation over success, and immoderate despondency over disaster, usually followed each other in prompt succession. Overestimating, in many instances, the importance of its own victories, the South quite as frequently exaggerated the value of those won by the enemy. There was thus a constant departure from the middle ground of dispassionate judgment, which would have accurately measured the real situation; making available its opportunities, by a vigorous prosecution of advantage, and overcoming difficulties by energetic preparation.

But this despondency happily gave place to renewed determination, as the success of the enemy brought him nearer the homes of the South, and made more imminent the evils of subjugation. A grand and noble popular reanimation was the response to the renewed vigor and resolution of the Government.

When the Confederate Government was organized at Montgomery, the operation of the provisional constitution was limited to the period of one year, to be superseded by the permanent government. No material alteration of the political organism was found necessary, nor was there any change in the personnel of the administration – Mr. Davis having been unanimously chosen President at the election in November, and retaining his administration as it existed at the close of the functions of the provisional constitution. Though the change was thus merely nominal, the occasion was replete with historic interest to the people whose liberties were involved in the fate of the government, now declared “permanent.” It was, indeed, an assumption of a new character – a declaration, with renewed emphasis, of the high and peerless enterprise of independent national existence; an introduction to a future, promising a speedy fulfillment of inestimable blessings or “woes unnumbered.”

On the 18th of February, 1862, the first Congress, under the permanent constitution of the Confederate States, assembled in the capitol at Richmond. On the 22d occurred the ceremony of the inauguration of President Davis.

To the citizens of Richmond and others who were spectators, the scene in Capitol Square, on that memorable morning, was marked by gloomy surroundings, the recollection of which recalls, with sad interest, suggestive omens, which then seemed to betoken the adverse fate of the Confederacy. The season was one of unusual rigor, and the preceding month of public calamity and distress had been fitly commemorated by a protracted series of dark and cheerless days. Never, within the recollection of the writer, had there been a day in Richmond so severe, uncomfortable, and gloomy, as the day appointed for the ceremony of inauguration. For days previous heavy clouds had foreshadowed the rain, which fell continuously during the preceding night, and which seemed to increase in volume on the morning of the ceremony. The occasion was in singular contrast with that which, a year previous, had witnessed the installment of the provisional government – upon a day whose genial sunshine seemed prophetic of a bright future for the infant power then launched upon its voyage.

But however wanting in composure may have been the public mind, and whatever the perils of the situation, the voice of their twice-chosen chief quickly infused into the heart of the people, that unabated zeal and unconquerable resolution, with which he proclaimed himself devoted anew to the deliverance of his country. The inaugural address was a noble and inspiring appeal to the patriotism of the land. Its eloquent, candid, and patriotic tone won all hearts; and even the unfriendly press and politicians accorded commendation to the dignity and candor with which the President avowed his official responsibility; the manly frankness with which he defended departments of the government unjustly assailed; and the assuring, defiant courage, with which he invited all classes of his countrymen to join him in the supreme sacrifice, should it become necessary.

The inaugural ceremonies were as simple and appropriate as those witnessed at Montgomery a year previous. The members of the Confederate Senate and House of Representatives, with the members of the Virginia Legislature, awaited in the hall of the House of Delegates the arrival of the President. In consequence of the limited capacity of the hall, comparatively few spectators – a majority of them ladies – witnessed the proceedings there. Immediately fronting the chair of the speaker were the ladies of Mr. Davis’ household, attended by relatives and friends. In close proximity were members of the cabinet.

A contemporary account thus mentions this scene: “It was a grave and great assemblage. Time-honored men were there, who had witnessed ceremony after ceremony of inauguration in the palmiest days of the old confederation; those who had been at the inauguration of the iron-willed Jackson; men who, in their fiery Southern ardor, had thrown down the gauntlet of defiance in the halls of Federal legislation, and in the face of the enemy avowed their determination to be free; and finally witnessed the enthroning of a republican despot in their country’s chair of state. All were there; and silent tears were seen coursing down the cheeks of gray-haired men, while the determined will stood out in every feature.”

The appearance of the President was singularly imposing, though there were visible traces of his profound emotion, and a pallor, painful to look upon, reminded the spectator of his recent severe indisposition. His dress was a plain citizen’s suit of black. Mr. Hunter, of Virginia, temporary President of the Confederate Senate, occupied the right of the platform; Mr. Bocock, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the left. When President Davis, accompanied by Mr. Orr, of South Carolina, Chairman of the Committee of Arrangements, on the part of the Senate, reached the hall and passed to the chair of the Speaker, subdued applause, becoming the place and the occasion, greeted him. A short time sufficed to carry into effect the previously arranged programme, and the distinguished procession moved to the Washington monument, where a stand was prepared for the occasion.

Hon. James Lyons, of Virginia, Chairman of the House Committee of Arrangements, called the assemblage to order, and an eloquent and appropriate prayer was offered by Bishop Johns, of the Diocese of Virginia. The President, having received a most enthusiastic welcome from the assemblage, with a clear and measured accent, delivered his inaugural address: