Poor Jeff

If one utterance could sum up how I was taught the Civil War in Texas public schools, it would be: “The South had better generals, but what could we—I mean they—do against that many men and guns? It was really a victory to hold out that long.” Robert E. Lee, the greatest general among all those allegedly great commanders, personifies the Confederacy in a way no one else does, and that great, dignified beard and reputation for unimpeachable honor obscure the strange circumstance that the surrender of a general ended the war, as opposed to the capitulation of Jefferson Davis, the chief executive of the defeated South.

There’s at least one country song about getting drunk with Robert E. Lee’s ghost, but I’d be surprised if poor Jeff Davis had even a limerick. If non-historians think about him at all, it’s in a trivia-question, crossword-clue, fill-in-the-blank kind of way: he was president of the Confederacy the same way Ulan Batar is the capital of Mongolia. This will hopefully change after the publication of venerable Civil War historian James M. McPherson’s recent work, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander-in-Chief.

The book starts fifteen minutes before Davis becomes president; he and his wife Varina are on their Mississippi plantation choosing flowers for the house when a rider arrives with the news that Davis has been chosen to preside over the embryonic pseudo-nation. This was to be the last pleasant, relaxed moment he would enjoy for years. War had not yet begun, but planning had; and Davis immediately prepares for conflict. At this early stage, he makes a grave mistake: instead of concentrating Confederate forces to make them as formidable as possible, Davis embraces a “thin grey line,” under the assumption that any Union occupation of Confederate territory would undermine the credibility of the impulsive new nation. To successfully garrison the entire, uncertain border (remember, Maryland is on the verge of secession, West Virginia is seceding from Virginia, Missouri is divided, and Kentucky, bless her, is trying to stay “neutral”) would have taken an enormous, unified, well-led army—not the hodgepodge of hastily constructed militias actually at Davis’ disposal.

Davis’ early unwillingness to prioritize was reflected and magnified across the Confederacy. Much of his presidency was spent playing high-stakes Whac-a-Mole: state governments complained about everything, including the deployment of their forces outside their home states, and places like Corpus Christi begged for money and men to fight off phantom Yankee encroachments. (I’ve been to Corpus Christi, and in the unlikely event the Yankees really want it, they can have it.) The great irony here is that for the Confederacy to have a chance at victory, it would have needed a completely unified front, but the states’ rights-worshipping governors and “individualistic” (read: disobedient) field commanders made this impossible. Davis was a competent man faced with an overflowing Pandora’s box that would have defeated many a better leader; but he did his damnedest and comes across as admirable, if not likable.

Jefferson Davis’ ability to administrate was limited by circumstance, but the man could thunder with the best of them. McPherson quotes a speech Davis gave in Richmond in late 1862: “… the [Yankee] offscourings of the earth … [show] themselves so utterly disgraced that if the question was proposed to you whether you would combine with hyenas or Yankees, I trust every Virginian would say, give us the hyenas.” Find a good rhyme for “hyenas,” and this has the makings of a comeback single for Hank Williams Jr. Well-chosen quotes like this, replete with all the floral touches of the time, are one of the treats of this book: after the Mississippi returns to Union hands, Lincoln remarks that “the father of waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” McPherson’s casually excellent prose is a worthy setting for these ringing quotes: his writing is straightforward, but not dull, and can be easily understood by non-experts.

McPherson also has a historian’s eye for the illuminating detail. A discussion of the actual market value of Davis’ slaves early in the book makes the depravity of the institution uncomfortably real. “A few dozen slaves” is an abstraction, like extras in Gone with the Wind; but 800,000 1860-dollars of human flesh—several million of today’s dollars in purchasing power—drive home the idea of person-as-asset. Late in the war, Davis bowed to the reality of the manpower shortage and tried to have slaves organized into fighting units. This coincided almost exactly with Brazil’s experiment in using slaves as a fighting force, in a savage war against Paraguay; Brazil and its allies won, but slavery was gradually phased out over the next generation—because what are you going to do, take the slaves’ guns back and make them cut sugarcane again?—culminating in complete abolition in 1888, and the fall of the Imperial government in 1889.

This is an interesting jumping-off point for counter-historical speculation; but the congress dithered, and no slave soldiers had completed training before the end of the war.

Embattled Rebel is an accessible history that fills a gap in both Civil War scholarship and the public imagination. Full of information, but deftly written and a quick read, it deserves a place on your nightstand as we mark the 150th anniversary of Lee’s surrender this month.