Jefferson Davis Leads Southern States in the U.S. Civil War

The road to Montgomery, Alabama and the February 4, 1861 convention that produced the Confederate States of America was a long one for Jefferson Davis, the Mississippian elected to be President of the newly formed provisional government. Davis had been a leader in the Southern cause, seeing himself as John C. Calhoun’s inheritor when it came to the voice of disunion. On February 9, 1861, Mary Boykin Chesnut wrote that, “We have to choose born leaders of men, who could attract love and secure trust.” Was Jefferson Davis such a man?

 

The Roots of Jefferson Davis Formed his Leadership Qualifications

 

Many men in American history had civic and political resumes that assumed qualification yet when confronted by crisis were unable to act effectively. Jefferson Davis agreed to lead the Confederacy politically, but he had preferred to be the commanding general. A West Point graduate, Davis was one of over 300 graduates to serve the South, most of them as field commanders.

 

Davis was a product of the Southern planter class. Over seventy slaves worked in the fields at Brierfield, his plantation on the Mississippi River barely thirty miles south of Vicksburg. His first wife Sarah was the daughter of Kentucky planter Zachary Taylor, the twelfth President and the hero of the Battle of Buena Vista. After Sarah died of malaria, Davis remarried at the age of thirty-five. Varina was only eighteen.

 

Jefferson Davis the Soldier-Politician

 

The Mexican American war broke out soon after Davis’ remarriage. Elected as their “colonel,” Davis led the “Mississippi Rifles” and fought with distinction at Buena Vista where he was wounded. His military background propelled him into the Executive branch, serving as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. In this capacity, he did what he could to strengthen federal arsenals in the South.

 

Davis was one of the new Senate personalities during the tumultuous debates over Henry Clay’s 1850 compromise resolutions. Davis realized that there could be no compromise over slavery. Slavery was protected by the Constitution and was biblically sanctioned. Although cautious about Southern secession, even after learning that Mississippi had voted to leave the Union on January 9, 1861, Davis never stepped back from his position on Southern slavery.

 

Fracturing of the Democratic Party at the 1860 Charleston Convention

 

The national convention of the Democrats in Charleston in 1860 demonstrated the severe rifts within the party. Although Davis reviled Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the men of the South were not in total agreement. Some favored immediate secession if the Democrats lost in November while others counseled caution.

 

Davis was as much responsible for the breakup of the convention as any fire-eater, ridiculing Douglas’ Freeport Doctrine and his perennial solution of popular or “squatter” sovereignty. In early 1861, former South Carolina Senator James Hammond called Davis the “most irascible man I ever knew…as vain as a peacock as ambitious as the Devil.”

 

Disunion Achieved with the Fall of Fort Sumter

 

Jefferson Davis blamed President James Buchanan for the shots fired at Ft Sumter. In early January 1861, Davis had counseled Buchanan to evacuate the Charleston forts. But Buchanan followed the advice of General Winfield Scott and actually attempted to resupply Ft Sumter.

 

It should also be noted that it was Davis, as President of the Confederacy, who authorized P.T. Beauregard to bombard Ft Sumter, against the strong advice of his own Secretary of War Robert Toombs, former U.S. Senator from Georgia. Toombs correctly assessed that this action would unify the North against the South and result in what every reasonable secessionist wanted to avoid: a war with the Union.

 

The Two Sides of Jefferson Davis in the Pre-War South

 

Davis portrayed himself as a humane and kindly slave master, building a small hospital for his slaves and a nursery for infants whose mothers toiled in the fields. He was opposed to whipping slaves and, like many planters, led his slaves in Sunday worship. But Davis still saw slaves as property, protected by the Constitution.

 

Davis also rationalized that slaves were products of the “curse of Ham,” and could not care for themselves if freed. He supported a federal slave code for the new territories and the acquisition of Cuba. Davis joined other Southern political leaders in wanting to reopen the African slave trade. Like his ideological mentor Calhoun, Davis believed that the cotton South must never be surrounded by free soil states and territories.

 

Jefferson Davis was elected President of the Confederacy in part because of his long and distinguished background as a Southern military and political leader. The pressures of creating a new nation as well as preparing that nation for war, however, showed his leadership weaknesses.

 

Historian Gerard A. Patterson writes that, “Even Jefferson Davis, a West Pointer who should have realized what was entailed in putting together an army, did not exhibit any appreciation of the magnitude of the problem…” This assessment would carry over into the first year of the war during which Davis acted arbitrarily and not without personal subjectivism in the promotion of officers.

 

President Davis and the Coming of Civil War

 

Mary Chesnut referred to the need for born leaders. Davis was a leader, but not a born leader in the manner Chesnut described. Unlike his counterpart Abraham Lincoln, Davis lacked humility and empathy. Additionally, as the leader of a confederation, his decision making powers were not always absolute, nor could they be.

 

Sources:

 

Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary From Dixie, Edited by Ben Ames Williams (Harvard University Press, 1980)

Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South (Louisiana State University Press, 1982)

Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of The 1850s (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978)

Stephen B. Oates, The Approaching Fury: Voices Of The South, 1820-1861 (Harper Collins, 1997)

Gerard A. Patterson, Rebels From West Point (Stackpole Books, 2002)