Jefferson Davis's Pursuit of Ambition: The Attractive Features of Alternative Decisions

Jefferson Davis's Pursuit of Ambition: The Attractive Features of Alternative Decisions Richard E. Beringer Jefferson Davis was a man who slipped out of one role and into another with frequency, but his biographers give us no explanation for the twists and turns in his career. One explanation is that scholars have paid insufficient attention to the process by which Davis made decisions, although it is only because of his decisions that Davis achieved sufficient status to be worth the historian's attention in the first place. Decisions did not always come easy for Davis, who sometimes regretted those he made. In his earlier years, this difficulty is best understood in terms of his goals in life; in his later years a pattern of indecisiveness carried over into the Civil War period and adversely affected Davis's effectiveness as president of the Confederacy. The first point of this article is to demonstrate that prior to the Civil War, Jefferson Davis's ambitions engaged him in a constant quest for status, that much-coveted "position in the hierarchy of prestige and influence that characterizes every community or association," as Robert A. Nisbet put it, and "a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor," according to Max Weber.1 Much of this quest can best be understood in terms of the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance. Davis could not simply win status and then enjoy it; in order to be secure, he had to earn it again and again, its possession ratified periodically by the community. Davis therefore continually placed his status This article is based on a paper given at the 1990 meeting of the Social Science History Association. I wish to thank Joan R. Gunderson, Robert E. May, and Ronald Hatzenbuehler for their helpful comments on that occasion. I also wish to thank Archer Jones and Herman Hattaway, who read this manuscript and offered suggestions. Any errors that remain are my responsibility. 1 Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 6; H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 187. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1, » 1992 by The Kent State University Press 6 CIVIL WAR HISTORY and honor in jeopardy by abandoning one achievement in order to ratify his position by achievement in another. During the Civil War, Davis's life goal changed and he sought victory above all. The second purpose here is to show that once again the decisions he made to reach his goal— especially on personnel matters—illustrate the mechanism of cognitive dissonance. This decision-making process is common to us all, but it is especially striking in Davis. It helped him to achieve status before the war, and adversely affected his effectiveness as president of the Confederacy during the war. The notion of cognitive dissonance provides a way of understanding when and how Davis decided to abandon one intent or decision and adopt another, initially in his pursuit of status and honor and later in his quest for Confederate victory. It "centers around the idea that if a person knows various things that are not psychologically consistent with one another, he will, in a variety of ways, try to make them more consistent."2 The complement of cognitive dissonance is postdecision dissonance, which is created by the subject's understanding of the attractive features of rejected alternatives; it becomes significant to the same degree that a person has an emotional commitment to the outcome of a particular decision or position. If an action, behavior, or belief has a potentially profound effect upon one's life, there is a possibility that the knowledge of that effect will create severe dissonance. The awareness of attractive features of alternatives that must necessarily be rejected creates conflict, for "a decision once made tends to generate subsequent dissonance between the cognized fact of choice and the persisting cognitions that support the rejected alternative and oppose the chosen one."3 No matter which way Davis turned, whether as soldier, planter, or politician—and he was all three at one time or another—he could appreciate and be oppressed by the memory of...