Jefferson Davis and the Art of War

JEFFERSON DAVIS AND THE ART OFWAR Grady McWhiney The President of the Confederacy has been a controversial figure for more than a hundred years. There is no consensus on whether Jefferson Davis was a capable commander-in-chief, and historians disagree over what or who most influenced his military decisions during the Civil War. Half a century ago two scholars suggested that Davis failed as a war leader because he thought he knew more about the art of war than he actually did. Hamilton J. Eckenrode hinted that the Confederacy may have been doomed to defeat as early as 1847 when Jefferson Davis formed his regiment of Mississippians into an obtuse angle and halted the attacking Mexicans at Buena Vista with converging rifle fire. "The applause [for this spectacular feat] was so great that he was deceived himself," noted Eckenrode. "He was looked on in the South as a great soldier and he was firmly convinced of his own military talents. His war service was destined to be decisive of his future. It put him in the Senate and made him President of thé Confederacy. When the Richmond Examiner near the close of the Civil War said, 'If we are to perish, the verdict of posterity will be, Died of a V,' it was commenting bitterly on the consequences that had flowed from the famous obtuse angle of Buena Vista." Major General Sir Frederick Maurice, a British military expert, was even more specific. He claimed that Davis failed "in the general direction of [Civil War] military operations . . . because he had never worked out in his mind a system for the conduct of war." His knowledge of strategy "was insufficient to enable him to appreciate the difficulties of and the need for unity of direction of forces scattered over a wide area. Here," insisted Maurice, was "one more example of the danger of a little knowledge." Davis had "a tendency to rely too much on his small military experience, which caused him to concern himself with minor details." He simply "did not realize that the command of a battalion in the field might be an inadequate schooling for the direction of a great war."2 1 Hamilton J. Eckenrode, Jefferson Davis: President of the South (New York, 1923), p. 45. Frederick Maurice, Statesmen and Soldiers of the Civil War: A Study of the Conduct of War (Boston, 1926), pp. 8-9, 22, 17. 101 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY In 1956 David Herbert Donald presented a provocative new thesis. He argued that the rigidity of Davis and his generals contributed to Confederate defeat. But it was not the Mexican War that had fossilized them; it was their devotion to the outmoded military ideas of Baron Henri Jomini. Northerners innovated and won; Southerners remained inflexible and lost. Donald claimed that Davis—a "military martinet, stiff and unbending," who "was constitutionally incapable of experimenting"—"retained to the end [his] . . . faith in Jomini's maxims."3 Since the Donald essay appeared, Jomini has been mentioned in the texts and notes of most serious studies of Davis and other Confederate military leaders. But there is no agreement on either the nature or the extent of Jomini's influence on these men. T. Harry Williams thinks it was strong and detrimental to Confederate generals, especially Robert E. Lee, but Williams makes no claim that Jomini's ideas shaped Davis's policy.4 Even so, Williams calls Davis' defensive strategy "the worst strategy for the South."5 Frank E. Vandiver admits that Jomini's maxims probably influenced Davis, who "had studied principles of war at West Point," but Vandiver insists that the Confederate President developed his own "bold and original war policy, which he called the 'offensive-defensive.' "e The most recent writers emphasize "Confederate strategy's strong conformity to the teachings of Jomini and Napoleon , and the prominent role of [General P. G. T.] Beauregard in securing this conformity." Thomas L. Connelly and Archer Jones argue that Davis favored a defensive or a counteroffensive strategy until he was won over in 1863 to the Jominian concept of "a surprise offensive concentration on an enemy weak point." This was precisely the strategy preached by Beauregard. Indeed, Connelly and Jones...