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106 EVALUATING JEFFERSON DAVIS AS PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERACY Paul D. Escott E valuating the losers in history can be a complicated process. For example , consider the situation of a man named Edward John Smith. One day he probably received congratulations and was told that he was going to make history, for it was his good fortune to take command of the newest, fastest, grandest, and most advanced ocean liner of his day. The world has remembered Smith, but as the captain of the Titanic—the principal figure in a great disaster. In fairness, this was roughly the situation of Jefferson Davis, though he performed far better as president of the Confederacy than Edward John Smith did as captain of the Titanic. Smith was negligent and took unnecessary risks, whereas Davis ran great risks from necessity. Still, the course of each man ended in a disaster that has fixed his reputation. An iceberg sank the Titanic; the problems faced by the Confederacy proved, like an iceberg, to be much larger than secessionists could see and more dangerous than they ever imagined. To assess Jefferson Davis fairly, one should first consider the dimensions of the challenge he faced. Davis took the helm of an untried nation in a situation rife with major disadvantages. Lists of these disadvantages normally begin with the North’s superiority in almost every objective measure of strength and resources . In human terms, the Confederacy was severely outnumbered. It could call on only nine million inhabitants in the eleven states that joined fully in the war effort, whereas the North had a population exceeding twenty million. Although southern loyalties in two additional border states, Kentucky and Missouri , motivated approximately 90,000 men to fight for the Confederacy, far XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 107 Evaluating Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy more men from those states—200,000—fought for the Union army. Close to four million of the Confederates, or 40 percent, were African Americans, 96 percent of whom were slaves suffering under and resenting their exploitation. Southern leaders often claimed that their slave population would maintain the home-front economy while white men fought. Yet from the beginning of the contest, state leaders worried about preserving “good order” on the plantations, and soon slavery proved to be, as General Patrick Cleburne put it, “our most vulnerable point . . . an insidious weakness,” instead of a strength.1 In economic terms, the North possessed three times as much wealth as the South, nearly two-and-a-half times as much railroad mileage, and twenty- five times as much naval tonnage. The value of its factory output exceeded the South’s by a factor of ten. The states remaining in the Union produced fifteen times as much iron as the Confederacy, thirty-eight times as much coal, and thirty-two times as many firearms. Factories to produce textiles were concentrated in the North, in a ratio of fourteen to one. Another vitally important resource was draft animals, needed by the thousands to pull the supply wagons and artillery for a nineteenth-century army. Fully one-third of all the South’s draft animals were in the border states and thus were lost to the Confederate war effort. The Union’s advantage in this respect mounted to nearly two to one.2 Davis also led a new nation whose sense of nationalism was undeveloped and whose reflexive devotion to states’ rights suggested how unprepared the culture was for a massive war. Four key states in the upper South had held back from joining the new nation until war forced them to choose a side. “Furthermore ,” as historian David M. Potter has pointed out, “secession was not basically desired even by a majority in the lower South.” Its advocates there triumphed through skillful use of “emergency psychology,” the strategy of “unilateral action by individual states,” and “the firmness with which they refused to submit the question of secession to popular referenda.” Many of the most enthusiastic secessionists were states’ rights ideologues, devoted to their state and suspicious of any national government. Robert Barnwell Rhett spoke inaccurately, yet expressed a common viewpoint, when his Charleston Mercury trumpeted that “the new Government . . . leaves the States untouched in their Sovereignty, and commits to the Confederate Government only a few simple objects, and a few simple powers to enforce them.”3 The South was a rural, agrarian society rather than an industrializing power. Towns were small, and only 7 percent of the South’s population lived in a...

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