I

I propose to begin with Jefferson Davis, who has been as bitterly criticized as has the leader of any cause which has been defeated. And this is natural, for, while it is the usual lot of statesmen and soldiers who have led a people to disaster to share the obloquy and abuse of quondam friends and foes, in this case the soldier, Robert E. Lee, had the rare experience of retaining in defeat the devoted affection of his men, and of gaining the respect of his former enemies. There remained, therefore, but one of the chief targets of criticism, which gained in volume by concentration. Much of this had to do with the causes of the conflict. There have been many less competent statesmen in time of war than Jefferson Davis. It happened that he was opposed to a giant, and the inevitable comparison has made him appear to be a dwarf, which he was not. In another milieu he would have appeared to be an administrator of more than average competence; where he failed was in the general direction of military operations, in combining policy and strategy; and he failed there because he had never worked out in his mind a system for the conduct of war.

When Jefferson Davis was chosen to be President of the Southern Confederacy he possessed an unusual equip ment for a statesman confronted with problems of war. The son of a small farmer of the South, he obtained through the influence of an elder brother a nomination to West Point, and passed through the Military Academy at a time when two men with whom he was to be closely associated, Robert E. Lee and J. E. Johnston, were there. He entered the United States Cavalry in 1828 and was engaged as a young officer in that Black Hawk War in which his great opponent, Abraham

Lincoln, served as a volunteer captain. But he tired of military service and, his elder brother having made a fortune as a cotton planter in Mississippi, he left the army to become, like his brother, a successful grower of cotton and employer of slaves. Turning his mind to politics, he was elected to Congress in 1845, and was a member of the Federal legislature when the Mexican War broke out. He then raised and commanded a regiment of Mississippi Rifles, which he took to the front, and at the battle of Buena Vista he gained with his regiment a somewhat facile success over the Mexicans which made him one of the heroes of the war. The effect of this upon his political career was immediate, and may be compared with the consequences of Roosevelt's not dissimilar exploits in Cuba. He was made a Senator at once, and became one of the protagonists of the Southern cause and eventually the Southern leader in the Senate. When Pierce became President, in 1853, he chose Davis as his Secretary of War, and for four years the future leader of the Confederacy controlled the War Department of the United States, returning in 1857 to the Senate to resume his advocacy of the Southern cause.

Naturally, then, when the breach came, the South turned to him and unanimously elected him President. In that position he had, out of such resources as the several states could provide, to create a government, an army, and a navy, to provide the Confederacy with a financial system, and to organize the supply of munitions and of war material. If the fact that the North was almost equally unready for war assured him of some leisure for these preparations, their magnitude would have taxed the capacity of the greatest organizer with unlimited time at his disposal. The South, in which the chief industries were the growing of cotton

and tobacco, was poor in manufacturing resources; all the powder factories and most of the coal and iron were in Northern territory, while the Federal fleet, if small at the outset, was sufficiently strong to make communication with Europe precarious even in the early days of the struggle. Criticism of Davis's war administration must therefore be tempered with a sense of the weight of the burden which he had to carry.

II

The Confederacy, on its creation, adopted the Constitution of the United States, with a preamble affirming the right of secession and with the addition of clauses securing the right of property in Negro slaves and making it the duty of Congress to protect slavery in any territory which might subsequently be acquired. Therefore both North and South possessed a Constitution which conferred on the President such powers as permitted him, if they did not specifically authorize him, to act as a dictator in time of war. These powers were freely used both by Jefferson Davis and by Abraham Lincoln, and on the whole this attempt to adapt to the needs of modern democracy the custom of the Roman Republic stood the test of a prolonged war amazingly well.

The practice of placing supreme authority temporarily in the hands of one man in a time of great emergency, when rapid decisions are frequently needed, has been proved by the experience of the Civil War to have, for the purpose of conducting war, most of the advantages which have been claimed for a permanent autocratic system of government. It may, however, be doubted whether the provision of the Constitution of the United States that makes the President Commanderin-Chief of the Army and Navy proved to be equally wise. The control of

military forces by the civil power could be assured in other ways and the distinction between control and command should be clear. In fact, as we shall see, on such occasions as either President was tempted to exercise the military functions of Commander-inChief he was usually unsuccessful, and in the event Jefferson Davis was forced by the pressure of circumstances and of public opinion to hand over those functions to another, while Abraham Lincoln abrogated them voluntarily.

Undoubtedly Jefferson Davis found his military experience to be of great value when he was shaping his administration; later he was tempted to rely unduly on that experience, and to take too much upon himself, a not uncommon failing with ministers who have some expert knowledge of the department which they administer. The greatest asset which he possessed was his knowledge of the character and qualifications of the officers in the Army of the United States. His first selections for command from among those who threw in their lot with the South proved him to be an exceptional judge of men. When he moved the Government of the Confederacy from Montgomery to Richmond he found in the capital of Virginia Robert E. Lee, whom he made his military adviser. He sent A. S. Johnston to the Mississippi front and chose J. E. Johnston and Beauregard to watch the Potomac. It is indeed rare that the selection of four commanders, made before a shot was fired, proves at the end of a long war to have been more than justified, though it must be confessed that some of Davis's later appointments to command in the west were less happy.

Davis has been accused of lack of energy in providing arms and equipment for the Confederate armies. The best answer to that charge is the fact that the Federal Government, with an

established organization, considerable manufacturing facilities, and free access to Europe, made at first little better progress, while our own recent experience of the time it takes to organize the manufacture of munitions and to obtain them from other countries should make us skeptical of suggestions that, in the first months of the war, Davis should have succeeded in providing arms for all who were willing to fight.

He has also been charged with neglecting to use the cotton of the South to provide his administration with financial facilities in Europe. There has been more misunderstanding about the influence of cotton upon the war than about any other of its features. By the time the Confederate Government had been constituted, the whole of the 1860-1861 cotton crop had been exported, and before the 1861-1862 crop was ready the Northern blockade had become sufficiently effective to make exportation in bulk impossible. There was no substantial neglect of opportunity. Davis, like most Southerners, had an excessive belief in the influence of 'King Cotton' in Europe. His conviction that a cotton famine would certainly cause Great Britain, and probably France, to intervene undoubtedly influenced his conduct of the war, and here he was wrong in his estimate of the situation. Professor Channing, in the latest volume of his History of the United States, has shown conclusively that when the war broke out there was a glut of cotton in Europe, and that the brokers of Manchester were actually reëxporting cotton to Northern ports as late as May 1862. Before the cotton famine had become severe Lincoln's first Emancipation Proclamation, of September 1862, by making abolition the prime issue in the struggle, so won over popular opinion in Great Britain as to remove what little prospect of

British intervention had ever existed, and later the distressed cotton hands of Lancashire were among those who sent addresses of sympathy and encouragement to the Federal President.

But if Davis was wrong in this respect his administrative measures at the beginning of the war compare favorably with those taken during the same period at Washington. He cannot fairly be accused of lack of foresight, seeing that, when most of his countrymen believed that they would be allowed to secede without fighting, he insisted that the North would fight and fight hard. He was one of the few who foresaw and said publicly that the war would be a long one. He succeeded in getting Congress to change its proposal that first enlistments should be for sixty days in favor of a term of twelve months. Later he obtained authority for the acceptance of volunteers without limit of numbers for the duration of the war, and in April 1862 he had a conscription act passed. In many of these measures he had the advantage of the advice of Lee, but he had the merit both of recognizing good advice when he received it and of acting upon it. The terms of service of the Confederate Armies were more judiciously arranged than those of the North and this fact materially increased the power of resistance of the South.

III

I have been at pains to answer some of the critics of Davis's war administration and to show my agreement with those who take a kindly view of his capacity because, if he had been merely a blunderer, there would clearly be nothing to be learned from his experience. Davis was not a great man, but I believe him to have been above the average of war ministers, and during the first year of the war his experience

of affairs in general and of military affairs in particular made him a formidable opponent of Lincoln, who had no such experience. His weaknesses were due to his failure to insist that the interests of the Confederacy as a whole should take precedence of the interests of the individual states, to an excess of caution, and to a tendency to rely too much on his small military experience, which caused him to concern himself with minor details.

The first of these weaknesses was inherent in the Southern claim of the precedence of the rights of the states, but Davis appears often to have made little effort to get the states to relinquish their several rights for the common good, and even to have gone further sometimes than the states themselves required. One example will suffice. The Confederate law authorized the President to accept contingents from the states, but left him free to choose all the commanders of larger formations than regiments. Esprit de corps would naturally be promoted by keeping troops from the same state together, under a commander from that state, but the first essential was that the commander should be efficient. We find Davis writing on October 10, 1861, to Major-General G. W. Smith: 'Kentucky has a brigadier but not a brigade; she has, however, a regiment; that regiment and brigadier might be associated together. Louisiana had regiments enough to form a brigade, but no brigadier in either corps; all of the regiments were sent to that corps which was commanded by a Louisiana general. Georgia has regiments now organized into two brigades; she has on duty with the army two brigadiers, but one of them serves with other troops. Mississippi troops were scattered as if the state were unknown.'

There is in this letter and in a number of others of similar tenor no hint

that military exigences should be considered, or that commanders should possess some other qualification than a birthplace in a particular state. Ample evidence exists that Davis was subject to considerable political pressure on these and similar matters, but his position was sufficiently strong, at least in the first years of the war, to have made it possible for him to explain to his complainants that military requirements must have precedence over sentimental considerations and that such matters must be in the hands of the soldiers. As it was, his time was taken up with these details, which he should have insisted on leaving to his War Department, and his generals were worried and sometimes even seriously hampered by untimely requests to change commanders and reorganize troops. Later in the war a number of those generals who had most distinguished themselves proved to be Virginians, and in this the influence of Lee, a Virginian, was seen by jealous citizens of other states. There is good reason to believe that the difficulties between Lee and Longstreet, which had very serious consequences for the South, were not remedied by Davis because Longstreet, a gallant man and a good tactician, but a bad subordinate, was a favorite son of Georgia, and the President was fearful of offending that state.

This kind of difficulty usually arises when forces have to be raised at the outbreak of war. Kitchener has been considerably criticized because he did not use the existing Territorial Force for the expansion of the British Army in the Great War, but preferred to raise new armies ab ovo. The chief factor which influenced him was his memory of the pressure brought by county magnates and persons of influence during the South African War to get employed at the front units which they had raised, or were prepared to raise,

according to their fancy, and he feared that similar influences would prevent the development of the systematic organization which he knew to be necessary. The best way to deal with this matter in a country which has not a system of compulsory service, and in which the general public is therefore usually ignorant of the principles and requirements of military organization, is to explain it frankly. A public eager to win the war and not lacking in common sense may be trusted to respond when it knows what is wanted and why it is wanted. If Davis had exercised in this matter the same courage which he displayed in getting the conscription act adopted, which might fairly have been considered a violation of state rights, he would have rendered the South a very real service, and incidentally relieved himself of much vexatious labor.

IV

But the Confederate President's desire to foster state sentiment, doubtless for what he believed to be good military reasons, led him to make an even more serious mistake. He organized the Confederacy into military departments, placing a general in command of all troops in each department. Such an arrangement, excellent in time of peace, was fatal in time of war, for the military situation took no account of geographical boundaries, while the departments followed, in the main, state lines. The Mississippi early in the war was seen by the Federals, with their command of the sea, to be a promising line of attack, but the great river was a dividing line between Confederate military departments, and lack of cooperation between them was one of the reasons why Lincoln was able, in July 1863, to proclaim that 'the father of waters goes again unvexed to the sea.'

Nor was this all. For a great part of

the war the only coördinating authority between the several departments was the President himself, and he had neither the military competence nor the leisure to arrange and direct timely concentration. The consequence of this was that the Confederacy failed to obtain the fullest advantage from its central position, which was the greatest strategical advantage it possessed. When Lee was at Davis's side there was combination, and the first battle of Bull Run was won because of J. E. Johnston's opportune junction with Beauregard. But for a great part of the war Lee was not in Richmond, and combination between departments was then the exception. It is, however, only fair to Davis to say that in 1861 no Power in Europe save Prussia had devised an effective system for the provision of military advice to the head of the State in time of war. Davis's military knowledge was sufficient to keep him from interfering, save exceptionally, with the operations of his generals in the field, his interference being usually confined to matters of organization and personnel; but that military knowledge was insufficient to enable him to appreciate the difficulties of and the need for unity of direction of forces scattered over a wide area. Failing to understand the difficulties, he could produce no solution. Here is one more example of the danger of a little knowledge. Davis's small experience of war had taught him what a name and an association may mean to soldiers. He recalled the pride which his Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican campaign had taken in their name and in their state connection, and remembered what this had meant in military efficiency. But he did not realize that the command of a battalion in the field might be an inadequate schooling for the direction of a great

war.

When the news reached Richmond