Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back by Robert Penn Warren

Author:Robert Penn Warren [Warren, Robert Penn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0813114454
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 1980-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

WHAT should Davis have done? He might have insisted on a military reorganization to remedy the cumbersomeness of the departmental system, under which large-scale flexible planning was not readily feasible. Perhaps some action might have been taken—in the face of intransigent Southern personalities and principles—to connect the fatally unconnected rail systems (some even had different gauges of rails), in order to exploit the geographical advantage of interior lines and to distribute food and military supplies where they were needed instead of letting rifles rust and food rot. Perhaps more attention to internal problems, to questions of finance, and, more important, to morale. Perhaps, even with the departmental system, more attention to the crucial West, especially to Vicksburg. Perhaps less favoritism, especially to West Point commanders. Perhaps a change in the conscription law that made the owner of twenty slaves exempt from military service—a change that would at least have defanged the poisonous witticism that the bloodshed was “a rich man’s war and a pore man’s fight.” Perhaps a capital farther away than Richmond from the frontier (Montgomery, say), to free Southern forces for maneuver. Perhaps the risk of a pursuit into Washington itself on the heels of an army in panic and total disorder after the First Battle of Manassas. In any case, an abandonment of the policy of maintaining a defensive posture and waiting for European recognition, and an assumption of greater and more immediate military initiative—as Robert Toombs, Secretary of State of the Confederacy in 1861, and later a brigadier general, had urged from the beginning. But each of these proposals presented difficulties.

Davis was what he was, and he was caught in the complications of the world he lived in—a world in which virtues could sometimes turn into liabilities. One way to approach the question of the suitability of Davis as a war President is to ask who among those available in 1861 would have made a better President.

By and large, underlying many of the particular problems were fundamental difficulties built into the very nature of the Confederacy. It can even be argued that the factor underlying all other factors was a state of mind that existed in the North but not in the South. Though the Northern philosophy was unformulated, we can recognize it in the context of thought that led William James, in the end, to his doctrine of pragmatism. This was the state of mind that saw history not in terms of abstract, fixed principles but as a wavering flow of shifting values and contingencies, each to be confronted on the terms of its context. Both Calhoun and Davis (with thousands of others) saw the Constitution as equivalent to the tablets that Moses delivered from Sinai, in contrast to Lincoln, who apparently regarded it in some such evolutionary sense as that of Justice Holmes when Holmes wrote of the development of law.

This Northern bias toward experience was definitely related to the successful conduct of the war. To begin with, once Lincoln had passed the early period of inaction he had no compunction about brushing aside legal technicalities.

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