Lee and His Men at Gettysburg: The Death of a Nation Read Free Page A

routine garrison duty for a couple of years before he resigned from the army, and a moment of minor heroics in the Mexican War as colonel of Mississippi volunteers. But Davis came under the influence of the South’s image of itself. In a land where the age of chivalry was perpetuated, the military leader embodied the gallantry, the glamour, and the privilege of the aristocrat in a feudal society. His shrewd older brother had earned his way into the aristocracy that emerged from the frontier in the Mississippi delta country, and Davis took his status with the seriousness of one not born into the ruling class. He confused his susceptibility to the officer symbol with talents in the honored profession of arms.
    Jefferson Davis was supported in his delusion by an excellent record as war secretary for President Pierce (1853–7), when he had been one of the most powerful figures in Washington. Apparently the ambitious man regarded his efficiency in this paper work relating to peacetime garrisons as qualifying him to command armies in the field. He went further than that: he regarded himself as the one person in the South fitted to command the generals of armies, to plan the war policy and design its execution in detail. In his one-man show Davis brought to war the same bureaucratic cast of mind and methods which had made him so successful as peacetime war secretary, and he guarded his authority as jealously as a Caesar.
    From the beginning of the war, both presidents had taken quite literally their title of commander in chief. In this capacity, however, less was demanded of Lincoln than of Davis. As leader of an established nation, Lincoln had at his disposal unlimited wealth, the organized machinery of government, a navy, the war potential of heavy industry, and a four-to-one manpower superiority. Davis led a disorganized movement in self-determinism composed of proud and fiercely individualistic provincials who had scarcely declared independence before their borders were pierced by invading armies.
    Moreover, unlike Lincoln, Davis lacked the capacity for growth, for changing as events changed. The more the war went against the Confederacy, the more he exhausted his mind and his associates’ patience by a concentration on bureaucratic details. There was something compulsive especially about his passion for interfering with troop dispositions. He endlessly shifted units from one post to another, frequently over the protests and sometimes to the outrage of generals in the field. His clerical work, which properly belonged in the war office or adjutant general’s office, seemed to afford the harassed man a sense of adequacy in the press of events beyond his capacity to direct. The consequences of this mania, and the policy behind it, caused the White House conference in which was born the desperate plan that ended at Gettysburg.
    From the first, Davis’s policy was based on his fear that the states comprising the Confederacy could not win their independence from the Union, and his purpose always was to defend territory until the enemy lost the will to subjugate or until, as in the Revolution, help came from Europe. In his tenacity to hold ground, the president scattered his available troops in what might be called a strategy of defense by dispersal. Wherever the enemy posed a threat, there he hurried troops. As the enemy had more troops and superior lines of communication, by common arithmetic the Federal forces outnumbered the Confederates at any given point, and the results were inevitable. By May of 1863 the Confederate territory was being chewed up in detail.
    West of the Mississippi, except for causing the dispersal of some Federal troops, the Confederate forces had virtually ceased to be a military factor. The buffer state of Tennessee was largely lost, including the river port of Memphis, at the Confederacy’s northern end of the Mississippi River. At the southern end, New Orleans, the South’s largest port, had long been