Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

cooperate with each other; so they began their war for state sovereignty by immediately subordinating themselves to a confederation arrangement and the authority of a central government in Richmond. Second, they were forced to wage a major war of national defense, which would strain their resources to the breaking point in simple economic terms, but which would also strain their own self-perception, as more and more nonslaveholding whites balked at the sacrifices they increasingly had to make to defend the planter elite, and as Southerners who valued independence even more than slavery began tinkering with the slave system so that the Confederate nation might survive. At first, neither of these undertakings appeared difficult. The convention that assembled in Montgomery, Alabama, in February 1861 to form a Confederate government for the first wave of seceding states worked hard to avoid any suggestion of ultra-Jeffersonian radicalism and seemed to give remarkably small place to the states’-rights fire-eaters. The convention, in fact, turned itself into the Confederacy’s first Provisional Congress, and the constitution that the Provisional Congress adopted for the Confederacy was a close replica of the U.S. Constitution. Just like the old Constitution, it provided for a president, a bicameral Congress, and an independent judiciary. Though the Confederate constitution explicitly recognized the principle of state sovereignty in its preamble, stressing that each state was “acting in its sovereign and independent character,” its announced intention was to form a “permanent federal government.” The states were given authority to initiate constitutional conventions (with consent from only two-thirds of the states needed to ratify amendments) and to remove Confederate officials operating within their boundaries, but no mention about a right to secession or to nullification was added. The principle of judicial review was restricted to specific constitutional questions (and not “all cases in Law and Equity,” as in the U.S. Constitution), and the Confederate Congress was forbidden to “appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce.” Yet, at the same time, the Confederate president was granted powers that even the federal president lacked, such as a line-item veto over appropriations, a six-year term of office, and the provision for cabinet members to be allowed a voice on the floor of the Confederate Congress. Even more to the point, the decision to elect Jefferson Davis as provisional president and Alexander H. Stephens as provisional vice president neatly skipped over the slavery and state-sovereignty ideologues.76

The principal challenge to making this constitution operate was that it would have to do so under the immediate pressure of outside attack, although even on that point, the Confederacy appeared to have a major advantage in the person of Jefferson Davis, its president.

Despite Davis’s reputation as the ideological heir apparent of John Calhoun, Davis’s political outlook on banking, tariffs, and internal improvements had sometimes been as close to Whiggery as a Democrat’s could be. From the very beginning (and to the disgust of the states’ rights fire-eaters), Davis warned the Southern people to stop thinking of themselves as citizens of states and start seeing themselves as the members of a new political nation whose overall survival was of greater importance than the survival of any of the separate parts—slavery, culture, states’ rights—which made it up. “To increase the power, develop the resources, and promote the happiness of the Confederacy, it is requisite that there should be so much of homogeneity that the welfare of every portion shall be the aim of the whole,” Davis warned. “Our safety—our very existence—depends on the complete blending of the military strength of all the States into one united body, to be used anywhere and everywhere as the exigencies of the contest may require for the good of the whole.”77 That led Davis to stretch his war powers as president of the Confederacy in precisely the same ways Lincoln stretched his: Davis acted to extend Confederate control over former U.S. arsenals and navy yards within the Confederate states, to justify Confederate military control over Southern rail lines, and to secure presidential oversight of the Confederate army’s officer selection process, and all before the end of 1862.

Davis’s political flexibilities surprised many observers even within his administration, since in many ways Davis was not a particularly charming or attractive personality. Erect in his bearing, rigid in his conception of his own correctness, thin to the point of emaciation, and virtually blind in one eye, Davis was crippled throughout the war by bouts of illness that would have killed most people and by levels of political catcalling that would have killed most politicians. The raw willpower that kept him at the helm of state through all these storms was his greatest asset, but it also made him impatient, unforgiving of failure, and excessively sensitive to criticism. Still, no portrait of the Confederate president can ignore his political canniness, his ability to draw all but his most violent critics back into cooperation, and his sterling dedication to the idea of a Confederate nation. “There may have been among them some equal to or even superior to President Davis in some one department or study or branch of knowledge,” wrote John H. Reagan, the Confederate postmaster general, “but taking into view the combined elements of character and ability I regard him as the ablest man I have known. … In all my association with him, I found him thoughtful, prudent, and wise.” Like Lincoln, Davis ruthlessly overworked himself and failed to delegate responsibilities; like Lincoln, he turned most of his attention to managing the war effort rather than domestic politics; like Lincoln, he was notoriously inclined to issue pardons to condemned soldiers; and like Lincoln, he tasted tragedy in his presidency in the death of a young son.78

If Davis turned out to be a more calculating politician than his enemies imagined, he also turned out to be a far more lackluster commander in chief than his friends had expected. Although Davis frequently insisted that the Confederacy was not interested in waging a war of aggressive conquest, he fully shared Robert