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

E. Lee’s preference for offensive over defensive warfare, “that reviled policy of West-Pointism,” and he committed the Confederate armies in 1861 to the well-nigh impossible task of policing (and in the case of Kentucky, seizing) every inch of the slave South’s immense Ohio and Potomac River boundary lines with the North. After the fall of Forts Donelson and Henry, Davis acknowledged “the error of my attempt to defend all the frontier,” and he would later sanction Lee’s raids north of the Potomac and lend eastern troops to Bragg so that he could go on the offensive against Rosecrans.79

Far more serious than his strategic misjudgments, though, were Davis’s personnel misjudgments. If Lincoln was overly prone to appoint incompetent politicians to generalships, Davis was overly willing to appoint and defend incompetents—Leonidas Polk, Theophilus Holmes, Braxton Bragg—who were either personal friends or else men he believed had been unfairly condemned by unscrupulous and self-interested rivals (as Davis was convinced he himself had been). At the same time, though, in many cases Davis made these appointments knowing full well that he was dealing from the bottom of the deck, and he stood by them through one blunder after another simply because the supply of real military talent in circulation was so limited. “A General in the full acceptation of the word is a rare product, scarcely more than one can be expected in a generation,” Davis grimly observed to his brother, “but in this mighty war in which we are engaged there is need for half a dozen.”80

Davis’s military miscues were not nearly as harmful to the Confederacy as were the lamentable failures of his cabinet and the Confederate Congress. Most of Davis’s first choices for the Confederate Cabinet were dictated by the need to assure the various states that their interests were being represented in the government. His first secretaries of state and war, Leroy Pope Walker of Alabama and Robert Toombs of Georgia, were both brainless political appointees, and neither of them survived the first year of the war in office. Davis’s most talented cabinet member, Judah P. Benjamin, was also, unfortunately, his most unpopular. With a Cheshire-cat smile playing around his lips, Benjamin was described by John S. Wise as overfull of “oleaginous” slickness, with a “keg-like form and over-deferential manner suggestive of a prosperous shopkeeper,” and “more brains and less heart than any other civic leader in the South.”81 But Davis could not spare Benjamin, and each time Benjamin’s political enemies demanded that he be removed, Davis would simply shift him to another post within the cabinet, moving him from attorney general to secretary of war, and then to secretary of state.

The weakest link in Davis’s chain of cabinet secretaries was the secretary of the Treasury, Christopher Memminger. Born in Württemberg, Germany, and brought to America with his grandfather as an orphan, the wealthy South Carolina politician’s only real fiscal experience was his chairmanship of the old House Committee on Finance. He had been an important standard-bearer for secession in South Carolina, however, and the need to accommodate the South Carolinians in the Confederate government compelled Davis to make room for him in the cabinet. It is hard to know where Memminger would have done the least damage, and it was probably Davis’s own naiveté in fiscal matters that led him to park Memminger at the Treasury.82

As it turned out, Memminger’s tenure as the Confederate Treasury chief was as close as one could come to unrelieved disaster. Overconfident as a result of the Confederacy’s initial military successes in 1861, Memminger scoffed at Judah Benjamin’s proposal that the Confederate government buy up all available Southern cotton with Confederate bonds and notes, hoard the white gold to drive up the price on foreign markets, then sell it and (once the principal was repaid) use the gigantic profits to purchase the weapons and ships the Confederacy needed. In 1861, Southern credit seemed sound on the world’s financial market (an initial Confederate loan of $5 million was snapped up, even oversubscribed, at face value), and Memminger could not imagine when such good financial times would ever fail. He made no effort to prevent Northern merchants from removing hard currency from their Southern bank accounts, and allowed the specie in the vital New Orleans banks to fall into Federal hands while hardly stirring in concern when New Orleans was captured by Farragut’s ships in April 1862.83

Not until the war had dragged on into 1862 did Memminger reverse himself and attempt to buy up cotton for government use. By then, however, cotton was commanding much steeper prices, and even when he was able to purchase it, he found himself unable to find enough blockade-runners willing to ship the cotton at government prices. Memminger was not able to ensure a regular means for exporting cotton until 1863, when the Confederate Congress acted to regulate the blockade-runners. Even though this was much too little much too late, the export of Confederate cotton still helped underwrite the Erlanger loan, and it is anyone’s guess how much other financial support a cotton-starved Europe might have lent to Memminger if he had acted as decisively in 1861. This forced Memminger to resort more and more to the printing presses to print the money he needed, and he helplessly flooded the Confederate economy with notes and bonds that had little or no backing in either specie or cotton.84

If there was any single nonmilitary matter that must stand before all the others in leading to the defeat of the Confederacy, it was the stunning failure of Memminger and the Treasury to make the Confederate economy work. As late as the fall of 1863, Josiah Gorgas was confident that “there is breadstuff enough” and “war material sufficient—men, guns, powder… to carry on the war for an indefinite period.” None of it was going to change hands for the worthless shinplasters Memminger was offering, though. “The great fear of every patriot at this moment relates to our currency,” groaned Gorgas. “The fear is that a