Failure Of A President (February 1961 | Volume: 12, Issue: 2)

Failure Of A President

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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February 1961 | Volume 12, Issue 2

One American President usually gets omitted from the list of chief executives who have led their countrymen in time of war. Jefferson Davis was also a war President; and if he was not President of the United States, he was at least President of an American nation whose constitution, as far as war powers were concerned, was almost identical with that of the United States. Is it possible to shed any light on the general question of how a President must act in time of war by examining his experience?

Davis was no man to let any scrap of presidential authority go unused. He was commander in chief, and he worked at it day and night, in season and out of season; his trouble, as a matter of fact, may have been that he worked at it too much, concerning himself with masses of detail that clerks might have handled and reducing his Secretary of War to a limited and subordinate position. But in any event, no one in the Confederacy was ever in the least doubt about who was running things.

The question, then, is how all of this worked out; and a sharply critical answer is returned by Clifford Dowdey in Lee’s Last Campaign , which is of course principally a study of Robert E. Lee’s actions during the final year of the Civil War but which also, of necessity, is an examination of Davis’ actions as commander in chief.

Mr. Dowdey, studying the 1864 campaign in Virginia in great detail and with expert knowledge, concludes that General Lee was ruinously handicapped by President Davis’ supervision. The chief trouble was not that the President told Lee when, where, and how to fight; Davis was much too intelligent to try anything like that, and Lee would not have stood for it if he had tried it. But Davis had set up a rigid, compartmentalized system for the control of the Confederacy’s separate armies, and this system he refused to modify even when the enemy was at the gates. Not until it was too late was Lee able to exercise control over all of the forces that were resisting the Federal drive on Richmond. In effect, the Confederacy in its hour of supreme peril opposed a badly divided command to a command that had been grimly unified. The result was disaster.

General Ulysses S. Grant, supreme commander of the Federal forces, set out in May of 1864 to crush the Confederate armies in Virginia and take Richmond. His principal weapon was the powerful Army of the Potomac, which Grant led directly against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In addition, Grant had two other armies: one led by General Benjamin Butler, which came up the James River prepared to capture Petersburg, the railroad junction whose loss would involve the loss of Richmond; the other, General Franz Sigel’s Army of the Shenandoah, which was to move up the great