The Life of Jefferson Davis

by Frank H. Alfriend

Until the opening of spring, military operations in Virginia were attended by no events of importance. But the East was not to be without its contribution to the unvarying tide of Confederate disaster. In the month of February, Roanoke Island, upon the sea-line of North Carolina, defended by General Wise, with a single brigade, was assaulted by a powerful combined naval and military expedition, under General Burnside, and surrendered, with its garrison. This success opened to the enemy the sounds and inlets of that region, with their tributary streams, and gave him easy access to a productive country and important communications.

It was not difficult to estimate correctly the serious nature of these successive reverses covering nearly every field of important operations. They were of a character alarming, indeed, in immediate consequences, and, necessarily, largely affecting the destiny of the war in its future stages. Retreat, evacuation, and surrender seemed the irremediable tendency of affairs every-where. Thousands of prisoners were in the hands of the enemy, the capital of the most important State in the West occupied, the Confederate centre was broken, the great water-avenues of the south-west open to the enemy, the campaign transferred from the heart of Kentucky to the northern borders of the Gulf States, and hardly an available line was left for the recovery of the lost territory.

Within a few weeks the extravagant hopes of the South were brought to the verge of extreme apprehension. The public mind was not to be soothed by the affected indifference of the press to calamities, the magnitude of which was too palpable, in the presence of actual invasion of nearly one half the Southern territory, and of imminent perils threatening the speedy culmination of adverse fortune to the Confederacy. Richmond, which, during the war, was at all times the reflex of the hopes and aspirations of the South, was the scene of gloom and despondency, in painful contrast with the ardent and gratulatory tone so lately prevalent.

Popular disappointment rarely fails in its search for scapegoats upon which to visit responsibility for misfortunes. A noticeable result of the Confederate reverses in the beginning of 1862 was the speedy evolution of an organized hostility to the administration of President Davis. The season was eminently propitious for outward demonstrations of feeling, heretofore suppressed, in consequence of the brilliant success, until recently, attending the movement for Southern independence. The universal and characteristic disposition of the masses to receive, with favor, censure of their rulers, and to charge public calamities to official failure and maladministration, was an inviting inducement, in this period of public gloom, to the indulgence of partisan aspirations and personal spleen.

To one familiar with the political history of the South during the decade previous to secession, there could be no difficulty in penetrating the various motives, instigating to union, for a common purpose, the heterogeneous elements of this opposition. Prominent among its leaders were men, the life-long opponents of the President, notorious for their want of adhesion to any principle or object for its own sake, and especially lukewarm, at all times, upon issues vitally affecting the safety of the South. These men could not forget, even when their allegiance had been avowed to the sacred cause of country and liberty, the rancor engendered in the old contests of party. Some, in addition to disappointed political ambition, arising from the failure of the President to tender them the foremost places in the Government, had personal resentments to gratify. Much the larger portion of the opposition, which continued, until the last moments of the Confederacy, to assail the Government, had its origin in these influences, and they speedily attracted all restless and impracticable characters—born Jacobins, malcontents by the decree of nature, and others of the class who are “never at home save in the attitude of contradiction.”

At first feeble in influence, this faction, by pertinacious and unscrupulous efforts, eventually became a source of embarrassment, and promoted the wide-spread division and distrust which, in the latter days of the Confederacy, were so ominous of the approaching catastrophe. Its earliest shafts were ostensibly not aimed at the President, since there was no evidence that the popular affection for Mr. Davis would brook assaults upon him, but assumed the shape of accusations against his constitutional advisers. A deliberate movement, cloaked in the disguise of respectful remonstrance and petition, sustained by demagogical speeches—which, though artfully designed, in many instances revealed the secret venom—was arranged, upon the assembling of the First Congress under the permanent Government, to revolutionize the cabinet of President Davis.

Mr. Benjamin, the Secretary of War, and Mr. Mallory, Secretary of the Navy, were the objects of especial and most envenomed assault. They were assailed in Congress, and by a portion of the Richmond press, as directly chargeable with the late reverses. Yet it should have been plain that the most serious of these disasters were attributable chiefly to the overwhelming naval preponderance of the enemy—an advantage not to have been obviated entirely by any degree of foresight on the part of the Confederate naval secretary—and by a deficiency of soldiers, for which the country itself, and not Mr. Benjamin, was to be censured.

The indisputable facts in the case were ample in the vindication of Mr. Mallory, as to the insufficient defenses of the Western rivers, now in Federal possession. The obvious dangers of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers, as an avenue of access to the heart of the South, were not overlooked by the Government. The channels of these rivers are navigable during a large portion of the year, and the two streams gradually approach each other, as they pass from Tennessee into Kentucky, on their course to the Ohio, coming at one point within less than three miles of each other, and emptying their waters only ten miles apart. The facilities afforded by their proximity for combined military and naval operations, were necessarily apparent. The Government contemplated the defense of these streams by floating defenses the only means by which they could be debarred to the enemy. The Provisional Congress, however, by a most singular and fatal oversight of the recommendation of the Government, made no appropriation for floating defenses on the Tennessee and Cumberland, until the opportunity to prepare them had passed.

It authorized the President to cause to be constructed thirteen steam gunboats for sea-coast defense, and such floating defenses for the Mississippi River as he might deem best adapted to the purpose; but no provision was made for armed steamers on the large Western interior rivers until the month of January, 1862, when an act was approved appropriating one million of dollars, to be expended for this purpose, at the discretion of the President, by the Secretary of War, or of the Navy, as he might direct. This was less than four weeks before the actual advance of the Federal gunboats, and was, of course, too late for the needed armaments. The appropriation of one hundred thousand dollars, for equipment and repairs of vessels of the Confederate navy, hardly sufficed to enable the Secretary of that department to maintain a few frail steamers on the Tennessee, hastily prepared from commercial or passenger boats, and very imperfectly armed.

A congressional investigating committee censured Mr. Benjamin and General Huger as responsible for the capture of Roanoke Island and its garrison. The latter affair was indeed a disaster not to be lightly palliated, and was one of those inexplicable mishaps, which, upon retrospection, we see should have been avoided, though it is at least doubtful who is justly censurable. It is, however, only just to state that no view of the Roanoke Island disaster has ever been presented to the writer, which did not acquit General Wise of all blame. His exculpation was complete before every tribunal of opinion.