V
Jefferson Davis was also having problems with the amour propre of his generals. On August 31 the Confederate president named five men to the rank of full general.48 Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beau-regard were fourth and fifth on the list, below Adjutant General Samuel
46. Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 34–35; Foote, The Civil War, I, 143.
47. McClellan to Ellen Marcy McClellan, Aug. 16, Nov. 2, 1861, McClellan Papers.
48. No Union officer at this time held a higher rank than major general, two grades below full general.
Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee. When Joseph Johnston learned of this, he erupted in outrage. Not only was this ranking illegal, he informed Davis in a hotly worded letter, it was also an insult to his honor. He had outranked all of these men in the United States army, and by the terms of the law creating the Confederate grade of full general he still outranked them. Moreover, Cooper was a desk general (and a Yankee to boot, having been born and raised in New Jersey); A. S. Johnston had just arrived in the Confederacy after a slow trip from California and had not yet heard a shot fired in anger; Lee had won no battles and was even then floundering in West Virginia; while he, Joe Johnston, had won the battle of Manassas. Davis had committed a "violation of my rights as an officer," Johnston told the president, "tarnished my fair fame as a soldier and a man," and "degraded one who has served laboriously from the commencement of the war . . . and borne a prominent part in the one great event of the war, for the benefit of persons [none] of whom has yet struck a blow for the Confederacy."49
Insulted by the tone of Johnston's letter, Davis sent an icy reply: "Sir, I have just received and read your letter of the 12th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one sided, and its insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming."50 Not until later did Davis explain that he had ranked Johnston below Lee and A. S. Johnston because the latter two had held higher line commissions in the U. S. army than Joseph Johnston, whose rank as general had been a staff commission—a dubious rationale, which in any case did not apply to Cooper, who had also held a staff appointment in the old army.
The main effect of this graceless dispute was to plant a seed of hostility between Davis and Johnston that was to bear bitter fruit for the Confederacy. It also demonstrated an important difference between Davis and Lincoln as war leaders. A proud man sensitive of his honor, Davis could never forget a slight or forgive the man who committed it. Not for him was Lincoln's willingness to hold the horse of a haughty general if he would only win victories.
Davis also quarreled with Beauregard. The jaunty Louisianian's report on the battle of Manassas became public in October. It implied that Davis had delayed Johnston's reinforcement of Beauregard almost
49. Johnston to Davis, Sept. 12, 1861, O.R., Ser. IV, Vol. 1, pp. 605–8.
50. Davis to Johnston, Sept. 14, 1861, ibid., 611.
to the point of disaster. It noted Davis's rejection of Beauregard's grandiose plan for an offensive before the battle in a manner that caused the press to confuse this issue with the then-raging controversy over responsibility for failing to follow up the victory by capturing Washington. Throughout the report Beauregard's flamboyant prose tended to magnify his own role. Miffed, Davis reprimanded the general for writing an account that "seemed to be an attempt to exalt yourself at my expense."51 One way to deal with Beauregard, who had grown restless in his role as second in command to Johnston in Virginia, was to send him as far away from Richmond as possible. In January 1862, Davis transferred Beauregard to the Tennessee-Kentucky theater, where he could try to help the other Johnston—Albert Sidney—cope with the buildup of Union forces in Kentucky.
Despite quarrels with his generals, Davis faced the New Year with more confidence than Lincoln. Since mid-July the Confederacy had won most of the important land battles in the war: Manassas, Wilson's Creek, Lexington (Mo.), Ball's Bluff. Although the Union navy had achieved some significant victories, these had not yet led anywhere. One of the apparent naval triumphs—the capture of southern commissioners James Mason and John Slidell from the British ship Trent—had even produced a Yankee backdown in the face of British threats. Northern banks had suspended specie payments and the government faced a financial crisis.52 Northern morale was at its lowest ebb since the days after Bull Run. The London Times correspondent in Washington reported that every foreign diplomat but one agreed that "the Union is broken for ever, and the independence of the South virtually established."53 The Army of the Potomac went into winter quarters having done nothing to dislodge enemy outposts within sight of that river; worse still, McClellan fell ill with typhoid fever in mid-December, leaving the army without a functioning commander for nearly a month. Lincoln had assigned two promising generals, Henry W. Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, to command of the Missouri and Kentucky theaters, but in January both reported an early advance impossible. "It is exceedingly discouraging," wrote Lincoln on a copy of Halleck's letter to him. "As
51. Ibid., Ser. I, Vol. 2, pp. 484–504; Davis to Beauregard, Oct. 30, 1861, in Rowland, Davis, V, 156–57.
52. Naval affairs, the Trent crisis, and financial developments will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
53. Russell, My Diary North and South, 259.
everywhere else, nothing can be done." On the day he wrote these words, January 10, 1862, the president dropped into Quartermaster General Meigs's office. "General, what shall I do?" he asked despondently. "The people are impatient; Chase has no money; . . . the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?"54
But January 1862 proved to be the darkness before dawn for the Union cause. Although other dark nights would follow, the four months after January turned out to be one of the brightest periods of the war for the North.
54. CWL, V, 95; "General M. C. Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War," AHR, 26 (1921), 292.