American History Hit - The Confederacy: Who Was Jefferson Davis?

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

Only one person has ever held the title of President of the Confederate States of America. In this episode, we're going to find out more about him and the power structure of the Civil War rebel states.How did the confederate constitution differ from that of the United States of America? How was Davis selected? And what happened to him after the war ended?Don is joined by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Professor at Louisiana State University and editor of a number of books on this subject.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Virginia's state capital building is bursting at its seams. It's December 1861, and lawmakers and visitors press and jostle through crowded doorways,

navigating the Equally Stone halls in search of a quiet corner to prepare for meetings. Despite the chill outside, the central rotunda is sweltering, the air thick with the fetid odor of hundreds of bodies, not to mention the greasy aromas of cooked poultry, peanuts, and hard-boiled eggs. available from food stands. Chicken bones crackle underfoot in a slick residue of tobacco spit, all of it creating a dicey walking hazard.

Back in 1785, Thomas Jefferson designed this grand building for Richmond's Capitol Square, modeling it after classical Roman temples. But at this time, there are yet no front steps or legislative wings. Practically speaking, the space is too small even for its designed purpose. never mind now the Virginia General Assembly will be sharing the structure with the first Confederate States Congress, which will use the Senate Chamber to debate the ongoing dreadful issues of slavery, secession, and war.

Greetings all, Don Wildman here, and this is American History Hip. Welcome back. It's 1861. Steam now powers American industry and transportation as locomotives pull train cars to the Mississippi and just beyond. ships can now be built to the enormous dimensions of the USS Kyrsich, 200 feet bow to stern. For the last two decades, folks have been communicating by telegraph, but just three years ago, the first successful transatlantic cable was sent between Europe and North America. In medicine, ether and chloroform are now being used for patients under the knife, but germ theory is not yet widely accepted. Elijah Otis has patented his brake system for elevators, making high-rises a feasible

reality, while American men attach very starched collars to their shirts, and the most fashionable women are in hourglass dresses, constrained by corsets, all the rage. In the midst of all this, Abraham Lincoln is the newly inaugurated president of the United States. But another American president has been inaugurated as well. But this one, down in the seditious South, in blatant rebellion against the nation he once fought for and served. Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the seceded Confederate States of America. Who was this man? And how did he rise to power? How has this new American nation, the CSA, amputated itself from its former body politic,

to be ruled differently? But how differently will that really be? We have Professor Aaron Sheean Dean to explain it all today. He is the Fred C. Frey Professor of History and Department Chair at Louisiana State University, go tigers, has authored and edited so many publications, but particular to our conversation today, a companion to the U.S. Civil War, as well as the Civil War, the final year, told by those who lived it.

Good day, Professor Shandine. Great to meet you again. You were on a previous podcast of us so long ago. I was. It's good to see you again, and I'm glad to be back here today. Thanks. Let's begin with the process of secession.

Very basic stuff here. What happens in several phases through the late part of 1860 and into 61. We have eventually 11 states seceding. I'll read the list. South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina. It's the SEC, basically. The border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware all declare their neutrality. And this will be a delicate balancing act for Lincoln, keeping them in the union. December 20th, 1860, South Carolina kicks things off first. And then the process unfolds through the following spring after Fort Sumter. Can you explain how this unfolds, folded? Why such a phased process? The important thing for people to remember is that secession, I usually explain it as a kind of two-stage process. So South Carolina, as you identified, secedes first in December of 1860 in response to Lincoln's election, apprehensive that the

rise of a Republican president is going to spell the end of slavery, whether immediately over the long term. And the Gulf South states, so beginning from South Carolina and moving west, Georgia and Florida and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, Texas, secede all by the sort of end of January 1861. The Confederacy has created February 4th, 1861, and then there's another kind of very pregnant moment of anticipation where the rest of the slave states, and you name them as border states, but it's important to remember that Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland were all slave states, and those four plus the upper south of North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia had not seceded and didn't do so until April. They're really waiting to see how the problem

plays out in this sort of first phase. What's the reaction of the U.S.? And is this something that's actually going to happen? Sure. I mean, I guess it speaks to the internal strife within themselves, right? The politics are going on all the time about who wants to leave and who wants to stay. And there's there's a lot of disagreement about where slavery will be most secure. So it's not as though the people in the lower south of pro-slavery and the people in the upper south are anti-slavery by by no measure. But there are a lot of conservatives and these are kind of what we think of traditionally, it's conservatives who favor the status quo in places like Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky who recognize that the U.S. Constitution has provided protection for slaveholding,

even though it's a domestic institution, meaning it's controlled by states. And that if you leave the protection of the Constitution, it's very hard to say what the future of slavery will be. That's overwhelming the debate in Kentucky is that if we do this, we will ruin ourselves. And so they never secede effectively Kentucky. It's a baby with a bathwater thing, isn't it? Yeah. And Virginia, tellingly, is the last to secede in the spring. Obviously, that's the home of the Federalist Party.

This is where it all begins, George Washington. And a lot of Virginians who had felt in that colonial era as though basically they were the ones in charge, right, the first sequence of presidents. And by the 1850s, it seems like South Carolina is now calling the shots. And so that conservatism in Virginia famously Lee referred to secession as the essence of anarchy, as revolution. And these are conservatives. They don't eagerly endorse revolution. And Lee says that to his son in January of 1861. So they are coming very slowly.

But when they do come, they commit fully. Of course, the capital is moved from Montgomery, Alabama, up to Richmond, and Virginia enlists an enormously high percentage of its men in Confederate forces. So those four upper south states are really key in terms of the production of resources, food, industrial production, and enlistment, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, especially. How outsized, to use the right word, is Texas in this whole process? I mean, is it an influential force yet? No, not really.

It still does not have a significant enough population. And it's frankly, although, as you were noting in your intro, there are now railroad connections that run east-west. Texas is on the far side of the Mississippi River. That is, you have to get over to Louisiana and then into Texas. And it's mostly travel by ship, which takes a long time. The population is still much smaller. And although it will be a central producer of beef and supplies for the Confederacy, it is not shaping the Confederacy are driving it. In fact, it's, it's Governor Sam Houston is violently opposed to

secession. I mean, he has to more or less be sort of taken out of the picture by the state legislature who are younger, eager secessionist. Houston, of course, had led the fight to bring Texas out of Mexico and into the United States. And from his perspective, this is sheer madness. How much was it assumed by those who were pro secession that this would be a simple process? Like they had the right to do this, so let's just go. Well, they certainly made the argument that the Constitution never explicitly outlawed secession and that as they understood it, it was a compact that's fudging a very important line, which is the opening stanza of the Constitution, which says we the people, not we the states,

but notwithstanding that, there is also a very widespread expectation that if there is a conflict, it will be a short conflict, that certainly the abolitionists and reformers in the North, from their perspective, the problem should be solved, that is slavery will be gone from the United States. And do they really want to invest blood and treasure in keeping this? And, you know, famously James Chestnut, the senator from South Carolina, whose wife, Mary Chestnut leaves such a great diary, he says that whatever blood spilled in the Civil War, we can probably soak up with a handkerchief. You know, that is. The expectation is a very low body count. And other people say similar things. This proves to be, of course, horribly wrong. But there is a widespread

expectation that military conflict may come, but if coming will be of short duration, six weeks. They write a constitution, and let's discuss that process. But I've always wondered, wasn't it basically just going to be the Articles of Confederation? Wasn't it just a throwback to what the United States was previously conceived as? Well, the articles did not work well. And Southerners were key to drafting the Constitution. Madison, you know, Virginia, of course, wrote the draft that basically becomes the genesis of the, of the Constitution. And so they basically don't want to return that far back to a system that is so balkanized and empowered the states. Even though, of course, much of this is driven by a concern about a federal government that might

claim the ability to end slavery, there had been a lot of innovations in terms of the federal, in terms of federal authority that were quite useful. And that Confederates are eager to replicate. So there is a convention. They go through a process of writing this thing. It starts, I guess, it's adopted on the 8th of February 1861. So pretty early in this process, that's what the other states are looking at, right, when they're determining whether they want to be part of this.

I'd say that's part of it. I think the concern is sort of what by mid-February, if you're in Virginia or Tennessee or Kentucky, you're kind of calibrating the union response. the constitution, the Confederate constitution, as you say, adopted almost within days of the creation of the state, done in an organized way, but very quickly, is different enough. Most importantly, it enshrines protections for slavery forever. There are a number of other differences, and we can talk about those, but they are attempting to reassure anxious upper southerners, upper white southerners, that coming into this space guarantees for them slave property for as long as they might choose to hold it. I don't think the Constitution itself is a sort of key factor for most of them, but it does restructure the government, and it signals some of the things that white Southerners had been apprehensive about in the years leading up to this, mostly the advance of democracy. Interesting. It is very similar in that regard to the U.S. Constitution. Is it called

the Constitution of the Confederate States of America? Is that the name of it? It is, yes. And it has the same shape, you know, in terms of articles. And they begin with the legislative breaches. branch, the executive branch comes second. The key innovations are a single term for the presidency, so effectively term limits on the presidential reelection, but a six-year term. And the goal of that was to insulate the president from popular will, to make them less responsive to the needs of constituents. The movement towards more democratic state governments had happened through the 1840s and 1850s all across the United States. That means the lowering of, of, of, of thresholds to vote so that you don't have to own property anymore, the creation of more elected

offices as opposed to offices appointed by governors. And there are a number of white southerners, particularly in places like South Carolina, but also in Georgia, there's a good book about this, where the secession conventions are an opportunity to rewrite state law. And in some of those places, what they are doing is making their states less democratic. These are overwhelmingly slaveholders that are elected to represent in these secession conventions. And Virginia has a vigorous debate about taxation and how sort of where the tax burden should fall. Slaveholders were complaining about ad valorem taxation of slaves and Westerners were complaining that the development had not proceeded in the western part of the state.

Virginia sort of maintains itself, but in other places like Georgia and South Carolina, what you see is a kind of retrenchment. And there's something similar happening at the Confederate at the federal level with the Confederate Constitution as well. So three branches of government, just like the U.S. Constitution. President serves for six years, not four, and I guess not available to re-election. It's a single term. Okay. It's a single term. It's a single term. It is important to note that the Confederacy never actually organized a Supreme Court. It's sort of on the books, but they don't actually appoint members and have them sit. There are effectively federal judges that do intervene on draft cases and other court cases brought against the Confederate. government during the war. But it basically doesn't last long enough to produce a bona fide Supreme Court. The idea generally is to emphasize state autonomy. Is that literally written into that constitution? Well, it is, although it also, curiously, I've always found the preamble quite puzzling

because it does identify states as the kind of constituent parts in a way that the federal, the U.S. Constitution did not. But it also claims that part of the, in the preamble to the Confederate Constitution, part of the purpose is to establish a permanent federal government, which actually is not language in the U.S. Constitution. In other words, the Confederate Constitution embodies all of the paradoxes and ambivalences that secession itself did, which is a conservative revolution, you know, an effort to protect the future of slavery with a very radical political measure in a period of rapid political change in, you know, the post-1848 Europe. So there's just no getting around those tensions within the Confederacy and they're present in its organic law.

How do they define slavery in terms of, is it the three-fifths compromise? That's maintained. And then it basically is a kind of blanket protection for slavery at the federal level. Under the U.S. system, slavery was primarily protected and regarded as what they called in the 19th century a domestic institution, which meant one controlled by state law, which is why when northern states ended slavery after the American Revolution, they did so by having constitutional conventions and rewriting their state constitutions. And so all the way up to this, the presidents don't really have, and even Lincoln, when he's elected, says, I don't have the authority to change the status of slavery in Alabama. That is dependent on the state of Alabama

and Mississippi and Louisiana, adjusting their organic law. But in the crisis of secession, which really, in some respects, accelerates when the Democratic presidential convention collapses. It was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1860, and the southern members there, men like William Lowndesiancy, are arguing that what they want is a federal slave code, meaning federal protection for slavery in the new territories.

And this is in blatant violation of a kind of professed belief in state rights, but they recognize that having the federal government It protects slavery provides more certainty than this system in which the federal government may or may not interfere and you're left to have states regulated. In wider scholarship, is it acknowledged that this gang of people who had done this, who are intellectuals, who are very smart people, were recognizing this was an economic necessity versus a moral one? I mean, were there thoughts to that effect writing this Constitution? Well, they do believe that slavery is a moral obligation for white Southerners and a Christian obligation that what they are doing is civilizing and Christianizing people who don't have access to that. And that means better for them in the afterlife. Certainly they are well aware of the economic importance. You know, we talked a little bit about the interim of the sort of interregnum between the secession of South Carolina and the formation of the Confederacy. The deep South states send what they call commissioners to, Upper South States. These are basically diplomats trying to talk Upper South States into seceding, and they lay out every variety of argument they can. There's a great, short little book on this

by Charles Dew on the secession commissioners, and he has some of the speeches reprinted. And one of them from a man named Stephen Hale from Alabama, who speaks to the Kentucky legislature, and he makes economic arguments and moral arguments, and he predicts a kind of black takeover of the United States. I mean, he speaks in very apocalyptic terms. So, you know, sexual anxieties about interracial marriage, sort of every stop is pulled out at that point. But certainly, and there's also an effort in the debate about the Confederate Constitution to reopen the Atlantic slave trade, that economics is central to this. That provision is defeated in the Confederate Constitutional Convention, mostly because people in the Upper South States, white Southerners from Virginia

and North Carolina had long been selling their slaves to deep South states and making a lot of money. And if the trade was reopened, it would have reduced the value of those enslaved people significantly. And so there's basically a kind of political call made to not alienate Virginia if you're trying to bring them in. It's both clarifying to understand that this was really discussed and really negotiated, but it's also incredibly depressing. That smart people sat around and discussed this to such lengths and yet didn't come up with the most sensible. issue, which is, you know, this is wrong. We can't do it anymore. But anyway, the initial structure is created as a one-year tryout period. Am I right? There's sort of a break-in phase? Yeah, for the, for the president. I mean, there's widespread expectation that he will basically

be permanently. He's kind of appointed provisional president. And then he is kind of re-inoguated in 1862 as the permanent president. But the idea was that there was no factions, right? They didn't want to have any kind of arguments between themselves. How unrealistic is that? How unrealistic is that? Well, I think, yes, the unrealistic part is expecting that if you outlaw political parties, then people won't disagree. And there had been a long anti-party tradition in American politics, people going back to concerns in the federalist papers about factionalism. And so the belief, again, as you point out, among smart people was that if we prevent party labels from being used, that will somehow generate a kind of uniform politics. And as it turns out, that's not how it goes.

Yeah. Let's talk about that president. The only president of the CSA, Jefferson Davis. Born in 1808, son of a revolutionary war soldier, very important. These guys were second generations from the founders. A youngest of 10 children, a bunch of older brothers, goes to West Point, thanks to one of those brothers in 1824. Ends up not doing too well from there at that place because of his kind of problem with authority, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it's also worth noting that Abraham Lincoln is born not far away. They're both born in Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln in 1809. They're sort of months apart in age.

So, in fact, they're coming out of the same place, culturally speaking. But of course, they go in very different directions, mostly owing to Lincoln's move west with his family, eventually into Indiana and then Illinois. But yes, Jefferson Davis is, he attends Transylvania as a very young man, Transylvania College, one of the oldest west of the Mississippi. and then, as you say, thanks to his brother, receives an appointment at West Point. He accrues demerits. Yes, there you go. That's the way to end up 23rd out of your class of 33. Let's not ignore the fact he's named Jefferson.

I mean, this is no coincidence. You know, the family is proud of being among the founding class. Yeah, and that's an old American tradition at the time of sort of basically hoping that if you name someone after a famous person, they will sort of follow in their footsteps. We end up with lots of George Washington's and Benjamin Franklin's, Benjamin Franklin Butler, right? Ben Butler is one of the famous Union generals named after Ben Franklin. And I think that process, as you say, shows how tightly they were knitted together. And Lincoln talks about this in the Gettysburg Address and other places, the degree to which they felt themselves extending and building on the revolutionary inheritance. Yeah, exactly.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. He's assigned out west after West Point, Michigan forts Crawford and Winnebago, plays a minor role in the Black Hawk War, then resigns to become a cotton planter in 1835, having been tried for insubordination, which he was acquitted for. He gets 800 acres, which he calls Breyerfield Plantation. And of course, there would be enslaved workers on that property. Starts with 23. Eventually, by 1860, he will legally possess well over 100. One important factor in his life as he plays a big part in the Mexican-American War really distinguishes himself there. It's true. And I should note for listeners that don't know as historians do the sort of slaveholding,

the breakdowns and socioeconomic turns, 23 slaves is actually a huge number. His brother, Joseph, is fabulously wealthy on any measure. So typically what for a person to be qualified as a planter, sort of in retrospect, somebody that owns more than 12 slaves puts them in that category. And that's the top 10% of slaveholders. So he really, that is the majority of slaveholders owned a single slave, numerically speaking. The big ones, of course, own many hundreds. But Jefferson Davis sort of begins at, you know, in the top 5% or something. His brother much higher than that. And as you say, he was part of a big coterie of West Point trained, although not necessarily

still in the Army, service members who participated in the Mexican-American War, nearly all of the famous Civil War generals are kind of there together. And they do develop. I mean, he does get a very close experience of war. There's some leadership experience there. Lee distinguishes himself more. There are a lot of other military service members that exit that war with a kind of higher pedigree or a more impressive luster than Davis does. The takeaway really is important how deeply enmeshed Jefferson Davis was in the founding of America by his family story and then by the service to the nation through the military. I mean, he was really deep in. So it's, it's so strangely ironic that this man should end up being the president of the Confederacy. It's a, it's a

weird turn of events. Yeah, I would put Robert E. Lee in that same category. His father, Lighthorse Harry Lee, had been one of Washington's George Washington's chief aides. And Lighthorse Harry Lee came to a sort of bad debt-ridden end. He actually dies, I think, in Barbados or certainly somewhere in the Caribbean. But as you say, you know, these are men who feel very clearly a profound attachment to the United States. The argument of secessionists were that the Republican Party, which remember is really just organized in about 1854 and its first presidential candidate is 56, have so perverted the course of the nation that it can no longer claim its actual roots in the revolution. And so their effort, and there's a big contest through the war of basically who can claim. a more authentic root or foundation in the American founding. And for Confederates, I mean, part of where you see this is Alexander Stevens,

the vice president of the Confederacy in his inaugural address, famously rejecting Jefferson's dictum that all men are created equal, that that was a mistake, but we have rectified it. And this nation is founded on the opposite belief. He says it's cornerstone rests on slavery famously in what comes to be called the cornerstone speech. I see. He marries his wife dies early on and after a very short period of time, he later remarries to a woman 18 years as junior, 1845, this happens. He then becomes from this cotton planter career involved in politics, locally, then regionally.

He won the election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1845, joins the 29th Congress. He is by definition, a Jacksonian Democrat, opposition to federal power, to the National Bank, votes to annex Oregon. So there's manifest destiny in there. He does fight that war with Mexico during this time he spends in Congress. He eventually leaves the army to become a U.S. senator for Mississippi, 1847, becomes involved with the issue of Western expansion, which was everything to these guys at the time, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, in many respects, you can think of the civil war. The fight over slavery manifests in what the future of the United States will look like,

and that future is in the West. So will this be free labor or that is, free labor territory or slave labor territory. Sure. And it's not, I mean, much as we might like to believe that it was sort of initiated out of moral concerns in many respects, if we read the language of the people who become the Republican Party in the 1850s, and they are anti-slavery, but they are primarily anti-slavery for their concern about the way that slavery weakens the profit motive and the incentive

to labor, so it's economically inefficient. and there are concerns about what that will do to the economic development of the United States in the West. Yeah, sure. It's no coincidence that Jefferson Davis becomes the president when he was also, well, he understands this westward expansion from fighting in the Mexican-American war. Look what we've got, you know, as a result of winning this war. A third of the country now exists out West. That's the future of America. And he's one of those first people who's really dealing with that, viscerally.

March 1853, he becomes Secretary of War in the Pierce administration. We're still before the Civil War here. And therefore, he is now operating in the White House. He understands how that whole thing is set up. How is he eventually chosen to be the president? Where does he come from in that discussion? Well, to go back to secession, Davis is not one of these people from the 1840s or 1850s that we call fire eaters who are preaching secession and the importance of secession.

I mentioned Yancey, Robert Barnwell-Ret in South Carolina, Edmund Ruffin in Virginia, who from the really 18, mid-1840s in the aftermath of the Mexican War are saying the only future solution for the problem of protecting slavery is for the South to leave. Davis is, as you say, an American. He serves in the House and the Senate. He serves in the cabinet. So he is in these terms a kind of moderate on this question, which in this respect helps and that is in the respect of who will we elect to be president?

You really don't want a fire-breathing radical who doesn't have any administrative experience to be your president. You want somebody who knows how government works. Davis has military experience as Secretary of War. He understood in a really intimate way, the scope of American military power and all of its sinews.

And he knew Washington. He knew people on both sides. And so he's in many respects a very logical choice to be president, given that the likelihood of war. And a leading Democrat, the Senate is, of course, a great place to launch a presidential bid from. And so his nomination and election makes a lot of sense, as it turns out, he has some real liabilities that we'll talk about as we go. But in terms of background, it would be hard to craft somebody who has better experience going in. Right, right. What was the committee of 13? What does that refer to?

So this refers to a very late stage effort to try to solve the crisis of secession that comes in the winter of 1860, 61 with a group of kind of upper south representatives and some northerners who are trying to find a way around the impasse. The Confederacy has already been created, but it remains to be seen whether it will actually take root. There have been threats at secession before. This was what John Tyler was involved in, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, and famously, there's a kind of variant of this called the Breckenridge compromise, John Breckenridge of Kentucky. And they're advocating a set of constitutional amendments that they hope will basically solve the problem and let Southerners safe face and re-enter. These are things like a constitutional amendment that permanently protects slavery in the United States. And then a constitutional amendment that prohibits future constitutional amendments from outlawing slavery.

However, that would work, right? I mean, these are sort of half, I would say, half thought out. Because, of course, the amendment process is by nature wide open. But it's a series of kind of compromise measures mostly to placate slaveholders. I see. And Lincoln says, quite frankly, at the beginning of the, that is in this interregnum, in February, January, he says, the Republican Party was built on stopping the extension of slavery. If we give that question up, if we give up in a seed to the Southerner's demands, why wouldn't any Northerner ever vote for us again?

The party would implode sort of on its first moment of success. And so he's thinking we have built now for five or ten years in some cases an argument against the expansion of slavery. That's the rub. That's what he says. We cannot give on that issue. I'm willing to compromise on other things, but not on the expansion of slavery. Interesting. So Davis really gets elected, as you say, because he is a moderate.

He really is very opposed to this, even as South Carolina withdraws, isn't he? He is. And he stays in his Senate seat until into 1861, you know, he gives, depending on how you read it, either a tearful or alligator tear-filled resignation speech. But he had committed a huge part of his life to the American government. And so I don't think it's not a, it's not a, it's not. a disingenuous moment for him. These are very hard decisions for white southerners who had taken an oath of loyalty to defend the U.S. Constitution. He had taken that as a soldier and as a

politician against all enemies foreign and domestic, and resigning your seat to join now a nation dedicated to destroying the United States as a real Rubicon to cross. And they're smart enough not to take that lightly. Does he become commander in chief at that point? I mean, I mean, effectively, yes. And in fact, I would argue that one of Davis's weakness, is that he basically, not just commander-in-chief, but general-in-chief, which was the kind of position that Lincoln created separately to have some military officer kind of managing. Jefferson Davis maintains active command of kind of the military planning. And this is one of his great weaknesses, is a kind of reluctance to delegate.

Again, he had military experience. That turns out to, in fact, be a liability once a real war develops. Should have paid more attention at West Point, shouldn't he? He's inaugurated February 18th, 1861, grand procession to sort of Dixie up to the, to the Alabama state capital. All of this is very official and very formal. Again, I'm always stuck on the idea that they thought they were just going to kind of get away with, that it was all going to just sort of happen.

It wouldn't be in an, we'd now have our elegant state to rule. Little did they know. But I do want to circle back. He is not elected, right? This is a, he has chosen for a one year period. Yeah, by the provisional, by the provisional Congress or the sort of convention that had crafted the constitution. Right. And they're the ones, yes, sort of identifying Jefferson Davis.

It's a pretty closed group that's doing this. There is eventually an election later on, and which leads to his second inauguration, which is February 22nd, 1861. So at that point, they're into the constitutional process. They have an elected president. I want to move ahead to the war itself. Fort Sumter is something that Jefferson Davis triggers, right? He says go. He is the one responsible. I would say the division of responsibility is partly split with the governor of South Carolina, who is the one sort of on the ground monitoring what's happening. But Davis, and this speaks to the question of kind of federal authority, Davis is the one giving the orders. And both Davis and Lincoln are in a very hard position because their publics are kind of worked up. and ready to see a kind of solution to whatever is going on. And Lincoln chooses to send the Star of the West

an unarmed ship to resupply what was a federal installation at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together. It was sort of half-constructed, but it's mostly just kind of a big sandbox. It may have been decades in the making. And Davis is unwilling to see that ship enter the harbor and resupply the fort.

There's a U.S. flag flying there. And this is territory that the Confederacy claims. Yeah. They are really driven into making kind of both of them in some respects, hasty decisions in order to placate a public eager to see some resolution. And of course, what this then triggers is the Confederacy actually firing, famously on April 12th on the morning thereof, firing on Fort Sumter. There's a kind of desultory artillery barrage, and then the Fort surrenders.

They've run a food anyway. So it isn't really a battle per se. but then that precipitates a rapid sequence of events that's going to be the secession of the Upper South and the kind of full creation of the Confederacy. And much that will happen in the next year confirms their greatest hopes that this will be a pretty easy battle for them in terms of the summer anyway. It gets tough later on. One of the things that's ironic, I suppose, that comes up is that in creating the Confederate States of the South, they actually have to kowtow to federal authority again.

You know, you have to create an army. You have to, you know, the central authority of the Confederate states led by Davis gets an undue amount of power right off the bat. It does. I mean, this provides really one of the main axes along which people divide politically in the Confederacy. We had talked earlier about the way in which party labels are jettisoned and the presumption is that, and in fact, when they people are elected to the Confederate Congress, they don't sit as Democrats or Whigs. The Whig Party had effectively disappeared in the South in the 1850s. But this question of are you a nationalist or as one historian has termed the opposition libertarians? And the nationalist like Davis, as you say, right out from the gate, there is a strong assertion of central state authority.

We have to build a federal army. We can recruit from the militia. But if we're going to have an army of two or 300,000, eventually they're going to put close to 900,000 men under arms, that's not going to happen piecemealing it out state by state. It has to be managed from Richmond. Yeah, and they're about 20 years from an income tax at that point. Although the Confederacy institutes the first one. I mean, they impose more taxes from the central government than the Lincoln administration does, or certainly than the pre-war United States had.

And this again, Davis is doing this not because he thinks taxes are great, but because he has to fund this government. And so he's driven to Prince of the policies that really alienate those Southerners who thought part of what should happen in secession is a kind of scaling back, a federal authority. And in fact, you get a much stronger central state out in the Confederacy than you did before this. You end up there, he's dealing with some of the same issues that Lincoln is, you know, and that's the incredible parallel that happens here. He has to create this army out of nothing, out of militias. Yeah, the first year, I mean, he, the, the call is for a hundred thousand man army, many more men than

that volunteer. And it's a kind of chaotic first year. of trying to organize them, but those men only enlist for 12 months. So that means that if you're enlisting in April, May, June of 1861, by the start of the active campaigning season in 1862, which is April, May, June, those men are set to go home. And many of them feel that they have already done their obligation. They have served a term. They signed a contract. Contracts are the basis for landless or propertyless men to have some purchase in the economy.

So there's an enormous amount of respect, or there should be, for companies. contracts. And yet in January, the Confederate Congress at Davis's urging begins considering and eventually passes a draft act, the first in American history, because they are terrifically anxious that those men are all going to just go home. And the draft act creates enormous unrest in the armies. It initiates a spike in desertion that's really not matched until the final days of the war because those men felt as though they were being treated not as men any longer, but as some of them said as slaves, whose bodies could be requisitioned by the state and use. for whatever purposes. And you end up with the class problem of every military, which is, and especially

in these days, rich men could opt out. They could hire somebody to fill in for them, right? Well, that is part of the draft is passed in April. There are exemptions created in October. There's a kind of second set of enabling legislation, and it carves out exemptions for things like teachers and ministers, certain classes of industrial workers. It importantly included an exemption for every 20 enslaved people that someone controlled. they received one exemption from the draft. And poor men assumed that this meant that the firstborn son, and if you had 40 slaves, two sons of the slaveholder,

would be exempted from the draft. The initiative is really driven by anxiety about the few number of military-age white men left on the Confederate home front and the dangers of an uprising. So it is, in fact, driven as a kind of public safety measure. And my own reading of the evidence, because you almost never hear soldiers talking about this law. It is really a kind of feature for a Confederate press that dislikes Davis and dislikes the draft.

They talk about the kind of rich man's war, poor man's fight, seeing in this policy, the 20 Negro law, gross favoritism towards the wealthy. Newspaper editors make a lot of that. There certainly is a lot of anger. Yeah. But there are, in fact, men who don't own slaves who understand the importance of keeping white men on the Southern Home Front in order to manage an increasingly restive population of enslaved people who see the war as an opportunity to liberate themselves, which they do, of course.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Let's talk about how he organizes the Army, eventually appointing Robert E. Lee. Does he go through the same struggles that Lincoln did in the early days? Well, I think what's important and the distinction between him and Lincoln is that Lincoln entered the war as a commander-in-chief, knowing very little about the military. He had participated in the Black Hawk War as well as part of a kind of Illinois militia unit. They mostly sort of chased their tail in the woods and got bitten by mosquitoes. So he is, I would say, humble, and this is one of Lincoln's chief attributes.

He is educating himself. He is reading manuals and treatises on the military, and he is trusting his commanders to make decisions. Jefferson Davis, because he had military experience, felt like he could make those decisions. famously after the battle at Bull Run, you mentioned the euphoria in the South about what a short war would be. Jefferson Davis shows up on the battlefield. He takes the train up from Richmond, maybe intending to take control of the troops. And Beauregard, you know, the commander on the scene is sort of thinking, I'm in command here. You're not, you don't show up as president.

That's a civilian office and sort of take over active command. And that proves to be a real weakness because Davis does not take advice well in the way that, say, Lincoln was able to look. And now, you might argue Lincoln got bad advice from McClellan and other people for a long time. And it takes them years, really, to find the winning group, which is Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and men like that. But he had a humility and a respect for the authority of military figures to actually understand how to run an army. Davis holds that pretty close to the chest. And so he is reluctant to appoint a general in chief. Lee's first year is not very distinguished. He's in South Carolina building enforcement.

His nickname at the time was Granny Lee because he felt like, the soldiers felt like all we do with him is shovel and we're on the defensive. It's really only at the Seven Days campaign and the Battle of Seven Pines before that when Lee is put in in place of Joseph Johnston and behaves aggressively with his army that sort of people say, oh, wait, this is the guy to command. But that took a long time. How much support is he getting from within his cabinet and the Congress? I mean, is it very factioned or not? His Congress is very supportive. His closest ally is a former Louisiana senator named Judah Benjamin. And Benjamin serves nearly in every cabinet position at some point over the course of the war.

And he's a kind of close confidant. They do go through the Confederacy, I think cycles through five secretaries of war, which is not the kind of rotation in office you want during a conflict. So his administration works generally very well with him, the quartermaster general, the postman people like that. The Congress, the Confederate Congress was illustrious in terms of its membership. It included a former U.S. President. John Tyler is a congressman for a while, but they sort of deserve a record for the least accomplished. The Confederate Congress is a persistent break on the initiatives that Davis is trying to take, and he often just kind of ignores them and goes ahead with things,

but it is never the source of ideas that the Northern Congress is for Lincoln. Lincoln has, on the the federal Congress side, a host of people, Charles Sumner and others who are thinking creatively about solutions to the war and are working kind of constructively with the president. That's not happening in the South for most of the war. It's a distasteful idea to me anyway to consider, but it's interesting to think about the fact that this is only a wartime administration. Anyone who had high hopes for the CSA then or now would say it never had the chance to be a real, governing thing. It was only a wartime thing. Yeah. And of course, most of the elite and especially the political members realize that once a war starts, the glory is in the military side, not in the

political side. So many of them resigned. I mean, John Breckenridge famously, who had been the presidential candidate of the Democrats in 1860, then becomes a general. And he's not a great general. Many of these political generals are not. And so, yes, there's a kind of transfer of leadership and skill out of politics into the military. This is part of not having his deep a bench. The North has more people. And they're able to mount both robust military leaders and competent political leaders to actually manage the crisis. How did the public feel about Jefferson Davis? Was he a popular figure? He was popular initially. Part of the problem with not having a partisan structure, a party system that kind of channels your energy is that without that, most of the

opposition is directed at the person of Jefferson Davis. So it's not that we've got a Democrat in office and we don't like him. And I've never liked Democrats, so I'm not going to like him. But Jefferson Davis himself is to blame. And it results in a personalization that becomes very bitter and really quite nasty, including from his vice president, famously Alexander Stevens. I mean, the real deficit for Davis, especially as compared to Lincoln, is an inability to really articulate the war and the causes and the kind of needs of the Confederacy in a way that elevates those and that inspires people. Lincoln received a lot of criticism for being rough and callous and coarse and sometimes even vulgar. He used to famously sit in the telegraph

office and read aloud humorists of the day. But he was terrifically adept at crafting short analogies, at telling jokes, at using a language that common people could understand, and that, of course, very elevated high language in his most famous addresses that touched people in different ways. And Davis was never able to really crack the code on that. Very smart and very kind of rational and clinical. But communication is a huge part of being a wartime president. So there's no equivalent of, you know, the fireside chats that you're going to get from Jefferson Davis. He just, that's not in his skill set. Yeah, that's a good episode idea. He's, you know, You've given me comparing Davis to Lincoln and how much that was the root of success or failure

for those sides. Yeah. And I mean, the differences turn up. Historians have, have, you know, sort of go back and forth. And in some respects, it's not the fair comparison to say, compare him to Lincoln, although it's a useful one. But the sort of expectations that people had of him, which, as I say, were quite high. And then over the course of the war, he is terrifically loyal to the people that are close to him.

But if you cross him, you end up on a kind of black. list. And so, for instance, he stays very loyal to Benjamin Bragg, long into the war, long past the point when Bragg had the loyalty of his soldiers. Davis famously has to go out to Tennessee in 1863. And, you know, the army under Bragg is in near revolt. And Davis is still dragging his heels because he has a friendship with Bragg that he's sort of unwilling to, to mess with. And Lincoln has from the beginning of the war, much less ego involved in these decisions. After Gettysburg, it really becomes that sort of classic, you know, the war of attrition idea. Let's just hold on long enough to have some favorable terms of surrender. Is that Davis's view? Is that he's the architect of that

strategy? No. And I mean, Davis is still, Davis still believes victory is possible. And in fact, he's not wrong in the sense that the 1864 presidential election that reelects Abraham Lincoln is in serious jeopardy late into the fall of 1864. It's only, there's three essential military victories, the capture of Mobile Bay late in August, and then the victories in the Shenandoah Valley in October, and then the capture of Atlanta. But if those things don't happen before the election, Lincoln is not going to be reelected. And Lincoln himself had said that. And in that case, what you get is George McClellan elected on a platform dedicated to immediately negotiating a peace with the Confederacy. What that would have looked like, we don't know, but Lincoln feared that

what it would have meant the permanent splitting of the United States. So Davis is not, I mean, it looks sort of high in the sky or wildly, unrealistically optimistic to imagine the Confederacy could actually win. But even as late as late 1864, it's, it's not clear on the ground. Interesting. Okay. So when things go south, no pun intended, for Davis and the rest, how much is he a part of the decision that Lee makes at Appomattox? Has he, he okayed this? He's been in, yeah, he's been in close contact with Lee, and Lee is, I mean, that said, Lee is acting on his own sort of whizzed judgment about the fate of his army and the utility of maintaining resistance against Grant when his army is effectively surrounded. The cavalry forces

from the, the union had cut under the railroad that Lee was using to move to the west and that he was anticipating rations and supplies reaching his troops. The, I mean, Davis certainly hoped that Lee could hold out longer. Richmond is effectively evacuated on April 1st. There's a famous dramatic moment on that Sunday when Davis comes into the St. Andrew's Church in Richmond, and then an aide comes in during the service and whispers to him and what he whispers is that is that Petersburg has fallen and Davis gets up and leaves in the middle of the service. And there's a kind of gasp because people know this is it. We're now done. And Richmond is going to be evacuated imminently. So Davis, as you said, South. He hopes to keep the government intact. It's going to basically put on a train and it goes to

Danville and then South. He's actually captured in Georgia. But he's hoping that Lee can hold out. There is still Joseph Johnston's big army, which has not yet been pinned down, though it will be shortly by Sherman in North Carolina. So he's holding out hope that the surrender of Lee's army alone does not spell the end of the Confederacy. He's arrested. He's putting leg irons, the whole thing. Indicted for treason becomes imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe. Roe, Virginia, not right on the James River right there. Yeah, and under indictment for longer. I mean, the federal government eventually abandons the decision to prosecute him, but that

takes nearly four years after Appomatics. It's not really until 1869 that he's sort of cleared of the threat of being tried for treason. He's parodied as running away in women's clothing, isn't it? That's how he's seen because he was carrying a shawl over his head. He does. And in fact, I will say we, LSU, the archive here at LSU just obtained some letters that are, that I think have not been as widely used by scholars that actually have the

testimony of several of the soldiers who captured him. And in that capture, I was reading them just the other day, Verena Davis, his wife sort of makes a comment about to one of the soldiers saying, well, you wouldn't harm old women, would you? Meaning herself and her mother-in-law, I think, is there. And also implying that Davis is a woman, he has the shawl on. There's a huge amount of disagreement sort of historically about whether he was actually dressed as a woman. But the shawl is enough to give northern satirists all the ammunition they need to present the Confederacy is literally unmanned. So all the cartoons have him in a full dress, I mean a skirt sort of skipping away from the

soldiers at the moment of capture as opposed to, you know, Lincoln's manly conquest here. Right. Over time, this two year, more than three-year period, he is increasingly free to move around eventually the country. He makes his way to Canada in 1867 released on bail. The case against him is dropped officially December 25th, Christmas time. As a matter of fact, 1868. He is really, the fate of Jefferson Davis is really the beginning of how do we heal this country as far as, you know, it becomes the lost cause of the Confederacy, et cetera. He figures prominently in that, isn't he? Yeah, I would say that, you know, by 1867, certainly by 1869, reconstruction is in full swing. And so the fate of his actual fate is less consequential. And that's part of why that the government

finally just let that case. There was a great deal of kind of legal political wrangling over how he would be charged or what the charge would be in what would it be in a military court, would it be in a civilian court. The chief justice at the Supreme Court, Sam and Chase, was responsible for the circuit involving Richmond and Chase has some kind of constitutional reluctance to participate in the way that the prosecutor wanted. So in a way, it's sort of technicalities, but in a way, his prosecution has also kind of become irrelevant. But why? I mean, don't you think, I mean, had there been a famous hanging of Jefferson Davis, wouldn't that have been the nail in the coffin for the CSA and all of that? It certainly could have been, and it would have dramatically changed how we view

the CSA, which is as an act at the beginning of the show, you talked about the seditious Southern States. And still to this day, I would say sort of popular memory is reluctant to use words like treason or traitor, despite the fact that these are people, and Lee knew this well, who had taken an oath of obligation on a Bible to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, and then they wind up making war against the United States. Sure, yeah. Very hard to square those things. But there is a groundswell of eagerness in the immediate post-war period, Bill Blair has written a very good book on this in the sort of summer of 1865, led by people, ministers and others who are saying, now is the time to be generous and to welcome white Southerners back, and that executions and hangings are going to

exacerbate the goal for which we fought, which was to reunify the South and the North. And that decision, there's maybe 10 or 12 executions. The majority of them are guerrillas who had been long sought. Famously Henry Wirtz, the commandant of the Andersonville prison. But the public sentiment, although it turns after Lincoln's assassination, basically there's little stomach in the north for the kind of widespread executions that say, I mean, if we look at a comparative event, the Paris Commune, when the national troops come into Paris, they kill tens of thousands of communes.

bodies are stacked in the street. They don't have coffins for all of them. There's no compunction about, and this isn't the commanders of the commune. This is just the everyday soldiers. There's never any question of sort of arresting or executing a common soldiers. It's a very small class of men that even have their political rights temporarily lost as a result of the war. He lives a good long life. He dies in 1889, Jefferson. He does. He does the home that he spends most of his time in Beauvoir is not far from us. I'm in Baton Rouge, and it's down along the Gulf. though it has been repeatedly destroyed by hurricanes in the last decade or so. But he has the good fortune of being in the United States, if it not has.

He doesn't sort of function as a full citizen. But he lives out his full life. He writes a long, I would say, tedious defense of what he did on constitutional grounds when, as we discussed, there was a lot more driving secession than an abstract theory of commitment to state rights. That's my last question for you. Did he atone for his sins, what I would view his sins? No, he never admits that secession was either unconstitutional or, or wrong. And that's the part that I think, you know, when I discuss this with students,

you have to take seriously his belief in 1861 that the war was winnable. Because if he thought it wasn't winnable and he prosecuted a war nonetheless, that's actually a horrible position ethically to be in. He really believed that it was possible. But in a kind of larger sense that he takes responsibility for the set now, what we would say is 750,000 dead. You know, the bloodiest war by several orders of magnitude in American history and one of the worst anywhere in the 19th century, that that was driven by a government that he led. And instead, he sort of goes down resisting that kind of an interpretation. I mean, he said famously, I would say after the emancipation proclamation was passed, he called it the blackest crime in all humanity, which is a, I mean,

this is what I call sort of going all in, not just that emancipation is a bad idea, but it's the worst idea in Christian history. Wow. And we don't believe that. anymore. So Davis is on the wrong side of that position. He took that to the grave. Yeah. Aaron, what is it like to teach the Civil War in the Deep South? Is it any different than doing it in Maine? Well, to be fair, I haven't taught it in Maine, but I grew up in Michigan. And at this point, I don't think that it's very different. I think that the generations coming out of the Civil War centennial in the 1960s and 70s, there were a lot of students who entered campuses with a kind of ax to grind, what we would call today a kind of neo-Confederate interpretation.

And I don't find that. Students are interested, and they're probably more interested in studying it in the South than students who grew up in places like Minnesota or Michigan. There's much more visible public architecture built around the Civil War in the South. But I don't find students politically angry or predisposed to a particular historical interpretation. And so from my perspective, it's great because they actually want to hear about it. And when you lay out the evidence, which is that the secession was driven by a desire

to protect slavery, they just, genuinely look at the evidence and say that's persuasive to me. Yeah. And, you know, we're trying to do it in an analytical way without, they didn't commit that crime. That's not something they need to feel personally guilty for. Maybe their ancestors did, but there are a lot of things that all our ancestors do that we're not proud of.

And then they go see a football game. And I personally am a huge LSU fan. So thank you very much for joining us. Aaron Shee and Dean is a professor at Louisiana State University, LSU. He edited a companion to the U.S. Civil War and the Civil War the final year told by those who live it, among many other things. Aaron, do you have a website that we should know about or anything like that? I do. Simple.

She and Dean with the hyphen.com. There you go. And all my books are on there, and it was a pleasure talking to you today, Don. Thanks. Thank you very much. You too. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes,

two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman.

So grateful for your support.