Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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Braxton Bragg. The Richmond Examiner published a headline in October 1864 when it learned Davis had appointed Bragg to the defense of Wilmington, North Carolina: “Bragg Is Going To Wilmington. Good-bye Wilmington.” In the body of the article the newspaper expanded on its headline with: “General Bragg’s presence wherever he has controlled, has been felt as a disaster, an omen of impending evil like a dark, cold, dreary cloud.”
In some ways, it was remarkable that Davis had not chosen Bragg. He might have slotted Bragg into the position just to spite his political enemies, who had objected to his leadership style since his inauguration four years ago. Davis fought back against them by ignoring them, doing the opposite of what they wanted, or wasting his time by often writing them long, complicated letters condemning them for their complaints.
Davis could strike back at the political elites who had nominated him to run the government that they now complained about, but he had no power other than speeches to influence what the average Southern citizen thought of him and his conduct of the war.
John B. Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, never had the ear of Davis, but he had the common man’s pulse on what the public felt about the chief executive as the end of the Confederacy was becoming apparent to all but its president. Jones kept a diary for most of the war where he made observations about all he saw happening around his little desk.
On December 17, 1864, Jones noted that a wild rumor was circulating in the streets that Davis had died. He wrote: “Alas for President Davis’s government! It is now in a painful strait.” He ended the day’s entry with a final comment about the rumor he personally discounted: “His death would excite sympathy,” but he also noted that Davis’s “enemies are assailing him bitterly, and attributing all our misfortunes to his incompetence.”
Jones believed that so many men in high positions now hated the president that they were considering a coup against him. On Christmas day Jones wrote that “a large number of the croaking inhabitants censure the President for our misfortunes and openly declare for General Lee as Dictator.” On New Year’s Eve, Jones wrote again of the supposed plot:
It can only be done by revolution and the overthrow of the Constitution. Nevertheless, it is believed many executive officers, some high in position, favor the scheme.
But while common clerk Jones had sympathy for Davis, he also did not think he made a good president. On January 1, 1865, Jones wrote down what many of Davis’s enemies were thinking and saying:
The President is considered really a man of ability, and eminently qualified to preside over the Confederate States, if independence were attained and we had peace. But he is probably not equal to the role he is now called upon to play. He has not the broad intellect requisite for the gigantic measures needed in such a crisis, nor the health or the physique for the labors devolving onto him.
Jones continued his observations that all the politicians who voted Davis into office in 1860 now “desire to see General Lee at the head of affairs [but] the President is resolved to yield the position to no man during his term of service.”
DAVIS WOULD NOT YIELD to any man in the Confederacy, and he would not yield to any man in the United States, including Lincoln, whose troops were closing in on the capital city of Richmond from the east and the south.
On February 3, 1865, Davis sent three commissioners, including Vice President Stephens, to talk over peace terms with Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Davis himself did not go because Lincoln had declared in a December 1864 speech to the United States Congress that he would never recognize Davis as a head of state, but he was open to the possibility of meeting with lower ranking Confederate officials.
The meeting took place aboard the Union transport ship River Queen at Hampton Roads, Virginia, within shouting distance of Fortress Monroe, a U.S. fort on the tip of the peninsula between the James and the York rivers that had never fallen into Confederate hands. The meeting’s eventual outcome was telegraphed to all attending within a few minutes of it starting when Lincoln noticed that Davis had changed Lincoln’s original letter asking for the meeting to discuss “securing peace to the people of our one common country.” Davis had written his own reply, using Lincoln’s own sentence structure, but substituted “our two countries” for Lincoln’s “common country.” Although most of the Confederacy was already occupied and the rest in imminent danger of being overrun by overwhelming Union forces, Davis still insisted that any peace would hinge on the United States recognizing the continuing existence of the Confederacy.
Lincoln said to the Confederates when he noted the change in wording:
The restoration of the Union is a sine qua non [Latin legal term for an indispensable action] with me, and hence my instructions that no conference was to be held except upon that basis.
The commissioners listened as Lincoln offered some surprisingly liberal terms, such as allowing the Confederate states immediately back into the House and Senate, and some terms that they knew were unacceptable to the Confederate Congress and its citizens. Lincoln offered $100 per slave compensation to owners who would willingly free them, less than ten percent of the prewar range between $1,000 and $1,500 for a fit field hand. Lincoln and Seward also confused the Confederate commissioners by hinting that the Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure that might be found unconstitutional by the U.S. Courts. In another part of the discussion, Lincoln told the Confederates that the U.S. Congress (minus the Southern states) had just passed the Thirteenth amendment outlawing slavery. Seward suggested that if the Southern states quickly reentered the Congress, they might be able to rally their own state legislatures to defeat the ratification of the amendment.
Grant would later remember that he was surprised at the liberal terms offered to the Confederates by Lincoln.
Grant wrote:
They would have to agree on two points; one being that the Union should be preserved and the other that slavery should be abolished; and if they were ready to concede those two points, he was almost ready to sign his name to a blank piece of paper and permit them to fill in the balance of the terms upon which we could live together.
The Confederate commissioners, their heads swimming in confusion over what they had just heard, left the meeting with no assurances that the war would end unless the surviving Southern states gave up and returned to the Union. That much they understood from the meeting because Lincoln had not permitted any notes to be taken to produce an official transcript as to who said what and who offered what to whom.
It had been a promising meeting where peace was discussed, but the Confederate commissioners returned to Richmond knowing no matter what the Union had offered, Davis would not agree to surrender the idea of the Confederacy as a separate nation from the Union. He was committed to an independent Confederacy.
On the evening of February 6, 1865, not long after the commissioners had returned, the president addressed a large crowd in the auditorium of Richmond’s African Church, a church that slave owners had built so that their people could worship in the city. On every other day but Sunday, the African Church was a favorite speaking spot for politicians because it featured a large auditorium, larger than any white church in the city.
Davis, a man normally taciturn in his dealings with the public, came alive with a rousing, extemporaneous speech condemning Lincoln for demanding the surrender of the Confederacy.
At one point Davis exclaimed:
We must lock shields together and go forward to save our country, or sink together to honorable graves…. If our disagreements result from passion we must exorcise it, and make the good of our country our sole aim. If we will all do our duty, we shall reap a brilliant reward. If the absentees from our armies will return, and if the local assistance be rendered which may be readily afforded, the noble Army of Northern Virginia will read General Grant a yet severer lesson than it taught him from the Rapidan to the James; while the gallant Beauregard will cause Sherman’s march across Georgia to be his last.
Immediately after hearing Davis’s speech, Vice President Stephens left Richmond for his Georgia home. He did not share Davis’s optimism that the South could rise again. In his 1870 book, A