Question of the Week: What advice would you give Jeff Davis?
If you could go back in time and give Jefferson Davis one piece of advice or factual information, what would it be and when would you want to tell him?
If you could go back in time and give Jefferson Davis one piece of advice or factual information, what would it be and when would you want to tell him?
Remove Braxton Bragg from command earlier, please!!
That GBR and France will never come into the war on the Confederacy’s side.
Don’t be pressured into firing the first shot at Sumter. Play to those in the North who are willing to let the South go without bloodshed and try to force Lincoln into starting the war, including an invasion of the CSA, to divide the Northern populace, just as happened during the War of 1812. You know that there is a strong anti-war faction in the North. Restraint also may help with foreign recognition. This will require you to “sit on” the South Carolina hotheads. (Easier said than done, but try it.)
Don’t talk to newspaper reporters!
Don’t secede. You have a Supreme Court decision validating slavery.
The US Constitution was written in a way to preserve slavery.
Don’t blow it.
Do you mean the constitution that banned slavery in January 1865?
No!
1. In the legislative branch….. The Three-Fifths Compromise was an agreement made in 1787 that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a free person for the purpose of taxation and representation in Congress. So some Southern States received increased representation than states in the North
2. The Executive Branch. The President is elected by the Electoral College. The States with slaved receivedincreased importance in electing a President.
3. Judiciary branch. The President nominates t he Justices to the Supreme Court.
Basically the South eft the Union on the issue of slavery since they realizes that the increased population in the North meant the South no longer had the votes to protect slavery.
What Kevin Donovan said…do not fire on Sumter or any other Union facility or fort. Let Lincoln be perceived as the aggressor.
Decline the presidency and be the general you really wanted to be.
Never borrow your wife’s shawl for warmth.
You lose
Dismiss, not reassign, Braxton Bragg as soon as he learned of his incompetence.
Having seen the variety of response to this question, I highly recommend EMBATTLED REBEL by McPherson. It is very illuminating and gives a very different picture of Davis than is commonly seen.
Send Beauregard to the Mississippi/Tennessee valley after Ft. Sumter to command over Pillow and Polk (better don’t make Polk a general but a recruiter). Send Lee to Manassas. Send J.E. Johnston to Tennessee to take responsibility of East and Middle Tennessee (subordinate Beauregard to him). When A.S. Johnston gets to Richmond make him General In Chief and give him more of the burden. Make John C. Breckinridge your Secretary of War.
Think about making Atlanta the administrative capital while having the Confederate Congress meet in Richmond and various other cities.
Specific to the war… listen to Bragg and J.E. Johnston and don’t move Stevenson’s division to Vicksburg. Peremptory order Holmes to send a comparable amount of troops from the Trans-Mississippi. Trade a lot more of Arkansas for Mississippi.
1. Before you accept the role of president of the confederacy- understand you are going to preside over the destruction of the very society & economy you think you are trying to save. Yes – the election of Lincoln and a Republican controlled congress threatens the survival of slavery by limiting the further expansion of slavery to the west but for the near term (20 years or so) you are secure, guaranteed by the Constitution until eventually amended by the necessary number of free states. Give yourself time to transition to the inevitable.
2. Do not expect help from the British or French. The United Kingdom outlawed slavery in 1833. While currently dependent on your cotton exports in employing tens of thousands textile workers in Britain, they are going to find alternative sources. Despite the ruling class’s support of the Confederacy, they are not going to go to war with the federal government over this or recognize you. The French will do whatever the British do.
3. If you accept the presidency – make Lincoln the aggressor. Do not fire on Sumter or seize any additional federal property. Without the attack on Sumter, Lincoln will have difficulty raising that initial call for troops from northern states that are not yet enthusiastic about going to war. Yes Virginia will succeed when Lincoln calls for suppressing the rebellion but it is not worth it.
4. You personally are better off being the general you think you are in the Confederate army than a politician. You don’t have the skills to preside over a confrontational congress who will fight you every step of the way. Your ‘nation’ will die from to much ‘States Rights’.
5. Most of your generals will suck. You will have some good ones but they will be vastly outnumbered by the crappy ones (to include Bragg). The confederacy is not in a position to afford inadequate generals.
Lincoln
Don’t do it.
If you’re going to dress up in women’s clothes to try to avoid arrest, shave the goatee!
I know, I know, he wasn’t wearing women’s garments when he was apprehended. But nonetheless, I do think it’s good advice!
On a more serious note, I would suggest that foreign assistance be in place before the cannons were fired. Establish ‘benchmarks’ and the like as far as what the seceding states would have to accomplish militarily and otherwise to facilitate and perhaps ‘enhance’ such assistance.
But still, lose the goatee!
Transgender people were written about at that time.
Invite slaves to join the military in return for their freedom. If their owners resist, conscript them.
Don’t do it.
He should have put down the administrative pen and picked up the sword. Honestly, he could not have done any worse than some of the other generals he appointed.
Occupy Cairo.
Don’t withdraw Southern senators from the U.S. Senate.
If my recollection is correct, he was the last one to leave. He attempted to preserve the Union, in his way, in the Senate through the end of 1860 and early 1861. He effectively had no choice after his constituents in Mississippi voted to secede.
Davis left the Senate on January 22, 1861, almost three months before Lincoln was sworn in. If the Southern senators had not left they could have blocked Lincoln’s cabinet appointments and held back funding for the Army.
Just decline the presidency of the confederacy. Your reaction when you were informed that you would be the president should have alerted you to refuse.
I would not tell him anything … unless it was R.E. Lee talking, Jeff was not a good listener.
President Davis, when General Lee takes the Army of Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania in June 1863, he will nominally have 75,000 men. Augment this with as many first rate troops as you can find in the Eastern Theater, with Home Guard troops taking their place for 90 days. This should bring his force to 90,000. Then, inform General Bragg that his Army of Tennessee is not to fight this summer, but play hit and run with the Federal forces in the Western Theater, so that he can send 30,000 troops, commanded by General Breckinridge, by rail to join General Lee.
This will bring Lee’s army to 120,000 men, which he can organize into four Corps of roughly equal size. Furthermore, do not force General Lee to accept Richard Ewell as 2nd Corps commander, but allow him his choice of Jeb Stuart to take over the late Stonewall Jackson’s corps. Keep the size of the force a closely-guarded secret, and in fact, spread the word that Lee is merely taking two corps, 60,000 men, into Pennsylvania on a raid. Once in Pennsylvania, move with alacrity on Harrisburg. Capture it, strip the banks of gold, silver and cash, strip the city of anything useful to the army – and if the residents resist, burn it to the ground. Immediately move on Philadelphia. Capture it, strip the banks of gold, silver and cash, strip the city of anything useful to the army – and if the residents resist, burn it to the ground. Then, move on Washington D.C., defeat any Federal forces in your path, and force an end to the war with terms favorable to the Confederacy.
You should also do this because historian Eric Schafer is writing a novel on this subject and you will make him look like a genius.
Meade has roughly 100,00 men at Gettysburg. Lee with 120,00 most likely insufficient to destroy the AOP on a good defensive line. McClellan maybeish but Meade? If Davis can strip forces the I suspect Lincoln would do the same. The Union navy can transport an awful lot of soldiers other fronts to Washington D.C. in a hurry. Don’t believe Lee can support a force of that size north of the Potomac for the length of time it would take to seize Washington. Perhaps live off the land for food, but ammunition is another thing. If Davis strips all eastern units to reinforce Lee are you really going to rely on the Home Guard to fend off Union forces stationed on the Peninsula (Fort Monroe) – see “Gettysburg’s Southern Front” much less forces in the Carolinas. You may tell Bragg not to fight and transfer troops east but are you also telling Rosecrans not to fight? He may not agree to Davis’s request. And you really expect Bragg to successfully execute a hit& run strategy or Lincoln to let Rosecrans stay inactive without pulling troops to send east. Your premise seems based on the Federal executing no counter measures and everything going Lee’s way. And your willing to let Vicksburg fall?
Excellent points, though remember, Meade came up to Pennsylvania piecemeal; if Lee had four corps he would, as I write, move to interdict his separated corps on the march and destroy them in detail. Then there’s the big question – would Meade move to try to save Harrisburg or Philadelphia, or fall back to choose a line whereby he could defend the capital? Or, be ordered to do so?
As for the Home Guard units, etc. I wouldn’t have Davis strip all good troops from the other departments in the East, but gather just 15,000 or so. In the summer of 1863 the remote areas of the Confederacy were not under such threat that this could endanger the country any more than it already was, when the tradeoff was a few months assisting the greatest effort to destroy the Army of the Republic and take Washington. As for the West, as I said, have Bragg spend the summer being elusive instead of meeting Rosecrans head on. If needed, send out Joe Johnston to help him. He was a master of withdrawing in the face of the enemy without putting his armies in danger of destruction. Remember, one of Davis’ disastrous policies was to scatter troops hither and thither – and just before Lee began moving north in the summer of 1863, Davis withheld a brigade or two from him and kept them at Richmond, serving no good purpose. They were partially replaced with second rate troops who performed badly in Pennsylvania.
The other theatres and areas were important, but what happened in the East completely superseded everything else. If Lee is rampaging through southern Pennsylvania, taking Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and has trapped and destroyed, say, four corps of the AoP, taken Baltimore and is marching on Washington City – as they called it then – what happened in the other theatres didn’t matter.
One thing I’m toying with is to have someone, like yourself, on whom I can bounce ideas, playing Meade in order to counter Lee. When we write novels we tend to subconsciously make the opponent in a story do exactly what we want them to do, but that is not how life, or war goes. It would probably be far more realistic and thus better to have that other mind offering “counterattacks” such as you did in your post. It might be good to have two minds working on the strategy than one…and I don’t want to do it with AI, or Tik Tok – we’d end up with China invading and capturing Washington City.
I left out Vicksburg. Vicksburg fell anyway, even with Lee’s diminished instead of augmented army being in Pennsylvania. What Vicksburg needed was not troops, but a competent commander, who could have and should have destroyed Grant when he was floundering around in the swamps. As noted, the East superseded all; a crushing victory there earned with a massive concentration of forces would have rendered Vicksburg irrelevant.
when does your book come out … and what’s the title?
Thank you, Mark. The novel, ‘Invasion,’ will take some time, as a few books are ahead of it. The first two are about my 25 ancestors, most of whom fought in Pennsylvania regiments in the East and West, though a few fought in North Carolina regiments. Amongst them they left three remarkable diaries, which form the core of the books. The first, ‘Till The Stars Appeared,’ will come out this autumn or next spring, the second, a year after, but for the first we are already working on a film deal. Those two will be followed by a companion coffee table photo book. I’m hoping no more than two years for ‘Invasion’ but we’ll see!