by David Martin
Unlike his adversary in what is inaccurately called the American Civil War and is imprecisely called the War between the States, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the North’s war to end Southern secession, was not a lawyer. Born in Kentucky like Abraham Lincoln, he was a West Point graduate and career army officer who got into politics in Mississippi, where his family had moved when he was young.
There’s quite a bit of irony here. First, his military background seemed not to have helped him very much as a war leader, especially in many of his personnel decisions; his counterpart, Lincoln, seemed to be a good deal better at it, in spite of the generally lower quality of his officer corps. It is hard, though, to think of any personnel blunder by Davis that quite compares with Lincoln’s decision to give command of the Army of the Potomac to General Ambrose Burnside after Burnside’s monumentally bad performance at the Battle of Antietam. In a review of William Watson’s