[applause] if you live long enough you were interviewed a lot. This was absolutely great a in v you are going to ireland. Were you born in ireland . My husbands family is 100 irish and we are going to celebrate her tenyear anniversary there. I couldnt be more grateful. [applause] now you can stand. [applause] up next on booktv after words with guest host James Swanson author and heritage fellow. This weeks James Mcpherson and latest book embattled rebel Jefferson Davis as commander in chief. And its the acclaimed historian present confederate president Jefferson Davis as an astute military strategist whose failures he argues are not the reason confederacy lost the civil war. This program is about an hour. Host gem lets start at the beginning. Its november 181860 and lincoln is president elect. Who is Jefferson Davis in the fall of 1860 . Guest Jefferson Davis in the fall of 1860 as a senator from mississippi. He has served in that capacity off and on for about eight yea years, interrupted in the middle 18 50s by four years as secretary of war under president franklin pierce. He was one of the most prominent southern senators. He was not a fire being secessionists but he did believe in the right of the south to secede. But because he had a strong affinity for the union, for which he had fog in the mexican war, he was a graduate of west point 1828. He was put on a committee of 13, a Senate Committee of 13 to try to find some way out of the crisis precipitated by the response of the deep south states starting with South Carolina. To lincolns election South Carolina immediately called the convention to consider seceding from the union and everybody expected that they would pass it. So when congress met in december of 1860, davis was put on this committee and i think he hoped at first that it might be possible to find some kind of solution to the burgeoning crisis of this union. Host davis was really not a hothead. He was a man of reason. He didnt put armies in the field. He would have preferred the secession would not happen. Guest i think thats right. At times during the 18 50s at the time of the crisis over the admission of california in the proposal for what became a compromise of 1850, but he sometimes talked like a fireeater. He sometimes said that if the north does not grant us our rights and buy the rights they meant the right to take their slaves into the territories, the right to recapture escaped fugitive slaves in the north, maybe we should set up for ourselves but for the most part he was known as a reasonable southern nationalist but also an american nationalist. Host and davis like the north. He had northern france. He gave talks on the north and at one point in his career he said with your great industry and our great agriculture we will conquer the rest of the continent. Guest absolutely an impact in 1859 he had taken a summer trip to new england where he had given a number of speeches, praised new englanders. Actually when i got back to mississippi after that trip, he was criticized by a lot of other politicians and newspaper editors in mississippi for kowtowing to the north. You are quite right he did have quite a few friends. Actually demand that everybody expected to be the republican candidate for president william h. Seward was a friend of davises until of course the split came. Other northern senators as well. Host how did a man like this, mandy like the north who fought for United States who helped gather their position was in the congress, was in the senate, was not an avid secessionists. How this man end up as president of United States of america . Guest once the state of mississippi seceded and once it became clear to davis that no compromise that would be acceptable to the south was going to emerge from this committee of 13 are from the congress itself. He threw in his lot with the confederacy. He resigned from the United States senate, giving a final speech in which he said that he did so with regret. P. Host people in the audience were reduced to tears. Guest thats right, they were reduced to tears and went back to mississippi and was immediately named as the general in chief of the Mississippi State militia. At this stage of the secession process there was no Confederate States of america yet. There were six and about to be seven states that had seceded from the United States and it was clear that these states would be facing potential military conflict if the United States army moved in and try to quote unquote coursed them to stay in the union. So he was named as the chief of the mississippi militia and began organizing the mississippi militia. And looks forward with regret but realism to the possibility that there would in fact be military conflict and then he went home to his plantation along the Mississippi River where he owned 113 slaves. He was a large slaveowner and while he and his wife were making rose cuttings on the morning of february 10, i think it was february 10, 1861 a messenger came with a telegram. The telegram was from Montgomery Alabama where a convention of delegates from the six and soon to be seven states were meeting and the telegram and formed him that he had been named provisional president of the Confederate States of america. I think there were two basic reasons why they named him as president. One, he was known as a moderate and not as a fireeater. The confederacy was trying to present to the world and especially to the states that had not yet seceded and for that matter even to the union states an image of reasonableness, of moderation. And second his military experience, his graduation from west point. He had served seven years in the regular army. He had commanded mississippi volunteer regiment quite courageously and effectively. He came home as a Wounded Warrior and served as chairman of the Senate Committee on military affairs and as secretary of war. There is probably no man in the south who is Better Qualified both in terms of his political experience but especially his military training and experience to lead this new nation which its founders anticipated might have to fight for its existence. Host is possibly also the most qualified man in the south knowing the challenge he had. He knew about the railroad, the ships, the guns, the canons and the fire rounds. He knew every disadvantage that the south had faced, didnt he . Guest he was very much a realist. He had traveled all over the country. He could read the census returns. He knew that the south produce cotton and other staple crops and had a majority of the exports earning most of the Foreign Exchange in the economy. It was an overwhelmingly rural an Agricultural Society and therefore did, it would be confronting a much more modern diversified economy. So he was well aware of the challenges and once the war began when many other southerners expected a shorter and victorious war he warned them that this is likely to be a long and very difficult contest and that they should recognize that it was not going to be an easy task at all. Host he did have some advantages. What were some of the advantag advantages . Lets start with the territory. 750 square miles the huge agricultural empire in the union wasnt there except for a few courts. There were no union troops in the south. Thats exactly right and thats something that a lot of people dont really appreciate because its so obvious that it escapes attention. That is unlike most rebellious or revolutionary movements the Confederate States of america began life in complete political and military control of nearly all of the territory that they claim to control. They did not have to fight to gain control of the territory, of the resources, of the political institutions. They already had it so basically the confederacy could win the war merely by surviving. Thats a huge event because it takes a lot more to invade and conquer than it does to defend and survive. Another advantage or at least another quality that the Confederate States had was potentially Strong Military leadership. Not only davis himself but a large number of fairly Prominent Army officers who had troops at west point made a commitment to join the confederacy. Once virginia joined the confederacy their names were very wellknown. Robert e. Lee, joseph e. Johnston, Stonewall Jackson and a good many others. These were some of the most talented officers in the whole United States army and they were making a commitment now to bleed the new Confederate States army. So davis, even though the north had more than twice the population and several times the industrial resources, commercial resources if our nation is going to mobilize for war the south had advantages which made it possible for davis although he expected a difficult and long war also to be confident that the south actually could win in the sense of surviving. Host the firing at fort sumter, lincolns call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the intercession and the secession of former state senator lincoln called for 75,000 troops. After that happened what was the planned . Did david sit down with his top generals in cabinet and say all right whats our plan . How do we fight and how do we win the . What were his first Strategic Moves . Guest the first strategic move was to mobilize an army and to train on army, a point the officers and the administrators that were going to organize and lead that army and to station troops as they begin, the volunteers began to come in. The confederacy had to rely entirely on the state militias for the state volunteer regiments. It didnt have a core of a regular United States army. It was the United States. So to organize the troops and to create an army was the first task. Davis because of his experience as chairman of the Senate Committee on military affairs and secretary of war, was quite capable of doing a good job of that. His secretary of the navy steven mallory, turned out to be a very good secretary of the navy. The person that davis appointed as secretary of the army turned out not to be very good and that would be rory walker. So davis in effect from the very first day was sort of his own secretary of war. That lead to problems later on. Posted didnt he go through five secretaries best guess so he went to five secretaries of war and some felt that their office was nothing more than being a mere clerk but it was an advantage in initial stages of the war. Davis did a good job. He also sent to rafay also assumes that turned out to be a great naval hero of the confederacy to the north to purchase arms. This was before the war began and he sent agents abroad. The initial steps in creating dharmic the confederacy did a very effective job. And the question was what do we do at this army . Host did he defend the entire confederacy . Guest thats what davis initially hoped to do and part of the reason why he hopes to do that was political pressure from state government, state legislature. It became clear that once virginia seceded and once the confederate provisional congre congress, the same convention that had formed the confederacy constituted itself as the provisional congress, once they made the decision to move the capital to richmond after virginia and seceded and invited them to do so, it became clear that some of the heaviest fighting would take place in virginia where the two capitals of the two countries were only 100 miles apart. Host was that the first bad strategic decision for the confederacy . I realized they had to appease the state of virginia. Was it bad strategy to put the confederate capital within 100 miles of washington d. C. . Guest well, i dont think so. As you know, it took the United States army longer to capture richmond then virtually any part of the confederacy so it turned out to be quite successful in terms of defending the confederate capital. Early in the war of the confederates lost nashville. They lost to new orleans. They lost memphis. They lost a number of other places but it took four years for them to lose richmond. So maybe it wasnt such a bad strategic decision. In any case, it was i think an important political decision and that was the main reason for taking that decision in the first place. Davis was well aware that one of the cardinal rules of military strategy is the principle of concentration. You should concentrate your forces and a substantial army that is capable of taking on enemy armies or two or three substantial armies. That would have seemed to dictate concentration of one army in virginia and perhaps another in the Mississippi Valley which was the northernmost Southern State in the Mississippi Valley. But because of political, for political reasons david could not davis could not adhere to that teaching principle of concentration because the governor of georgia, the governor of arkansas and the governor of louisiana and so on were insisting that their borders had to be defended. Host i remember the governor of louisiana said we have 30 residents colluding in the army and theyre all up north. The governors did want to send troops, uniforms, weapons. Isnt that one of the big dilemmas that davis faced at the outset to . The present of a nation are confederacy bounded on states rights. The rights of individual states but to win the war davis had to try to consolidate these states and make the governors of the states total allies essentially violate the rights to win the war. Guest that was daviss biggest headache, this tension between states rights and all of the political pressures that go along with that. And the smartest military strategy. In the American Revolution the United States had given up huge swaths of territory to the british but eventually had one and eventually that of course happened in the confederacy too. In 1861 it would have been politically impossible for davis to strip the gulf coast, the south Atlantic Coast of troops in order to defend what they virginia and tennessee. He had to defer to some degree to these political pressures from the southern governors and of course the disadvantage of that is that you have got small groups of troops scattered around the perimeter of the confederacy. Sometimes called a permit or defense or a first offense or accordance defense. Sooner or later the enemies going to break through that and of course thats what began to happen in february 1862 with a loss support hendrie and fort donaldson and the loss of new orleans. The failure in kentucky in western virginia. The enemy begins to penetrate this line. The consequence of that, davis actually admits not publicly but privately that it may have been a mistake to try to defend the entire frontier of the confederacy and he changes the strategy. In the course of doing so provokes an awful lot of controversy and dissent from governors like joe brown of georgia for example. Host and its almost too late. In early 64 early 65 davis says i think publicly no single point is vital for the existence of the confederacy. If they had had that attitude in 1861, no state, no courts no city the survival of the confederacy might have had more freedom of action to be more successful. You might have but i think it was politically impossible. Its one thing to say in theory thats right but another thing to say its a fact. I dont think he really had a choice in 1861. But in 1862 he does begin to concentrate the bulk of the first line of troops in the confederacy and three major field armies and tennessee and mississippi and while those three states primarily. And he carries that one step farther not only the concentration but also the development of ytd on two or three different occasions called the strategy of the offense of defenses. A modern analogy to that would be a football analogy, the coach who says the best defense is a good offense. Robert e. Lee who became daviss principle military partner not only is best general but i think his closest confidant among the military commanders was the practitioner par exelon. The best way to defend the confederacy was to seize opportunities when they present themselves to take the offensive against the enemy armies and to drop them back on their heels. Host lets turn to daviss inner circle. Lets talk about the man who commanded these armies and what forms they were in his side. Joe johnston, bragg, beauregard. Talk about the jealousies, the rivalries, the disobedience. Is that really the case that just like Lincoln Davis had a terrible time managing the general . Guest thats quite true. Both davis and lincoln have some of the same kinds of problems. Outsized egos among some of the principle generals. I suppose an outstanding example of that in the confederacy was peer beauregard who had a very high opinion of himself and a very low opinion of davis or at least increasingly low opinion of davis. They came into conflict fairly early after the first confederate victory in the war. The battle of manassas orb bull run. Beauregard was quite concerned about taking credit for that. He issued a report in which he took full credit for davis not turning him loose to do even more damage to the yankees. That began a process of deterioration of the relationship between those two generals. Davis basically sent beauregard to the western theater in 1862 and after Albert Sidney johnston was killed at the battle of shiloh, beauregard became commander of the army, second in com