An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

Author Essay
No one in the past seems to have appreciated the full dimension of the disintegration -- political and civil as well as military -- during the closing days of the Confederacy in February-April 1865. Indeed, that proved to be a story in its way even more fascinating than the incredible adventure of the flight of the government itself and its pursuit by Union cavalrymen.

Moreover, the characters involved are compelling. Difficult as he could be, and unlikable as he may seem to our sensibilities today, President Jefferson Davis was a rock throughout. He never lost faith or dedication to his cause. Indeed, though there is no other comparison between them, there is something almost Hitler-like about Davis in these final days, reminiscent of the Führer buried in his Berlin bunker and refusing to acknowledge that his cause was crumbling about him, or that his army and people no longer had the will, determination, or physical ability to go on. Unlike Hitler, however, Davis was no coward. Not for him the easy escape of suicide, to leave his people to their fate. Davis would share their hardship, though he, too, in the end, felt betrayed by some and abandoned by others. He had been the most dedicated Confederate of them all.

At odds with Davis in those final months was his chief cabinet minister, an altogether different sort of man. Warm, engaging, diplomatic, and urbane, Secretary of War General John C. Breckinridge possessed all the social virtues that Davis lacked, and he knew how to use them. Where Davis's life is largely a story of lost friends, Breckinridge held the loyalty, even adoration, of almost everyone who knew him. He also had the gift of pragmatism, the ability to make rational judgments detached from his emotions.

Unlike Davis, Breckinridge knew when it was over for the Confederacy, and as a result, during the final months of the infant nation's existence, Breckinridge's efforts were bent behind the scenes on engineering a dignified peace and surrender short of the utter defeat and conquest that were the only alternatives in Davis's independence-or-nothing policy. No cabinet minister had ever had the courage to stand up to Davis, but Breckinridge had the personal prestige and the following in the government and army to risk doing so, again and again.

Yet theirs was a civil and constitutional battle between men who were cordial friends, if not intimates; even though in later years Davis would endlessly castigate everyone who had opposed him during his presidency, he never had anything but praise for Breckinridge, the only man who ever successfully resisted his policy. Perhaps that was because Breckinridge had been so subtle and nonconfrontational that Davis never actually realized just how much he had been outmaneuvered by his war secretary. Indeed, Breckinridge even enlisted the sainted Robert E. Lee in his plan to gently force Davis to recognize the inevitable -- a behind-the-scenes political role that most Lee biographers have failed to note, and proof that Lee was a man who could confront the inescapable (even though in the end he stopped short of playing the role devised for him in the peace plan.) Still, this story reveals hints of a revolutionary Lee that few would suspect.

We spend far more time studying how nations begin than we do looking at their ends, and in so doing we miss some of the essential understanding of how countries and societies cope in crisis. The death of the Confederacy proved to be far more complex and intrigue-ridden than the simple story of defeat and disintegration that has come down to us. It was political and personal as well, founded as much in personalities as it was in policies. Most amazingly of all, those trying to bring about its demise from within were doing so as a way of setting the role for a new South in the future in a reunited America. In their end, men like Breckinridge and Lee were seeking their beginning. (William C. Davis)