Free Dixie Betrayed by David J. Eicher Page B

given a different order of ranking among the generals of the Confederacy. (Hindsight
     would show that Davis’s simple method worked pretty well.) Whether Joe Johnston was capable of being the South’s leading general
     is debatable; clearly, Johnston felt he was more than good enough, and Davis felt he wasn’t. But the deed was done, and Johnston
     ranked fourth.
    The press had a field day speculating on the different possibilities of what might have been. Johnston, too, would not let
     it rest. “Cabinet meeting today,” Stephen Mallory penned in his diary in mid-September. “The Presdt. shows us a letter from
     Genl Joe Johnston; a protest against the appt. of Cooper, Lee, and Sydney Johnston over his head in the grade of Genl.— It
     is an intemperate letter, written evidently under great excitement of feeling. The Presdt’s answer is short, and abrupt, &
     this terminates a lifelong friendship, for a time, at least.” 8 In his capacity as president, it was Davis’s first lesson in not being able to please all the people all the time. 9
    To be sure, such difficulties with officers were not limited to the Confederacy. The U.S. Army had its own long-standing concerns
     over command. The term “commander in chief” engendered confusion, for example: by Constitutional specification the president
     was defined as the supreme military leader, despite the fact that many politicians believed the president to be the nominal
     head only, dependent on the leadership of a professional soldier during a time of war.
    The Union’s vague notions of a commander had deep roots. Bvt. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, hero of the wars of 1812 and Mexico,
     was commander in chief of the U.S. Army by custom. He was titled “general-in-chief” to differentiate his role from that of
     the president. As the ranking officer of the army, Scott was regarded by most as too aged and too infirm to remain in active
     command. This, despite his engineering of the Union “Anaconda Plan” to infiltrate the South by Mississippi River invasion
     and weaken its military resolve. As a Virginian Scott was considered by some Yankees as leaning too much toward the South.
     But in early 1861 no obvious successor to Scott existed. Lincoln needed Scott’s expertise as politicians challenged the president’s
     complete lack of military experience, and Scott needed Lincoln’s support to thwart any negative comments about his Virginia
     background. Despite the instability the Scott-Lincoln partnership functioned reasonably well, at least relative to what was
     happening in the South.
    In the midst of the squabbling over rank, the Confederate Congress had business to conduct. The second session of the Provisional
     Congress, held in Montgomery, lasted from April 29 through May 21. During these early meetings, which continued in the State
     Capitol, Davis discovered new enemies. Members of the Congress, who considered themselves, not the president, the supreme
     authority of the Confederacy, now included Robert Rhett, Howell Cobb, Aleck Stephens, Louis T. Wigfall, and Robert Toombs,
     as well as Virginian Robert M. T. Hunter, Louisianan Edward Sparrow, and South Carolinians James Chesnut, Lawrence M. Keitt,
     and William Porcher Miles. Although some like Chesnut, Wigfall, and Hunter were Davis friends, others wanted to test the president
     immediately. On May 11 Congress began that test. Anxious for a location that would serve the war front better logistically,
     and following Virginia’s secession, Congress voted to move the Confederate Congress to Richmond, Virginia. Among the strong
     supporters of this move were Cobb, Keitt, Miles, Wigfall, and Hunter. President Davis objected, reminding Congress that Montgomery
     was the seat and that “great embarrassment and probable detriment to the public service must result from a want of co-intelligence
     between the coordinate branches of the Government incident to such separation.” 10 In other words Davis had