Thomas Mauser

The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy

Thomas Lawrence Connelly and Archer Jones

(LSU Press Paperback Edition 1998)

The late academic historians Thomas L. Connelly and Archer Jones offer a detailed analysis of the competing factions within the Confederate high command that sought to influence Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s war policy during the American Civil War. Connelly and Jones contend that, “. . . the continual infighting among the Confederate leadership . . . involved a continuing debate over basic war policy, particularly the Confederacy’s proper strategic course,”[1] and they argue that the intellectual framework for this debate was Baron Henri Jomini’s strategic military principles. Connelly and Jones discuss Jomini’s principles in great detail, and they note that his written interpretations of the military campaigns of Frederick the Great of Prussia and Napoleon influenced the strategies of the Confederate and Union high commands during the American Civil War.[2] Their analysis of Jomini’s principles, however, bogs down in overlong and repetitive details, and the maps of Prussian, Napoleonic, and American Civil War military campaigns used to illustrate Jomini’s principles are poorly drawn.

Connelly and Jones point out that the military education offered to pre-Civil War military cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, did not emphasize tactics and strategy. Some cadets studied the lessons and principles of Jomini and Napoleon on their own, while others did not. Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a West Point graduate, studied Jomini’s principles and Napoleon’s military campaigns and used his knowledge to lead the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in a series of audacious military campaigns beginning in June 1862. Lee was also a trusted military advisor to President Davis. In this role he sought to influence the president’s strategic policy by pressing him to maintain a strong Confederate military presence in Virginia at the expense of the Western Confederacy because he felt duty bound to defend his native state and did not understand the geography of the Western Confederacy.[3] While being a native Virginian might explain his Virginia-first mindset, the second part of Connelly and Jones’s argument is incorrect. Lee learned about the geography of the West during his time as a young United States Army engineer working on various Mississippi River projects in the late 1830s.[4]

Counterbalancing General Lee’s influence was a cohort of Western-based Confederate generals and politicians. Riven by political rivalries and personal animosities, this lobby was nevertheless united around two strategic ideas: (1) the Confederacy had to secure a Jomini-inspired offensive-minded concentration of men and materiel in the West in order to strike the Western-based Union armies at their most vulnerable points; (2) the defence of valuable Confederate munitions centers in Georgia and Alabama was of critical importance.[5]

A member of this lobby, West Point graduate and Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, promoted the lobby’s strategic ideas to the Confederate high command. A student of Jomini and Napoleon, Beauregard submitted various strategic plans to President Davis that aimed to defeat the Union armies in the West by emphasizing Jomini’s principles of mobility, a focus on the offensive, and a concentration of force at the enemy’s weakest points. Connelly and Jones go out of their way to dismiss Beauregard as vain and pompous, and his plans as largely unrealistic,[6] and then proceed to argue that Lee was, “. . . the ablest executor of the ideas so eloquently advocated by Beauregard.”[7]

Pulled in opposite directions for two years, it was spring 1864 before President Davis accepted the strategy promoted by the Confederacy’s Western lobby. His efforts to reform and decentralize the Western military departments and seize the offensive in the West ultimately failed because the Confederate government still insisted on overseeing military coordination while ignoring the logistical realities in the West.[8] By late 1864, most of the Confederacy’s vital manufacturing areas in the West had fallen into the hands of the Union Army and by April 1865 the Confederacy collapsed.

In their engaging work, Connelly and Jones succeed in detailing the factions and ideas that struggled for influence over Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s strategic policy, a struggle that was finally resolved but failed to turn the tide in favour of the Confederate war effort.

[1] Thomas Lawrence Connelly and Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Louisiana State University Press, 1973), x.

[2] Connelly and Jones, Politics of Command, 3.

[3] Connelly and Jones, Politics of Command, 39-40.

[4] Rick Britton, “’What a Beautiful Country It Is’ – Robert E. Lee on the Mississippi,” The Lee Family Digital Archive, accessed 28 November 2024, https://leefamilyarchive.org/history-reference-addresses-britton-index/

[5] Connelly and Jones, Politics of Command, 53-54.

[6] Connelly and Jones, Politics of Command, 82-83.

[7] Connelly and Jones, Politics of Command, 173.

[8] Connelly and Jones, Politics of Command, 158.