Final Delusions

“Poor President. He is unwilling to see what all around him see. He cannot bring himself to believe that after four years of glorious struggle, we are to be crushed into submission.”

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Confederate Soldier Describing Jefferson Davis 1865

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The quotation is from a book I just finished titled Embattled Rebel, a study of Jefferson Davis as the Confederate Commander in Chief by noted Civil War historian, James McPherson. I think it’s fair to describe McPherson’s verdict on Davis’s?performance as mixed. He had a tough job…but made it tougher by making some key mistakes on personnel decisions (which of us hasn’t?)…and by not suffering fools gladly. He had enough fools around him to make this a flashpoint.

As I read the book, I kept finding strong similarities between the South in its last throes and Ukraine today. Both combatants were/are short of men, ammunition, equipment, and funds. Both – despite the evidence to the contrary – continually insisted that a full reversal of fortune was imminent.

It struck me as I read the description of Davis and the Confederacy in their last days, that the collapse of a nation in war may follow a more predictable trajectory than we might expect. Perhaps it’s a bit like Ernest Hemingway’s description of how he went broke: “Gradually and then all at once.”

People urged Davis to seek negotiations with Lincoln. Against his better judgment (he could anticipate the outcome), he agreed to do so late in the conflict. The discussions quickly reached an impasse. Lincoln’s demands included reunification and the end of slavery. Both were non-starters with Davis. Why else had he fought the war?

Essentially, the goals of the South precluded any negotiations.

As Winston Churchill once said in a time of similar impasse: “Let us go forward together and put these grave matters to the proof.”

What he meant was that – like it or not - some conflicts can only be settled on the battlefield.