Who was the better President, Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?

“If the Union and the Confederacy had changed presidents with one another”, wrote historian David Potter in 1960, “the Confederacy might have won its independence.”

This accolade is mirrored in the public memory.  In 2000 Sociologist Barry Schwartz suggested that, for many Americans, Abraham Lincoln was “a sacred being” and "a moral symbol inspiring and guiding American life".  There are 42 statues of Lincoln in the USA, including the famous one in Washington DC.  By contrast, had you heard of Jefferson Davis before you started this course?  Three of the 18 monuments to him have been toppled or removed in the past decade. 

This disparity, suggests Brian Dirke (2010) is not unwarranted; Lincoln won the war – “ultimately, the only way to assess each man”.  Nobody loves a loser. 

However, in the following essay I am going to disagree.  Let’s have a look at what we have learned. 

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War leadership

IIn his excellent 2000 Great Courses booklet on the Civil War, Professor Gary Gallagher writes that “both did well as war leaders” but that, although Davis “provided capable direction to the Confederate war effort … his performance inevitably suffers in comparison to Lincoln’s”. 

Is this comparison fair? 

Lincoln had almost no military experience, Davis a distinguished military career.  Lincoln looked uncomfortable and scruffy at military events, Davis – in the words of one Confederate soldier – “bears the marks of greatness”.  Dirke suggested that Lincoln’s volunteer army “actually liked seeing a frumpy commander-in-chief” – the image worked in the North … but only as much as did Davis in the South where “the president’s visit to the army roused enthusiasm once more to fever heat”. 

Historians have given great emphasis to Lincoln’s “evolution” as a Commander-in-Chief; it is said that he made mistakes in the beginning, but he listened to his advisors, learned quickly, and eventually fastened upon Edwin Stanton as his irascible-but-efficient War Secretary, Grant as his brilliant General, and the policy of ‘total war’.  By contrast, Davis is represented as being too confident in his own military capabilities, acted as his own War Secretary, and stuck far too long with his friend-but-mediocre-General Braxton Bragg.  His disastrous ‘cordon strategy’ at the start of the war – trying to hold a broad front in the west (it immediately collapsed) – has been especially criticised. 

This evaluation is often linked to the different approaches of the two men to their role as Commander-in-Chief.  Lincoln (especially after his disastrous insistence of an invasion of the South in 1861) tended to leave strategy to the generals.  Davis, we are told, “micro-managed”, pouring over and adjusting every document and decision. 

But is this evaluation really fair?  EVERY war involves new technologies and tactics, and takes the leaders of the last war by surprise; there are ALWAYS initial disasters and a turnover of generals until one turns up who is equal to the job.  In Davis’s case, Robert E Lee is often regarded as THE greatest general in the war; Prof Gallagher believes that Davis did not give him enough freedom, but that was how Lee liked it (he believed that the politicians made the decisions and the soldiers carried them out).  If Lincoln got his Grant, Davis got Lee … and both seem to have been well-suited and well-served by the partnership. 

Most of all, Lincoln and Davis were not competing on a level playing field.  The fictional character Rhett Butler summed it up perfectly in the 1939 film Gone With The Wind:

“The Yankees are better equipped than we.  They’ve got factories, shipyards, coalmines and a fleet to bottle up our harbors and starve us to death.  All we’ve got is cotton, and slaves and arrogance.”

… which of course is ‘Lost Cause’ reasoning, but true nonetheless.  So if one way of looking at the issue – as per Dirke – is that Lincoln won and Davis lost, another would be to say that, despite his overwhelming advantage in men and materiel, it took Lincoln four years to win the war; and that, despite impossible odds, Davis’s South held out for four years … and was finally defeated, not by Lincoln, but by sheer human exhaustion. 

“They have made Jeff Davis their scapegoat,” complained his wife’s friend Mary Chesnut, and there is an argument that historians have done no differently. 

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Political leadership

What about political leadership? 

The accepted wisdom here, of course, is that Jefferson Davis was flawed.  Biographies are replete with words such as “rigid”, “overbearing”, “unable to be forgiving towards his enemies”, “authoritarian”; even one of his most favourable biographers allows himself an “ineffective”.  By contrast, Lincoln is portrayed as the consummate politician, affable, laughing off criticism with a joke, flexible to change, and the achiever of consensus. 

One wonders how true it all is.  In terms of what each did as President, there is a remarkable similarity.  Both worked self-sacrificingly for their cause (Davis through painful chronic illness).  In a time when politicians were much more accessible (as Lincoln was to find to his cost), both spent a good deal of time dealing with favour-seekers.  Both introduced conscription, both levied an income tax, both suspended habeas corpus, both ruled increasingly by Presidential order and were accused of becoming a dictator. 

Both faced opposition – Davis’s was more personally vitriolic, but Lincoln’s just as damaging.  In September 1864 the radical Republicans were so dissatisfied with his policy on Reconstruction that they tried to nominate a different candidate; military success – the fall of Atlanta and the ‘March to the Sea’ – saved Lincoln, not any politicking that Lincoln did. 

And again, one has to take into account the hand that Davis was given compared to Lincoln.  In 1860 Lincoln became President of an established government, with an established administration, established protocols of behaviour, and a belief in ‘Union’ and political compromise.  Secession removed his most fierce opponents and, from then on, if he was falling out politically, he was falling out with his own side.  By contrast, Davis was having to create and mobilise a national government from scratch … a government which was founded on the principle that every State had the right to go its own way, by politicians who for the past decade had seen politics only as opposing and obstructing.  Davis’s Senate was a shambles, unwilling to make decisions, full of personal insults and even fights on the floor, frequently drunk, routinely absent.  If Lincoln was facing political opponents, Davis was herding cats. 

Davis’s recent biographer, William Cooper, presents him as a wise and forceful leader, totally committed to the Confederate cause.  By contrast, it is possible to portray Lincoln as a man who survived by ‘bending to the wind’ to avoid defeat – to total war, to Emancipation, to arming Black Americans, to a harsher Reconstruction.  It is like winning the war; it was a lot easier the President of a country that was successful to look like a great President, than it was for the President of a country that was disintegrating. 

Here, also, history teaches us also the impact of assassination.  Lincoln was killed, tragically, having just won the war, at the height of his success.  One wonders what would have remained of his political reputation had he been required to struggle through the quagmire of Reconstruction ...  instead, that job fell to Andrew Johnson, who is ranked by historians “among the worst presidents in American history”. 

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Moral leadership

One word appears and reappears in biographies and histories of Lincoln, and it is the word “moral”.  He had, writes one university chaplain, a “moral clarity”. 

In an age when the quality of a speech was measured by how long it went on, Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg address of just 272 words was a masterpiece of inspiration, and is still learned and recited in some US schools:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

“… from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

The best most historians have to say about Davis, by contrast, is that he genuinely believed in his morally-wrong opinion that slavery was right.  He was, as they say, on the wrong side of history.  If only things were so black-and-white, we would be able to assert, not only that Lincoln was a better President, but that Davis was a monster.  However, they are not. 

As we have seen, Lincoln was decidedly wishy-washy on slavery.  His election platform in 1860 was to continue to allow slavery in the South; and although he pushed hard for the 13th Amendment in late 1864, it was a decision towards which he had moved both slowly and at times reluctantly, and which seems to have been more politically- than morally-motivated. 

There was a similar hesitancy about Lincoln’s decision to enlist Black Americans as soldiers; he feared that arming Black Americans would create opposition.  It was not until February 1863 that the Governor of Massachusetts actually started officially enlisting Black soldiers. 

Also, we need to remember that the 14th and 15th Amendments were not the work Lincoln at all, but of the Reconstruction Congress.  Just seven years earlier, in 1858, Lincoln had assured listeners that: “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races” – a policy he only fully renounced in April 1865, in the speech which is said to have motivated John Wilkes Booth to assassinate him.  There is every evidence that, for Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of Black soldiers were military and political exigencies, not statements of principle. 

Lincoln’s caution extended into his plans for Reconstruction.  Apart from their leaders, he proposed, Confederates should be allowed to rejoin the Union by an oath to the Constitution, and all lost and confiscated lands should be restored to their owners.  This was the plan which caused his breach with the radical Republicans, but he insisted on it to the point that, when Congress suggested a compromise in July 1864, Lincoln vetoed it. 

Frederick Douglass was in no doubt about Lincoln, at least in the early years of his Presidency:

“He was pre-eminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men”. 

Having said that, there is no grey area in Davis’s belief in white superiority and slavery.  Yet it may surprise you to know that in March1865, with the war clearly about-to-be-lost, Davis and his generals decided that they needed to give up slavery to try to save Secession, and the Confederate Congress passed a bill authorising the levying of enslaved men.  “We are not fighting for slavery; we are fighting for independence,” the Richmond Examiner reported Davis as saying in August 1864. 

It is relevant to note, here, that both Lincoln and Davis came from Kentucky, a state noted for being politically, as well as geographically, in the middle between the Southern and Northern states.  Davis opposed secession, hoped that it might be accepted without war, and took the presidency of the Confederacy reluctantly.  Lincoln said on a number of occasions that he sympathised with the people of the South, and held that they had never left the Union.  They were both, to a degree, moderates. 

You will rightly say that a desperate last act to sign up the help of enslaved Southerners still falls morally far short of coming late to emancipation and equality, and you would be right.  A Confederate victory would have been a moral disaster.  But it is worthwhile noting that Lincoln was not the sainted prophet of Black freedom and equaliy that he has been painted, and it most certainly does not warrant the claim that, if Lincoln had been the Confederate President and Davis the Union’s, the Confederacy would have won the war.