58 e lusive v ictories
Swamp Fox). During the Civil War, Confederate irregular operations
and cavalry raids behind Union lines gave northern commanders fi ts, as
shown by the raids that drove Grant into retreat in his fi rst eff ort to take
Vicksburg.
Davis persuaded himself that the Confederacy was too fragile to base
its strategy on defense in depth and harassing operations. He believed
that any territory left to the enemy would defect. As evidence, he could
point to increasing desertion by soldiers whose homes had fallen under
Union control. Yet he clearly underestimated what carefully planned
and organized guerilla-style activity might accomplish, as well as the
dedication of Confederate supporters to the cause of southern indepen-
dence. Even after the trans-Mississippi South (Arkansas, Texas,
Missouri, and part of Louisiana) was cut off following Grant’s capture
of Vicksburg in July 1863, the region remained loyal to the Richmond
government. Davis worried, too, that loss of political control would
encourage slaves to fl ee or rebel, one reason that owners of twenty or
more slaves were exempt from conscription. Here again he misjudged
the potential of unconventional forces. As postwar depredations against
freedmen in the South would show, violence by irregulars could serve
as a powerful instrument for continuing racial intimidation. Davis left
himself with no alternative, then, but to pursue conventional warfare
against an adversary of far greater means.
Even on the terms he chose, Davis proved himself to be a poor
leader. Although he recognized that the Confederacy could not hope to
hold its entire 1,000-mile frontier with the Union, he devised no
coherent strategic response. Initially, he acquiesced as General Albert
Sidney Johnston in Tennessee adopted a cordon (linear) defense, which
collapsed quickly when pierced by Union advances in early 1862.
Davis understood that his commanders would need to join forces to
defeat larger enemy armies, but he never ordered them to do so or
grouped them under a single general. Rather, he merely urged them to
cooperate for the common good, failing to recognize that each one
would perceive that good from his own particular perspective. T i m e
and again, whether in Kentucky in summer 1862 or at Vicksburg in
1863, Confederate generals refused to work together. Th ey thus surren-
dered the key geographic advantage of interior lines that might have let
them fi ght particular Union armies on equal or better terms and instead