The President of the Southern Confederacy, on the other hand, was Jefferson Davis, a man whose personal instrumentality in bringing about the rebellion gave him both knowledge and authority; an educated soldier and veteran of the Mexican war, in which he held a high command; familiar, through long service as Secretary of War and on the Senate Military Committee, not only with all the details of military administration, but with the points of strength and weakness in the military establishment of the enemy he was about to grapple with. Placed at the head of a new government, with neither army nor navy, nor law nor tradition for their control, he was free to exercise his superior knowledge of military matters for the best possible use of the men at his command in organizing his military establishment. None of the political conditions surrounding him forced on President Davis the appointment of political generals--an unavoidable evil which long postponed the effectiveness of President Lincoln's army administration. Whatever his judgment, guided by his professional military experience, approved of, he was free to do. It was President Lincoln's difficult task to learn something about military matters himself, and then to untie or cut the Gordian knot of hampering conditions; and if, in doing this, an occasional injustice was done to an individual officer, it is a cause for wonder far less significant than that by the exercise of his extraordinary faculty of common-sense he progressed as rapidly as he did toward the right way of accomplishing the ends he had in view.
[Illustration: FRANCIS H. PIERPONT, Governor of West Virginia.]
[Illustration: CAMP OF THE FORTY-FOURTH NEW YORK INFANTRY, NEAR ALEXANDRIA, VA.]
The beginning of trouble in 1861 found the administration of the War Department in the hands of Secretary Joseph Holt, who had succeeded the secessionist Floyd, and was in turn succeeded by Simon Cameron, the war secretary of Lincoln's first cabinet, who remained there until the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton, the great "war secretary" of the remaining years of the struggle. Cameron was a shrewd politician, but was uninformed on military matters, for advice on which President Lincoln relied principally on other members of the cabinet and on General Scott. The cabinet of 1861 contained also John A. Dix, in the Treasury--whence issued his celebrated "shoot him on the spot" { 49} despatch--who took a general's commission when he retired in favor of Salmon P. Chase, the Secretary of the Treasury during most of the war. Gideon Welles was Secretary of the Navy.