Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/105

 President Davis and General Johnston. 99

" RICHMOND, VA., September 14, 1861.

"General J. E. JOHNSTON:

"SiR I have just received and read your letter of the i2th instant. Its language is, as you say, unusual; its arguments and statements utterly one-sided, and its insinuations as unfounded as they are unbecoming.

" I am, &c.,

"JEFFERSON DAVIS."

It may be noted that up to this date his official telegrams and letters to the General were couched in the most friendly tone. In an indirect way he had previously justified his appointments on the ground that the laws were "new and unsettled by decisions" and that "their provisions were special." Afterward the President studiously avoided the question.

DAVIS' POSITION.

After the war, in his "Rise and Fall" Davis gives his views of this question at the time. He held that Johnston's position of brigadier in the old army was simply staff, and did not entitle him to command troops without special assignment, and evidently intends to leave the inference that by reason of this Cooper, Sidney Johnston and Lee all ranked him.

His reasoning is of doubtful cogency, and greatly weakened by the fact that if Johnston's previous rank of brigadier-general was merely staff, so also was that of Samuel Cooper, who had been adjutant-general of the old army, with only the rank of colonel. Yet, for reasons of his own, the President coolly ignored the staff argument as well as that of rank, and made Cooper the senior gen- eral of the Confederate army. This point seems to have entirely escaped the keen observation of Johnston as well as all other com- mentators. And notwithstanding Mrs. Davis' claim that the Presi- dent was scrupulous in his strict construction of the law, it is a strange fact that in promoting Cooper he clearly and probably inten- tionally violated a plain statute of the Confederate Congress.

Mr. Davis is mistaken, as I think, in asserting that Robert E. Lee had held the higher rank in the United States army. Johnston and Lee were made lieutenant-colonels respectively of the first and second