Our Presenter: Dr. Anne Bailey
Dr. Anne J. Bailey is Professor Emeritus of history at Georgia College & State University, the public Liberal Arts college for the University of Georgia. She is the author or editor of eight books on the Civil War, numerous book chapters, and more than 300 articles and book reviews. Her books include Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War, War and Ruin: William T. Sherman and the Savannah Campaign, and The Chessboard of War: Sherman and Hood in the Autumn Campaigns of 1864, among others. Her books have been featured in The History Book Club and she has won several book awards. The Chessboard of War, which looks at the Confederate Army of Tennessee, won The Richard Barksdale Harwell Book Award for the best book on the Civil War in 2001. Dr. Bailey is also general editor of “Great Campaigns of the Civil War,” published by the University of Nebraska Press, and she serves as editor of the SCWH Newsletter, a quarterly publication of the international Society of Civil War Historians. In addition, she was the editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly, the state’s historical journal of record, from 2000 until 2010. Dr. Bailey is the 2005 recipient of the Dallas CWRT’s Grady McWhiney Award of Merit.
Topic: Who’s Minding the Store: Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Cabinet
When in 1861 the seven seceded states created the Confederate States of America, newly appointed president Jefferson Davis was faced with organizing a government while at the same time preparing for war. One cabinet appointment went to each of the original seven states, but only the postmaster general and secretary of the navy were still in their positions when the Confederacy collapsed in 1865. During the four years, Davis made sixteen appointments to head six departments. (One man accounted for three of these, Judah Benjamin, as he went from being attorney general to secretary of war to the secretary of state.) And men like Robert Toombs didn’t want to serve his country from behind a desk; he wanted to be a general fighting in the field. For that matter, Jefferson Davis preferred the military side of his job: the Confederacy had no general-in-chief like Lincoln did and Davis ran through six secretaries of wars. Dr. Bailey will look at how Davis’s military background influenced his overall strategy and how the secretaries of war, in particular, fared under him. Could Confederate strategy have been different if there had been a different man in charge? And how much influence did the men in the war department really have over final decisions? What happens when politicians run a war instead of a single general at the top?