JOHN B. JONES’S WAR

A deep divide between military and nonmilitary topics runs through the literature on the Civil War. Historians interested in the home front too often have explored politics, society, civilian morale, and economics, with scarcely a nod toward the campaigning of massive armies. In many such works it is possible to lose track of the fact that the largest war in American history was in progress. Similarly, historians primarily interested in strategic and tactical movements often have ignored the broader political and social context within which armies maneuvered and fought. Both approaches deny readers an appreciation of the innumerable ways in which the home front and the battlefield intersected. These intersections were especially crucial in a conflict between two democracies, wherein the respective peoples let their political and military leaders know what they expected.

Letters and diaries written by participants highlight the reciprocal impact of events on the home front and the battlefield—how civilian morale rose and fell in response to victories and defeats, for example, and how political imperatives shaped strategic planning. No published primary source offers better insights into this phenomenon than John Beauchamp Jones’s A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital. Published in Philadelphia in 1866, its two substantial volumes comprise nearly nine hundred pages of reporting and commentary on the war as seen through the eyes of a man well positioned near the seat of Confederate government. Although frequently quoted over the years, Jones’s diary never has been fully exploited, in part, no doubt, because the absence of an index in the original edition militated against easy access to its many riches. Unsatisfactory two-volume reprints in 1938 and 1982 failed to provide careful annotation and a full index, and a one-volume abridged version in 1958 deleted so much useful material as to seriously compromise the diary’s integrity. Fortunately, James I. Robertson Jr. undertook the task of preparing an annotated, indexed edition of Jones’s diary, the 2015 publication of which marked a milestone in Confederate historiography.

Jones’s discussion of civilian attitudes toward Confederate military strategy illustrates the diary’s value. Historians have expended great effort debating whether the Confederacy should have pursued a more rigorously defensive strategy in order to conserve precious manpower. Robert E. Lee has come in for particularly harsh criticism from scholars such as J. F. C. Fuller, Thomas L. Connelly, and Alan T. Nolan (and later writers who parroted those three men’s arguments) because his offensive tactics resulted in horrendous casualties. Too often ignored in this debate are civilian expectations in the Confederacy. What kind of military action did the people want? What effect did offensive and defensive operations have on civilian morale?

Jones’s diary should give pause to those who argue that Confederate generals too often took the offensive. It makes clear how popular morale often sagged when the people perceived that their armies stood on the defensive everywhere. In late June 1862, to name a crucial instance, Jones described widespread concern that Richmond would be besieged (every major siege of the war, it is worth noting, ended in Confederate disaster—though this was not apparent in the early summer of 1862): “Our people are beginning to fear there will be no more fighting around Richmond until McClellan digs his way to it. The moment fighting ceases, our people have fits of gloom and despondency; but when they snuff battle in the breeze, they are animated with confidence.” Even Lee’s aggressive, and exceedingly bloody, triumph during the Seven Days failed to satisfy many Confederates. “Lee does not follow up his blows on the whipped enemy,” observed Jones, three days after the battle of Malvern Hill, “and some sage critics censure him for it.”34

Jones included in his diary a vast amount of useful information and opinion about an astonishing range of events and issues. In early April 1863, he wrote about the famous bread riots in Richmond. When the commotion began, one young woman in the mob—“seemingly emaciated, but yet with a smile”—told Jones the rioters sought only “to find something to eat.” “I could not, for the life of me,” noted Jones, “refrain from expressing the hope that they might be successful.” Just two days later, however, his last entry on the topic repeated a rumor “that the riot was a premeditated affair, stimulated from the North, and executed through the instrumentality of emissaries. Some of the women, and others, have been arrested.”35

Jones accorded a good deal of attention to the war’s impact on slavery—and especially to how Union military forces threatened to disrupt Confederate control over black people. In late March 1863, for example, he wrote, “A very large number of slaves, said to be nearly 40,000, have been collected by the enemy on the Peninsula and at adjacent points, for the purpose, it is supposed, of co-operating with Hooker’s army in the next campaign to capture Richmond.” In January 1865, as Confederates debated whether to arm some slaves in the face of increasing Federal pressure, Jones reacted strongly to a comment that General Lee “was always a thorough emancipationist.” Were that true about Lee, thought Jones (it was not true, I hasten to add), “and if it were generally known, . . . how soon would his great popularity vanish like the mist of the morning!” This passage appears in the diary just more than three weeks after Jones commented that most Confederates, having concluded that Jefferson Davis was inadequate to the task of winning independence, “desire to see Gen. Lee at the head of affairs.”36 Even Lee’s towering reputation, the diary thus reveals, was subject to damage from the rip currents generated by discussions relating to slavery.

On April 17, 1865, Jones and his family prepared to leave Federal-occupied Richmond. “I never swore allegiance to the Confederate States Government,” he wrote in his penultimate entry, “but was true to it.”37 The pages of A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary highlight that loyalty, and its pages introduce modern readers to a very perceptive witness.