en to its
actions by its chief directors. And here there is something to be said.

With all his high qualities of integrity, courage, faithfulness, and
zeal, Davis lacked that insight into human life which marks the genius
of the supreme executive. He was not an artist in the use of men. He had
not that artistic sense of his medium which distinguishes the
statesman from the bureaucrat. In fact, he had a dangerous bent toward
bureaucracy. As Reuben Davis said of him, "Gifted with some of the
highest attributes of a statesman, he lacked the pliancy which enables a
man to adapt his measures to the crisis." Furthermore, he lacked humor;
there was no safety-valve to his intense nature; and he was a man
of delicate health. Mrs. Davis, describing the effects which nervous
dyspepsia and neuralgia had upon him, says he would come home from
his office "fasting, a mere mass of throbbing nerves, and perfectly
exhausted." And it cannot be denied that his mind was dogmatic. Here
are dangerous lines for the character of a leader of revolution--the
bureaucratic tendency, something of rigidity, lack of humor, physical
wretchedness, dogmatism. Taken together, they go far toward explaining
his failure in judging men, his irritable confidence in himself.

It is no slight detail of a man's career to be placed side by side with
a genius of the first rank without knowing it. But Davis does not seem
ever to have appreciated that the man commanding in the Seven Days'
Battles was one of the world's supreme characters. The relation between
Davis and Lee was always cordial, and it brought out Davis's character
in its best light. Nevertheless, so rooted was Davis's faith in his own
abilities that he was capable of saying, at a moment of acutest anxiety,
"If I could take one wing and Lee the other, I think we could between
us wrest a victory from those people." And yet, his military experience
embraced only the minor actions of a young officer on the Indian
frontier and the gallant conduct of a subordinate in the Mexican War. He
had never executed a great military design. His desire for the military
life was, after all, his only ground for ranking himself with the victor
of Second Manassas. Davis was also unfortunate in lacking the power
to overcome men and sweep them along with him--the power Lee showed
so conspicuously. Nor was Davis averse to sharp reproof of the highest
officials when he thought them in the wrong. He once wrote to Joseph
E. Joh