Critic's Corner

Robert G. H. Kean’s Inside the Confederate Government (1957)

By Stephen Davis · Originally published May 2022 · pp. 24–25

Robert Garlick Hill Kean (1828–1898).

Inside the Confederate Government; The Diary of Robert Garlick Hill Kean, Head of the Bureau of War, by Robert Garlick Hill Kean. Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York, 1957.

“An essential Confederate narrative,” David Detzer calls Robert Kean’s wartime diary. He judges it as “a good companion with that of the war clerk John B. Jones.” Yet while Jones’ A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary (published in 1866) has been reprinted six times (most recently, as magnificently edited by James I. Robertson), Kean’s diary, edited by Edward Younger and published in 1957, has only been reissued once, by LSU Press in 1993. (I’m working from the 1957 edition, which I bought years ago for $7.95.) Born in 1828 of a substantial Virginia family, Kean received a fine education, which included a B.A. and law degree from the University of Virginia. (It’s pronounced Cane; Younger got the diary from the family.) Then followed legal practice, marriage and children. “He was passionately devoted to Virginia,” Younger writes in his Introduction, so when the war began Kean enlisted in the 11th Virginia Infantry. A few months after Manassas his colonel, Samuel Garland, saw to his promotion and assignment to the quartermaster service. In February 1862, now a captain, he was transferred to the staff of Brig. Gen. George Wythe Randolph (who just happened to be his uncle). Well before then he had begun this diary. During the winter of 1861-’62 Kean, like all of

Joe Johnston’s troops in northern Virginia, complained about inactivity (“dullness reigns supreme,” December 8). When he returned home to Lynchburg he found his wife Jane with a newborn lad—“a two day old soldier for the Southern Confederacy,” as the new dad called him. In the fall of 1861, Captain Kean stood unsuccessfully for election to the C.S. House of Representatives. It was just as well, as our diarist came to view the Confederate Congress as ineffective. “Certainly no deliberative body ever met in this state with less of statesmanship in it,” he recorded in March 1863; “I do not know that I lost anything in not being elected to Congress.” Kean was appointed Chief of the Bureau of War in April 1862, but we are without his observations during that fruitful summer, as Kean did not maintain his diary from February to October 1862. But when he resumed, it was at full force. Watching the work of his uncle (named Secretary of War in March), it didn’t take long for Kean to recognize that Jefferson Davis was a micromanager. Davis appointed and met with generals without involving the War Secretary, and by making strategic decisions himself he reduced Randolph “to a mere clerk.” “Thus the President actually evicted him of his office,” Kean wrote. Following a disagreement with the president (the secretary wanted Holmes in Arkansas to cross the river to help Pemberton; Davis did not), Randolph resigned in November. Inside the Confederate Government bristles with Kean’s acerbic observations, particularly of high-ranking officers. He didn’t care much for Jeff Davis: “he is not a comprehensive man. He has no broad policy, either of finance, strategy, or supply.” Then there was the President’s “irrepressible West Pointism” that led him to keep such mediocrities as Samuel Cooper in high office. After Brandy Station Kean criticized Stuart for having been so conceited as to become careless, allowing the Yankees to attack him “with horses grazing and guns empty.” Braxton Bragg was “a weak man, who had lost the respect of his officers.” On D. H. Hill: “harsh, abrupt, often insulting in the effort to be sarcastic, he will offend many and conciliate none.”

On Joe Johnston Kean’s comments on Joseph E. Johnston provide some of the most fascinating elements of his diary. “I have little confidence in the General” he complained, “who came near losing Richmond and who thinks so much of himself.” He writes elsewhere that Johnston “seems more anxious to make a point than to gain a battle, to put the Government in the wrong than to defend a state.” “I do not trust him because he is timid and because he hates Davis and Lee”—this latter a comment on Johnston’s jealousy of his fellow Virginian and West Point classmate. (Both generals’ biographers comment on this. After Lee succeeded Johnston following Seven Pines, Johnston “had grown jealous of him,” writes Symonds. In addition to his being superseded, Johnston “resented Lee’s apparent favor with Jefferson Davis,” Emory Thomas notes.) It was Kean’s job to receive and process letters sent in from the field, including Johnston’s, and the Bureau Chief didn’t like what he read. “General Johnston has written another of his brief, unsatisfactory, almost captious letters,” he recorded in March 1863, when Johnston struggled to command a super-department of the west. “Another sharp captious letter,” Kean noted on April 12. (Let me save you a trip to the dictionary: captious is carping and fault-finding.) Then, a month later, after the administration had sent Johnston to Mississippi to raise an army of relief for Vicksburg, our diarist charged that Johnston’s idea of “strategy” was always to “retreat and sacrifice.” On May 29, after Grant had invested Vicksburg, Kean wrote, “If it is lost without a desperate battle to save it by Johnston, he will be ruined too, and justly. The stake is worthy of a desperate throw. Such venture is inconsistent with Johnston’s character as I understand it, and I greatly fear he will not make it.” He was quite prescient. “The President is furious with Johnston,” he recorded on June 21, two weeks before (as Kean had predicted) Pemberton surrendered. He also saw campaign reports. Of the one from Richard Taylor about Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Kean lamented, “It is enough to make a man sick to read it.” On Aug. 13, 1863, he entered, “General Lee’s report of the Pennsylvania has been received some days. It is as jejune and unsatisfactory a document as I ever read.” Kean was unafraid of commenting on big matters of strategy. “The radical vice of Mr. Davis’s whole military system is the separate departmental organizations, each reporting only to him,” he wrote after the fall of Vicksburg, noting that the river fortress might have been saved if the several C.S. departments had coordinated resources. (Supra., Holmes across the river.) Yet it is Kean’s comments on people around the capital that make up the heart of the diary. After Gettysburg, Lee sort of clammed up. “He is silent as the grave,” Kean observed; “when he deigns to make a communication of any importance it is a letter to the President, or telegram—always brief and jejune. Beauregard is the only general who keeps the Department advised fully of affairs in his department, of his plans and prospects.” Then there was the time when Mrs. Abraham Myers called Varina Davis a “squaw” because of her dark complexion. “The remark became commonplace in every parlor in the city,” Jack Davis observes. Kean stated that he heard of the incident from “the late A.S.W.,” who had told Ms. Davis of the remark. (Younger doesn’t identify “A.S.W.”)

The Stuart-Hood imbroglio

Here’s something you might not have heard: “It is also rumored that Stuart is to be relieved of the command of the Army of Northern Virginia and Hood put in that position” (entry of Aug. 9, 1863). The reason, of course, was Stuart’s absence at Gettysburg. In his memoir, Hood is mum on the subject, and Richard McMurry only got it from Confederate newspapers, which of course flapped aloud over this juicy gossip. In early August the Petersburg Express even printed an article that claimed Hood had already been appointed as cavalry commander in Lee’s army. Recall Kean’s remark about Stuart being “so conceited”? Here it was, his job on the chopping block, and Jeb was writing home to Flora without a carat of concern. Not only that, but he actually fantasized about promotion. “I suppose you have seen mention of Hood’s assignment to the command of the Cavalry as Lt Genl,” Stuart wrote his wife on August 11. “It is all bosh, gotten up by some malicious scamp striving to undermine and vilify me.”1 The next day he wrote home again, stating that General Lee knew nothing of all the talk. Then, on the 18th, the conceited Stuart wrote home again: “I feel very confident that Genl Lee has recommended me for Lt Gen’l of Cavalry”; “the newspaper talk on the subject is an effort (which I believe will fail) to manufacture public opinion in favor of Hood.”2 “The L.G. is still in suspense,” he wrote her on August 28.3 A week later he beamed, “Rumor is quite rife that I have been actually appointed Lt. Gen’l.”4 As it turned out, R.G.H. had a firmer grasp of J.E.B.’s conceitedness than J.E.B. had of his promotability. On September 9, Lee’s headquarters issued its reorganization of the army’s cavalry, and while some officers received promotions, Stuart did not. Dr. Freeman observes that this stemmed merely from Lee’s belief that command of a cavalry corps did not carry the weight of responsibility as that for a corps of infantry.

A good read, and then some Kean was a good old Rebel. Writing of his beloved Virginia, he declared, “while life is spared me

I will fight in her behalf so long as a foe is on her soil.” On the other side, Lincoln was “a buffoon.” As for Yankees, he wrote, “the Earth contains no race so lost to every sentiment of manliness, honor, faith, or humanity, at once so servile and so tyrannical, so mean and so cruel, such willing slaves, and so bent on destroying the independence and existence of their enemy.” And more: contemplating the horrible plight of Confederates confined in Northern prisons, Kean shrugged, “the devilish malignity of that people passes belief and comprehension.” Reading Inside the Confederate Government is more than a literary or historical exercise; it’s also a cultural one. When all things Confederate today are being tainted by skewed notions of presentism, returning to the wartime thoughts and feelings of an intelligent, articulate Southerner 150 years ago should be helpful to all Civil War enthusiasts who wish to broaden their perspectives on our nation’s greatest struggle.

Note: Kean’s book, Inside the Confederate Government, is available on several book sellers’ websites for less than $30.

Endnotes: 1. Stuart to “My Darling Wife,” Aug. 11, 1863, Jeb Stuart Papers, 1862–1864, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond. I wish to thank John McClure, reference department manager of the Virginia Historical Society, for his invaluable help concerning the Stuart letters relating to the “Hood imbroglio,” which have been cited in Stuart’s biographies, but not in Hood’s. 2. Stuart to Flora, August 18, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, GLCO2334.0. My thanks go to Alinde Borell, archivist, for her assistance. 3. Stuart to “My Darling Wife,” August 28, Stuart Papers, VHS. 4. Emory M. Thomas, Bold Dragoon: The Life of J. E. B. Stuart (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 259 (quoting Stuart to Flora, Sept. 4).

Stephen Davis of Cumming, Ga., is author of seven books related to the Atlanta Campaign, including the Emerging Civil War paperbacks A Long and Bloody Task (2016) and All the Fighting They Want (2017). His two recent volumes on John Bell Hood (Mercer University Press, 2019, 2020) have won the Fletcher Pratt Award of the New York CWRT, the Richard Barksdale Harwell Award of the Atlanta CWRT, and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award of the Military Order of the Stars and Bars. His latest book, with Bill Hendrick, The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer Covers the Civil War, will be released this summer by the University of Tennessee Press.