reconstituting the gov't

[atlantis]

Davis was when captured headed west to reconstitute the gov't. Was this the only plan or was there a plan to set up a gov't in exile.

 

[Rebforever]

Davis was when captured headed west to reconstitute the gov't. Was this the only plan or was there a plan to set up a gov't in exile.

Do you have a source for your statement?

 

[atlantis]

Do you have a source for your statement?

Davis wrote his wife on the 22nd of April of his intent to go to Texas and if need be Mexico. What I would like to know is how far he had thought it out, the cabinet had been dismissed, congress was scattered to the four corners. If he had made it to Texas or Mexico was it even possible to reassemble the cabinet .

 

[Rebforever]

I am not sure where his intentions were but he was caught in Georgia.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/civil/jb_civil_jeffdav_1.html

 

[chellers]

Moving to What ifs.

 

[AndyHall]

What I would like to know is how far he had thought it out

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A good account of Davis' flight from Richmond is James L. Swanson's Bloody Times: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Manhunt for Jefferson Davis. The takeaway is that Jefferson Davis didn't so much have a plan, as had a notion about reconstituting the government in Texas or Mexico, and continuing the struggle from there. When he set out from Richmond in early April, he didn't really have any specific plan other than to keep up the struggle. Davis comes across in Swanson's book as being one of the last Confederate leaders to recognize that the South had genuinely been defeated on all fronts, and doggedly impervious to the idea that there really was no longer a Confederate military to regroup and carry on the fight in the Western theater. By late April 1865, Davis' belief in the ability to carry on the fight was unrealistic at best, and delusional at worst.