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,