Almost anyone was a better choice than Jefferson Davis. Davis tried to fill his cabinet with yes-men and used them as scapegoats for failed policies. He micromanaged the war, yet never came up with a plan to win it. He appointed generals based on seniority and/or personal friendship. He sent diplomats to seek foreign recognition, yet gave them nothing to negotiate with. He often turned allies into enemies. And without Davis the damage done to the Confederate cause by Braxton Bragg, Leonidas Polk, Lucius Northrop, John Hood, and perhaps William Pendleton is reduced.
Best choices, IMO, but with no chance of the nomination are John Breckinridge and John Reagan. People that appear to have been considered at the time were Howell Cobb, Robert Toombs, and Alexander Stephens. Robert Barnwell Rhett probably wanted the job, and is one of the few choices I think would be worse than Davis. Toombs probably could have had the position if not for a bit of overimbibing and Stephens nearly got it, but Davis' supporters did a better job of politicking. Less likely possibilities, but not needing ASB's would be William Yancey, Christopher Memminger, and Louis Wigfall.
Many people have wished Toombs (despite his drinking problem) had been chosen, noting that he had warned against firing on Fort Sumter. ("It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.") But even if as president he would want to resist the temptation to fire the first shot, I doubt that Confederate public opinion would allow him to hold back for very long.
Many people have wished Toombs (despite his drinking problem) had been chosen, noting that he had warned against firing on Fort Sumter. ("It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.") But even if as president he would want to resist the temptation to fire the first shot, I doubt that Confederate public opinion would allow him to hold back for very long.
It seems to me unlikely that anyone will be elected Confederate president in November 1861 unless he was first elected provisional president in February 1861--which presumably rules out those of your candidates who are from Kentucky (Breckinridge) or Texas (Reagan or Wigfall).
The problem with Stephens is that his opposition to "despotic" Davis measures like conscription, suspension of habeas corpus, etc. would have made things even worse for the Confederacy. (Of course you might say that he opposed them only because Davis supported them, and that as president he might endorse them, but I doubt that. He seems to have been sincere, and he did not really hate Davis personally.)
Many people have wished Toombs (despite his drinking problem) had been chosen, noting that he had warned against firing on Fort Sumter. ("It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.") But even if as president he would want to resist the temptation to fire the first shot, I doubt that Confederate public opinion would allow him to hold back for very long.
I think a fire-eater like Rhett or Yancey is unlikely--the Confederacy is trying to persuade the Upper South to join them and Great Britain to recognize them, and someone with an extremist reputation is not the right man for the job.
Also, the idea of Stephen Douglas as Confederate president manages to make no sense on multiple levels.
The man who in the last few days of the election campaigned against southern secession, in the last days of his life supported Lincoln and the Union war effort, and wasn't even from the South?If you can keep Stephen A. Douglas from dying of typhoid fever, he might be a good leader, he was nicknamed the "little giant" for his short physical form was out done by his powerful and decisive figure in politics.
He was also a stanch believer in democracy.
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If you can keep Stephen A. Douglas from dying of typhoid fever, he might be a good leader, he was nicknamed the "little giant" for his short physical form was out done by his powerful and decisive figure in politics.
He was also a stanch believer in democracy.
The man who in the last few days of the election campaigned against southern secession, in the last days of his life supported Lincoln and the Union war effort, and wasn't even from the South?
I've been doing a great deal of research on Robert Toombs for my upcoming novel House of the Proud (sequel to Shattered Nation), in which he is a major character. Had he become President, he would have had some strengths and some weaknesses. His most obvious weakness, the one which lost him the chance of being President during the Montgomery Convention, was his drinking problem. He drank a lot, he drank often, and he couldn't hold his liquor at all. Just two drinks would send the poor fellow over the edge. Needless to say, this is not a good quality in a chief executive.
Another factor to consider is that Toombs despised the idea of a standing army and a professional officer corps. He hated West Point and the men who had graduated from it, considering them little more than foolish snobs. He was one of the few men in the Confederacy who thought Robert E. Lee was an idiot. Although his own military service as a brigade commander had one moment of glory at Antietam, it was otherwise disastrous; nevertheless, he thought he knew better how to run armies and fight battles than any professional officer. I don't think that this would been a very beneficial trait for the President of what would have been an embattled nation.
On the other hand, one of the things Toombs would have had going for him was that he understood government finance and fiscal policy better than perhaps any other Southern statesman. He saw the folly of trying to finance the war through printed money and tried to stop it, but no one was paying any attention. State's righter that he was, Toombs still felt that heavier taxation would have been preferable to additional printed money. The South lost the war because of inflation more than any other single cause. Davis never quite grasped the nature of the problem, but Toombs surely would have. Whether he could have done anything about it is another question.