Who is the military commander for the confederacy?

Answer 1

The Union Army always had a general-in-chief, but the Confederates did not, except for the last two months of the war, when Robert E. Lee was made general-in-chief, too late to save the situation. Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a West Point graduate, basically was his own general-in-chief, and Secretary of War also.

The Confederates divided the south into geographical Departments, and appointed generals to command Departments. These generals also had command of any Confederate troops in the Department. So Lee, for instance, was commander of the Department of Northern Virginia for most of the war, and also of the Army of Northern Virginia.

In August 1861 the Confederate Congress passed a law authorizing the president to name five men as full generals, four-star generals. These were the first four stars in American history. (The Yankees had only a single officer with three stars, Grant, and only for the last year of the war. No other northern general was more than a two-star Major General.) The five men named by Davis, in order of seniority, were Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard. Later three more men became Confederate four star generals: Braxton Bragg, Edmund Kirby Smith and John Bell Hood.

Cooper, the highest ranking Confederate general of them all, was from New Jersey. His wife was from Virginia, and he went south with her when the war started. Nobody has ever heard of him today. When Davis was Secretary of War during the Pierce Administration, Cooper had been Adjutant and Inspector General of the US Army, and worked closely with Davis. Davis seemed to hope that Cooper would be a help running the war, but he spent the entire war in Richmond as a glorified clerk, shuffling paper. Cooper was Adjutant and Inspector General of the Confederate Armies.