Katherine Addison's Reviews > An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government

My primary takeaway from this book is that Jefferson Davis was a pig-headed nightmare.

This is a step-by-step recounting of the flight of the Confederate government from Richmond. William C. Davis's two principal characters are Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, whom he depicts as locked in an almost-unacknowledged struggle for how the Confederacy was going to end the war. Or, in J. Davis's case, NOT end the war. He was talking up to the moment he was captured by the Yankees about going to Texas and raising another army, and the fact that he apparently could not understand that this was impossible is actually one of the things I found most frightening about him. Against him, Breckinridge's determination to end the war and end the Confederacy in a way that provided maximum protection for both soldiers and civilians does look honorable.

I think W. C. Davis is wearing rose-colored glasses in a couple of places. He asserts that Robert E. Lee waffled about telling J. Davis that the war had to end because the "old warrior" couldn't bring himself to admit defeat, whereas I've read enough about Lee to know that he waffled because that was what Lee DID---given almost any moment at which he needed to provide a clear statement of his opinion, he equivocated and sidestepped, was vague where he needed to be specific, etc. It was the nature of the beast.

And W. C. Davis is definitely wearing rose-colored glasses in his conclusion, where he tries to argue that BOTH Breckinridge AND Davis provided good examples for the South after the Civil War. Breckinridge I'll give you---when he came back to the US after the amnesty, he stayed away from political office, he supported the enfranchisement of Black men, when he said anything it was about reconciliation. But Davis?

"If the Confederate president never accepted defeat gracefully, and even if he fell into the bitter post war squabbles that helped to make so many Southerners look foolish and spiteful, still he always rose above the mendacity and rank falsehoods to which the others repeatedly sank. If he never inspired his people with love, still by his conduct as a prisoner and for twenty years afterward, he gave an example of unbending pride and refusal either to supplicate or apologize" (397), and I'm sorry, but how is this a good thing? Also, I'm not quite sure I understand the difference between "mendacity and rank falsehoods" and what he says about J. Davis's memoirs: "What he did not wish to admit, he simply wrote out of his history. Inconvenient facts he ignored, and embarrassing incidents he expunged. His failures were really those of others; his only mistakes had been putting faith in subordinates who then let him down" (395). It seems to me like W. C. Davis is splitting hairs, just as I think he's splitting hairs when he tries to argue that J. Davis wasn't a fanatic. J. Davis's complete divorce from reality seems to me to be the essence of fanaticism.

So I think W. C. Davis needed to think through what he was saying about J. Davis a second time. I would also have liked a slightly more heads-on acknowledgement of chattel slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War---he doesn't deny it, or try to ignore it out of existence, but he doesn't address it, either. I know, it's so much easier to talk about the Confederacy if you don't, because then it DOES almost look as simple as a disagreement over the Constitution, and words like "honor" don't have such an uneasy footing, but the fact is that the liberty that white Southerners were so loud about wanting was specifically the liberty to own other people, and while I understand that most of them didn't see it that way, I also don't think it's something that we should move past. We have the example of the abolitionists to show us that it's also NOT simply a matter of imposing 21st century values on 19th century people, and as I said in some other review, I think about Frederick Douglass and what HE would say. And that tends to cut through the rhetoric pretty quickly.