Themes of the American Civil War

vision, the defects of which had already been apparent in his founding address in Montgomery nearly four years earlier. The South may have been a distinctive society in 1861, as its new President had insisted, but the most vital element in its distinctiveness—the relationship between race, class, and power—was also its greatest burden, and for Davis to have challenged it openly would have conceded the very argument the Confederacy had been founded to defend.
Confederate nationalism failed, therefore, because, as Drew Gilpin Faust has argued, it sought to prescribe change in the service of continuity, and then proved unable to contain or to explain the social, economic, and political transformations generated by civil war The extent to which this deficiency could have been overcome through a more creative application of Confederate federalism remains open to question. Much has been written about the structure and style of Confederate politics, and especially about the failure to develop a party system through which, it is argued, principle and practicality could more effectively have combined. As George Rable has noted, however, the suggestion that the absence of parties in itself proved harmful to the Confederate war effort rests more on assumptions than evidence . . .”
42 Parties in some shape may conceivably have developed had the war lasted beyond the spring of 1865, but rebuilding a competitive party system in a region, the lower South, from whence they had disappeared a decade before would have proved a Herculean task.
Yet, by comparison with the federal states, where Abraham Lincoln was able to deploy partisanship to crucial advantage, Confederate politics was a conspicuously disputatious art, a cacophony of voices ill tuned to the harmonious needs of wartime nation-building. And here Jefferson Davis must share responsibility. Too much of Davis’s energy during the war was dissipated in querulous argument, in warding off political enemies real or imagined, too little in shaping, articulating, and promoting the policies needed to defeat the real foe. I am no stranger to the misrepresentation of which malignity is capable, nor to the generation of such feeling by the conscientious discharge of duty and have been taught by disagreeable experience how slowly the messenger of truth follows that of slander,”
he characteristically complained in August, 1863.
43 Similar behavior obtained in his relations with his senior military commanders and advisors. As Frank
E. Vandiver noted over a half-century ago, before the war Davis had been a progressive, an innovator in military matters, but as President he found these same qualities unacceptable in his subordinates. This led, among other things, to alack of trust on Davis’s part and a reluctance to relinquish control in an area in which, after all, the West Point-educated leader believed he was as well if not better equipped than most of those around him Fiercely loyal to his friends, equally intolerant of his enemies, Davis’s temperamental rigidity contrasts sharply with Abraham Lincoln, the master pragmatist.
Davis and the Confederacy
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As William J. Cooper has commented, Davis’s absolute identification with the Confederacy led him to demand the same full measure of selfless devotion in others. Those who questioned or disagreed with him became for Davis a challenge to the cause itself.
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Finally, what other aspects of Jefferson Davis’s character and beliefs proved inhibiting after 1861 and potentially helped to dilute his effectiveness as the
South’s leader Several historians have analyzed, for example, the religious component of Confederate nationalism yet Davis himself, notwithstanding his regular calls for public fasting (nine times during the Confederacy),
was not a particularly devout man and joined a church only after the Civil
War had begun—and then only at the insistent urging of his wife, Varina.
Significantly, Davis became a member of the Southern Episcopal Church,
whose conservative philosophy could only serve to distance him further from the daily concerns of his increasingly suffering citizenry.
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We might also wish to return to the issue of slavery, the cornerstone of the Confederacy, in his vice-president’s celebrated phrase. What were Davis’s real feelings about the South’s peculiar institution Jefferson’s elder brother,
Joseph, ran one of the most benign plantation regimes in the South, and at Brierfield the President’s own slaves experienced a similar regime, including the establishment of a court system with slave jurors. Yet it is possible to overstate the Brierfield effect. After a thorough review, William J. Cooper,
Jr., concludes that Jefferson Davis was a reasonably humane master, but no evidence presents Brierfield as unique or as some idyllic garden for its enslaved inhabitants Although, in his first important Senate speech in July, 1848, Davis had explicitly denied that slavery was a permanent condition for black southerners, he also confirmed his belief in white supremacy and in the ultimate separation of black and white in any post-emancipation
South, a position he would consistently uphold. As William C. Davis has observed, the Mississippian retained his fundamental distrust of the intellect,
reliability, and humanity of the black man In this matter, as in so many others, Jefferson Davis was the representative Southern slaveholding patriarch, unwilling or unable to free himself from his region’s racial and class prescriptions.
New research and fresh perspectives may shed more light on these and other issues, although the absence of a substantial corpus of private correspondence for the war years will limit revisionism. Whether they will provoke greater sympathy for the manor, less likely, for the cause he represented is unclear. Jefferson Davis came to Montgomery in 1861 better equipped than any of his planter-statesman contemporaries to head anew Southern slaveholding republic. Admittedly, the Confederate States of America was no ordinary experiment in nation-building. Barely had Davis assumed office when the fuse of war was ignited. Plagued by illness and personal tragedy—
his young son Joseph fell to his death while at play in May, his tenure
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Martin Crawford

of office proved as demanding as that of any American chief executive before or since. Jefferson Davis was a determined and capable man, a man of principle, but his history tends to confirm the old adage that societies get the leaders they deserve. For all his qualities, Davis remained bound to the
South’s reactionary ideal, his values, and those of the class he represented,
conspicuously at odds with the modern world.
Unlike his federal rival, Jefferson Davis survived the violence of civil war and for the rest of his long life—he died in New Orleans in 1889 at the age of eighty-two—he could reflect on his role as Confederate leader. The
New South proved less than kind to the ex-president. After his release from federal prison in May, 1867, Davis spent his remaining years in vain attempts to repair his economic fortunes, and in preparing his memoir of the sectional struggle, finally published in 1881 as The Rise and Fall of the Confederate

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