Party System The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876

Stephen L. Hansen, The Making of the Third Party System Voters and Parties in Illinois,
1850–1876 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1978), pp. 142–3.
52.
Independent, November 10, The ideological element in Union soldiers motivation is emphasized in James M. McPherson,
For Cause and Comrades Why Men fought in the Civil War (New York, 1997).
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Richard Carwardine

CHAPTER
Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy
MARTIN CRAWFORD
Despite the publication of several modern biographies, Jefferson Davis’s status in the Civil War pantheon shows little sign of improvement. Davis revisionists must surmount a number of serious obstacles, not the least of which is what the historian Clement Eaton—a confirmed supporter—called the Mississippian’s “self-defeating personality.”
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Above all, as we reach the two hundredth anniversary of both men’s birth, the Confederate president’s reputation continues to suffer by comparison with that of his Federal rival, Abraham Lincoln. This is the result not merely of Davis belonging to the wrong side, but also because of the uninspiring manner in which he characteristically expressed himself. Nothing that Davis said or wrote during his four years as Confederate leader resonates in the way of countless Lincoln utterances. As David Potter memorably concluded, Jefferson Davis seemed to think in abstractions and to speak in platitudes.”
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Yet Jefferson Davis was a pivotal actor in the political and constitutional drama of nineteenth-century America, a leader whose broad consistency of purpose to borrow a phrase from Bruce Collins, establishes him as an indispensable guide to the practical and ideological vicissitudes of the movement for Southern independence that culminated in four years of civil war.
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Whatever his individual failings, and those of the cause over which he presided, Davis was, we should never forget, the first and only elected leader of the putative Southern nation, the Confederate States of America.
Like all American presidents, Davis combined the dual functions of chief executive and head of state, charged both with the efficient running of the government and with embodying and articulating the values and aspirations
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of the people who had elected him. He also served as the commander-in- chief of his new country’s armed forces, a job which, as a West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran, he arguably approached with the greatest enthusiasm of all.

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