Jefferson Davis: The Real and the Unreal
by
[Harpers, 2 vols., $8.00]
COMPARED with the vast library that has accumulated about the name of Abraham Lincoln, the attention bestowed by biographers upon his fellow Kentuckian who became President of the Southern Confederacy has been insignificant. Heretofore Americans interested in Jefferson Davis have had to go to his own wordy and extremely dull Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, to the worshipful but rambling Memoir of his wife, and a few single-volume studies, of which that by William E. Dodd is the most satisfactory. Nothing resembling an exhaustive treatment of the man’s personality and statesmanship has hitherto been attempted.
Yet a fairly definite figure of Jefferson Davis, the creation of tradition, has taken shape. A refined, at times a gentle spirit, impeccable in private life, cultivated, sensitive, proud, keenly alive to matters of ‘honor,’ unflinchingly convinced of the rectitude of his course, humorless, deficient in small talk and quiet, intimate graces, — of charm, in fact, — capable of rancor and bitterness, headstrong in the assertion of will, arrogant when confronted with opposition, yet with it all dignified, honest, sincere — such are the traits that, in the view of friend and foe alike, strengthened and warped one of the most remarkable characters of his age.
In statesmanship the memory of Davis has suffered because he was the champion of ideas that Americans have long since decided to forget. Slavery, state sovereignty, Southern nationalism, secession — what once passionately held political concepts have been relegated to a darker Erebus! Who now believes that Virginia, Massachusetts, and the rest are independent ‘nations,’ like Great Britain and France; that the Federal Government is merely their ‘agent,’ selected to perform precisely delegated tasks? Intellectually also Davis savors of another age. A Fundamentalist in religion as in social concept, the Bible was to him the all-sufficing justification of slavery, and the black man, in his own words, was ‘ the graceless son of Noah, and as such, condemned by God to perpetual servitude.’
A whole world of thought and emotion is compressed in that sentence, but it is a world that has vanished forever.
Professor McElroy’s able volumes do not materially change this view. He has done his work conscientiously and well. The available material on the subject is extensive; he has examined it with the thoroughness and acumen of an accomplished scholar, presented the results in well-organized array, and set them forth in a style which, while making no pretense to vividness and grace, is competent and readable.
It can no longer be said that a complete life of Jefferson Davis, based on first-hand materials, does not exist. Yet from this minute study emerges the same Jefferson Davis that had already etched himself in the American mind. Here again we see the slender, physically frail, polished, intellectual, and upright defender of forgotten things.
Again emerges the statesman who, though born under circumstances almost as plain as Lincoln’s, rose to be the leader of the cotton-planting ‘aristocracy,’ and the evil genius of the Franklin Pierce administration. Once more Davis plays his rôle as the foe of the conciliatory legislation of 1850, as the main influence in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and as able Secretary of War.
Here is the man who fancied himself a military expert — and with some right, for was not his greatest act as President the selection of Robert E. Lee as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, at a time when that general was popularly regarded as a failure?
The indomitable, obstinate, at times intransigent leader of a cause that was ‘lost’ from the start; the statesman who built false hopes on a great illusion, that cotton was king and would compel European recognition; the ‘last ditch’ autocrat of a ‘nation’ sinking day by day into deeper ruin; the shackled prisoner of Fortress Monroe; the lonely, poverty-stricken, embittered hermit of Beauvoir on the Mississippi Gulf — the book adds little to the general outline of this disastrous career, though it does make it more vivid with new details.
Both North and South should be grateful to Professor McElroy for this impartial, finely tempered presentation — the North because it affords the opportunity of surveying a tragic character in a more charitable light than has been its wont; the South because it shows that it has followed a true instinct in making Lee, and not Davis, its hero of ’the War between the States.’
BURTON J. HENDRICK