Statesmen of the Lost Cause
by [Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown, $3.75]
MR. HENDRICK breaks a considerable amount of new ground in his long, detailed, and exceptionally interesting study of the leaders of the Southern States during the four bitter years of the Civil War. His central thesis, that the Confederacy failed because of its essential nature, is one that is finding gradual acceptance among historians with open minds, and he supplies sufficient evidence to support his claims.
The title itself is ironical for the reason that, whatever Southern military leadership and valor might have been. Southern statesmanship was conspicuous by its absence. Jefferson Davis, who did the Southern cause irreparable harm because of his unshakable belief in his own skill as commander in chief of the armies, was never a statesman by any stretch of the imagination, and the men he surrounded himself with were, with few exceptions, wholly unequal to the tasks assigned them.
Mr. Hendrick also makes an excellent point in his insistence upon the lack of agreement among the members of President Davis’s cabinet. The breach between Davis and his Vice President, Alexander HI. Stephens, opened almost immediately after the Confederate Government had been formed, and grew wider until, during the last few months of the war, Stephens was the avowed enemy of Davis, and with his fellow Georgian, Toombs, undoubtedly played a large part in bringing the conflict to a close by his subversive speeches.
Some of Mr. Hendrick’s most fascinating chapters deal with the efforts of the Confederacy through such agents as Pickett, Slidell, Mason, and others to win support abroad for the Confederate States. The complete failure of such men as Memminger, Secretary of the Treasury, to take advantage of the South’s stores of cotton as security for loans is a well told story with plenty of significance in relation to current problems. In fact, the book has particular value at the moment, because it touches upon many vital points in international relations which are quite as valid today as they were in 1861 — 1865.
It is possible to quarrel with Mr. Hendrick’s insistence that it was the cotton aristocracy of the South which wanted the war, a supposition no longer tenable in view of recent studies on the subject. Only a few days before Mississippi seceded, every cotton planter in Mississippi owning more than 1000 slaves met in Vicksburg and voted to a man against leaving the Union, but when the State went out these same men were the first to fight.
As a study in personalities, Mr. Hendrick’s book deserves a high rating. He is a fine biographer and well deserves the reputation he has both for thorough research and for his ability to bring the dead to life. And while Davis and his fellows were not adequate to their jobs, they were as complex, contradictory, and amusing a collection of human beings as has ever been gathered together since history began.
This, then, may rightly he called a monumental contribution to a subject inexhaustible in its interest and its importance to Americans. It does not allow its fine scholarship to be a burden, but it is readable, informative, and provocative. Not much can be said for the writing, which is rarely better than pedestrian, but in all other respects the volume is one to be recommended to students and general readers with an equal degree of enthusiasm.
HERSCHEL BRICKELL