Volume 48, Number 19 · November 29, 2001
The Good Loser
By Eric L. McKitrick
Jefferson Davis, American
by William J. Cooper Jr.
Knopf, 757 pp., $35.00
Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart
by Felicity Allen
University of Missouri Press, 809 pp., $34.95
Most literate Americans know who Jefferson Davis was. But what they know is mostly an abstraction: the presidency of a defeated Confederacy in the Civil War. Some of the more historically learned have, to be sure, given an inordinate amount of attention to this abstraction through end-less debates among themselves over Davis's administrative capacities, his grasp of military requirements, and relations with his subordinates and his Congress, all largely in comparison with his Union counterpart Abraham Lincoln.[1] The closest they come to any assessment of Davis's actual character—the kind of man he was, what he was really like—are impressions of chilly aloofness, a certain snappishness, and a single-minded insistence on his own opinions, mostly based on what his enemies thought of him, and on the assumption that such enemies were much more numerous than in fact they were. All other aspects of a long life—eighty years—have been a closed book to just about everyone, including myself, who has engaged with the others in controversies restricted to within a mere four years out of the eighty.[2]
Review, 4585 words
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