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  • Rise and Fall of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Senator Williamson S. Oldham, CSA
  • Charles B. Dew
Rise and Fall of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Senator Williamson S. Oldham, CSA. Edited by Clayton E. Jewett. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. 312. Cloth, $39.95.)

So why did the South fail to win the Civil War? Confederate senator Williamson S. Oldham of Texas certainly believed he knew the answer, and he poured out his thoughts in a lengthy memoir written shortly after the collapse of the Confederacy. His manuscript, held by the University of Texas, has been consulted over the years by a number of historians (indeed Wilfred Buck Yearns, The Confederate Congress [1960], concludes with a long paragraph drawn from Oldham's memoirs), but the full document has remained unpublished until now. Thanks to editor Clayton E. Jewett and the University of Missouri Press, we now have the complete text of Oldham's Rise and Fall of the Confederacy in print. It is a book that deserves careful consideration. [End Page 310]

Oldham, a native Tennessean, moved west prior to the Civil War, first to Arkansas and finally to Texas, where he became a newspaper editor and a Democratic party stalwart. After serving as a secessionist delegate to the Texas State Convention in 1861, he was elected to the Confederate Senate and held a seat in that body for the duration of the war.

His memoir has two distinct parts. First, there are descriptive chapters in which he recounts his frequent trips across the South during the war years (parts of this material, edited by Yearns, appeared in 1998 under the title From Richmond to Texas: The 1865 Journey Home of Confederate Senator Williamson S. Oldham). Much more lengthy, however, are the chapters dealing with the second and central focus of Oldham's work: explaining the failure of the great Confederate experiment.

From the very start, Oldham lets us know he is not going to sugarcoat or obfuscate. Unlike Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, to cite only two Confederate apologists, this crusty Texan made no attempt to claim that slavery had nothing to do with disunion. The Yankee government was determined "to alter and change the domestic institutions of the Southern states," he writes, and the resolute citizens of Dixie were not about to let that happen (107). Once the South was launched on the floodtides of war, however, the blunders began, and it is here that Oldham begins sharpening his knives.

He is convinced that the Confederate government quickly lost its way and began enacting policies that eventually doomed the South. "To strengthen the government, its federative power was destroyed, and absolute despotic power, was conferred upon the executive and the military," he charged (105). The Confederate Congress was complicit in this disastrous process. The early embargo on cotton exports, conscription, exemption policy (particularly the odious Twenty-Negro law), impressment, and suspension of the writ of habeas corpus were all approved by the House and Senate with predictable results. Jefferson Davis became "a despot with unlimited power," and military personnel at all levels, from thoughtless commanders to overzealous enrolling officers, systematically abused the South's civilian population (108). These blundering policies produced "distrust in the minds of many" and "division amongst the people" (115). The Confederacy was thus deprived of the one thing critical for success, Oldham believed: "the entire support of all the people," and their consequent willingness to commit their full "physical, and moral power" to the southern cause (115).

Congress and the president were not the only culprits, however. Poor military leadership and faulty strategic decisions also played their part. Oldham's [End Page 311] list of good and bad generals includes the usual suspects: Lee, Joe Johnston, and Forrest on the plus side (oddly, Stonewall Jackson is mentioned not at all), and Bragg, Pemberton, Holmes, and Hood on the negative. Even more important were strategic choices made throughout the conflict. "Scattering our forces, along our line of frontier . . . gave to the enemy the advantage of concentration" at the outset of the war, Oldham lamented (141). Far better to have drawn the Yanks deep into the interior, where commanders like...

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