Jefferson Davis, Confederate President (review)

This is a problematic book, made more so by its curious title. In the preface to Jefferson Davis, Confederate President Herman Hattaway and Richard E. Beringer admit that theirs "is not a biography," but neither is it exactly, as they claim, a history of the Davis presidency and administration (9). In fact, Davis serves only as an organizational device, a thin thread on which is strung not only a military history of the war and "a lot of biographical data about a goodly number of individuals" (xii), to which the authors confess, but a myriad of other more or less related topics, as well.

Theirsis, in fact, areference book disguised as a biography. Rather than a life of Jefferson Davis, they offer a series of bibliographical essays on topics as far-ranging as agriculture, alcohol, chaplains, conscription, counterfeiting, desertion, diplomacy, finance, flags, habeas corpus, impressment, inflation, literacy, nationalism, officer training, postage stamps, prostitution, railroads, rations, religion, salt, taxation, uniforms, and women. The book's organization, therefore, is somewhat random, and transitional devices range from tenuous to nonexistent. Indeed, finding order and structure for so many disparate topics, short of alphabetizing them into a handbook, is rather like herding cats.

When Davis, however fleetingly, does claim the authors' primary attention, it is from secondary sources that we learn of him. Remarkably large chunks of this non-biography are taken directly from William C. Davis's, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour and William J. Cooper's, Jefferson Davis, American, as block quotes, often without attribution. Indeed, Hattaway and Beringer, authors of the highly regarded Why the South Lost the Civil War, are not at their best when they do bring Davis center stage. When, for example, they describe the stand of his First Mississippi Rifles at Buena Vista—the famous "inverted V" formation—as Davis's "mounted men charging at a crucial moment" (9) the reader is not inspired to confidence.

One of the very few attempts that its authors offer in terms of a new interpretation of the life of the Confederate president is the introduction of political science scholar James David Barber's theory that American presidents have displayed four styles of leadership, based on their character, worldview, and style. Following Barber's analysis, Hattaway and Beringer place Davis—as Barber does Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon—in the "active-negative" category, pursuing power, but not enjoying its use. This theme pops up from time to time early in the book, but disappears about midway, and is not missed thereafter.

Its two authors correctly anticipate that some readers "may be inclined to fault" (xii) their book for leaving its purported subject to follow so many digressions. For an authoritative desk encyclopedia covering a vast number of topics concerning Confederate history and historiography, one may profitably consult Jefferson Davis, Confederate President, but for a life of Davis read William Davis or William Cooper.