Jefferson Davis, Confederate President ed. by Herman Hattaway, Richard E. Beringer (review)

ing one of the traditional goals of the historian to determine what happened and wh>. The several maps and photographs help in following the action , but if there is a weakness in the book it is here. More and largei- 111Ups Would hilve made it easier to keep pace with events as they unfolded. But this is a small criticism of a book that succeeds admirably in providing a compelling account of an event onl>' we thought we knew. Hess's research in previously neglected sources has uncovered a depth of detail about Pickett's Charge that makes this the definitive study of the event. The book is not only a tribute to the continuing power and relevance ot the " old military history," but reminds us that new or neglected sources can change the way we understand even the most thoroughly researched areas of our hist(, n. William H. Mulligan.Jr. Murray State University Herman Hattaway and Richard E. Beringer. Jefferson Davis,Confederate President. 1« awrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2002. 531 pp. ISBN: 0700611703 ( cloth), $ 39.95. n the seventeen years since the authorscontracted to write this book, probably twenty works have been published on Jefferson Davis' s life,his discordant administration,and the last days of the Confederacy . Now,at the pinnacle of their careers and narrative powers, Herman Hattaway and Richard E. Berringer, both distinguished Civil War historians , have produced not a biography of Jefferson Davis but a biography of Davis' s administration. Dramatically,they intertwine the life and death of the Confederate government with that of Jefferson Davis, its first and only president. Thoroughly familiar with the extensive number of manuscripts and documents of the period dealing with Davis and the Confederacy,Hattaway and Beringer also spice their work with ample quotations from reSPRING 2003 cently printed secondary works they admire,including William C. Davis' s five books on Da is and his administration, William Cooper, Jr.' s, Jefferson Dat,is: Ajizerican 2000), and Felicity Allen's Uncoliqtterable Heart:1. ife of Jefferson Dat'is 2000). Hattaway and Beringer found the classifications of leadership made fanious in ] ames David Barber' s The Presidential Character:Predicting Perforina, ice i, 7 tl) e White Hotise (4th ed., 1992) a useful tool in their analysis of Davis, whom they zie„' as an American president." ( xvili) Davis, ther maintain .typically demonstrated Barber' s " activenega tive " leadership qualities, portra>ing him as a perfectionist unable to achieve his impossible goals. A States' Rights advocate who typiCally deferred to constitutic, nal restraints,Davis as (: onfederate president readily yielded to revolutic, nary necessities,but he failed to inspire siinilar compromises in his fellow southerners, even those needed to achieve victory . Great intelligence.generallikeability,and lessons learned through experience were all qualities that should have made Davis an effective President. But they seemed useless to the beleaguered Confederate leader in crisis after crisis throughout the wan Davis' s wellknown failures resulted from his micromanaging all departments that led tc, widespread disorganization in the Confederate government , a characterization that Hattaway and Beringer's make perhaps most clearly in their chapters detailing Confederate military defeat. Loyalty, a characteristic that subordinates surely admire in leaders, became a grievous fault when Davis evaluated his generals. His support fc, r Leonidas Polk, despite numerous military blunders on battlefields west of the Appalachians, ended only with Polk's death. Similarly,Davis's support for the incompetent Braxton Bragg was as tenacious as was his loathing for the eminently more talented R G. T. Beauregard. Like most historians who have evaluated Jefferson Davis,Hattaway and Beringer see him as a tragic, almost heroic figure and they doubt that anyone could have forged a successful Confederate 49 REVIEWS government. But at war' s end,generals and politicians , scrambling to deflect criticisms from their own failures in judgment, quickly placed blame for the collapse of the Confederate government on Davis's shoulders. Denunciations, however, only energized Davis to rise from the ashes of his Civil War reputation to become the embodiment in the Lost Cause." An unabashed conservative t() the end, Davis never asked if support for slavery and secession had been wise nor whether commencing a war that laid the South...