Approaching Civil War and Southern History by William J. Cooper (review)

William J. Cooper’s compilation of essays that were initially published between 1970 and 2012 celebrates his illustrious career and traces the evolution of Civil War and southern history. Cooper’s first essay, “A Reassessment of Jefferson Davis as War Leader: The Case from Atlanta to Nashville,” dates to Cooper’s Princeton University undergraduate years, but he contends that the interpretation of the Confederate president stands. Cooper’s overview of Davis’s military policy decisions in the western theater, appointing generals like P. G. T. Beauregard and John Bell Hood, reveals that criticism of Jefferson Davis as rigid is unwarranted. Cooper argues that Davis took advice and interacted with his generals in ways “calculated for victory” (p. 14).

Cooper then shifts to the 1890 gubernatorial election in South Carolina. Benjamin R. Tillman defeated the Conservative Democrats, “who had dominated the state since the end of Reconstruction” (p. 15). Cooper’s interpretation of Tillman’s victory departs from that of other scholars, arguing instead that Tillman’s success resulted from generational differences and Tillman’s commitment to solidifying white supremacy, and not from class warfare. While Cooper’s interpretation of Tillman eschews economic causation, his discussion of the mid-1850s cotton crisis addresses economics. Cooper again departs from eminent historians, like Eugene D. Genovese, by instead analyzing how southern planters thought about economic conditions and considering the productive potential of land. Both factors helped southern agriculturalists determine that potential for growth and expansion dominated cotton culture in 1860.

Cooper next considers the southern economy from the perspective of one man. Daniel R. Hundley, author of Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860), sought to provide an accurate view of the South at that time by asserting that “rural yeomen and the town-dwelling middle class,” not planters, maintained central importance (p. 36). Hundley, a self-styled lover of the Union, showcased the South’s complexity by hoping to inspire “northerners and Englishmen to view the South rationally” (p. 43). Hundley, like many white southerners, vigorously defended white supremacy and slavery, but he admitted that its harsher aspects needed reform. According to Cooper, Hundley offered one of the most realistic and nuanced accounts of southern life.

Cooper remains focused on the peculiar institution in “The Politics of Slavery Affirmed: The South and the Secession Crisis,” arguing that the “politics of slavery” prevailed even absent two major political parties (p. 56). Contrary to other scholars, Cooper believes that slavery, constitutional dynamics, emotions, or economics alone do not explain secession. Rather, “Secession was a supremely political act prompted by the values most cherished by southern white society” (p. 58). Cooper turns to the southern Whigs in his 1985 essay “‘The Only Door’: The Territorial Issue, the Preston Bill, and the Southern Whigs,” examining how the party tried to skirt territorial issues during and after the election of 1848 for the sake of party unity. This essay highlights the growing sectional divide that wracked the nation and its political parties and ultimately led to the breakup of the Union.

The Civil War and postwar years characterize Cooper’s later essays. “Edwin Forbes and the Civil War” is a reprint of Cooper’s introduction to Forbes’s memoir in Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Memoir of the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1993). Forbes followed the Army of the Potomac, sketching soldier life in and out of battle from 1862 through the fall of 1864. Forbes’s pen captured the challenges of war and sectional tensions as described by Union soldiers. Cooper’s next piece is a reprint of an introduction for another book—Volume 12 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis (Baton Rouge, 2008). According to Cooper, this volume of Davis’s papers traces the wealthy man’s fall to “powerlessness and poverty” after the Confederate defeat and his release from prison in 1869 (p. 115). In the late 1860s and 1870s, Davis seldom mentioned Reconstruction...