Jefferson Davis: Confederate President (review)

Book Reviews331 the surface condenser] , it is fair to say that sailing ships would have retained their supremacy until the introduction of the diesel engine. . . ." The first iron-hulled warship in the United States was the Michigan and not, as Mrs. White maintains, the Princeton. The author's affectionate lens captures a portrait of the "Big Swede" which is a trifle blurred but usually entertaining. James M. Merrill Whittier College Jefferson Davis: Confederate President. By Hudson Strode. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959. Pp. xvii, 556. $6.75.) the first volume of professor Hudson strode's projected three-volume study of Jefferson Davis was praised by the Madison Avenue pundits, and now the second volume of this work receives the same treatment. This second book is supposed to cover the life of the President of the Confederacy from his inauguration to January 1, 1864. I dissented in a published review to the praises given the first volume, and I herewith give my reasons for dissenting from the praise given the second volume. Mr. Strode's book possesses virtues. It is sympathetic with a defeated man who has been unfairly treated by the biographers. To speak favorably of Davis outside the precincts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is a contribution to the interpretation of an important period of American history. Mr. Strode is an experienced writer who throws his rhetoric around spaciously enough to win the applause of the cherishers of the Lost Cause. Moreover, to write of Jefferson Davis is a difficult task. Few scholars have produced monographs on phases of the Confederate President's life. The ten volumes of Dunbar Rowland's Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist are mostly concerned with public utterances and do not go behind the scenes. Yankee vandals succeeded in partly destroying the Davis records. He was treated the same as Hitler: a man so despicable that evidences of his life were destroyed. Mr. Strode's imperfections are numerous. His use of trite metaphors and clichés is cloying. An extensive three-volume work on a much controverted character should have elaborate references to authorities. The author does not bother with footnotes. Except where the obvious is repeated from handbooks, one is at a loss whether or not to believe what Mr. Strode asserts. This book has other defects more fundamental. It is not a true biography. It is a hit-and-miss history of the Confederacy to which is added whimsical recordings of what an amateur historian has stumbled on in desultory reading, with Jefferson Davis as a bagatelle. All sorts of characters are elaborately discussed—Lincoln, McClellan, Mrs. Davis, Secretary of State Benjamin, and so on without a precise connection of these characters with Davis. We are actually given a better understanding of Lincoln's disagreement with McClellan than we are of Davis' misunderstanding with 332civil war history Joseph E. Johnston. Oh, the endless meanderings of this so-called biography! Where is the trimming away of irrelevances that one is led to expect of the literary artist Mr. Strode is reputed to be? This book is not the classic defense Jefferson Davis deserves. All that Mr. Strode effectively proves is that his hero was a saintly man who said his prayers, had gentlemanly manners, and was kind to those he was expected to succor and to those he had the duty of killing in battle. The author seems to think that the one way to vindicate Davis is to have him shed sentimental tears over the ill treatment the enemy gave certain other enemies. Another device of the author is to pour sugar over those Davis loved, such as Albert Sidney Johnston, Judah P. Benjamin, and Mary B. Chesnut, and to be positively vicious to those Davis did not like, such as Joseph E. Johnston, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Henry S. Foote. The author misses entirely the lonesome pinnacle that this Macbeth of the Confederacy carved out for himself. Davis may have been unethical in setting himself against the wave of nationalism that enveloped progressive countries in the nineteenth century. He may have been so deluded that he fell like Shakespeare's heroic villain. But Davis' fall was as grand as...