Jefferson Davis Revisited and Reconsidered
Richard Nixon was accurate when he
groused that most historians are on the political left. His claim is particularly true of those who
come from academia.
One historian who is definitely an
academic is James M. McPherson, Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton
University. McPherson is the bestselling
author of several books on the Civil War including his Pulitzer Prize winner, Battle
Cry of Freedom.
If McPherson writes from a leftist
persuasion, one would not know it from his objective 2014 book titled Embattled
Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief. Objective because in his introduction
McPherson writes, “My sympathies lie with the Union side in the Civil War. Yet
I have sought to transcend my convictions and to understand Jefferson Davis as
a product of his time and circumstances.”
McPherson goes on to praise Davis
for his many admirable qualities, arguing that he was never a rabid secessionist. McPherson portrays Davis as a loyal
Southerner, a stately Mississippian who, like the respected Robert E. Lee,
could not turn against his own state and side with the Union.
McPherson’s favorable portrait
doesn’t mean he embraces everything about Davis. In 2009 McPherson signed a petition asking
President Obama not to lay a wreath at the Confederate Monument in the
Arlington National Cemetery. In part the petition read, “The monument is a
denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners,
Confederates and neo-Confederates.” The
President placed the wreath there anyway, to the joy of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans.
As his title implies, McPherson is
analyzing Davis’ role and performance as the head of a new nation and its army. He definitely views Davis as being
“embattled” and defends him from the criticism of his fellow confederates,
particularly his vice-President, Georgia’s Alexander H. Stephens and his
Secretary of State Robert Toombs, also a Georgian. (Toombs once called Davis a
“false and hypocritical wretch.”)
The tone of McPherson’s book is much
like that of William J. Cooper of Louisiana State University in his 2001
biography, Jefferson Davis, American.
And an American Jefferson Davis truly was. He was the son of an American Revolution
veteran, a graduate of West Point and a soldier in the Mexican War. Although casting Davis as an “American,” not
a renegade, Cooper’s book has won accolades from the most liberal newspapers and
college history departments in the country and is now considered the most
definitive biography on Davis.
Neither McPherson nor Cooper
subscribe to the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War, pointing out that there
were several times during the war that the outcome could have gone either
way. They both view Davis as a dutiful
politician and a sincere, if complex, leader who reluctantly deemed secession a
necessary action.
Davis lived 24 years after the war,
2 of which were spent in prison. Though
indicted for treason, he was never tried.
After prison, he was offered the presidency of the University of the
South in Sewanee, Tennessee but declined the offer. His last years were spent in considerable
impoverishment at Beauvoir, his home on the Mississippi coast. Visiting Beauvoir recently, I learned that
although Hurricane Katrina damaged it severely, it has been restored and is a
beautiful and remarkable place for learning about Civil War history.
Why should we spend time reliving
history and revisiting its players?
Because we need to know what brought us to where we are. We also need to be fair to the deceased when
new light is shed on them. Today’s
Generation DotNet isn’t too fond of history.
For all its marvels, technology and social media are producing a
generational cocoon to which youth are escaping and enwrapping themselves,
eschewing history.
But young minds can be excited about
history again if we make it a study of people, not just wars and
elections. McPherson’s contribution to
this cause is that he focuses not so much on a major conflict itself as on one
of its major participants. In doing so,
he himself was enlightened. In doing so
he shows us how to study the past and how to help our children see that history
really is about them and their tomorrows.
McPherson’s remarkable last sentence
veers from conventional wisdom: “Davis was not responsible for losing the war;
the salient truth is not that the Confederacy lost but that the Union won.”
Jefferson Davis gave many talks to
young people in his last days. He stated
often that he was happy America was re-uniting.
Without apology, he asserted that he never viewed himself as a rebel,
but as a defender of freedom.
Roger
Hines
January
11, 2015
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