Justice for a Rebel

JEFFERSON DAVIS by Hudson Strode. 556 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $7.50.

With perverse sentimentality, posterity often remembers history's losers more fondly than the luckier or more competent heroes who beat them. But nothing like this Joan of Arc or Mary Queen of Scots effect has occurred in the case of Jefferson Davis. The public memory retains his name, but his deeds and character are dimmer than Hannibal's. Perhaps it is because Davis refused to let himself be forgiven, and went on proclaiming the Tightness of the South's cause until his death in 1889. Or it may be that the popular taste for gallant losers is satisfied in this historical instance by the courtly warrior, Robert E. Lee. At any rate, the dimness of Davis' repute, even among Southerners, is attested by the fact that Hudson Strode's three-volume biography is not only the best modern work on Davis; it is virtually the only one.

Partisan View. The book is clearly partisan, and Strode, who is emeritus professor of English at the University of Alabama, frankly admits that he is presenting "the Southern viewpoint." He obviously believes that Davis was correct in his fundamentalist reading of the Constitution, that the South was justified in seceding, and that the Civil War was a close parallel to the American Revolution, in that it, too, was a war for independence. His references to slaves almost invariably mention their great loyalty and contentment. This, the third and last volume, bears the title Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero, and Strode writes in his introduction: "I can find no fatal 'flaw' in the Davis character like to that which Shakespeare gives his heroes to bring about their own ruin, unless it be a passion he shared with the classic Greeks: an almost fanatical belief in freedom in government."

The reader who stops short of seeing Davis as tragic must admit that he was an extraordinary man, whose best quality was an inflexible devotion to principle. Davis had been a minor but authentic hero of the Mexican War, an exemplary Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce and, up to a few weeks before he was called to the presidency of the seceding states, an outstanding member of the U.S. Senate. His maltreatment after the Civil War was shameful. President Andrew Johnson signed a proclamation ridiculously charging him with complicity in the assassination of Lincoln, and he was kept in prison for two years--the first week in leg irons--before being released without a trial. His personal burdens were increased by the death, in infancy or early youth, of his four sons.

Near Treason. But Davis is remembered because he was President of the Confederacy. Strode, listing his achievements, writes that he was "perhaps the only political chief in history who successfully organized a new nation in the course of pursuing a mighty war." But did he? Davis' constitution, with its emphasis on states' rights, left it up to the individual Governors to contribute troops and supplies only as they felt inclined. The Governors of Georgia and North Carolina particularly were obstructive to a degree that, in a more centralized nation, would have been treason. Governor Joseph E. Brown of Georgia pettishly sent the whole state militia on furlough at one crucial point in 1864. Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina hoarded huge quantities of military supplies. Strode observes that "the President must have reflected somewhat bitterly what a difference these hoarded commodities would have made to Lee's men during the grueling siege of Petersburg. But he had been unable to persuade the Governor to relinquish his stores."

Apparently, it did not occur to Davis that a governmental system in which a President was required to "persuade" a state Governor to contribute supplies during a wartime emergency was ridiculously unworkable.

It was, of course, a remarkable achievement for Davis to have imposed as much order as he did on a military situation in which the odds were almost always poor. But Strode, perhaps in an effort to make up for all of the wrongs done to Davis in those times and since, asks that he be listed among history's great chiefs. He was neither a great chief nor a tragic hero, and a more measured appraisal would have done him more justice.

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