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Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief
Penguin Press
October 2014
On Sale: October 7, 2014
320 pages
ISBN: 1594204977
EAN: 9781594204975
Kindle: B00INIQQD6
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of
Freedom, a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as
military commander of the Confederacy History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis. His cause went
down in disastrous defeat and left the South impoverished
for generations. If that cause had succeeded, it would have
torn the United States in two and preserved the institution
of slavery. Many Americans in Davis’s own time and in later
generations considered him an incompetent leader, if not a
traitor. Not so, argues James M. McPherson. In Embattled
Rebel, McPherson shows us that Davis might have been on the
wrong side of history, but it is too easy to diminish him
because of his cause’s failure. In order to understand the
Civil War and its outcome, it is essential to give Davis his
due as a military leader and as the president of an aspiring
Confederate nation. Davis did not make it easy on himself. His subordinates and
enemies alike considered him difficult, egotistical, and
cold. He was gravely ill throughout much of the war, often
working from home and even from his sickbed. Nonetheless,
McPherson argues, Davis shaped and articulated the principal
policy of the Confederacy with clarity and force: the quest
for independent nationhood. Although he had not been a
fire-breathing secessionist, once he committed himself to a
Confederate nation he never deviated from this goal. In a
sense, Davis was the last Confederate left standing in 1865. As president of the Confederacy, Davis devoted most of his
waking hours to military strategy and operations, along with
Commander Robert E. Lee, and delegated the economic and
diplomatic functions of strategy to his subordinates. Davis
was present on several battlefields with Lee and even took
part in some tactical planning; indeed, their close
relationship stands as one of the great military-civilian
partnerships in history. Most critical appraisals of Davis emphasize his choices in
and management of generals rather than his strategies, but
no other chief executive in American history exercised such
tenacious hands-on influence in the shaping of military
strategy. And while he was imprisoned for two years after
the Confederacy’s surrender awaiting a trial for treason
that never came, and lived for another twenty-four years, he
never once recanted the cause for which he had fought and
lost. McPherson gives us Jefferson Davis as the commander in
chief he really was, showing persuasively that while Davis
did not win the war for the South, he was scarcely
responsible for losing it.
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