Book Review: The Short History of the Confederate States of America by Jefferson Davis

Winners shape history. Occasionally, the defeated write alternative accounts, and a few develop a cult following. Jefferson Davis was among them. While not the first to put pen to the “Lost Cause,” Davis became its chief mythmaker due to his status as president of the Confederacy, his early statements, and his later books.

After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis spent two years in prison without trial. He was released on bail, and a year and a half later, the government finally dropped the treason charges against him. In 1877, he retired to Beauvoir, where he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. This was a two-volume tome of over 1,500 pages. I did not read this book. I tried, but I kept falling asleep. Luckily, ten years later, Davis wrote A Short History of the Confederate States of America. Roughly one-third in length, “A Short History” covers the same ground and is more readable.

I recommend reading his “Short History” because it is always advisable to get the story from the horse’s mouth. If you don’t study the losers, then you have an incomplete picture. An example would be the hallowed Federalist Papers. There is a collection of opposition opinion pieces called the Anti-Federalist Papers. I suggest reading both.

Davis's writing is clear for modern readers, but I would recommend a good understanding of the war to provide context for his narrative. The Davis perspective may be biased, but those perspectives did not change between the war and the writing of his memoir. That consistency makes this book valuable for understanding the motivations for war.

Davis extols victories and offers strained excuses for errors and failures. In Davis’s mind, nothing was his fault; the Confederacy was always honorable, the Union always vile. For those not imbued with “The Lost Cause” mythology, this heavy-handed prejudice can be off-putting, but I found it helps to understand the ethos of the period.

I highly recommend Jefferson Davis’s A Short History of the Confederate States of America.

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