Abraham Lincoln: The Enigmatic President

  William C. Davis’s Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour is a major contribution to Civil War history. To get the full picture of a major historical event, you need to study both sides of an issue.  Davis helps us by presenting the Confederate view. (Since the author and subject have the same last name, although unrelated, I will use the term “author” for William C. Davis.) This highly researched book presents fascinating details of Davis’s life and actions. The writing is smooth and easy to understand. It gives a reasonable account of Confederate and Davis’s views. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour is a good way to learn about the conflict from the secessionist perspective. The biography falters in its attempt to rationalize Davis’s personality flaws. The author seeks sympathy for Jefferson Davis, but his arrogance, combativeness, and stubbornness undermine this effort. At times, the author seems almost surprised by Davis’s failings, excusing them as "insecurity." Ul...

  Dixie Betrayed, How the South Really Lost the Civil War  by Davis J. Eicher To understand the Civil War period, it is necessary to study the war from both sides. Dixie Betrayed by Davis J. Eicher provides the view from the Confederate side. Dixie Betrayed is a different book than the title implies. The last words of Eicher’s book are “Jefferson Davis had lost his power as Confederate president — but not before the whole cause of the Confederacy was lost. Dixie was Betrayed.”  The title and these final words actually betray the worth of this book.  Nearly twenty thousand books have been written about Lincoln and almost a hundred thousand about the Civil War. Less than an estimated twenty percent of these were written from a Confederate perspective, and many of those were Lost Cause screeds. Since the Confederacy lost, official documents were often destroyed, requiring historians to rely on sources like newspapers, letters, and memoirs—and these are not nearly as w...

  Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War by David Williams Bitterly Divided by David Williams makes sense. If the political establishment in a bunch of states decided to secede, there would obviously be inhabitants who retained a stronger loyalty to the United States of America. After all, they had been proud U.S. citizens for their entire lives. I bet you saw a but coming. The but is that although Williams presents voluminous evidence of insurgence within the CSA, it is not clear that it materially hampered the Confederacy’s war efforts until the final year or so. The catchphrase, ‘rich man’s war, poor man’s fight,’ may have been a truism, but Southern men continued to fight until victory became hopeless or they received news from home that their families were starving. Williams contends that slaveholders masterminded the war, but, for the most part, non-slaveholders fought it. Three-fourths of southern whites owned no slaves, so arithmetic alone proves Williams correct. S...