An Honorable Defeat; The Last Days of the Confederate Government / by William C. Davis

[Kim Allen Scott]

Like many Americans of my age, I became interested in the Civil War during my childhood in the early 1960s when my country observed the centennial of the war while simultaneously grappling with its lingering after effects.  While many southerners welcomed the opportunity to remember their “lost cause,” the descendants of the people they enslaved struggled to gain equal rights in access to housing, amenities, and even the ballot box.  I was too young to appreciate the latter events, but my imagination was set on fire when contemplating the epic struggle of 100 years past and its almost Homeric retelling by hundreds of authors.

One of the most simplistic understandings of the Civil War that I indulged in was the perception that once General Lee had signed the documents General Grant set before him at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, the war was suddenly and completely over.  In An Honorable Defeat, author William C. Davis shows just how complicated that end came about when considering the fate of the Confederacy’s civil government.  President Jefferson Davis and the remnants of his cabinet fled Richmond, Virginia prior to Lee’s surrender and slowly made their way south, temporarily establishing their nation’s capitol at several towns along the way.  This book details that flight, and does so in a way that reads more like an adventure novel than a historical study.  To the author, the real hero of the story is John C. Breckenridge, the Confederate secretary of war, who tried unsuccessfully over and over again to convince Jefferson Davis that the end had come.  The story presents Jefferson Davis as almost a deluded fanatic, still making plans to rally an army of rebels west of the Mississippi River even while those same soldiers were all surrendering to the Union forces.  After Davis and his family were captured in southern Georgia, Breckenridge managed to gain the Florida coast and escape to Cuba in an adventure that is told in thrilling detail.  This book is simply great, and I highly recommend it.

I cannot close this review without pointing out a similar volume written in 1986 by archivist Michael B. Ballard, Cast a Long Shadow.  I read this smaller book immediately after An Honorable Defeat and was struck with the differences in interpretation.  Bennet presents Davis’s stubborn refusal to accept defeat as almost heroic, and spends time describing how that attitude helped project a positive memory of the Confederate president in the post-war south.  Contrasting these two volumes allows a reader to understand the story in detail, and to ponder how historical truth is often just a matter of emphasis.  This is especially true when trying to overcome a simple childhood understanding of how a terrible war that tore our country in half truly ended.