Civil War History

Civil War History 50.1 (2004) 68-69

An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government. By William C. Davis. (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2001. Pp. 512. Cloth, $30.00. Paper, $16.00.)

In this book William C. Davis tells the tale of the final months of the Confederate government in rich and colorful detail. Davis argues that the Confederacy's final moments were dominated by a titanic struggle between President Jefferson Davis and his last secretary of war, John C. Breckinridge, over how the Confederacy might surrender and rejoin the Union.

Throughout the book Jefferson Davis appears as a figure increasingly out of touch with political reality and reduced to grasping for straws. His choice of Breckinridge to shepherd the war to its final conclusion was conceived to counter a rising tide of criticism against his own faltering leadership. Breckinridge, a former U.S. senator from Kentucky, had long been a political rival of the president whose broad political popularity stemmed partly from his role as the states' rights Democratic candidate for president in 1860. His reputation was further burnished by success on the battlefield when most Southern politicians were making fools of themselves in Richmond. According to the author, Breckinridge was the "only man" in the Confederacy who could bring the Civil War to an "honorable end" by negotiating a cease fire in exchange for recognition of the rights of Confederate soldiers and the preservation of Southern state governments.

Davis the author offers an engaging narrative of the collapse of the Confederate government. The cabinet's flight by train from Richmond quickly deteriorated into a nightmarish flight into oblivion. By the time the government's train stopped in Danville, Virginia, the route ahead was endangered more by anarchic bands of demobilized Confederate soldiers than by patrols of Union cavalry. [End Page 68] When the cabinet finally reached Charlotte, North Carolina, site of its last meeting on April 19, 1865, regard for the Confederate president had sunk so low that it was difficult to find a place for him to stay. Thereafter the cabinet split up; some headed for home and individual surrender, others continued the flight south on horseback. Until his capture in Georgia, Jefferson Davis was determined to resist in the hope that some kind of formal government could eventually be reestablished, perhaps in the trans-Mississippi West.

Despite An Honorable Defeat's engaging story, Davis's account of the death throes of the Confederacy suffers a fundamental weakness. After Abraham Lincoln's reelection in November 1864, the future of the Southern states lay not in the hands of Confederate leaders like Davis and Breckinridge, but rather in the hands of Union generals and Northern politicians. It was the relentless advance of Ulysses S. Grant and his lieutenants in the spring of 1865 that dictated the unconditional surrender of Confederate armies. No generosity in such minor terms as the retention of side arms or draft animals could conceal that blunt fact from Confederate soldiers themselves, whose desire to demobilize eventually overwhelmed their officers' attempts to keep order in the ranks. Author Davis overstates Breckinridge's role in the friendly understanding between William T. Sherman and Joseph Johnston that guaranteed the continuation of Confederate state governments. Yet this agreement was instantly repudiated by Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. Indeed, before the year was out, Republican leaders in Congress forcefully demonstrated that they alone would decide when and how Southern states would be represented in Washington. When the time for their deliberations came, they paid no heed to Breckinridge's pleas for "an honorable defeat."