Adumbration

An Honorable Defeat:  the last days of the confederate government, William C. Davis, Harcourt, Inc (2001)

I've never been a great civil war buff, but it's hard to live in the South for several years and not come out with some fascination with the matter.  That combined with my long standing interest in the early years of this republic to cause me to pick up An Honorable Defeat, which exhaustively recounts the final months of the war, from the perspective of the top civilian confederate leaders, in particular President Jefferson Davis, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, and Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge.

And it turns out to be a very interesting tale of those days, picking up around when Grant had Lee on the edge at Richmond, and following the escape of the government south first by train, then wagons, then horseback, as Lee surrendered to Grant, Johnston surrendered to Sherman, the remaining forces faced massive desertion, then looting and other lawlessness, and the officials faced escape and near escape.

Through it all is an amazing level of detail, derived from telegraph papers, official records from the various government departments, newspaper reports, and letters, diaries, and personal memoirs of all the primary figures and numerous secondary ones.

And from it all rises a picture of the participants.  Davis shown as unwilling to see the reality of the southern defeat, continually hoping and planning for a resurrection of a cause clearly lost, and not taking well anyone who challenged that assessment.  Benjamin characterized as a sycophantic toady, a yes man to Davis whose role could very well have caused the war to last many more weeks than necessary.  And former US vice president Breckinridge, newly appointed to the War Department position, whose subsequent actions were of one purpose:  get the confederacy to admit defeat as soon as possible, so as to put an end to the carnage, to obtain the best possible terms from Lincoln, and put the nation on the least painful path to reconstruction.

But Davis would have none of it, and countered all attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with the north, generally by imposition of terms he knew would never be accepted (e.g. at the Hampton Roads conference, the "generals and wives" affair, and his instructions to Lee and Johnston).  Nonetheless Breckinridge persisted, and worked with his staff to show the south was unable to continue fighting, with the Confederate legislature to challenge continued prosecution of the war, with Lee and Johnston to get them to negotiate (only partially successfully) terms applicable to the entire confederate forces rather than the armies individually, and with Davis to get him to recognize the true nature of their situation.

Meanwhile the government and it's treasury proceeded south in progressively deteriorating conditions, but at almost a leisurely pace, set by Davis' undying confidence that a miracle would happen to allow the Confederacy to keep going.  He thought he could rally the people to just a little more sacrifice, and join up with armies to the West, failing to realize that those, too, were on the verge of collapse.  But somehow they carry on, even to the point of maintaining scrupulous records of all disbursements from the treasury, as the Union armies close in.

President Davis wanted to continue the war as a guerrilla action, but this was one of the things Breckinridge was most worried about, and tried most to avoid in spending so much energy counseling Lee and Johnston as they prepared to surrender.  To this end he tried to cause their actions to encompass as much of the confederate forces as possible, to leave as little as possible on which Davis could hang hopes of further military action.   Breckinridge feared an army of irregular partisans, living off the land and sniping Union forces from the sides, in that they would most likely also be stealing from the countryside for sustenance and generally causing more harm than good.  He characterized this possible outcome as a "farce" that would destroy any remaining vestige of honor in the southern cause.  It appears that he tried everything short of a coup, to attain a constitutional end to the conflict. 

We all know of the appalling slavery that played a major part in events surrounding that history, both in the form of chattel slavery imposed on black people in the south, and that of the draft imposed by Lincoln to preserve the Union (and also by the Confederates for their part).  But the interests of federal versus national government were also in play leading up to the conflict, and the suppression of that rebellion laid the groundwork for great expansion in the power of the government.  I have recently wondered whether the gradualist approach taken in Brazil to emancipation would perhaps have been a less painful solution to the problem than the civil war in this country, which left over 600,000 dead, as many injured, the vast destruction of property (mostly in the South), and social conflict persisting to this day.  We all know the South lost the war, but this tale of honor amidst the hopelessness of those final months is quite effective in portraying these men, in spite of their failings, as wholly dedicated to the cause and people they thought to represent.

Not a perfect book, to be sure.  A common family among some participants is confusing when only the last name is given.  And when aliases are taken the characters are sometimes referred to in those names.  And a few typesetting and editing errors as well.  However, extensively footnoted and referenced, and augmented with a helpful map tracing the escape routes, and numerous photos of the principals, the interest of the story far outweighs deficiencies in presentation.

There is a 2002 edition now available