Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart

Book Reviews Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart. By Felicity Allen. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. xx, 809 pp. $34.95. ISBN 0-8262-1219-0.

"If I had to characterize Davis," writes independent scholar Felicity Allen in the opening pages of Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, "I would choose the words simplicity, honesty, consistency" (p. xiii). Although this straightforward assessment offers a basic insight into Davis's life, it also seems quiescent in light of his central, and often controversial, place in the historiography of the Civil War. Over the years Davis has attracted defenders and critics. Biographers and scholars who have evaluated his ability as a leader in shaping battlefield strategy, administering the government, and inspiring the home front have found Davis skillful in some areas but wanting in others. Allen, in contrast, attempts to counter earlier critics of the Confederate president by presenting the "essential Davis" (p. xii). She relies heavily on documents written by and about Davis, including materials by family members, supporters, and enemies, in an effort to understand him "from the inside out." "The view we have of his times is largely the view he had," she writes. "If all this weights the scales on his side, perhaps it produces a balance long overdue" (p. xii).

Allen begins Davis's story with his father's experience in the American Revolution, connecting southern secession with the spirit of 1776, then follows his life chronologically from boyhood to death. She frames her text with Davis's capture in Georgia in 1865 and his triumphal return to the state in 1886. From this structure Allen establishes what she sees as the signal nature of his character and the principles that guided him. As the Confederacy collapsed and Union troops closed for his capture, she believes, Davis maintained his sense of duty and honor. Later, with Reconstruction at an end and Redeemers fully in control of the South, his dignified manner offered a comfortable symbol for the rightness of the Lost Cause. Davis also represented characteristics that Allen equates with the South: chivalry, loyalty, courage, discipline, and an "omnipresent Christian faith" (p. 28).

The Davis in this work is devout and determined but, despite many difficulties and challenges, is never complicated. He entered the U.S. Military Academy in 1824 and absorbed the values that shaped his life. Assigned to the western frontier, Davis became a levelheaded and capable professional who expected the army to be "my vocation for life" (p. 77), yet he resigned in 1835 to marry the daughter of Zachary Taylor. They settled in Mississippi, where malaria killed Davis's bride within the year, and he soon married Varina Banks Howell. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1844, then to the Senate after successful service in the Mexican War, Davis viewed office holding as a duty, and he emerged as an uncompromising voice for states' rights and slavery. "The enemy has passed the outer gate," he warned in 1849, and "we have to decide whether he shall be met at the threshold or on the hearth stone of our dwelling" (p. 175). He was not a fire-eater, but after serving as a somewhat innovative secretary of war, he returned to the Senate in 1857 to lead the fight against what he viewed as coercion by northern ideologues. Ultimately, that opposition led to secession and Davis's presidency of the Confederate government, a position that proved taxing and thankless.

Allen's depiction of Davis provides readers, particularly nonspecialists, with a helpful look into his world, but despite her intent and because of her method the view is narrow. His ideas and ideals are clearly stated but not placed within a broader historical context of scholarly debate. As a result he appears as a one-dimensional figure whose course seems tragic simply because of his stubbornness. The problem rests in Allen's romantic and simplistic image of the Old South, one that is more akin to that presented in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation than in modern scholarship. Like Griffith's 1915 film, she justifies slavery on paternalistic grounds, mocks abolitionists, and paints Northerners as ruthless invaders. Davis certainly felt this way, but he exemplified, as a contemporary noted, "a simplicity that was sublime" (p. 61). A biography should not.

J. THOMAS MURPHY

Bemidji State University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jul 2002
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