Review: Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals (1990)

[truepenny]

Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West by Steven E. Woodworth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So there's been a cultural shift since this book was written. Woodworth belongs to the generation of Civil War historians where it's okay to just say "slavery" without any consideration of the human beings actually enslaved---or any consideration of the moral/ethical question of whether anyone who protects the institution of slavery can be an admirable person (Robert E. Lee, I am looking at you)---and okay to write about the Civil War as a contest between two honorable forces. So this book doesn't ask some questions that it should be asking and it assumes that its readers are prepared to admire Jefferson Davis, which I am not.

But, okay. The past is a foreign country. This is an in-depth, blow-by-blow analysis of why the Confederacy failed in the western theater of the Civil War, with an emphasis on Davis's decisions and actions. The Confederate generals make the Union generals look like grown-up professional soldiers, which is saying something. Aside from a paragraph near the end where he loses his mind and asserts the Confederacy could have won the Civil War if Davis had just made a few critical decisions differently (and the general failure to question the Confederates' passionate belief in themselves as deeply honorable men), Woodworth offers a good military and psychological analysis of where the Confederate high command went wrong.



View all my reviews