Some people believe that a book once started must be finished; that there is a sort of moral imperative to see even a bad book through to the end, on the grounds that it might not be so bad after all. Dr. Boli has never subscribed to that view, and has always abandoned a book after the first few pages if it seems as though reading it will be of less benefit than not reading it. There was a time when he felt some residual guilt about these abandonments; but a friend, a Hungarian philosopher, gave him a universal principle that justified Dr. Boli’s original instinct: “Life is too short to read garbage.”
Book reviewers, unlike other mortals, are usually obliged to read the garbage; it is their profession to read garbage. But it does seem to Dr. Boli that there is room for a kind of review that will explain why he abandoned a book: what was so annoying, or incompetent, or merely dull about the book that he could not get past the first chapter or so.
And so we come to Jefferson Davis and his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. It is a book that richly deserves to be abandoned, and here are two thousand words to tell you why.
Jefferson Davis is your least-favorite high-school teacher, the one who always took the extra time to misunderstand your question and make you feel stupid for asking it, who made absurd and arbitrary rules and insisted that they were universal natural laws, and who never once in his life admitted that he was wrong about anything. You thought you had escaped him forever by graduating, but now here he is claiming your attention as if he were some important historical figure. He starts to lecture you about the late rebellion in the same tone of voice he used to tell you that your homework could not possibly be worth more than a C minus.
But now you have one weapon against him that you never had in high school. You can slam his book shut after the first chapter and refuse to listen to him anymore. This time he can’t give you detention after school.
Was Jefferson Davis ever wrong about anything in his life? He doesn’t seem to believe he was.
Here we have a man who clearly foresaw the dangers to the Union that came from the various conflicts and compromises that came up through the years before the war. He always, always made the honorable decision, the only decision that could possibly have been right, and he was infallible in these decisions even when the wisest and most experienced statesmen of the age could hardly see past their own noses. He never once regretted anything he had ever done. If he had been tried in an international court for crimes against humanity, he would have been one of those defiant prisoners who get extra time for showing no remorse.
We hear so much of the romance of the Lost Cause, about how Southerners saw themselves as characters in a novel by Walter Scott (as Mark Twain suggested), that this book is bound to be a disappointment. Jefferson Davis has a mind full of petty legalisms; there is no room in it for any romance.
It seems greatly to the honor of our country that, after an extraordinarily bloody civil war, the winning side allowed the rebel leader not only to live out most of the rest of his life in peace, but even to publish memoirs in which he proclaimed the justice of his cause. It is perhaps less to the credit of our literature that this book was published, but to our country as a whole it is a credit.
The most annoying thing about the petty legalisms that fill the mind of Jefferson Davis is the way he keeps implying, not at all subtly, that anyone who disagrees with his conclusions is a moron. “He must be a careless reader of our political history who has not observed that…” “Will any candid, well-informed man assert that…” “Can any historical fact be more demonstrable than…” These are all from just the introduction.
The cumulative effect of so many instances of this same rhetorical trick is to make the reader feel either stupid or hostile, or both. You may feel, in fact, as though you are stuck in one of those back-in-high-school nightmares, suffering through Mr. Davis’ sophomore American History class, where the teacher is eternally berating you for not having done your homework.
The first chapter begins by announcing that it will deal with, not the questions of slavery, but the nature of those questions.
Inasmuch as questions growing out of the institution of negro servitude, or connected with it, will occupy a conspicuous place in what is to follow, it is important that the reader should have, in the very outset, a right understanding of the true nature and character of those questions.
Most people misunderstand, as it turns out, not slavery itself, and not the questions about it per se, but the nature and character of those questions. Gosh, this is exciting! Why, it’s better than Ivanhoe!
So we get a capsule history of “African servitude” in the United States. We learn that, while it existed in some form in all the colonies, it was prevalent only in the South; that the Southern states themselves prohibited the importation of African slaves, but that “a few zealots in the North” began to demand that the Federal government interfere with the institutions of the states and abolish slavery. These zealots proceeded to pervert all discourse on the question of slavery.
For example, take the question of the “extension of slavery” into the territories. Here we come to an argument made by almost every Southern apologist—an argument both so legalistic and so absurd that it is hard to believe Jefferson Davis took it seriously. Yet he undoubtedly did. It is worth reading just as an example of how the kind of legalistic reasoning that apparently consumed his thoughts could completely blind someone to the most obvious facts. Speaking of the phrase “extension of slavery” as applied to the territories, he says,
To the reader unfamiliar with the subject, or viewing it only on the surface, it would perhaps never occur that, as used in the great controversies respecting the Territories of the United States, it does not, never did, and never could, imply the addition of a single slave to the number already existing. The question was merely whether the slaveholder should be permitted to go, with his slaves, into territory (the common property of all) into which the non-slaveholder could go with his property of any sort. There was no proposal nor desire on the part of the Southern States to reopen the slave-trade, which they had been foremost in suppressing, or to add to the number of slaves. It was a question of the distribution, or dispersion, of the slaves, rather than of the ”extension of slavery.” Removal is not extension.
Now, the number of implausible assumptions on which this argument rests is frightful. But we shall mention only four of the most obvious.
1. It assumes that, if slavery were made legal in a territory, no one but a transplanted Southerner could ever possibly desire to own a slave.
2. It assumes that Southerners who would migrate would never prosper—that, in spite of uprooting themselves from their old homes precisely for the purpose of making something of themselves, they would never succeed in owning anything greater than the farm they left behind, so that they would never desire more laborers for a larger farm, in spite of the obvious psychological truth that almost no one would leave his home for an unsettled territory unless there was a good chance of doing a lot better in the unsettled territory. For those who did not live through the era, it may be necessary to point out that, although the African trade had been suppressed (in the same way that the cocaine trade is suppressed today), breeding slaves domestically for sale was a profitable endeavor.
3. It assumes that the transplanted Southerners would never—in spite of the obvious inducements of material prosperity—reproduce at a faster rate than they did in the South, creating a larger class of slaveholders who would need a larger number of slaves.
4. It assumes that the Southern immigrants would never intermarry with the Northern immigrants, thus extending their “property” in slaves into the previously slaveless Northern families and the descendants of those unions.
Our author sees immigrants into the territories as if they were chess pieces. A Southern family arrives with a certain number of pawns, and that obviously removes those same pawns from the South. If you think of human beings as little wooden abstractions, this argument seems to make sense. But if you have an ounce of romance in your soul, you remember that human beings are sloppily real. Because human beings have aspirations—because they reproduce—because they imitate their neighbors, the extension of slavery into the territories would have meant more slaves, just as the introduction of free settlers into the territories meant more free settlers overall. It takes a sterile pedant to make the argument Davis makes—we had almost said a dimwitted pedant, and now that we think of it we shall just go ahead and say it. Yet, one after another, Southern writers made this argument. Is this the vaunted romance of the South?
The Missouri Compromise does not meet with Davis’ approval, because only the territory itself, not Congress, should have the right to decide whether to permit slavery. On the other hand, the admission of California as a free state, at the insistence of the territory itself, was a bad thing because it violated the Missouri Compromise. The legalistic arguments that support these assertions are too dull even to summarize.
At any rate, all this history of the slavery question leads to what may be the only really breathtaking moment in the whole chapter: the moment when Davis declares, after all these hair-splitting pedantries about the nature of the questions regarding slavery, that he has proved that the question of the morality of slavery had nothing to do with the controversies.
This brief retrospect may have sufficed to show that the question of the right or wrong of the institution of slavery was in no wise involved in the earlier sectional controversies. Nor was it otherwise in those of a later period, in which it was the lot of the author of these memoirs to bear a part. They were essentially struggles for sectional equality or ascendancy—for the maintenance or the destruction of that balance of power or equipoise between North and South, which was early recognized as a cardinal principle in our Federal system.
We went back and read that again to make sure it said what we thought it said. What can we say in response? Why did the North insist so vehemently that there must be no extension of slavery, unless it was because “the question of the right or wrong of slavery” meant everything to those Northerners? We can only assume that Mr. Davis believes the Northerners simply wanted to annoy Southerners, and they chose to needle them about slavery because thumping car stereos had not been invented yet.
But we hear this argument even today, especially from Southern apologists: the Civil War was never about slavery. It was about States’ Rights. It was a sectional rivalry. It was about grits vs. oatmeal. Anything but slavery. But Jefferson Davis has killed that argument dead. With pedantic thoroughness, he has shown us that the sectional controversies were never about anything other than slavery. It is a strange psychological mystery that he thinks he has proved the opposite, but that is between him and his therapist.
Here Dr. Boli will make an unfashionable admission. In his youth (he was only in his late 70s when the Civil War broke out), Dr. Boli was one of those moderate types who were opposed to slavery on moral grounds, but thought some sort of gradual emancipation would take care of the slavery problem without any unpleasantness. But when he began to read Southern tracts defending slavery, all of them making the same arguments Jefferson Davis makes here, he saw that, in the minds of these makers of Southern opinion, the idea of the African as a person, created with unalienable rights, equal in God’s sight to any other human being, simply could not grow; that they could never see a slave as anything but property. At that moment, when that realization dawned upon him, Dr. Boli became a raging abolitionist, thundering hellfire and damnation against the apologists for slavery, and vigorously collaborating with every effort to send fugitive slaves on their way to freedom and safety. He is a reasonable and moderate man, but Dr. Boli has his limits.
So let us hear no more about the romance of the old South. The Confederacy was founded by little men with little minds. The Underground Railroad—now, there is a big, bold, romantic idea, worthy of anything in Scott. We know where to look for the real romance of the antebellum era, and we are not responsible for the Confederate apologists who get it backwards.
Meanwhile, if you have some unaccountable desire to read the dry witterings of Jefferson Davis in his own words, the book is easy to find in the Internet Archive. There are two volumes of fairly small type, totaling 1700 pages; so if you find Jefferson Davis entertaining, you will not run out of entertainment for quite a while.
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. By Jefferson Davis. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881.
Volume I.
Volume II.
