Patriot in Gray

Jefferson Davis, American, by William J. Cooper Jr. (Knopf, 757 pp., $35)

NEARLY 140 years after the fall of the Confederacy, the man who led it remains a mystery. Jefferson Davis has come down to us largely as a caricature; perhaps the best-known tale has him fleeing Union troops disguised in women’s clothes. Yet like so much else that we now seem to “know” about his life, this is a fabrication. In truth, Davis was a deeply complex man, who loved his country—both of them. He greatly disliked the give-and-take of politics, but it was in politics that he spent the preponderance of his career; he revered Andrew Jackson and delivered his eulogy, proclaiming, “May our Union ever be preserved,” but he became an ardent devotee of states’ rights; he was a patriotic American who himself could have been president, yet when called, chose the Confederacy. How, then, did this man, so devoted to the Union, end up leading the struggle to destroy the United States?

JW

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Jay Winik

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Jefferson Davis, American, by William J. Cooper Jr. (Knopf, 757 pp., $35)

NEARLY 140 years after the fall of the Confederacy, the man who led it remains a mystery. Jefferson Davis has come down to us largely as a caricature; perhaps the best-known tale has him fleeing Union troops disguised in women’s clothes. Yet like so much else that we now seem to “know” about his life, this is a fabrication. In truth, Davis was a deeply complex man, who loved his country—both of them. He greatly disliked the give-and-take of politics, but it was in politics that he spent the preponderance of his career; he revered Andrew Jackson and delivered his eulogy, proclaiming, “May our Union ever be preserved,” but he became an ardent devotee of states’ rights; he was a patriotic American who himself could have been president, yet when called, chose the Confederacy. How, then, did this man, so devoted to the Union, end up leading the struggle to destroy the United States?