Books in Brief: The Long Surrender

The Long Surrender, by Burke Davis (Random House, 319 pp., $19.95)

Burke Davis adds to his already impressive canon on the Civil War with this behind-the-scenes account of the last days of the Confederacy. He wisely chooses as his subject not the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee but the flight of Jefferson Davis and his cabinet to the interior and, when they realized all was lost, to Mexico, Cuba, and England. He highlights the uneasy relations between the cabinet, the army, and President Davis and disproves several legends, none of which is hotly contested now: that Davis escaped with a fortune of Confederate gold; that he was captured in a woman’s dress. The author succeeds in adding a human dimension to the whole sorry show of the fall of Dixie. Scorned in the moment of defeat, the aristocratic Davis only became the Martyr of the Lost Cause when the harsh terms of his imprisonment became public. Ultimately, however, the United States decided to do nothing with him, leaving Davis free but a man without a country. Denied the drama of a trial he felt he could not lose, he was left to vindicate himself in his last years in a weighty two-volume history that, the author says, “failed to express his views as clearly as he had in a brief earlier statement: ‘The war proved secession to be impractical. It did not prove it to be wrong.’ ”

JM

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Joe Mysak

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The Long Surrender, by Burke Davis (Random House, 319 pp., $19.95)

Burke Davis adds to his already impressive canon on the Civil War with this behind-the-scenes account of the last days of the Confederacy. He wisely chooses as his subject not the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee but the flight of Jefferson Davis and his cabinet to the interior and, when they realized all was lost, to Mexico, Cuba, and England. He highlights the uneasy relations between the cabinet, the army, and President Davis and disproves several legends, none of which is hotly contested now: that Davis escaped with a fortune of Confederate gold; that he was captured in a woman’s dress. The author succeeds in adding a human dimension to the whole sorry show of the fall of Dixie. Scorned in the moment of defeat, the aristocratic Davis only became the Martyr of the Lost Cause when the harsh terms of his imprisonment became public. Ultimately, however, the United States decided to do nothing with him, leaving Davis free but a man without a country. Denied the drama of a trial he felt he could not lose, he was left to vindicate himself in his last years in a weighty two-volume history that, the author says, “failed to express his views as clearly as he had in a brief earlier statement: ‘The war proved secession to be impractical. It did not prove it to be wrong.’ ”