Jefferson Davis the Man and His Hour Review
I56CIVIL State of war HISTORY equality. Just unless the constitutional process which he felt gave that idea life is given at least equal weight, such an practice will serve only the purpose (of import just limited) of contemplating ideals. The primary thing, as Harvey Cox once said about Christianity, is non to believe it; it is to practice information technology. In this country equality will be achieved only when the dominion of law, which forms a vital chemical element in the nation's grapheme, is respected equally with platonic of equality, respected every bit providing the ways to alive, achieve, and non just recollect nearly equality. As Christopher Dodd once said, "In this state our ways are our ends." Lincoln understood this. Wills, on this evidence, has non adequately explored information technology. Phillip S. Paludan University of Kansas Jefferson Davis: The Human and His Hour. By William C. Davis. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. Pp. fifteen, 784. $35.00.) Co-ordinate to the writer, Jefferson Davis has hitherto been ill served and misunderstood by those who take tried to tell his story. He believes that "the Davis nosotros have been given in impress has come chiefly from an unbroken cord of second- and third-rate biographies," among which he mentions those by Edward A. Pollard, Hudson Strode, and Cloudless Eaton. Whereas other biographers have failed to understand Davis, to William C. Davis in that location is "naught at all mysterious" (xi) about him. Observing that "fantabulous works accept appeared by scholars like William Cooper, Frank Vandiver, Paul Escott, Ludwell Johnson and others," Mr. Davis nevertheless avoids secondary sources and embarks on a Rankeian-similar search for the pure flame of truth by confining himself almost entirely to sources gimmicky with his subject. (Incidentally, I am still trying to effigy out what I have written that is important enough for Mr. Davis to ignore.) This method, of course, has the reward of finessing the tiresome task of assimilating a daunting mass of mod scholarship. Generally speaking, i who does not choice the brains of other scholars runs the risk of making mistakes and failing to understand very precisely matters not fully explained by his necessarily incomplete range of sources. Fifty-fifty though this volume is supposed to be a "life" and not a "life and times," a good grip on the times can help in depicting the life, and in this case the life suffers to some extent from an inadequate grasp of the antebellum period. Mr. Davis is naturally more at habitation in the war years, but even there his avoidance of secondary treatises narrows his focus unnecessarily. Mr. Davis undertakes to practise two things: provide a narrative of his subject'south life and explain Jefferson Davis the man. The first is done well, field of study to the limitations of the author'southward method, and 1 must adore the impressive amount of work that went into making this book. Some might wish that more than threescore-7 of the 706 pages of text had been allotted to the twenty-four BOOK REVIEWS157 postwar years of Davis's life, but on the other hand i can applaud the total treatment of the antebellum years, something so frequently lacking in biographies of Civil War figures. If the narrative office of the volume is for the near part solid and strong, the interpretive part leaves something to be desired. These remarks pertain especially to the author's reading of Jefferson Davis's personality, character, and psyche. He does not practice psychobiography, for which we can all be grateful, but relies on what he calls a mutual-sense arroyo to human nature . Even so, there are difficulties; a couple of examples may be offered. The reader is told that the neat "unifying and overriding influence" of Davis'due south life was "ane single paramount force—insecurity," which in the "smashing event of his life . . . helped to guide him to failure," even though that failure "may have been preordained" (641-42). He admits that the etiology of this declared insecurity remains largely conjectural, simply then attributes much of information technology to Samuel Davis, Jefferson'due south father, who "never knew how to show his affection." This impelled the son to prefer a succession of father substitutes , whom he regarded "almost...
This website uses cookies to ensure you go the best experience on our website. Without cookies your feel may not be seamless.
Source: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/420926/pdf
0 Response to "Jefferson Davis the Man and His Hour Review"
Post a Comment