Customer Reviews

Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the Civil War

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

David Eicher has a difficult premise to prove but makes a good logical case for it. The short form is that the Southern mentality contained the seeds of the South's defeat. In saying this, he upsets all the Lost cause Mythology types, the new crop of Political Correctness types, in addition to all those that will disagree with his premise. This is a very heavy load for one book to bear and with all the naysayer's, I'm not sure a fair review is possible. One problem is the to lurid title, promising more than the premise can possibly deliver. However, with 120+ books on the American Civil War being released in 2006, I can understand wanting a "grabber" tile.
What this book contains is an intelligent description of CSA politics during the war. Detailing the waste of time, petty feuds and nastiness that the President, Congress and the state governors engaged in opens a window into a world that most histories ignore. Jefferson Davis often bears this alone. The book shows how much help he had from Stephens, Wigfall, Cobb, Brown and a legion of others. Their preference for obstructing, debating and endless obsession with "State's Rights" ended whatever small chance the South had for victory.
The war plays out in the background as Richmond and the states fight it out on center stage. The "CSA government" often is the President vs. the Vice-president with congress back stabbing both. The other option is the CSA congress unable to produce anything but endless debate. The sovereign state governors, see little reason for a central government and bicker with it over everything, until a Union Army appears on their borders. This leads to endless agreement over state regiments, where they are stationed and who commands them.
At the heart of the problem is the life experience of these men. They are the "opposition", a role that they can not abandon when they become the nation. All of them had spent their political life fighting the United States of America, if their party was in power or not. Proud to a fault, ready to argue the smallest point of order and used to obstructing legislation they carry these traits to Richmond, damaging their cause and reducing any chance of winning the war.
The chapter "Peace Proposals" and the Epilogue are worth the price of the book. The Epilogue contains as good a short history of the development of and Northern response to the "Lost Cause" as I've found. "Peace Proposals", shows how the years of silliness finally cause an almost total breakdown of the Confederacy. David Eicher is a very good writer but this is not an easy nor quick read. If you stay with it, you will gain a valuable insight into why the CSA government didn't work and the impact this has on the war effort.

Eicher presents his view of the downfall of the Confederacy, based on internal political dissent and the failure of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate Congress to resolve their many differences. He raises good points, although William Davis addresses many of these issues, in Look Away, in a somewhat more cohesive book. Eicher is strong on character sketches of key Confederate politicians, some of whom are not well known. The book drags at times, with long, somewhat tedious, quotations filling up more page space than is needed. However, the final chapter, his Epilogue, does an excellent job of explaining why the South lost the military aspects of the war but won the subsequent intellectual history of the conflict.

Dixie Betrayed (How the South Really Lost the Civil War) is a fascinating look at the government of the Confederate States of America. David J. Eicher explains why the Confederate States were doomed from the start, despite so many early victories on the battlefields. His revealing look at how the Confederate Congress functioned, and the battles that it fought contains all the intrigue associated with modern politics.

Eicher claims that the Confederacy was `born sick'. His thesis is that the states that succeeded from the Union were too strongly in favor of state's rights to form a new government strong enough to rule. He goes to great length to find first source historical records to prove this. He pieces together private correspondence from Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, Congressional leaders, and state governors to show a government in complete disarray. But he never probes into any other aspect of the Civil War.

He could have just as easily made a very similar case against the United States government. Like Davis, Abraham Lincoln had few friends in his Congress. Lincoln also suspended the writ of habeas corpus, declared martial law in major cities, jailed citizens for months for flimsy reasons allowing them no legal recourse. Lincoln was just as guilty as Davis of micromanaging the military, putting incompetent men in positions of power, and playing favorites through out the government. Both Presidents were also stubborn and refused to listen to anyone that disagreed with them.

The book is one of the few times that a major historian has looked beyond the battles to the inner workings of the Confederacy to find a reason for their loss. In doing so Eicher reveals the power struggles and back biting that prevented the Confederate government from being able to capitalize on the South's military victories. He illustrates the difficulty in waging a war when the central government does not have clear power to assert itself over the individual state governments. As the war progressed, he argues, the states became more focused on themselves and less willing to contribute troops, materials, and monies to the war effort; all the time expecting more and more from the Confederate Congress.

At times it seems as if Eicher is repeating himself when he writes about the dealings of President Davis and his Congress. This is because so often they covered the same ground, never coming to a real conclusion. While that was indeed the case many times, it does cause the book to drag towards the end. Readers that are not historians may well wish Eicher had used few (or at least shorter) quotes to make his points, and that he would have kept the plot moving a bit faster.

This is not a comprehensive look at the Civil War. Eicher has chosen not discuss any battle or skirmish in detail, except to point out a particular failing of the Confederate Congress or President. He also mentions none of the problems the war created in the North, or the difficulties Lincoln faced in his own Congress.

It is a compelling thesis written in clear, easy text making it accessible to today's readers. Southern Traditionalists are going to be bothered that there is none of the romanticisms of the South in Dixie Betrayed, and military buffs are going to be let down by the lack of attention paid to the battles. But readers looking for something new on a very well documented topic are going to be pleased with this book, even if it seems a bit slanted at times.

As Eicher eloquently points out, notable men such as John Calhoun and Louis Wigfall wanted secession desperately for years before it finally happened. Most of the politicians and more than a few Confederate officers saw secession as a way to win personal glory and a brilliant future in a new nation for themselves.... remember that they had grown up with Grandpa's glorious tales of fighting for liberty in the American Revolution. And, as usual, it was the common man who had to actually fight and die in the war.

There were many causes of this war.....states' rights, tariff issues, slavery, agrarian economy vs industrial, a sense of personal honor and duty to defend one's home state...and yes, unfortunately, greed and EGO also played a big part for some.

I gave this book only three stars because Eicher does refer with derision to "lost causers." The south DID lose the war...but that doesn't mean that the honor and courage of southern soldiers was all in vain. The average citizen was defending his home and family, and saw his whole way of life destroyed. THe southern armies WERE overwhelmed by numbers (as well as the lack of proper supplies) and not by lack of personal courage.

This book will undoubtedly raise hackles despite its many harsh truths. Worth a read by historians, War Between the States buffs and scholars, and political scientists.

I've just started reading this book. I was curious to see the reviews that had already been posted. My impression on reading them is that they are the epitome of "Lost Cause" romanticism (the idea that "Johnnie Reb" and his peerless leaders were only beaten by sheer weight of Yankee numbers). If you read the "one star" reviews, you'd get the impression that the author's thesis is that the South lost because of incompetent leadership and that its materiel disadvantage did not matter at all.

While I haven't finished this book, I have gone through the prologue and epilogue, and I can safely say that this is not the case. Rather, he seeks to debunk the notion that the Confederate military and political leaders' mistakes did not play a role in the Confederacy's defeat.

I don't think anyone who has read about the Civil War and is objective about it, can dismiss the fact that sometimes Confederates made grotesque mistakes. What about Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg? What about the inept Confederate leadership that led to the fall of Vicksburg?

So I'd advise people to give this book a chance to make its case. Don't let "partisans of the Lost Cause" distort perceptions of what really happened.

DIXIE BETRAYED: HOW THE SOUTH REALLY LOST THE CIVIL WAR analyzes the Confederate government and how its decisions caused it to lose the war. The Confederate politicians have long been applauded as fighters but in fact were divided by conspiracy and dysfunction. Previously unexplored sources are used to document in-house battles that even evolved to threats and physical violence. With military decisions coming more from political influence than skill and years of unresolved debates evolving over government setup, the South was doomed to lose.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

The book describes in considerable detail some of the political issues of concern to President Davis, members of the Confederate Congress, and the governors of various Confederate states while the Civil War was being fought. The interest to this reader was in seeing how irrelevant most of these issues were to the survival of the Confederacy, and yet how important they were to its leaders. In addition, while we frequently read of Lincoln's interactions with his cabinet and with members of the United States Congress, we less often have the chance to view the other side.

The prospective reader should be warned, however, that the book's title and subtitle wildly misrepresent its contents. The book describes neither a betrayal nor a new explanation for the South's defeat. (Had president and congress worked together in total harmony, a situation that has never existed in human history, they would not have saved the Confederacy.) A more accurate title would be: "Confederate Politics - How the Leaders of the South Attempted to Govern in the Middle of the War they had Made," but this title would doubtless have reduced sales.

Dixie Betrayed tells of the relationships between Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederacy and many of the politicians and generals in that nation. The idea that a government dominated by state-rights advocates is weak is certainly not new. Eicher sets out to show the weakness of the Confederate central government through a series of vignettes describing the relation between Davis and some other person in the government. The two main problems with this approach are: (1) Eicher assumes I know lots of things about the obscure people in the Confederate government already (which I don't); and (2) there seems to be no central thesis that is supported.

I expect that a well written biography of Davis would cover most of this material in a much more comprehensive manner.

Overall, this was a very easily digestible and enjoyable book to read. At the core of "Dixie Betrayed", Eicher is making two arguments. They are arguments that have been made many times before. First, that the ideological nature of the states rights argument probably doomed the C.S.A., and second, that Lost Cause romanticism has created a distortion of the true narrative of the American Civil War. However, these are good arguments to make.

I feel like this book was intended to be approachable to a wide audience but will not serve much of a purpose for veteran Civil War scholars. In essence, I liked this book and learned a great deal from it but something about it makes it feel like it isn't quite the stuff that a professor teaching me the subject would assign.

I think this book best serves people looking for a general study of the Civil War in a quick and painless fashion and anyone who has never looked at a good argument against the Lost Cause outlook of the war.

Eicher in Dixie Betrayed is refreshing in his willingness to be politically incorrect in his description of men and events leading to the failure of the Confederacy. Nothing he writes is new, but few historians have been willing to be so frank. Dixie Betrayed reminds me greatly of James Street's The Civil War: An Unvarnished Account of the Late but Still Lively Hostilities, which I first read in high school in the late '50s. Do not read either book if you subscribe to the Confederate myth.