Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (Southern Classics Series) [Paperback]

Allen Tate (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1879941244 | ISBN-13: 978-1879941243 | Publication Date: July 21, 1998

Written early in Tate’s career, this study of the Confederacy’s fallen leader is highly critical of his flaws yet ultimately sympathetic to the Southern cause.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"For historians, Davis seems strangely hard to find. Mr. Tate has discovered him."--New York Times Book Review, 1929

About the Author

Allen Tate (1899-1979), a major American poet and a leading New Critic, was the author of many works of criticism and poetry as well as a Civil War novel, The Fathers, and Stonewall Jackson.

Allen Tate (1899-1979), a major American poet and a leading New Critic, was the author of many works of criticism and poetry as well as a Civil War novel, The Fathers, and Stonewall Jackson.

Product Details

• Paperback: 311 pages
• Publisher: J.S. Sanders Books (July 21, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1879941244
• ISBN-13: 978-1879941243
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #926,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Eminently readable biography, June 13, 2000

By 

Randall Ivey "Randall" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (Southern Classics Series) (Paperback)

This book is no act of idolatry, despite the author's reputation as a Southern conservative and Agrarian. Tate believes Davis was a great man, but he points out his flaws as well, his diffidence in acting sooner that might have won the South the War, his pride, his sometime aloofness, his tendency to remain loyal to generals (Braxton Bragg foremost among them) whose incompetence was all too apparent to others, and his refusal to appoint the right men for the right job.

This is an absorbing read that puts one in mind of Shelby Foote's celebrated War trilogy, although Tate's was written first. It has the same novelistic quality and drive and the same quickly drawn but utterly convincing characterizations. The book alternates between presentations of certain monumental battles and portraits of life on the "homefront." The latter is actually more fascinating than the former. We learn in vivid detail of the strength and loyalty and perseverance of the Southern people.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A comprehensive, clear-eyed, and lyrical biography, January 31, 2003

By 

Andrew S. Rogers (Stamford, Connecticut) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (Southern Classics Series) (Paperback)

Poet, essayist, and Southern Agrarian, Allen Tate brings (brought) to his life of Jefferson Davis not only a tremendous narrative talent, but also a deep understanding of, and sympathy for, the Southern culture that produced Jefferson Davis. But unlike other Southern writers who made Davis a larger-than-life hero of the Lost Cause, Tate pulls no punches in his assessment of the President's weaknesses as well as his strengths, and how they may have crippled the Confederacy from the very beginning.

Tate considers Davis a man of high ideals and great personal honor. At the same time, though, he had a "peculiarly inflexible mind" ("he had not learned anything since about 1843") (p. 197) and a "feeble grasp of human nature" (p. 255). He treated his office as a sort of super-minister of defense, and was never "the leader of the Southern people as a whole" (p. 180). The South could have won the war if she had had the right kind of political leader, Tate argues. But Davis, whose rise to leadership was generally unearned (p. 79), wasn't it.

Beyond Davis the man, Tate also has a deep grasp of the Southern culture and the larger historical and cultural issues that were clashing in the War Between the States. In keeping with his Southern Agrarianism, Tate paints the South as the last outpost of European culture in the Americas, standing against -- and ultimately overwhelmed by -- the surging might of restless, expansionist, wealth-seeking "Americanism," embodied in the Yankee Northeast. Tate's grasp of Southern regionalism lets him place an emphasis on the tensions between Upper and Lower South that, for me, shone a light on the instability of the Confederate government that I haven't seen as emphasized elsewhere.

Tate's perspective and narrative form may not be in keeping with more modern styles of biography. But this book is nevertheless an excellent and insightful read, and I recommend it to any student of the men caught up in, as well as the issues behind, America's bloodiest conflict.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jefferson Davis--His Rise and Fall, November 27, 2009

By 

Thomas H. Pyle (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (Hardcover)

Jefferson Davis--His Rise and Fall is a Civil War biography today apparently so obscure that Amazon merits it only the scantiest listing without even a cover image. This is a shame, because it is a eloquent, fascinating, and compact account of the fortunes and failures of both Confederacy's president and its military policy. It is worthy of all Civil War enthusiasts' attention.

The Confederacy was led, Tate holds, by a good, but not a great man, sincere and sometimes inspirational but humorless, rigid, and unforesightful, a leader whose mantle was more received than earned. The fall of the South Tate lays mainly at the feet of Jefferson's failed military policy. The first culprit is Davis's inflexible departmental system for the Confederate army, a legacy of his experience of two decades earlier as a solider in the Mexican War and later as Secretary of War to Franklin Pierce. Through his creation of segmented military departments, Davis tightly controlled his army, but also restricted its ability to deploy forces between deparments when and where support was most needed. Pemberton's loss to Grant at Vicksburg, which Tate holds to be the ultimate nail in the South's coffin, results from such self-imposed incapacity to transfer needed troops from the East. Another is the elevation of the incompetent, unsuccessful, irritable and unpopular Braxton Bragg from a failed field command to general in chief in 1864. Distracted by personal rivalries especially with Johnston, Bragg proved an utter diaster to all but a deluded Davis. Tate proves this when recounting the lost chance to deploy Forrest from Tennessee to cut Sherman's supply lines before the fall of Atlanta, where such action if taken expeditiously could have changed the Georgia campaign and even the outcome of the war.

Written in 1929 (when he was in his late twenties), Tate's biography shows uncommon descriptive and analytic flair, harking back to a more refined and nuanced historiogrpahy than many plainer narratives of the current era. Tate's enjoyable assessment of Davis's misplaced confidence in Bragg is one good example:

"[South Carolina Governor Joe] Brown had, in fact, cut the ground from under Davis's feet. Davis had just been feebly arguing that Forrest was already on one of Sherman's communications; but Sherman was, as Brown intimated, drawing very little sustenance from Mississippi. And Brown exposed the misrepresentations that Bragg had been practicing upon Davis regarding the strength of the two armies. In Bragg's dishonor, not in his defense, it must be said that it is improbable that he deliberately misled Davis: he did it unconsciously because he wished to overthrow Johnston, and he cannot have the distinction of being a deliberate, calculating villain whose strength one is bound to respect; he was, more probably, only a weak and stupid fool who did not understand his own motives. This being said, what shall we say of Davis, who trusted him? Here Davis's feeble grasp of human nature betrayed him; he does not seem to have suspected that a ridiculed failure might possibly hate his admired successor, and plot his downfall. Davis's innocence would have been a virtue in a saint, but it was stupidity in a politician. His unshakable belief in Braxton Bragg was his sole major blunder as President; but it was a blunder of such magnitude that poor humanity must leave it to God alone to forgive."

Tate himself is an interesting character. Allen Tate (1899 - 1979) was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944. He was also a poet in residence at Princeton University until 1942 who converted to Catholicism in 1950, then went on to marry three times, including to a nun with whom he had an affair when she was his student at University of Michigan!

Although the book is about Davis and his conduct of his war, Tate in his epilogue offers an interesting strategic conclusion of the war's larger context. The Civil War was not a war between the states. It was a war between America and Europe--of "the Western spirit against the European--the spirit of relentless aggression against the stable spirit of an ordered economy--and the Western won." It this sense Tate's conclusion distantly echoes Lincoln's in the Gettysburg Address, that the war was the conclusion of what the American Revolution began, ultimately from the class oriented slow agrarianism of the South (and Europe) to the restless industrialism of the North (and America).