A Government of Our Own

A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy. By William C. Davis. New York: The Free Press, 1994. 550 p.

William C. Davis’s A Government of Our Own describes the creation of the Confederate government from February to May 1861. His work is primarily a socio-political history of the secession crisis and creation of the Confederacy. The work is a day-by-day account of the first few months of the Confederate government. From these first several months the reader can see many valuable themes beginning to develop, which would continue throughout the short life of the Confederate government. The Confederates sacrificed much for what they believed in and attempted to create a “more perfect union.” However, internal conflict and strife often plagued them and the “feelings of Confederate nationalism” failed to develop.

The first half of Davis’s work discusses at length the arrival of the Confederate congressmen to Montgomery. The amount of detail Davis adds to his work helps bring his narrative to life. For instance, he often notes the conditions that surrounded the quaint town of Montgomery. Davis takes into account the hotels, food, weather, fashion, and attitudes surrounding what was once called Yankeetown. He also juxtaposes moderate Confederates with the fire-eaters, which helps shed light on several convoluted situations the young Confederacy faced. The polarization of several leaders helped others to decide a president for the young Confederate nation. They did not want a fire-eater, like William L. Yancey, or someone as benign as Alexander H. Stephens. In fact, William Davis exclaims that Jefferson Davis lacked many of the skills to be president but was the best man for the job when all things considered. President Davis also selected a cabinet, which included one man from each seceded state. Many of the cabinet members were either previously considered as a potential president or were prominent men from their state.

Davis’s following chapters invite the reader into the chambers of the Confederate Congress. As in the U.S. Constitutional Convention, there were many questions that needed to be answered. Many asked what kind of constitution should be adopted. Could northern states apply for statehood? Could southern states secede from the Confederacy? And what about slavery? In many ways they were trying to enact what they believed were the true goals of the Founding Fathers. The Confederate Constitution was merely a “revision” of the U.S. Constitution and in many ways resembled the old one. Davis even goes into the making of the Confederate flag. There were many intricate designs to choose from, but the delegates decided to go with the simple “stars and bars.” Both the Confederate flag and constitution were tweaked to the South’s liking but retained the same base design as the former.

Finally, Davis examines the removal of the Confederate capital from Montgomery to Richmond, but the reader is left unsatisfied. He tends to focus on the political reasons for the removal, but he fails to acknowledge the significance of Virginia’s invaluable military resources, such as the numerous railroads, flour mills, and in particular the Tredegar Iron Works.

Davis uses many valuable primary sources. He often looks into the personal lives of Confederate politicians through his use of diaries and letters to relatives. He also researched several newspapers and the Southern Historical Society Papers. He is also the author of Battle of Bull Run: History of the First Campaign of the Civil War and Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. Overall, the highly readable opus is a must read for any Civil War scholar or anybody who has an interest in the Confederacy.

Shawn Devaney

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A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy. By William C. Davis. New York: The Free Press, 1994. 550 p.

William C. Davis’ epic-like account of the Confederate Constitutional Convention stands as an important look at the intricacies of the creation of a government. A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy covers just what Davis implies in the title – much of the desires of the individual convention delegates and how they interacted amongst each other at the convention. Whereas synthesis of how these separate desires combined and contrasted one another was not as thorough throughout the book, the day by day, blow for blow of the convention is covered in extreme detail here. Whereas Davis really does not tell the readers why what he is writing is important, the book remains as a crucial “insider’s view” into the convention.

Davis creates his extensively detailed narrative through a combination of sources. Newspapers, diaries, notes, and correspondence all help the author come up with his vast descriptions of opinions, settings, and actual places. Oddly enough, Montgomery, Alabama itself seems a character in Davis’ portrait of the convention, as he goes to great length discussing the city and its own quirks. With such a large cast of characters from Robert Rhett to Virginia Davis, the convention itself feels alive to the reader. Actually, too alive, it may take the reader multiple attempts to comprehend everything in this work because of the detail.

From the beginning, Davis looks to the panic over secession that brews in 1860. Of course starting with South Carolina, the author shows the process of the politics behind secession and then the task of merely electing officials to represent the state after secession is agreed upon. As with most of the book, secessionist voices are basically all that Davis gives the reader, even when explaining the debates between cooperationalists and fire-eaters. Next, after South Carolina proposes that the convention happen in Montgomery in February of 1861, Davis quickly takes a look at some of the other secession debates in the South.

When Davis finally takes the reader to Montgomery, he begins to introduce these “founding fathers” as they enter the city and immediately begin to informally come to a consensus on just what exactly they are doing in Montgomery. The debate between adopting the United States Constitution and / or merely amending it versus creating a new document became the first official debate of the convention. Quickly it was agreed on to write a new document, and thus began the more political portions of the convention. Davis describes the convention as if these men were demigods on the same pedestal as Washington and Jefferson, and indeed the reader will get the sense that men like Rhett and Thomas Cobb did feel that way about themselves. In fact, much of the rhetoric of the Southern leaders emulates that of the Jeffersonian Republicans.

The work proceeds to cover the adoption of the final constitution in March, after a drawn out battle between representatives. Past political rivalries helped hamper the debates, and the resulting constitution showed the lack of solidarity. It limited the executive power, while asserting a more conservative framework to protect slavery. After the Southern states quickly ratified the constitution and Virginia seceded, Montgomery was found lacking as a capital for the new nation. Fittingly, Davis ends his narrative with the departure of the government from Montgomery in early May of 1861.

As noted before, Davis’ narrative of the constitutional convention is an important look at the social and political motivations behind the thirty-seven men who attended the event and created the short-lived confederacy. Whereas this work does not really introduce any groundbreaking new material, it does give the reader a deeper sense of the characters behind secession. However, there are a few shortcomings to this book. Too much detail has already been mentioned, but furthermore, the bias that Davis has for some members of the convention is evident and sometimes distracting. Also, the attention to detail has left out many opportunities for synthesis. Overall, Davis’ A Government of Our Own is an valuable contribution to our understanding of the political formation of the Confederacy.

Dan Vogel Texas Christian University

A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy. William C. Davis. New York: The Free Press, 1994. 550 p.

Herein, William C. Davis uses diaries, personal correspondence, and newspaper articles to reconstruct the February to May 1861 period during which the Confederate government sat in Montgomery, Alabama. Often writing a day-by-day account, Davis chronicles the development of two Confederate constitutions, the election of a President, and the commencement of a working bureaucracy, with all their attendant ills. In so doing, the author demonstrates that personalities and ideologies of the South’s great politicians hindered agreement in the first few months of the Confederacy’s existence. While an insightful and well-researched narrative, this work suffers from disorganization, innocuous detail, and repetition.

Davis begins his work with the South Carolina secession convention in December 1860, which authorized a meeting of seceded states in Montgomery the following February. After a discussion of other such secession conventions, Davis offers a daily account of the first two months of the Confederate’s provisional government as it resided in the Alabama capital. For Davis, the thirty-seven men who first convened on 4 February 1861 were the titans of Southern politics: Howell Cobb, Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs, and Robert Barnwell Rhett, for example. Davis repeats throughout the work that these men did not see themselves as rebels, but as “reformers” and “keepers of the original flames of 1776,” correcting the Northern perversions of American constitutionalism (83).

Rapidly, these men reorganized as a Congress, elected a President, and drafted a provisional, and then a permanent, constitution. The permanent charter they adopted in mid-March, the author finds, was a “curious mix of looks backward, foreword, and sideways” (256). It looked backward because it curbed the usurpation of the federal government the framers felt occurred in Washington. It looked forward as it reformed the civil service, made Cabinet officers accountable, and included a line-item veto. In looking sideways, it retained some of the stronger provisions of its 1787 counterpart including the Electoral College and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. In essence, the Confederate Constitution mirrored the Washington version but it devolved more power to the states and explicitly protected slavery.

After the signing of the permanent Constitution on 16 March, the delegates left to push for ratification in their respective states, leaving Montgomery to President Jefferson Davis’s executive branch and a swarm of office seekers. For the next month, each department created a bureaucracy. Most important in President Davis’s mind was the military, especially since on 10 April he ordered the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Meanwhile, the seven seceded states quickly ratified the new constitution and a new Congress assembled in late April, in time to annex Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee. By mid-May, Confederate politicians found Montgomery, with its poor roads and inclement weather, ill-suited to serve as a national capital and, as a concession to newly-seceded Virginia, they moved to the government to Richmond in late May, wherein the author concludes.

While this work offers both encyclopedic narrative of the Montgomery period and an insight into the personalities of the Confederacy’s founding fathers, it suffers from two key problems. First, Davis fails organizationally to introduce the scope and importance of his topic in the beginning of the monograph. On one hand, the reader never finds any clear statement of the monograph’s topic in the title or in the first few pages much less any historiographical foundation to justify it. On the other, only in the epilogue does the author explain the importance of these months. Therein, Davis notes that Confederate policymakers all clung to states-first ideologies and emerged from what he terms the Southern political culture of being “boastful, egotistical, and larger than life” (407) and “there lay so much of their problem” (407), namely their inability to create “not a nation but a confederation” (405). Even so, did not these trends continue once the capital moved to Richmond? In other words, Davis never truly convinces the reader why the Montgomery period should warrant a study of 550 pages. Similarly, the above-mentioned theme of political reformism over revolution pervades the work, though Davis also never states this premise at the start of his narrative.

Second, Davis fills this monograph with innocuous detail and repetition. For example, Davis elaborates on menus, train accidents, and parchment dimensions. At the same time, Davis twice notes the course and outcomes of the Confederacy’s February peace mission to Washington, once on page 209 and once on page 303.

Nonetheless, if the reader can trudge through the detail, forgive the ineffectiveness of introducing the argument in the epilogue, and determine for himself the importance of the topic, he will find herein an useful encyclopedic study of the Confederate government’s stay along the banks of the Alabama River.

A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy. William C. Davis. New York: The Free Press, 1994. 550 p.

Forty three men gathered to chart a beginning for a new nation. That the setting and location were different mattered not. The greatest “assembly of brains, accomplishment, statesmanship and property” the South had ever seen, as William C. Davis states, was in Montgomery, Alabama to carry on the founding fathers’ revolutionary ideals and shape a new nation known as the Confederate States of America. (p. 75) This is how William C. Davis begins his interesting look into the creation of the Confederate government with his book, A Government of Our Own.

The delegates that made their way to Montgomery, Alabama were diverse men who saw themselves as founding fathers of a new nation just like the original revolutionaries of 1776. Davis provides a masterful view of these men and their ideals that drove them to this critical juncture in American history. With lively prose, the author describes the delegates’ personalities, their flaws, their strengths, and their differences. Davis adds the beneficial nature of the demographics of the delegates mainly in regards to the economic and social status of each. This aspect assists the reader when trying to understand the assortment of ideas promulgated at the convention and the type of man influencing the formation of the Confederacy. By delving into the personalities and demographics of the delegates, Davis promotes the divisions within the secessionists themselves that might be unknown to the less-academic Civil War historian.

Davis’ detail flows over into the Confederate capital of Montgomery itself. The author outlines the layout of the streets of the city and in many cases, the condition of the streets. He chronicles the weather noting the humidity and temperature of the occasions and adds details of dogs nipping at the delegates’ heal as they walked to and from their lodgings. Some of this intricate discussion is too much, most notably when the author discusses the buffet of food provided to the delegates during their sessions. However, this detail helps when Davis chronicles the mysterious, and at times, chaotic, way that Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederate States of America.

Davis conducted considerable research using newspapers, but much of his research comes from personal correspondence of the delegates themselves. The book is an interesting account of the machinations of the fledgling Confederate government in its new and short lived capital of Montgomery, Alabama. With good prose, the book reads more like a novel, yet at times, the tremendous detail can become dull and tedious and bore the reader. William C. Davis’ bias is evident from the start concerning certain characters and is worth taking into account when reading this intriguing history.

In general, though, Davis creates a compelling political and social history. The people and their persona come alive and leap from the pages. The good and bad of politics shine through with all the aspiration, principle, stubbornness, and deception that accompany an enterprise of the sort. The only glaring faults of the work are Davis’ own strong opinions which course throughout the book and the minute detail given to seemingly every possible individual and event. The general reader and amateur historian would enjoy this book but it may be cast aside by those of a more serious and academic nature.