William C. Davis. The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1996. Pp. xi, 224. $24.95 Get access Davis William C.. The Cause Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1996. Pp. xi, 224. $24.95. Richard E. Beringer Richard E. Beringer University of North Dakota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 103, Issue 2, April 1998, Pages 602–603, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/103.2.602 Published: 01 April 1998

Journal Article Steven E. Woodworth. Davis and Lee at War. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1995. Pp. xiii, 409. $29.95 Get access Woodworth Steven E.. Davis and Lee at War. (Modern War Studies.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1995. Pp. xiii, 409. $29.95. Richard E. Beringer Richard E. Beringer University of North Dakota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 102, Issue 2, April 1997, Pages 525–526, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/102.2.525 Published: 01 April 1997

Over the last decade Civil War history has enjoyed a surprising and robust revival. Volumes on the war crowd bookstore shelves; Ken Burns and his coterie of scholars have offered a compelling if controversial interpretation of the war on PBS; James M. McPherson comes into our living rooms over television to promote American Heritage. Aside from some recent unseemly squabbling over the merits and motivation of the new western history, the most colorful battles in scholarship today may involve debates over new interpretations of the military history of the Civil War. More important, scholars are questioning long-held assumptions as they search for new ways of understanding the war. Sometimes this basic reassessment is hard to discern among the new studies of the second day at Gettysburg or revisionist biographies of John Pope or Braxton Bragg-topics of limited interest to those not in the field-but its importance cannot be underestimated. Notions of total war and grinding attrition are giving way to an understanding of the interplay of war and politics, reassessments of leading participants, and new views on the conduct of the war. Still, the question remains: how do we explain the outcome of the war? Historians have offered various answers to this question. Some assume that Northern victory was inevitable; others, realizing the contingent nature of military conflict, focus on turning points. One favorite way of framing the inquiry is by asking why the Confederacy lost. Past answers include states' rights, an excess of democracy, poor leadership, disparity of resources, class divisions, and guilt over slavery. Why the South Lost the Civil War represents yet another effort to answer this most persistent question. The book's four authors-Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N.

Journal Article Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat. Vol. II. By Judith Lee Hallock. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. xiv + 298 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8173-0543-2.) Get access Richard E. Beringer Richard E. Beringer University of North Dakota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 79, Issue 3, December 1992, Pages 1186–1187, https://doi.org/10.2307/2080877 Published: 01 December 1992

Jefferson Davis's Pursuit of Ambition: The Attractive Features of Alternative Decisions Richard E. Beringer Jefferson Davis was a man who slipped out of one role and into another with frequency, but his biographers give us no explanation for the twists and turns in his career. One explanation is that scholars have paid insufficient attention to the process by which Davis made decisions, although it is only because of his decisions that Davis achieved sufficient status to be worth the historian's attention in the first place. Decisions did not always come easy for Davis, who sometimes regretted those he made. In his earlier years, this difficulty is best understood in terms of his goals in life; in his later years a pattern of indecisiveness carried over into the Civil War period and adversely affected Davis's effectiveness as president of the Confederacy. The first point of this article is to demonstrate that prior to the Civil War, Jefferson Davis's ambitions engaged him in a constant quest for status, that much-coveted "position in the hierarchy of prestige and influence that characterizes every community or association," as Robert A. Nisbet put it, and "a specific, positive or negative, social estimation of honor," according to Max Weber.1 Much of this quest can best be understood in terms of the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance. Davis could not simply win status and then enjoy it; in order to be secure, he had to earn it again and again, its possession ratified periodically by the community. Davis therefore continually placed his status This article is based on a paper given at the 1990 meeting of the Social Science History Association. I wish to thank Joan R. Gunderson, Robert E. May, and Ronald Hatzenbuehler for their helpful comments on that occasion. I also wish to thank Archer Jones and Herman Hattaway, who read this manuscript and offered suggestions. Any errors that remain are my responsibility. 1 Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 6; H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ed. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 187. Civil War History, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1, » 1992 by The Kent State University Press 6 CIVIL WAR HISTORY and honor in jeopardy by abandoning one achievement in order to ratify his position by achievement in another. During the Civil War, Davis's life goal changed and he sought victory above all. The second purpose here is to show that once again the decisions he made to reach his goal— especially on personnel matters—illustrate the mechanism of cognitive dissonance. This decision-making process is common to us all, but it is especially striking in Davis. It helped him to achieve status before the war, and adversely affected his effectiveness as president of the Confederacy during the war. The notion of cognitive dissonance provides a way of understanding when and how Davis decided to abandon one intent or decision and adopt another, initially in his pursuit of status and honor and later in his quest for Confederate victory. It "centers around the idea that if a person knows various things that are not psychologically consistent with one another, he will, in a variety of ways, try to make them more consistent."2 The complement of cognitive dissonance is postdecision dissonance, which is created by the subject's understanding of the attractive features of rejected alternatives; it becomes significant to the same degree that a person has an emotional commitment to the outcome of a particular decision or position. If an action, behavior, or belief has a potentially profound effect upon one's life, there is a possibility that the knowledge of that effect will create severe dissonance. The awareness of attractive features of alternatives that must necessarily be rejected creates conflict, for "a decision once made tends to generate subsequent dissonance between the cognized fact of choice and the persisting cognitions that support the rejected alternative and oppose the chosen one."3 No matter which way Davis turned, whether as soldier, planter, or politician—and he was all three at one time or another—he could appreciate and be oppressed by the memory of...

72CTVTL WAR HISTORY transformation, the ideological cleavage, the moral clash, the abyss between free and slave labor, the religious and ethnic hostility—all of which operated profoundly to mold antebellum politics (and its leaders)— are given at best glancing attention. In addition, Peterson asks his reader to accept on faith his statement that Webster, Clay and Calhoun "were representatives, spokesmen, ultimately personifications, of their respective sections: East, West, and South" (5). Can we derive the consciousness of a people from the goals and aspirations of the leaders? What of the diversity of voices that "East, West, and South" subsumes? The tight spotlight on three statesmen leaves too much that is crucial in the shadows. In a very real sense, they were not the cause but the result of basic changes elsewhere. That does not deny their individual genius and efficacy, but the zigs and zags of the leaders was only a part of politics and politics only a part of the broad transformation of antebellum America. This is not to say that Peterson's study is a frothy, lightweight pageturner . It is a serious, substantial work that instructs as well as delights. To criticize it for incompleteness is perhaps unfair. Nonetheless, its reticence about the impersonal but powerful developments that molded American politics and its single-minded devotion to individual "greatness " may mislead unwary readers, especially lay readers who will rightfully be drawn to The Great Triumvirate. James L. Roark Emory University 7"Ae Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas. By Robert W. Johannsen. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Pp. xix, 313. $34.95.) During his long career Robert W. Johannsen has been one of the leading historians of the 185Os. In addition to his well-known biography of Stephen A. Douglas, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, he has edited a collection of Douglas's letters and written Frontier Politics and the Sectional Conflict. He has also written on the Mexican War and published an edition of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. The essays in this collection illustrate the interests that informed his books and show his remarkable command of the history between the start of the Mexican War and the Civil War. Thirteen of these fifteen essays are reprinted as originally published and are so placed that the subject of one generally flows easily into the subject of the next. The two new pieces, given as addresses in 1978 and 1986, end the work. This collection is more unified than similar publications because the author's work has concentrated on sectionalism in the 185Os, in which the major issues proved to be highly interconnected. This also means there is frequent repetition—this may BOOK REVIEWS73 bother some readers, but it should not be irksome because much of the overlap serves to emphasize important points that need repetition. Johannsen notes in his preface that these essays focus on "slavery, secession, and the nature of the Union [which] came to dominate political thought and activity during the decade of the 185Os" (ix). One of the key figures in this debate, of course, was Stephen Douglas, and his policy of popular sovereignty and its precise meaning is a major theme of these essays. It is clear that Johannsen has a more positive view of Douglas than most historians have; the Little Giant was not a mere opportunist, nor was he any more racist than most of his countrymen. Perhaps because my own state celebrated its centennial in 1989, I am also struck by another theme, perhaps unintended, which is that many states have a fascinating history prior to statehood that has been largely overlooked. Territorial history is a field with plenty of empty spaces. Douglas was a western man, looking always to the future of the inland empire. Thus he favored western expansion, railroads, free land, and especially self-government. Oregon was one of the first tests of popular sovereignty, and when Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he seemed to Oregonians to be supporting their quest for self-government. They overlooked the slavery question and instead saw "an affirmation by the national government of their right to self-government no matter where they happened to be living...

book reviews363 Arthur inherited the family homestead in 1919 and found the task of providing for its extended families and for his own to be aheavy burden. He was finally crushed by the depression of the 1930s and forced to sell the homestead. The seeds of Sally Good'n, however, continue to multiply and make valuable contributions to the nation as doctors, lawyers, judges, military and business leaders, and educators. C. Calvin Smith Arkansas State University The Self-inflicted Wound: Southern Politics in the Nineteenth Century. By Robert F. Durden. (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Pp. x, 150. $16.00.) Durden's thesis is that "the single greatest cause of the essentially tragic political fate of the South in the nineteenth century was a self-inflicted wound: the gradual surrender ofthesouthern whitemajority, beginning in the 1820s, to the pride, fears, and hates of racism" (p. ix). By 1890 the South had suffered war and economic underdevelopment, and was "yet mired in sullen, defensive sectionalism and bitterly worsening relations between the races" (p. 132). In the era of Jeffersonian ascendency, southerners and northerners could at least agree in feeling uneasy about slavery. After the Missouri Compromise, however, southerners' deepest fears seemed to be confirmed by the growing numbers of slaves within their midst. Virginia alone attempted to deal with the problem, but in 1832 the legislature defeated a proposal to "initiate steps looking toward abolition" (p. 38). Opportunity was lost, and southerners attempted to overcome their misgivings by claiming that slavery was a positive good. Exactly why the South "closed ranks in defense of slavery" (p. 39) has never been satisfactorily answered, says Durden, who believed the explanation lies not in class but in race. The white equality implied in the advance of democracy in the 1820s and 1830s could be more easily maintained if there were agreement that blacks must occupy a position of inferiority. But when southerners expanded their argument to claim that federal law prohibiting slave expansion in the territories would be unconstitutional, they paved the way for the creation of the Republican party and Lincoln 's victory in 1860. In the challenge of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, a nationalist who refused to "let old-time scruples about states' rights" (p. 99) bother him, interfered with slavery and successfully pressured Congress into accepting slave soldiers. The decision was too late, but Durden believes the slave soldier debate was another lost opportunity, which "might have been a turning point in southern history" (p. 105) if the decision and its accompanying emancipation had been unequivocal. Durden believes that the real struggle of the postwar years was not 364civil war history between whites and blacks but between the New South-oriented business and planter interests and the majority of white farmers. In the long run, the Redeemers left apositive legacy: the South embraced industrialization , which eventually led "to its full reintegration into the mainstream of the nation's life" (p. 131). In a mere 132 pages of text Durden provides an amazingly complete sketch of southern race relations and politics during the nineteenth century . That so little of the discussion seems new or unusual may only be a measure of the degree to which a concensus has been achieved over the revisionism ofthe last two generations. Accordingly, this book will have an important role if it is brought out in a less expensive paperback edition and promoted for use as collateral reading in courses on race relations , the Civil War and Reconstruction, southern politics, even perhaps the U.S. survey—wherever a background in nineteenth-century politics, sectionalism, and race is necessary to place a course in proper context. One must be cautious in ascribing too much to racism. If it is really the South's self-inflicted wound, we must remember that the entire nation shot itself in the foot. It was not racism that made the South distinctive from the North but rather the way in which it found expression. Certainly the surrender of the white majority to racial fears is a self-inflicted wound that helps us to understand the nineteenth-century history of all the United States. If this is true, the explanatory power...

Michael Barton. Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1981. Pp. 135. $14.95 Get access Barton Michael. Goodmen: The Character of Civil War Soldiers. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1981. Pp. 135. $14.95. Richard E. Beringer Richard E. Beringer University of North Dakota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 90, Issue 1, February 1985, Page 225, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/90.1.225 Published: 01 February 1985

Journal Article The Papers of Jefferson Davis. Vol. 3: July 1846–December 1848. Ed. by James T. Mcintosh, Lynda L. Crist, and Mary S. Dix. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press and The Papers of Jefferson Davis. Vol. 4: 1849-1852. Ed. by Lynda Lasswell Crist, Mary Seaton Dix, and Richard E. Beringer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press Get access Charles P. Roland Charles P. Roland University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 71, Issue 1, June 1984, Pages 125–126, https://doi.org/10.2307/1899863 Published: 01 June 1984

BOOK REVIEWS The Encyclopedia of Southern History. Edited by David C. Roller and Robert W. Twyman. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Pp. xii, 1421. $75.00.) Roller and Twyman can take justifiable pride in their work. Here, from Abbeville to Zwaanendael, are almost 1400 pages of description, explanation , and identification of the significant persons, events, movements, institutions, and issues of southern history, prepared for an intended audience of teachers, students, scholars, and laymen. The editors define the South as the 1860 slave states plus the District of Columbia, thereby excluding Oklahoma. Articles are signed, unless written by the editors, arranged alphabetically, cross-referenced to other articles of parallel interest, and usually closed with bibliographical references. They are supplemented by thirty-six maps, seventy-two tables, and an extensive index. Unfortunately there is no listing of the 1130 contributors. Coverage is broad. For example, extended essays for each state usually embrace geography, exploration and early settlement, colonial and/or territorial history, the antebellum era, the Civil War and Reconstruction, recovery, and the twentieth century (sometimes with special note of trends since the Great Depression or World War II), and conclude with an extensive bibliography, a list of governors, and a table of population growth. Biographical sketches are also included, and a special effort was made to cover "significant figures about whom little has been written or about whom information is difficult to obtain" (p. vii), including women and blacks. There are entries for major scholars, "associations devoted to the study of the South" (p. viii), geography, linguistics, culture, literature, and natural history. Other types of entries discuss colleges and universities, families, political characteristics, political movements, churches, products, enterprises, religion, and amusements. Many users of this invaluable reference tool may feel a twinge of conscience when they examine it, because there will be a temptation to quarrel with the exclusion of some topics and the inclusion of others. However, such quibbles serve to underline the editors' problems with space limitations. There are surprisingly few unnecessary articles; it is easier to find omissions, but it is difficult to see just what could have been done to make the work more inclusive and still keep it manageable. And BOOK REVIEWS279 there are a number of entries a reader would not expect to find but is delighted to see—Humor, Local color, Minstrelsy, and Mint Julep, for example. The many historiographical discussions of individual historians and interpretations are important bonuses, as are the entries for newspapers—which often include comment on editorial policy and political loyalty—and the frequent inclusion of key court cases. This encyclopedia reflects the major concerns of American historiography in the last twenty years. There is a real effort to go beyond political, economic, and military discussions in order to reach social and cultural issues, and there is more coverage of women and blacks than would have been found in a work of this sort had it been compiled in the forties or fifties. Nevertheless, the "New History" emphasized by the current generation of younger historians is not as prominent as one might expect, both in content of articles and in authorship. The quantifiers usually get only passing mention, and even then generally not detailed enough that the layman would be aware of their distinctive approach. Although this could be taken as a sign that the New History has not yet impressed American historians, other publications, such as the major professional journals and Michael Kamman 's recent Past Before Us, seem to indicate the opposite. More likely, it is simply that a work ofthis sort does not easily lend itself to areport of the findings of the quantifiers, except in vague terms. On the other hand, The Encyclopedia of Southern History provides ample illustration of the New History's preoccupation with "history from the bottom up," as Christopher Lasch put it. Numerous articles on culture, customs, and behavior, and the discussions of institutional arrangements affecting the majority of southerners, black and white, attest to that: such entries range from Bourbon (whiskey), Clay eaters, dialects, Exodus of 1879, Folk medicine, and Galluses, to Peonage, Recreation, Shape-note songbooks, Tenant farming, Violence, Women, and Yeoman farmer. Historians of the...