The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

• 1. Introduction

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  The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government arrived in bookshops in 1881, a two-volume work of more than 1,500 pages written by the man who had served as President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Jefferson Davis had spent years assembling it, not simply as a history, but as an apologia - a formal defense of the causes he believed justified the war and the Confederacy's formation. The man writing it was elderly, in poor health, and nearly penniless, hoping the book might rebuild a shattered fortune. Who helped him write it, and at whose plantation did he do the work? What arguments did he make, and why did Oscar Wilde call it a masterpiece without having finished it? And why, despite selling more than 22,000 copies, did Davis die fighting his own publisher in court?

• 2. Beauvoir and Its Patron

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  Davis wrote most of the book at Beauvoir, a plantation in Biloxi, Mississippi, where he lived as a guest of Sarah Ellis Dorsey, a novelist and wealthy widow. Dorsey did far more than offer shelter. She assisted Davis directly with organization, editing, and encouragement as the manuscript took shape. When Dorsey fell ill with cancer, she made over her will in 1878 and left the plantation to Davis before dying in 1879. The work did not stop at Beauvoir's walls. Davis corresponded extensively with surviving Confederate statesmen and generals, including Judah Benjamin and Jubal Early, seeking fact-checks and details on key issues. His wife Varina and his secretary, Major W. T. Walthall, also contributed to the effort. The role Walthall played would later become a source of bitter suspicion when Davis's royalties came under dispute.

• 3. The Constitutional Argument

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  Davis did not write a straightforward military chronicle, though the book contains plenty of battle accounts. At its center sat a carefully constructed case for why secession was constitutionally and morally justified. Davis drew a sustained comparison between the formation of the Continental Congress and the American Revolution on one side, and the formation of the Confederate States and the Civil War on the other. He argued the two situations were ethically and politically similar; the only meaningful difference, in his view, was that one rebellion succeeded and the other did not. He cited constitutional passages, named constitutional scholars, and invoked the words of American political leaders to support his thesis, including a speech by Abraham Lincoln that had argued against the legality of the United States war with Mexico. Davis also argued that when a majority of states governed the Union not for the common welfare but as an instrument against a minority section, resistance was justified.

• 4. Defending Slavery

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  Davis devoted significant space to the institution of slavery itself, defending its fundamental morality in terms his contemporaries in the South largely accepted and that later generations have found indefensible. In his framing, slavery had introduced Black Americans to what he called the "arts of peace, order and civilization," and he described enslaved people as happy and "contented" in their servitude. He also pressed an argument about Northern hypocrisy: most Northern states had at one time permitted slavery, and all of them derived income from trade goods produced by enslaved labor. Davis paired this with a critique of federal economic policy, contending that numerous acts and measures had favored Northern industrialists at the expense of Southern planters. These arguments formed an interlocking system, each element reinforcing the others in what Davis presented as a coherent, principled case.

• 5. Praise, Criticism, and Oscar Wilde

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  Critical reception of the book was, from the start, sharply divided along sectional lines. The most enthusiastic praise at publication came from Southern reviewers, for whom the book spoke directly to their sense of lost cause and wounded pride. The most unexpected admirer was Oscar Wilde, who pronounced the book a masterpiece while openly admitting he had not read all of it. Most historians and literary critics who followed agreed the book badly needed editing. Davis had gone into extraordinary detail about every aspect of the Confederate Constitution and government, often far exceeding what most readers wanted to know. He had also retold numerous military campaigns at length, even though many superior accounts by generals and veterans already existed. Davis defended these detailed military sections by arguing that, unlike most nations, the entire history of the Confederacy was inseparable from the history of a single war.

• 6. Financial Disappointment and Legal Battle

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  Davis had hoped the book would restore his ruined finances. The destruction of his estates, the abolition of slavery, and the collapse of the Southern economy had left him nearly penniless. Published by D. Appleton and Co. in New York, the book was expensive and thus out of reach for many ordinary Americans. Davis refused to conduct publicity tours, citing poor health, reluctance to ask financially strained Southerners to spend money, and indifference to how non-Southerners might receive the work. Sixteen years after the war's end, public interest in the conflict had also begun to wane as a new generation with no direct memory of it grew larger. The book sold more than 22,000 copies by 1890, but this left it far behind the era's bestsellers, including the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Relations between Davis and Appleton grew openly hostile. Davis had no prior experience in literary contracts and had not secured generous terms. He accused the publisher of withholding royalties; Appleton replied that advances paid during the writing had consumed most of what was owed. Both sides came to suspect Major Walthall, who had left Davis's employ before the book appeared, of financial improprieties with those advances. Davis filed suit against Appleton in the final year of his life. The case was settled out of court by his heirs shortly after his death.

• 7. What Followed Davis's Death

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  Cheaper printings issued in the decades after Davis's death gave the book a longer commercial life than it had enjoyed while he was alive. Those later sales provided some income for his widow, Varina, in her final years. Most of her financial support, though, came from her work as an editorial writer and from the modest income she drew from renting out what remained of the family's properties. The book never went out of print entirely, and the arguments Davis made about constitutional justification for secession continued to resonate in certain quarters long after the man himself was gone.