Once the war all but ended in April, the turmoil that had kept the Confederacy continually unsettled was missing from many histories written by Southern politicians and generals. Few wanted to face up to the fact that internal strife had contributed to the Confederacy’s ruin. Soon after the Confederate surrender, Southern historians began massaging the political facts to make their leaders look better.

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Those revisionists included Davis himself, who even changed the notes of his wartime secretary, Burton Harrison. Davis reworked the claim that he had been “among the keenest and most sagacious of them all in his endeavour to precipitate secession upon the country” to “in his assertion of the rights of the States under the Constitution and of the right of Secession—although the records of Congress show that he cherished the utmost devotion to the Union and consistently opposed extremists of all parties who were endeavouring to precipitate actual secession.”

In his first inaugural address, Davis said he was “prophesyzing [sic] peace, but threatened that the enemies of the South would be compelled to ‘smell Southern powder, and feel Southern steel.’” He slightly altered that declaration after the war by saying that he was expressing a desire to maintain peaceful relations with the states that had remained in the Union and was asserting that all the seceding states desired was “to be let alone.” The threat that they would make the enemies of the South “smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel” would occur only if war were forced upon them.

Davis’ postwar embellishments described a harmonious environment that never existed and ignored the bitter squabbles that took place among those who needed to cooperate in order for the Confederacy to succeed. The roll call included men such as Alexander Stephens, Henry Foote and Robert Toombs—Southern leaders who held the principles of states’ rights and slavery higher than the existence of their own creation, the Confederate States of America.

This article was written by David J. Eicher and originally published in the January 2008 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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