Woodworth, Steven E. Davis and Lee at War

In this book, the author showed how the failure of Jefferson Davis and his military leadership in the West paved the way for the Confederate defeat. In "Davis and Lee at War," he concludes his study of Davis as rebel commander-in-chief and shows how the lack of a unified purpose and strategy in the East sealed the Confederacy's fate. Woodworth argues that Davis and Robert E. Lee, the South's greatest military leader, had very opposing views on the proper conduct of the war. Davis was convinced that the South should fight a defensive war in order to simply outlast the North's political and popular support for the war. Lee and the other Eastern generals - most notably P.G.T. Beauregard, Gustavus Smith and Stonewall Jackson - on the other hand, were eager to go on the offensive. They were convinced that only quick and decisive victories on the battlefield would prevent the North from finally defeating them with its overwhelming superiority in men and materiel. Davis and Lee, Woodworth shows, had mutual respect for each other throughout most of the war. But this respect was coupled with a stubborn resistance to the other's influence. The result of this tense tug-of-war was Davis's misguided pursuit of a middle ground that offered neither strategy the best chance of success. The war eventually ended in bloodshed, and Davis was as indecisive as ever, hardly realising how little confidence his generals had in his leadership. Drawing extensively on the papers of Jefferson Davis and the works of leading Civil War historians, Woodworth casts the military campaigns in the East in an entirely new light and expands our understanding of Davis as the leader of the Confederacy.