Books: Queer Cabinet

STATESMEN OF THE LOST CAUSE—Burton J. Hendrick—Little, Brown ($3.75).

The South’s Confederate heroes were military leaders—Lee, Jeb Stuart, Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson—not Jeff Davis and his Cabinet. The first full-length study of the Confederate Cabinet, Statesmen of the Lost Cause, is by a Yankee. Pulitzer Prize Biographer Hendrick (The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page) makes these forgotten statesmen the biographical find of the year. Individually picturesque, they made still more picturesque diplomatic history. And Author Hendrick gives them a large share of credit for losing the War. If that Yankee judgment seems harsh, what many a Southerner thinks of Jeff Davis and his Cabinet is not fit to print.

Significant to Author Hendrick is the fact that the South’s Civil War statesmen represented the “new men” of the cotton belt, not the aristocracy of the Old South. Jeff Davis was born in a log cabin 120 miles from Lincoln’s slightly smaller birthplace. Vice President Stephens got his start as a “corn dropper” on his father’s small farm. Secretary of the Treasury Memminger, born in Germany, was brought up in a Charleston orphanage. Secretary of the Navy Mallory helped his mother in a Florida boardinghouse. Secretary of State Benjamin was the son of a Jewish fishmonger in London. Diplomat John Slidell was the son of a New York candlemaker.

Jeff Davis, sickly, handsome, humorless, egocentric, unimaginative, contrasted almost as sharply with Lee as with Lincoln. Almost kicked out of West Point, where he was 23rd in a class of 33, he considered himself a military genius. At West Point too began his bitter feud with Joseph E. Johnston. Cause: a tavern keeper’s daughter. Elected to the Presidency by accident (delegates preferred Toombs), he was bitterly assailed by his own colleagues. (“That scoundrel Jeff Davis,” said Toombs.) A bad guesser, he made his worst guess when he tried to force English recognition by withholding cotton shipments. That notion cost the Confederacy a billion dollars, wrecked its finances.

Queerest-looking of the lot was Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, one of Georgia’s most brilliant lawyers, an admirer of Lincoln and Davis’ bitterest foe. Weighing around 90 Ibs., hollow-chested, skeleton-faced, he was so tiny that a fellow-traveler once said to him: “Sonny, get up and give your seat to the gentleman.” He read the Anatomy of Melancholy for his violent fits of blues, once cried out: “What have I not suffered from a look!” His good pal was hulking, roundheaded, roaring, witty, Rabelaisian Secretary of State Robert Toombs, great orator and charmer, who had once called Secessionists “bad men and traitors.”

“The brains of the Confederacy” was moonfaced, wily Judah P. Benjamin. An unusual character in other respects, Benjamin arrived in New Orleans with $4 after being mysteriously kicked out of Yale in his third year, quickly rose to be one of the most successful lawyers of his day, a Senator, holder of three Cabinet posts, Davis’ confidant. Called “the Mephistopheles of the Rebellion,” connected with many a shady deal in speculation and filibustering, Benjamin boasted that no letter of his would be found when he died. Only a few were. Yet he was thought charming by Mrs. Chestnut, “that tart memorialist of Southern statesmen,” who declared that “the Confederacy has been done to death by the politicians.” After a harrowing flight from Richmond, he became a leader at the London bar.

With Benjamin belongs Diplomat John Slidell, slick, charming, Byronic intriguer at the Paris court, oldstyle boss of New Orleans. “Slidellian” was once a synonym for “underhand.” (The Confederacy’s luckless diplomacy in Mexico, Paris, London became known when Colonel Pickett sold the Confederacy’s diplomatic correspondence for about $75,000 to the Federal Government.)

What chiefly impresses the reader of Statesmen of the Lost Cause is not that the South lost, but that it held out as long as it did.