The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume 1

Jefferson Davis's monumental two-volume work stands as the most significant primary source from the Confederate side of the Civil War. Written from prison and later completed at Beauvoir, the former Mississippi plantation where Davis spent his final years, this book represents the former Confederate president's elaborate defense of secession and the Confederate cause. Davis constructs his argument around the premise that the Southern states possessed the constitutional right to sovereignty and that their departure from the Union was a legitimate exercise of that right. He frames the conflict not as a war over slavery but as a constitutional struggle between state and federal authority, drawing extensively on the founding fathers' writings and the principles of 1776. The text is rich with Davis's personal recollections, correspondence with surviving Confederate leaders, and detailed political analysis of the decades leading to war. Volume I traces the path from the Missouri Compromise through the secession crisis, presenting what Davis termed an "historical sketch" of the events preceding the Confederacy's birth. Whatever one thinks of Davis's conclusions, and history has rendered a harsh verdict, this remains essential reading for understanding how the Confederacy understood itself, constructed its mythology, and justified its cause to posterity.