Among the most fascinating of Americans: an incredibly gifted speaker (his speech upon resigning from the Senate is still one of the best in our history), vain and arrogant and not at all a good war President, yet incredibly brave and resolute, as when he stood down a group of starving Virginians in Richmond late in the war.
Davis’ influence on the Civil War was damaging to the Confederacy, mainly because of his obstinate favoritism of certain generals in the western theater, and his bungling of foreign relations with England. Yet it’s hard to see how a better leader could have changed the result. Lincoln in charge of the rebels might have prolonged the war, but the South still would have lost. Davis’s most lasting damage to our history might have taken place years after the war, when his revisionist, self serving history ignited the “Lost Cause” movement, of which this birthday celebration is somewhat of a last remnant.