The Confederacy was never single-minded. From the fateful year of 1861
until Appomattox, the South was a complex of heroism and cowardice,
grief and frivolity, nationalism and state rights. But at the same time
the Southern nation underwent a complete career from birth through
maturity to death.
In The Confederacy Charles P. Roland is faithful to both the larger
career and the internal complexity. Paying careful attention to
President Davis' struggle against dividing forces within, the author
skillfully narrates the attempt of the Confederacy to wage total war
against superior forces. All the poignant events and conditions are
here: the formation of the government, the upper South's final
commitment to the cause, the doomed attempts to combat the Northern
blockade at home and Northern diplomacy overseas, an agrarian economy's
heroic defiance of an industrial enemy, the desperate measures by which
the Davis government tried to sustain the Confederacy, and, at last, the
dissolution and flight of the administration in 1865.
With accuracy, sensitivity, and balance, Mr. Roland develops the epic
themes of his story against a background of vivid historical detail and
re-creates the Confederacy with a tragic splendor-the prime quality of
its surviving image among Southerners.