Experiment in Rebellion

IT IS an awesome and often disastrous leap for a novelist to turn to expository writing. Clifford Dowdey, widely known for his expert historical novels, has sprung into the non-fiction field and landed securely on both feet. In Experiment in Rebellion he has packed into close compass the story of the Confederate government, of the men who started it and who kept it going up to the last pulse-beat.

This unusual book is highly readable, thoughtful, speculative, and always vivid. Many will wish that Mr. Dowdey had expanded it to the multi-volumed scope of Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants — and this reviewer is among those many.

The key figure, of course, is Jefferson Davis, who appears in most lifelike tones — self-blinded by his dream of a superman class of landholders and by his conception of himself as a practical soldier. At his elbow, the figure of his wife, Varina Howell, emerges magnificently, utterly devoted to Davis and to the ideals that were his.

About this pair shuttle the strange fish who ruled in Richmond: the Sephardic Jew, J. P. Benjamin; Mennninger, the German immigrant; Mallory, whose father was a Connecticut Yankee; Vice-President Stephens of Georgia; and the various other incumbents who drifted vaguely in and out of office. Some of them had little to do. All of them ran their departments in bland unconcern for their neighbors, State showing as little interest in War as War evinced toward Navy. And yet somehow the wheels of government turned.

All this is set forth against the war years. Not only do the people live, but the city of Richmond assumes a definite personality of its own.

With all the vitality of this book, the reader may be left slightly confused by the impressions that remain when the last page is turned. Few of the men come off well; indeed most of them come off badly. There seems more than a touch of derision for Benjamin, for Stephens, for Joe Johnston and Hood and Toombs. Davis himself is shown in an eternal self-created mist of delusion; hot fire is poured on most state governors, Brown of Georgia and Vance of North Carolina receiving the choicest atomic showers. No one will, I think, question Mr. Dowdey’s research, facts, or presentation. But one is left puzzling over how such a Barque of State, “shipped by a crew of fools and mutineers,” lasted even a month.

Other points bob up from time to time. Mr. Dowdey seems to feel that the defenseless South of 1861 faced a North that was prepared down to the last conventional gaiter-button. Actually the two sections started pretty much from scratch. Eyebrows may jump over his assertion that McClellan, in sparring with Johnston in ‘62, never made a mistake. It is, I think, demonstrable that McClellan turned out blunders in carload lots from the moment of his landing on the York town Peninsula.

This is a book that will be provocative of much comment and argument. Let us hope that Mr. Dowdey will give us more — while not abandoning his novels.

BRUCE LANCASTER