Circa 1865: Jefferson Davis (1808 - 1889), the first and only President of the Confederate States of America.

Was Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, a Failed Leader or Misunderstood?

The Leonard Lopate Show | Dec 22, 2014

Note: Today's Leonard Lopate Show in on tape. This is a rebroadcast of an interview that took place on October 7th, 2014.

History has not been kind to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. The defeat of the South in the Civil War left the region impoverished for generations. Many Americans in Davis’s own time and in later generations considered him to be an incompetent leader, even a traitor, but Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson argues that it is too easy to diminish Davis because he was on the losing side. In Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief, McPherson shows to better understand the Civil War and its outcome, Davis should be reassed a military leader and as the president of the Confederate nation.

Embattled Rebel by James McPherson

(Penguin Press/Courtesy of the publisher)

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