Rise and Fall of the Confederacy: The Memoir of Senator Williamson S. Oldham, CSA

Edited with an introduction by Clayton E. Jewett
Notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 290 pp., 2006. University of Missouri Press, 2910 LeMone Blvd., Columbia, MO 65201, $39.95 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Jeffry D. Wert
Jeffry D. Wert is a retired Pennsylvania high school teacher. He is the author of seven books on the Civil War, including his recent The Sword Of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac.

Review:
Williamson S. Oldham served his adopted state of Texas as a senator in the Confederate Congress. A native of Tennessee, Oldham was an attorney by training but actively sought political office. He lived for a number of years in Arkansas, where he sat as an associate justice on its supreme court and lost elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

Moving to Texas in 1849, Oldham edited a newspaper and suffered two more electoral defeats. With Texas' secession, however, Oldham was elected a delegate to the Montgomery, Ala., convention. Weeks later, the state legislature chose him and Louis T. Wigfall as senators.

A strident advocate of state rights and personal and property rights, Oldham opposed the expansion of the Confederate government's powers during his term of office. Conscription and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus particularly incensed him.

As he related in this memoir, he believed that those acts contributed to the Confederacy's defeat. He remained steadfast in his convictions about the abuse of governmental power throughout the struggle.

This memoir, ably edited by Clayton E. Jewett, is a work in two parts. One section of the book recounts his journey from Richmond, beginning on March 30, 1865, to the Rio Grande, ending on June 26, 1865. His story is a passage through a collapsing nation in its final death throes. It is a fascinating account and well worth reading.

The other section of the work is a critical analysis of the reasons for Confederate defeat. Oldham addresses political failings and military blunders. He asserts that the administration's attempt to defend seemingly every foot of its country was one of the major military reasons of the nation's downfall.

He is blistering in his criticisms of the national government's usurpations of individual and state rights. Oldham's arguments have found support in scholarly and general studies of the war.

Although he spent much of the four years in Richmond, Oldham does not offer details of life there during wartime. His memoir seems to bristle with anger as he recounts the reasons for the South's failure to achieve independence.

Such a work may not appeal to some readers of Civil War books, but his journey across the crumbling nation is revealing and well told.