Booknotes: Richmond Views the West

New Arrival:

• Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital by Larry Daniel (UP of Kansas, 2025).

Larry Daniel's Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital seeks to answer the following question: "How did politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, and civilians in Richmond understand a war being fought a thousand miles away?" Rather than looking backward with a critical engine fueled by a mountain of modern scholarship, Daniel instead focuses on what was known (or what was thought to be known, the "perceptions" of the book's subtitle) at the time. In the end, Daniel "shows for the first time how poor intelligence, fierce politics, and cultural prejudice affected Confederate strategy in the Western Theater."

For the purposes of the study, the author divides the Confederacy into three geographical parts: the Trans-Mississippi (self-explanatory), the Heartland (TN, MS, AL, cis-Mississippi LA, and most of GA), and the East (VA, NC, SC, a coastal strip of GA, and FL). Daniel's "West" is the combined Trans-Mississippi and Heartland regions.

From the description: "In his novel approach to understanding the Western Theater of the U.S. Civil War, Larry Daniel brings new insight and understanding to the war without ever setting foot in the West. Rather, he takes readers to Richmond, Virginia, to see how the war was understood in the Confederate Capitol. We see in real time how the Jefferson Davis administration received, understood, and reacted to reports from the front, which often arrived in Richmond days after they were written. Daniel gives voice to cabinet members, War Department clerks, congressmen, capitol reporters, and even civilians, all watching the war unfold hundreds of miles away."

As Daniel explains in the Preface, it is his belief that "the power base remained solidly in Richmond" and "not by some quasi-connected political and military western bloc." On the other hand, the author does seem to favor McMurry's view that there was a western power bloc "at least powerful enough to effectively immobilize Davis," forcing him, through geographical political appeasement, to assign resources East and West in balanced proportions that ending up dooming both military theaters to failure (pp. xvii-xviii).

While the campaigns and battles fought in Virginia may have absorbed the most attention in the Confederate capital, there was certainly a great deal of interest (and misperception) in what occurred out West. More from the description: "...Richmond was still rocked by the disastrous losses across the Appalachians, especially Fort Donelson, New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Atlanta. Still, incomplete information and biased press reports deified certain western generals in the public imagination, including P. G. T. Beauregard, Sterling Price, and Joseph E. Johnston, whose performance did not justify such public adoration."

According to Daniel, cultural factors combined with flawed national strategy helped place the Confederacy on the path to defeat. The cream of Richmond society tended to consider the West as the frontier, and that had a negative affect on how the war was conducted from Richmond. More: "Richmonders’ “Virginia-first” military strategy and their aristocratic sense of cultural superiority over the diverse regions and cultures of the West blurred their view and damaged their ability to make strong strategic decisions." Also, "(t)he Davis administration’s preference for territorial and static defense, influenced by their strategic and political (mis)understanding of the region, set the war in the West on a spiraling downward trend from which it never recovered."

Currently, I'm about fifty pages in and am liking it so far.