Confederate Bastille: Jefferson Davis and Civil Liberties.
ISBN 0-87462-325-1; 23 pp.
Delivered only a few months
after Neely won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on civil liberties
under the Lincoln administration, Confederate Bastille changes
the focus to the chief executive of the rebellious southern states.
Davis, unlike Lincoln, has not generally been criticized for crushing
civil liberties during the war. However, Neely argues that Davis
certainly set in motion policies that limited the freedoms of
individuals in the Confederate states, particularly in terms of
travel restrictions, the treatment of foreign residents, and civilians
arrested and imprisoned by military authorities. Placing the issue
solidly in its historiographical context, Neely explains why Davis's
reputation on civil liberties has not previously been questioned
and begins to revise age-old assumptions about the Confederate
president.
When he delivered the inaugural Klement Lecture, Mark E. Neely,
Jr., was John Francis Bannon Professor of American Studies and
History at Saint Louis University. A Texan, he received his PhD
from Yale University and directed the Lincoln Museum at Fort Wayne,
Indiana, from 1973 to 1992. His many books have focused on the
popular art of the Civil War era and on Abraham Lincoln. They
include The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (1982), The
Lincoln Image: Abraham Lincoln and the Popular Print (1984),
The Confederate Image: Prints of the Lost Cause (1987),
and The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
(1991), which received the Pulitzer Prize for History.
