This is a novel (pun unintended but apt) take on a Civil War blog: Fictionalized interviews with key participants. They’re played straight, and the language is a little too modern, but it’s a fun idea.
CWW: What were some of the immediate challenges of essentially putting together a new country while seeking to defend it militarily?
JFD: Looking back, it seems impossible that the Confederacy existed at all. The only consensus at times seemed to be that we indeed wished to form a country independent of the Union – but what was that country to be? The state governors each seemed to have different opinions on that subject. Gov. Brown of Georgia I think would have been happy if each state had been its own country, which didn’t help at all.
CWW: How, then, did you manage to navigate such rough waters while keeping the ship pointed in a determined direction?
JFD: It is difficult to inculcate a sense of duty to country when you don’t know exactly what that country is. It was all so new to us, you must understand, but we had all taken that step together. There was no turning back. We had to create a country seemingly overnight – and I must say here that so few, so very few, understood the magnitude of the challenge that lay before us. Men who seemed to shout the loudest seemed to believe that all we had to do was create a government. “All we had to do” – it was not as if we were forming a fraternity at college!