History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yet not without dispute.
V I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that "Jefferson Davis made Aaron Burr respectable," a sentence which clearly indicates that the writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.
Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse.

They are variously misunderstood.

Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certain vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if not visionary, were premature.
The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door of no man.

It was doomed the day of its birth.

The wonder is that sane leaders could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be induced to follow.