You're kidding, right?
Do you mean Davis's or Stephens's door stoppers? There's little point in plodding through them, unless you're out of Sominex. I plowed through a chunk of them once and wasn't convinced. Look at what such men said and did, not their self-justifications after the fact. The same goes for Dabney, Pollard and other lost cause propagandists. They wrote not to find out what happened and why but to justify the decisions they'd already made.
When DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln came out I was really interested in reading it. I wasn't biased against it. I was even biased in favor of it. On my hard drive, I still have an article of his from The Independent Review that got me interested. But the first reports here were disappointing. It wasn't those who attacked the book that made it look so bad. It was those who promoted and defended it. It looked like neither they nor DiLorenzo knew or cared about what people were arguing about in the 1850s.
When I did read DiLorenzo's book, I was appalled. It was poorly written, badly reasoned, selective in its use of evidence, at times deceptive, and motivated by a real animus against its subject. In short, it was a cheap hatchet job that wouldn't convince anyone who knew the history. The same is true of the Kennedy brothers books and Tom Woods' laughable Politically Incorrect Guide. It's not as though such books are on a much higher level that what one sees posted here. Jeffrey Hummel's book is a little better, but still flawed.
Criticism of The Real Lincoln highlighted its deficiencies, but it wasn't either other people's attacks on the book or my own prejudices that turned me against it. It was the awful, pathetic weakness of the thing itself. DiLorenzo's relentless self-promotion and the cheap shots of some of his fans did help turn me off, though. So many people piled on to defend even his weakest and most questionable arguments that it looked like you guys were just looking for someone to tell you what you already wanted to hear rather than reading critically. And DiLo wasn't content to just present his thesis, he had to hawk on every corner it like a common streetwalker.
Dixiecrats go on and on about their feeling for the Confederacy being an ancestral thing, more a matter of feeling than of reasoning. Perhaps we ought to just assume that they're acting out of some idea of ancestral loyalty or family honor and that any similarity between their views and the truth is more or less accidental.
True, but curious. I have always been amazed by the notion if someone was from their "clan" he had to be defended regardless of his actions.
IMHO, it shows that the person doing the defending is not comfortable enough in their own skin and has to claim some genetic or cultural claim to worth. We should be able to say that some ancestor was a jerk, just as we all accept that in everyday life, every family has it's share of jerks -- or worse.
Not all ancestors deserve reverence or respect, and it is not a sign of weakness to admit that fact. We're all, somewhere in our ancestry, the sons and daughters of bastards, whores, murderers, thieves and liars. It's simply a question of how far back you care to trace.
I vote for no Bills of Attainer, be they be financial, or emotional. We are all living individuals to be judged on our merit in the here and now, and our ancestors are history to be studied for what they were, but not worshiped. Some are worthy of admiration, and some are not.
I'd also add, that I consider myself to be a decedent of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Locke, Smith, etc., etc., etc., To my knowledge, there is no genetic connection to any of those great men and I could not give you the name of a single genetic ancestor that was contemporary with any of them, but I admire and agree with what those great men stood for and I consider them to be my "ancestors" via admiration.
Anyway, my reading list goes far beyond the title you mentioned.