Jefferson Davis

“ In the historical romance which I have woven of the dramatic events of the life of Jefferson Davis I have drawn his real character unobscured by passion or prejudice. Forced by his people to lead their cause, his genius created an engine of war so terrible in its power that through it five million Southerners, without money, without a market, without credit, withstood for four years the shock of twenty million men of their own blood and of equal daring, backed by boundless resources. ”

“ Of all the public men of America, Jefferson Davis is the least indebted for his long and noble career of distinction to adventitious influences or merely temporary popular impulses. The sources of his strength have been the elements of his character and the resources of his genius. Never hoping to stumble upon success, by a stolid indifference amid the [Pg 70] fluctuations of fortune, nor engaged in the role of the trimmer, who adjusts his conduct conformably with every turn of the popular current, his hopes of success have rested upon the merits of principle alone. ”

“ President Davis, supported by a confiding people, and an overwhelming majority of every Southern community, ruled in strict conformity with the laws of the land and its Constitution. In the midst of a revolution, unexampled in magnitude, in fierceness, and vindictiveness on the part of the enemy, and of difficulties in his own administration, he furnished an example of courage, humanity, and magnanimity, together with the observance of order, civil freedom, and legal and constitutional restraints unexampled in history. ”

“ Unalienable rights are unknown to this war-begotten theory of the Constitution. The day has come in which mankind behold this Government founding its highest claims to greatness and glory upon deeds done in utter violation of those rights which belonged to its own citizens in every State, North and South. The palladium of the freeman, the Bills of Rights, the limitations of power, the written Constitutions, have all lost their sacred authority, and not a man or a State dare, single-handed, gainsay the will of the agency which, feeling power, has forgotten right. ”

“ Usurpations of power by the Government of the United States, there may have been, and may be again, but there has never been either a sovereign convention or a direct vote of the "whole people" of the United States to demonstrate its existence as a corporate unit. Every exercise of sovereignty by any of the people of this country that has actually taken place has been by the people of States as States. In the face of this fact, is it not the merest self-stultification to admit the sovereignty of the people and deny it to the States, in which alone they have community existence? ”

“ I am certainly no admirer of Jefferson Davis or the late Confederacy, but in justice to him and that the truth may be known, I would state that I was a prisoner of war for twelve months, and was in Andersonville when the delegation of prisoners spoken of by Jefferson Davis left there to plead our cause with the authorities at Washington; and nobody can tell, unless it be a shipwrecked and famished mariner, who sees a vessel approaching and then passing on without rendering the required aid, what fond hopes were raised, and how hope sickened into despair waiting for the answer that never came. ”

“ Just such qualities have won the battles of liberty in all ages. Washington, at Valley Forge, with a wretched remnant of an army, which was yet the last hope of the country, and with even a more gloomy future immediately before him, declared that in the last emergency he would retreat to the mountains of Virginia, and there continue the struggle in the hope that he would “yet lift the flag of his bleeding country from the dust.” In the same spirit Jefferson Davis would never have abandoned the Confederate cause so long as it had even a semblance of popular support. ”

“ The death of Jackson was to Jefferson Davis an appalling disaster. He had never seriously believed the Southern people could win their unequal struggle against the millions of the North backed by their inexhaustible resources until the achievements of Lee and Jackson had introduced a new element into the conflict. So resistless and terrible had become the effective war power of Southern soldiers led by these two men whose minds moved in such harmony with each other and with their Chief in Richmond that the South at last was in sight of success. ”

“ Jefferson Davis, by far the most commanding man among them, now found himself—certainly it served him right—anxiously counselling delay, and spending nights in prayer before he made his farewell speech to the Senate in words of greater dignity and good feeling than seem to comport with the fanatical narrowness of his view and the progressive warping of his determined character to which it condemned him. Whatever fundamental loyalty to the Union existed in any man's heart there were months of debate in which it found no organised and hardly any audible expression. ”

“ As the last word fell from his white lips cannon thundered a salute from the hill crest and the great silk ensign of the South was slowly lifted by the hand of the granddaughter of President Tyler.
As the breeze unrolled its huge red, white and blue folds against the shining Southern skies the crowd burst into hysterical applause.
A Nation had been born whose history might be brief, but the people who created it and the leader who guided its destiny were the pledge of its immortality. ”

“ To argue that the man who follows the mandate of his State, resuming her sovereign jurisdiction and power, is disloyal to his allegiance to the United States, which allegiance he only owed through his State, is such a confusion of ideas as does not belong to an ordinary comprehension of our Government. It is treason to the principle of community independence. It is to recur to that doctrine of passive obedience which, in England, cost one monarch his head and drove another into exile; a doctrine which, since the Revolution of 1688, has obtained nowhere where men speak the English tongue. ”

“ There have been few spectacles presented to the admiring gaze of mankind, more worthily depicted than that union of capacities and virtues in Jefferson Davis, which so eminently qualified him, in the opinion of foreigners, for the position he held. An English writer has eloquently sketched him as “one of the world’s foremost men, admired as a statesman, respected as an earnest Christian, the Washington of another generation of the same race. A resolute statesman, calm, dignified, swaying with commanding intellect the able men that surrounded him ”

“ When, added to this representative quality, are considered his splendid career of public service, and his varied talents, exemplified on almost every field of exertion, it must be conceded that no ruler was ever more worthily invited to the head of a nation, and assuredly none ever was invited with such unanimity of popular acclaim.
We have said that Jefferson Davis must ever appear to the eye of mankind the historic representative of the Confederate cause. ”

“ Mark the prosperity, the growth, the honorable career of your country under the voluntary union of independent States. I do not envy the heart of that American whose pulse does not beat quicker, and who does not feel within him a high exultation and pride, in the past glory and future prospects of his country. With these prospects are associated—if we are only wise, true, and faithful, if we shun sectional dissension—all that man can conceive of the progression of the American people. ”

“ Jefferson Davis had received a training of peculiar fitness for his task. The first work before the South was the organization, equipment and handling of its army of defense. The President they had called to the leadership had spent four years at West Point and seven years in the army on our frontiers, pushing the boundaries of the Republic into the West. He had led a regiment of volunteers in the conquest of Mexico, and in the battle of Buena Vista, not only saved the day in the moment of supreme crisis, but had given evidence of the highest order of military genius. ”

“ Often it has been my duty to repel the accusations of others who sought to attribute to the State Rights Democracy opinions not their own, and to impute to them the purpose to agitate for the destruction of the government we inherited. As one of the State Rights party, I deny that the language published is a picture of me or my class, and I have as little disposition now, as at any former time, to separate myself from the body of the party, with which I have so long acted, which I rejoice to see in power at home, and daily more and more respected in the other States. ”

“ Independence existed before the compact of union between the States; and, if that compact should be broken in part, and therefore destroyed in whole, it was hoped that the liberties of the people in the States might still be preserved. Those who were most devoted to the Union of the Constitution might, consequently, be expected to resist most sternly any usurpation of undelegated power, the effect of which would be to warp the Federal Government from its proper character, and, by sapping the foundation, to destroy the Union of the States. ”

“ But in the next decade the division is clear between the leaders of the South and of the North. Let us glance at two separate groups.
Jefferson Davis was in many ways a typical Southerner. He was a sincere, able, and high-minded man. The guiding aim of his public life was to serve the community as he understood its interests. Personal ambition seemingly influenced him no more than is to be expected in any strong man; and, whatever his faults of judgment or temper, it does not appear that he ever knowingly sacrificed the public good to his own profit or aggrandizement. ”

“ It was exactly one o'clock on Monday, February 18, 1861, that Jefferson Davis rose between the towering pillars of the State Capitol in Montgomery and began his inaugural address. It was careful, moderate, statesmanlike, and a model of classic English. The closing sentence swept the crowd.
"It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look thus upon a people united in heart, whose one purpose of high resolve a [Pg 147] nimates and actuates the whole; where the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor, and right, and liberty and equality." ”

“ His ability had been recognized by the National Government in the beginning of the year by his appointment as Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point. His commission had been revoked at the last moment by the vacillating Buchanan because his brother-in-law, Senator Slidell of Louisiana, had made a secession speech in Washington.
Jefferson Davis was not enthusiastic in his confidence in the new hero. He was too much given to outbursts of a public kind to please the ascetic mind of the Southern leader. He had written some silly letters to the public deriding the power of the North. ”

“ We think that he is a victim as well as an oppressor. We wish to emancipate the master as well as the slave, and we think that thousands of masters are persons who merely submit to the conditions of labor established in their respective localities. Our opposition is directed, not against Jefferson Davis, but against the system whose cumulative corruptions and enormities Jefferson Davis very fairly represents. As an individual, Jefferson Davis is not worse than many people whom a general amnesty would preserve in their persons and property. ”

“ Jefferson Davis had created the most compact and terrible engine of war set in motion since Napoleon founded the Empire of France. It had been done under conditions of incredible difficulty, but it had been done. The smashing of McClellan's army brought to the North the painful realization of this fact. Abraham Lincoln must call for another half million soldiers and no man could foresee the end.
Davis had begun in April, 1861, without an arsenal, laboratory or powder mill of any capacity, and with no foundry or rolling mill for iron except the little Tredegar works in Richmond. ”

“ Whenever we shall be taught that the Democratic party is recreant to its principles; whenever we shall learn that it can not be relied upon to maintain the great measures which constitute its vitality—I for one shall be ready to leave it. And so, when we declare our tenacious adherence to the Union, it is the Union of the Constitution. If the compact between the States is to be trampled into the dust; if anarchy is to be substituted for the usurpation and consolidation which threatened the Government at an earlier period ”

“ I give him, therefore, all due credit for not escaping from a responsibility to which they might not have held him. Are we to give perpetual thanks to any one because he did not yield to so senseless a clamor, but conceded to us that small measure of constitutional right—because he has complied with a requirement so plain that my regret is that it ever required congressional intervention to enforce it? It belonged to the honor of the States to execute that clause of the Constitution. They should have executed it without congressional intervention ”

“ The power of resistance consists, in no small degree, in meeting the evil at the outer gate. I can speak for myself—and I have no right to speak for others—when I say, that, if I belonged to a party organized on the basis of making war on any section or interest in the United States, if I know myself, I would instantly quit it. We have made no war against you. We have asked no discrimination in our favor. We claim to have but the Constitution fairly and equally administered. To consent to less than this would be to sink in the scale of manhood ”