Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  Widely and correctly seen as close to Taylor, Davis found himself the focal point for a number of people eager to learn the general’s position on partisan and policy matters. Before Taylor made clear his intention of joining the Whigs, certain politicos explored the possibility of fitting him with a Democratic uniform. These would-be president-makers sought Davis’s advice and enlisted him as a liaison to Taylor. But even though Davis was devoted to his friend and believed his “true position” was on the Democratic side, he never thought Taylor would sign up with the Democrats, and he had no detectable influence on the general’s eventual decision to go with the Whigs.43

  When Taylor did receive the Whig presidential nomination in early June 1848, Davis had to cope with an uncomfortable political decision, but he never wavered. A loyal Democrat, he declared his unequivocal support for his party’s nominee, Senator Lewis Cass. He told Mississippi audiences that while he respected and even cherished Zachary Taylor, his personal creed meant his vote would go for Cass. Privately he expressed identical sentiments, telling a friend his affection for Taylor “will be opposed by my convictions, and adherence to measures.” At the same time, Davis did not campaign enthusiastically for the Democratic ticket, though he did make a few speeches, all fairly close to Warren County. His less-than-vigorous support for the Democratic standard-bearers did not generate unhappiness in the state party, which expressed considerable empathy for his position. Pointing to “considerations of a private character” that would keep Davis from actively participating in the race, the Mississippian pronounced Davis’s motives “highly commendable” and certainly approved by Mississippi Democrats.44

  Despite his relative quiet during the campaign, Davis remained forthright about his commitment to his party. Even before the election year, he publicly asserted that Mississippi Democrats should attend the party’s national convention and meet with their northern brethren. He also maintained that “the South should fraternize with the Democracy … the party of strict construction, of checks and balances, and constitutional restraints.” According to Davis, strict construction should forever abide as “the political Shibboleth of the South.” Voting patterns on the territorial issue in the recently adjourned session of Congress troubled him, however. That so many northern Democrats insisted on the Wilmot Proviso and refused to meet the South even partway, as in the extension of the Missouri Compromise line, caused him to question the general commitment of northern Democrats to southern constitutional rights. He worried about the possibility of “a geographical division,” which he had “always deprecated, and which must be the precursor of disunion.” Despite his concern, he had not yet come close to giving up on his northern associates, whom he believed could end any potentiality of a sectional party if they would “brave the abolitionists.” He had no doubt that Cass as president would prove true on the critical issue and veto the Wilmot Proviso should it ever pass Congress, though he did not consider the Michigan senator a great man.45

  Jefferson Davis genuinely liked Lewis Cass and sincerely believed he would block the Wilmot Proviso, but he did not have complete faith in the solution Cass proposed for the territorial question, popular sovereignty. Borrowing the concept, Cass at the end of 1847 presented popular sovereignty as a way around the proviso that would satisfy the South but not alienate the North. Based on the supreme Democratic principle that the people are sovereign, popular sovereignty first declared the Wilmot Proviso unconstitutional and then stipulated that the settlers in a territory, not the Congress or anyone else, should make the decision on slavery.46

  Popular sovereignty added to its political allure by leaving the time frame for the crucial decision on slavery conveniently vague. Although the doctrine implied that settlers could accept or reject slavery during the territorial stage, its advocates did not talk about territorial legislatures. The theory also asserted that all settlers had to abide by the basic principles of the Constitution. Northerners who took the implication as the chief thrust could argue that the first territorial legislature could ban slavery if it wanted to do so, but southerners, like Davis, who stressed the constitutional-principles theme, declared that a decision on slavery had to await statehood, for territories lacked the authority to decide so fundamental a question. Only a state possessed the requisite authority. As defined by southern Democrats, popular sovereignty became an extension of their traditional doctrine of states’ rights. The inherent inconsistency and vagueness that provided so much of popular sovereignty’s political beauty troubled Davis, though he recognized the political utility. Professing loyalty to popular sovereignty, both northern and southern Democrats could interpret it as they wished while banishing the inflammatory Wilmot Proviso from their political vocabulary.

  Although the lack of guarantees and the obvious obfuscation bothered Davis, the Democrats offered more on paper than the Whigs, whose northern and southern wings were so divided on the proviso that the Whig convention wrote no platform. That posed no problem for southern Whigs; they presented Zachary Taylor as one of their own, a slaveowning cotton planter, who would never betray the fundamental interests of the South. With his fervent friendship for Taylor, Davis never mentioned any doubts, even though some of Taylor’s observations in correspondence should have cautioned him against assuming that the two men would agree on how to handle the territorial issue.47

  In November the country elected the heroic general as its president, an outcome that did not surprise and could not have disappointed Jefferson Davis. Even in staunchly Democratic Mississippi, Taylor’s popularity was evident; he lost the state by fewer than 800 votes. Talk about the prospective Taylor administration even included the Democrat Jefferson Davis, with rumors that he would accept a place in the cabinet. Denying such a possibility, the Mississippian editorialized: “We freely say, that the democracy of Col. Davis, in our opinion, is above suspicion.” No surviving evidence suggests that either Taylor or Davis seriously considered such a maneuver, but Taylor remained concerned about Davis’s political career, always counseling Davis to act as he must. He assured the younger man that not even possible political differences could alter his personal regard and friendship. As for Davis, he was eager for Taylor to succeed as president, going so far as to share thoughts with one of Taylor’s closest Whig advisers.48

  After only two months in Mississippi, Jefferson Davis headed back to Washington for the short second session of the Thirtieth Congress, from December 1848 to March 1849. Taking the southern route downriver to New Orleans and then on to Washington, Davis traveled alone, once again leaving Varina behind. He arrived in Washington on December 1, and established residence, along with several other southern Democrats, at Mrs. Duvall’s boardinghouse on Missouri Avenue near 4½ Street, where he remained throughout the session.49

  Two political forces dominated this post-election Congress. First, basking in Zachary Taylor’s victory, Whigs wanted to hamper or undermine any congressional initiative that might possibly upstage Taylor’s administration, which would begin with his inauguration on March 4, 1849. Second, John C. Calhoun labored mightily in his supreme attempt to overcome party loyalty and achieve his long-desired southern unity. These two currents intersected when southern Whigs, supremely confident about Taylor’s prospects, set about torpedoing Calhoun’s effort. Senator Davis was not central in either camp, though he had an interest in both, and he did support Calhoun.50

  Davis was surely concerned about the circumstance prompting Calhoun to believe that he could substitute sectional for party allegiance—the territorial issue, specifically the possibility that the Wilmot Proviso would become law because northerners in both parties backed it. A move led by northern Whigs in the House against slavery in the District of Columbia heightened southern concern about the intentions of antislavery politicians and caused an uproar among southerners. Public opinion in the South knew no division on the proviso, and considerable activity in the slave states publicized that opposition. Davis had already noted with distress the northern
unity behind the proviso; besides, he considered Calhoun the great sentinel of southern rights in the Union. When the congressmen and senators from the South caucused to consider Calhoun’s ideas, Davis participated, and he signed the resulting address, which called for a united front against the North and insisted on equal southern rights in the territories. Although Calhoun gained the support of a substantial majority of southern Democrats, he failed to obtain his cherished solidarity, for southern Whigs overwhelmingly rejected his handiwork. Totally convinced that the slaveowning cotton planter Taylor would act for their benefit, southern Whigs wanted neither Calhoun nor anyone else undermining what they envisioned as their glorious political future.

  Winter did not find Senator Davis deeply involved in legislative activity. He was worried, however, by what he saw as a potential danger to Taylor’s presidency in Henry Clay’s scheduled return to the Senate in December 1849. A major Whig leader since the party’s inception, the magnetic Clay commanded the loyalty of many of the faithful in Congress, and he resented that Zachary Taylor, not Henry Clay, would sit in the presidential chair. Davis worried that Clay’s influence coupled with his jealousy might sabotage Taylor. At the same time, he counseled a Taylor adviser on the general’s cabinet. On the vexing territorial issue, southern Whigs in the House tried to bypass the proviso by admitting immediately all of the Mexican Cession as a single state, but they failed. When Congress adjourned on March 3, 1849, all was ready for the inauguration of the new president. Having served as one of three senators on the committee arranging the ceremony, Davis was present when his former father-in-law took the oath of office as the twelfth president of the United States. Then, after attending a brief special congressional session, he left in late March for home.51

  Davis returned to a state abundantly exercised by the seemingly inexorable growth of antislavery rhetoric and political strength. Both Whigs and Democrats from south-central Mississippi gathered in Jackson on May 7 to consider the general situation. This group in turn called for a statewide convention to meet in October to assess the condition of affairs and propose a proper course for the state to follow. Convening in the summer, official bodies of both the Democratic and Whig parties chorused support for the autumn assembly.52

  Jefferson Davis was in the midst of this activity. After appearing at the May meeting, he gave a major address in Jackson. He began by saying that he had not come “to articulate [his] indignation” at the North but to get “fresh instruction at the hands of the people,” though he was “gratified” to find “vigilance and unanimity” on a question that involved “the feelings and interests of the whole community.” Defining the war waged by antislavery forces as “both wounding and insulting” to the South, he urged that the time had arrived for the South to put aside the “long supineness” that had characterized its response to northern attacks and assert its legitimate rights. Northerners, who argued that the South should remain quiet because no real danger existed, Davis castigated for giving advice akin to “the lulling of the vampire fawning the victim which he will destroy.” If the South continued to give in, he asserted, “the equality given to us by our fathers is to be destroyed,” because the North would soon have three-quarters of the states and could then alter the Constitution at will. Even when faced with such an enemy, Davis found no “spirit of disunion” among southerners, and he certainly opposed “hasty action.” “We should make no ultimatum we do not mean,” he concluded, but “when all other things failed then was left the stern appeal—to arms.”53

  During the summer and fall, Senator Davis participated energetically in Democratic party affairs. He attended the party’s state convention that nominated his former Mexican War commander John A. Quitman for governor; by this time the two men had put their wartime estrangement behind them and renewed their friendship, at least publicly. Then, in October, Davis toured northern Mississippi, mounting the podium in towns like Aberdeen, Canton, Holly Springs, and Kosciusko. He spoke on behalf of Democratic candidates and spread his alarm at the surging antislavery sentiment in the North, highlighted by the formation in 1848 of the Free Soil party with adoption of the Wilmot Proviso as its chief end. He also wanted to make sure voters did not forget their junior senator. Proudly and correctly, he reported to Varina that he had been received with “most flattering demonstrations of regard.”54

  Davis took this opportunity to proclaim his loyalty to the Democratic party and to praise his political home. Pledging his fealty to party candidates, he declared that Mississippi Democrats knew no internal division; all acted as one. “Our creed,” he announced, is grounded “on the immutable basis of truth, and will descend from generation to generation such as it came to us.” Praising that creed’s permanence, he reached for a metaphorical illustration: “Temporary excitement, faction or error, like enveloping mists, may obscure it for a while, yet it will stand, as the house which the wise man built on a rock.” Davis’s efforts were not in vain, for the Democrats won a smashing victory: the governorship, both houses of the legislature, and all four congressional seats.55

  Although Senator Davis made every exertion for the electoral triumph of his party, he confided to a friend, “My heart just now is in union and action of the South against Abolitionism, which may as a generic term include all the associations making war on the slave holding states.” In the late summer of 1849, he prepared a long public letter spelling out his views for fellow Mississippians. He started out by sounding his now constant alarm that antislavery agitation had moved beyond a few fanatics to become “the heart of a great political organization” that “aim[ed] at political dominion over us, and str[uck] at our prosperity, our property, and domestic security.” Our assailants, he informed his readers, “have taken a variety of names, such as antislavery men, non-extensionists, emancipationists, liberty party, free soil party, etc., but considering them one family, differing somewhat in their mode of attack, but not at all in the final purpose of it, I will refer to them by their patronymic, as abolitionists.” If the activities of this “systematic, calculating, sectional organization” had not yet aroused some southerners, Davis averred that only inattention could explain the resulting laxness.56

  According to Davis, this movement posed such a grave danger to the South because of its substantial political influence in the North, often holding the balance of power in and between the Democratic and Whig parties. Southerners, Davis proclaimed, “no longer hear[d] of compromise for sectional equalization,” but the outcry of “the unsatisfiable horse leech—give! give!” Facing such opponents, the South had to hold fast to its constitutional rights or “consent to be the subject, to sink in the United States Congress to the helpless condition which Ireland occupies in the British parliament.” Davis believed that the time had come for the South to make its stand. Non-resistance, he predicted, would have a fatal outcome; besides, “our friends in the North” had been shackled by the inability or unwillingness of the South to present a united front behind a specific platform. Although he never specified the particular position the South should take, Davis clearly adhered to Calhoun’s view that the South confronted a major crisis focused on the territories and should come together in agreement on some kind of ultimatum. Based on his actions in the Senate and his words on the stump in Mississippi, Davis could certainly support compromise proposals, such as extending the Missouri Compromise line or resurrecting the Clayton Compromise, but he was convinced that a positive impact from any proposition required a solid South. Simultaneously, Davis confidently preached to Mississippians that if the South could forge unity, it could prevail, for the South still had enough political friends in the North to obtain congressional approval for a compromise measure that carried the authority of the South speaking with a single voice.

  Davis’s hope for southern unity enjoyed an auspicious beginning at a bipartisan, statewide meeting held in Jackson on October 3, where notables from both parties had substantive roles. This was not simply a Mississippi assembly, for John C. Calh
oun had been instrumental in getting it together, though his involvement was kept secret lest his reputation for sectional radicalism sink the entire effort. Davis participated in the deliberations and supported the published resolutions, which in large part repeated his public letter—the South faced a massive threat and the time for action was now. Furthermore, one of the resolutions called for all slave states to send delegates to a convention scheduled to take place in Nashville, Tennessee, on the first Monday of June 1850, “to devise and adopt some mode of resistance to these [northern] aggressions.”57

  Within three weeks after his speaking tour through northern Mississippi, Jefferson Davis left once again for Washington. This time Varina, along with two of his nieces, traveled with him, and they reached the capital before December 1. They established residence at Donohoo’s Building on Pennsylvania Avenue next door to the United States Hotel; they took their meals via “a little bridge” that connected Donohoo’s with the hotel dining room. At the outset several other southern senators and representatives shared the Davis “mess,” but by the following summer when Congress finally adjourned, only one remained. In his political lodgings, the Senate chamber, Davis had a different seat; his desk remained to the right of the vice president’s chair but was now in the middle of the third row beside John C. Calhoun’s.58

  As Senator Davis settled in for what he believed would be a difficult session, his own status occupied his attention. After his appointment to the Senate in 1847, the Mississippi legislature in January 1848 elected him in his own right, but only to serve out the remaining two years of that term. Thus, Davis once more had to have his name placed before the legislature that would sit in the winter of 1850. Although he had every reason for confidence, as early as the summer of 1849, he foresaw “many screws which will be tightened on me.” Mostly, he feared that the traditional sectionalism of Mississippi politics—the same apprehension he had experienced his first time before the legislators—would work against him. Davis’s senior colleague Henry Foote lived in southern Mississippi, and all five statewide candidates nominated by the state convention in the summer of 1849 also hailed from that area. Davis also worried that his political opponents would emphasize his friendship with Zachary Taylor and not separate it from his allegiance to the Democracy.59