Aware that the continued dominance of his party was at stake, Davis also knew that more was involved than a critical fight between State Rights Democrats and Unionists. He and Foote, whom he characterized as “industrious as a bee” and “reckless of truth,” were in a bitter contest for influence and prestige. In the Senate he had declared that he, not Foote, spoke for Mississippi. Moreover, the powerful position he had attained with his reelection to the Senate and his popularity with most Democrats were in jeopardy. Additionally, in May the campaign began for September election of delegates to the state convention set for November, the centerpiece of State Rights hopes. Davis’s published speaking tour, scheduled between May 10 and June 13, demonstrated just how serious he judged the situation—twenty speeches in as many different towns in central and northern Mississippi.19
Even though he had been away from his plantation and his wife since late November, but for a few days, at this moment his political work was paramount. Not sharing her husband’s sense of urgency, Varina wanted him home for a longer time. His response left no doubt about his priorities: “Your claim on my time though first could my heart decide it is interrupted for a longer period than I anticipated when we parted.” “Circumstances,” he told her, “have pressed” me “immediately” into the service of the State Rights Democratic party. He said he would not see her again until mid-June. As if consciously stressing the critical nature of the moment, he closed: “I commenced to talk to you my own dear Winnie but the people are crowding in on me and I have now asked them to sit down and let me close my letter.”20
Mississippi, 1851.
From Papers of Jefferson Davis, IV, with permission of the LSU Press
Davis understood that he carried a major responsibility as the recognized leader of the State Rights party. He knew that Quitman had pushed too far too rapidly and that following his lead would result in “disaster and disgrace,” as a political correspondent put it. Ready for his task, Davis started in Jackson on the evening of May 7, when “a large procession” marched to his lodgings and escorted him to the Capitol. There in the Senate chamber waited a substantial crowd, including many women. For some two hours he held his audience “spell bound,” in the words of the reporter from the Mississippian. Sending him off along the dusty roads of the state, the newspaper announced it would not summarize the speech because Davis intended to visit every county so that the people themselves could hear his message.21
The next day he began his tour with a traveling companion, former governor and new congressman Albert G. Brown, who during the previous fall had been rhetorically as well as politically with Quitman. After sharing podiums with Brown for a week, Davis was next joined by congressional candidate William McWillie, who spent several days campaigning with him. Beginning in the center of the state, Davis headed north, and then turned east. All in all, he made twenty-four appearances before returning to Jackson for the State Rights Democratic party convention on June 16.22
His speeches during this five-week trek fulfilled his own description of himself as unchanging or unbending. During debate on the Compromise, he admitted, “If I have one defect which stands out more prominently than the rest, I fear it is that I adhere to my own opinion when others believe that arguments enough have been offered to warrant a change.” These 1851 addresses did not deviate in substance from those he had given either in the Senate or on the stump the year before—the Compromise was no compromise but a defeat for the South; the admission of California was no less than an executive proviso and most importantly ended sectional equality; slaveowners did not receive the declared right to take their property into the territories; Mississippi and the South must demand their constitutional rights. Davis maintained that several avenues were available for southerners to make their displeasure known, from a boycott of northern goods to building up southern industrial strength to a state- or sectionwide convention. Never, however, did he speak for disunion. He did defend the right of secession, but he emphatically insisted that the situation did not mandate resorting to that drastic step.23
All along his route, party faithful heaped accolades upon him. The Mississippian judged the tour a rousing success, with large numbers attending almost every speech. Identifying Davis as the “untiring friend” of southern rights, the Vicksburg Sentinel characterized his canvass as “little less than a triumphal march.” An eyewitness reported on one address to the Mississippian: “Every eye was riveted on the speaker. Tears were on many a cheek. The orator touched the heart and convinced the reason.”24
Of course, the Unionists viewed him quite differently. With a keen sense of where Davis was most vulnerable, the Unionist press depicted no faithful servant, but rather a misguided evangel who propounded ultra doctrines that would surely endanger Mississippi and destroy the Union. When Davis tried to shun the designation of disunionist, his opponents accused him of fearing “to avow” secession directly, though he acted in every way to aid forces bent on breaking up the Union.25
In Jackson for the state convention of his party, a weary Davis strove mightily to throw off the disunion shroud Unionists had woven for him and his comrades. He understood how effective Unionist rhetoric had been; he was aware that Quitman’s radicalism left the State Rights cause in a precarious position. Although the long statement of principles adopted by the convention repeated familiar points, it also quite specifically in a final resolution written by Davis attempted to disclaim once and for all the accusation that the party favored disunion: “That the advocates of State Rights are the true friends of the South, and of the Union; and that no right can be more clear or more essential to the protection of the majority, than the right of a State peaceably to withdraw from the Union, without denial or obstruction from any quarter whatsoever; but whilst we assert the right, we consider it the last remedy, the final alternative; and also declare that the exercise of it by the State of Mississippi, under existing circumstances, would be inexpedient, and is a proposition which does not meet the approbation of the Convention.”26
In addition to adopting a platform, the convention also had to select a gubernatorial candidate to run against Foote, who had been nominated for the governorship at the Union party gathering in May. Contemporary evidence points to Davis as the preferred choice of his party, and “a decided majority” of the committee appointed to choose a candidate supported him. Informed of the committee’s wishes, Davis agreed to accept, provided that Quitman concurred. Quitman’s status and ambition placed both party and Jefferson Davis in a difficult position. Quitman was the previous governor, but not the incumbent because he had resigned in early February 1851 after his indictment by a federal grand jury. The charge of violating the Neutrality Laws by assisting a Cuban-American group to invade Cuba was dropped a month later, however. Quitman saw nomination as vindication; besides, he had long labored for the Democratic party and had put up critical guideposts along the road to the State Rights party. Davis recognized the legitimacy of Quitman’s claims, but also his liability.27
This political tug-of-war ended with Quitman as the State Rights nominee, for he absolutely refused to step aside, even when the committee spurned his plea to turn from Davis. Although Quitman failed with the committee, he succeeded with Davis, who finally informed the group in a note transported by Quitman’s friends that he refused to accept its nomination. Quitman’s candidacy muddied the State Rights position on disunion. Despite the platform’s outright rejection of secession as policy, Quitman as the personification of extremism undermined that declaration, though even he had begun to bend to the obvious—in the summer of 1851, most Mississippians wanted no part of secession.
The convention over, Senator Davis immediately returned to the hustings, now concentrating on the southern counties, and much of the time accompanied by Congressman Brown in his home district. Davis stepped into a political conflagration, for as a veteran politico recalled, “Mississippi was in a blaze from east to west, and from north to south.” With the massive effort to
win delegates in the September election in full swing, Davis, Quitman, Foote, the congressmen, and numerous other politicians were all canvassing the state. Moving through political heat that matched the torrid Mississippi summer, Davis did not alter his text. He continued to lecture audiences that a hostile northern majority had denied southerners their constitutional rights in the common territories. He reiterated his conviction that his state and his section had to assert themselves against a determined antislavery enemy. He wanted Mississippi to act in conjunction with other states, even including South Carolina, despite the latter’s radical reputation. He was in touch with leaders in that state, though no evidence points to his influencing their actions, or vice versa. And he remained convinced that such a show of unity and resolve would result in the South’s achieving its goals.28
Simultaneously, Davis struggled to throw off the disunion yoke placed on him and his fellow State Righters by Unionists. He derided the proposition that the contest was in any way between union and disunion. Emphatically denying that he or his party agitated against the Union, he proudly proclaimed himself a dedicated unionist. Although he repeated his belief in the right of secession—to him a legacy from 1776—he stressed that current conditions did not necessitate such drastic action. Furthermore, he declared that he knew of no one in either his party or the state who advocated secession, except for one man who claimed to be already out of the Union.
Davis kept up a brutal pace despite the enervating weather, and associates praised him for doing “much good,” but the incessant travel and constant speechmaking were taking their toll on his physical strength. His weakened condition confined him to his room during much of the State Rights convention in Jackson. Then in mid-July, following a speech in Fayette, exhaustion led to illness, which forced him to retreat to nearby Brierfield. After resting for only a week, he once again took to the stump, this time in northern Mississippi.29
As before, he faced a demanding job, with at least fifteen stops publicly scheduled in the month remaining before election of convention delegates. Even before he really got underway, a supporter described him as “worn and jaded.” Yet he kept mounting rostrums in towns and villages in the northern counties. Crowds poured out to hear him, and his voice rang out with the same themes he had been hammering on since May. Reports, friendly to be sure, praised his effort: he “held the crowd in breathless attention until the hour of dinner”; “the gallant Davis… [told] a plain eloquent tale of our wrongs with dignity, truth and power.”30
As the campaign for electing delegates wound down, Davis’s body simply refused to keep going. In Oxford on August 16, “a slight chill” forced him to curtail his remarks; around two days later, in Pontotoc, he collapsed. Quite ill, he finally had to give up his speechmaking; nursed by friends, he remained there for more than two weeks, until regaining sufficient strength to travel to Memphis and a steamboat home.31
“A shadow of his former self,” Davis reached Brierfield in mid-September practically invalided by the most serious illness to strike him since his initial battle with malaria more than a decade and a half earlier. The almost nonstop campaigning through the sultry Mississippi summer had so worn down his resistance that he succumbed to fever and chills, undoubtedly a recurrence of malaria. The massive pressure generated by the enormous political stakes for Davis and his party probably contributed to a further affliction, a severe eye attack.32
Although he had been bothered previously by inflamed eyes, never before had he suffered anything approaching the severity of this attack. Varina recalled that he could not “bear a ray of light upon either eye,” though the left one was more severely afflicted. For some three weeks “he slept all day, arose after sundown, and walked through the house all night.” After little more than a week at home, Davis wanted to consult Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a noted physician in New Orleans as well as a family friend, but he did not believe that he could yet make the trip downriver.33
Davis was not able to go to Dr. Cartwright, but he did relate to the doctor his symptoms and his regimen, which had led to a partial recovery. After a time of keeping himself in “mild and uniform light,” Davis told Dr. Cartwright that “the inflammation has greatly [su]bsided, and the sight of that eye which was entirely blind has been partially restored.” Although he still dealt with “great irritability in the nerve of the eye,” “the cloud which had collected between the coatings of the cornea, and which entirely covered the pupil … has receded so as now to appear like a clear drop of water which swells the cornea on one side (the outside,) and encroaches very little on the pupil, though it covers about a third of the iris.” He went on to report that “the eye has ceased to weep, and has rather an unnatural dryness, and heat, but without any engorgement of blood vessels.”34
Although it is impossible to be absolutely certain, it is most probable that Davis’s disorder resulted from a herpes simplex infection of the cornea of the left eye, a condition known as herpetic keratitis. Davis’s description points to that diagnosis, as does the established connection between herpetic keratitis and malaria. The type I herpes simplex virus does have a positive relationship to heat, sunlight, and febrile illness like malaria, as well as emotional stress. Certainly during the summer of 1851, Davis was exposed to heat and sunlight, did come down with malaria, and most assuredly felt tremendous emotional stress.35
Davis’s own delineation of his symptoms meshes with modern clinical reports, including redness, tearing, and decreased vision. His emphasizing the cornea indicates that he had most likely developed metaherpetic keratoiritis, with severe stromal involvement. The stroma makes up approximately 90 percent of the corneal substance. As the stroma of his left cornea began to disintegrate from the inflammatory process, it weakened, allowing a prominent membrane (Descemet’s) to protrude forward because of the intraocular pressure of the aqueous humor, forming what is termed a descemetococle, which Davis refers to as appearing like “a clear drop of water.”
Davis recovered slowly from this siege, but his eye problem did not disappear. The type I herpes simplex virus can recur, given the proper physical and emotional conditions. Moreover, a usual course of herpetic keratitis fits Davis’s clinical history, with his ongoing and ultimately even more serious ophthalmological difficulties.36
While weakness and disability hobbled Davis, his party was knocked off its political feet. The Union party swept the state, capturing 57 percent of the vote, with a margin exceeding 7,000. This outcome distressed Davis, who in midsummer had still thought his party, his cause, and his prestige would prevail. Postmortems were quickly produced. Astute State Righters realized that Quitman had been an albatross in two different ways. First, his extremist reputation made it too easy for Unionists to cast the disunionist net over the State Rights party. Quitman had simply “outstripped the views of the people” when he “recommend[ed] secession as the proper cause” for the state. Second, with his “poor and flat” speaking style, Quitman could not match Foote on the stump.37
During the joint canvass by the two gubernatorial candidates, in June and July, Foote consistently bested his opponent. Relations between the men so deteriorated that a threat of violence came to hover over the campaign—a threat that was finally realized on July 18, when they pummeled each other with fists and feet. As a result, Quitman called off all further joint appearances, arriving thereafter in a particular place roughly two days after Foote. This tactic backfired, however, for it enabled Foote to boast that Quitman was afraid to meet him face-to-face. Quitman took the defeat of his cause as a personal repudiation, which in a significant way it was, and resigned as the Democratic State Rights nominee for governor on September 6, only two months before the election.38
Although Quitman’s notoriety and his oratorical shortcomings certainly did not help his party, a more fundamental cause underlay the State Rights debacle. A significant number of Mississippians were not prepared for extreme measures. Though not thrilled with the Compromise of 1850, they did not consider i
t so awful or so dangerous as to require preparation for disunion, much less disunion itself. That fact enabled the Union party, with a former Democratic notable at its head and reciting the Georgia-become-Mississippi Platform, to present itself as the state’s responsible, conservative defender.
The election for convention delegates revealed an evaporation of the normal, overwhelming Democratic majority. Winning handily, Unionists carried all but eighteen counties, mostly in the Piney Woods of southern Mississippi, and elected better than a two-to-one majority of convention delegates. Contributing heavily to the State Rights rout was a significantly lower turnout. In the election for convention delegates, 49,643 Mississippians voted, compared to 56,113 in the 1849 gubernatorial contest, and 57,717 in the November election. The overwhelming majority of those who stayed home had usually lodged in the Democratic tent, for in 1849 the victorious Quitman won 33,117 votes, but in 1851 the State Rights delegates managed to garner only 21,241. Thus, many Democrats who would not support what they perceived as extremism still refused to vote for a party made up chiefly of Whigs and led by a man most Democratic leaders branded a turncoat or traitor.39
Even though the convention campaign left the Democratic State Rights party “scattered to the four winds of Heaven,” party stalwarts labored “to retrieve the fortunes of the day.” That so many traditional Democrats stayed home on election day—party leaders estimated as many as 7,000 or more—provided hope that the decision in September could be reversed in the gubernatorial election, if the right candidate replaced Quitman. Almost as one man, party managers turned to Jefferson Davis. Only days after Quitman’s withdrawal the committee designated by the State Rights state convention to fill any vacancies selected Davis, announcing in a public letter that the press and people of Mississippi had already named him. Even Quitman joined the chorus.40
Jefferson Davis, American Page 30
