Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  Davis did strive to supply the basic physical needs of his bondspeople. He provided ample food, chiefly the pork and cornmeal that were the principal elements of the slave diet across the South. Supplements came from chickens and eggs raised in the slaves’ own chicken coops, along with fruits and vegetables in season. This diet probably furnished sufficient calories, but also undoubtedly failed to supply all needed nutrients. When present at Brierfield, he and Varina often tended ill slaves. He built a hospital for them, which he enlarged in 1855, and also scheduled visits from a physician, usually Dr. McElrath. In one instance he sent a slave girl with an unusual affliction all the way to New Orleans by steamboat for Dr. Cartwright’s treatment.79

  Davis took note of matters spiritual as well. Varina remembered worship held every Sunday in the chapel at one end of Joseph’s hospital. The Davises engaged an Episcopalian chaplain for the whites, but not for the blacks, who preferred either Baptist or Methodist services, the two denominations favored by slaves as well as whites almost everywhere. Accordingly, the Davises brought in ministers of these two persuasions alternately: a Baptist minister would preach for two weeks, then a Methodist for the next two. Whether or not slave preachers functioned on the Davis plantations is simply not known, though Varina spoke of Uncle Bob as being “eloquent in prayer.” The existing documents neither confirm nor deny the activity of slave preachers, who had considerable influence on many farms and plantations. Marking the end of life, slaves on Brierfield received special allotments for the supper that highlighted the wakes for the deceased. Burial followed in the slave cemetery, located just to the southeast of the Davis residence or the big house.80

  As did most slaveowners, the Davis brothers recognized families among their slaves, despite the absence of any statutory provision or protection for the slave family. Jefferson’s first slave and overseer, James Pemberton, had a wife and at least one child. On Hurricane, Joseph certainly acknowledged the family of the remarkable Ben Montgomery, a literate and extraordinarily capable slave, who ran the plantation store and kept accounts.81

  Brierfield slaves lived in cabins. The exact number of cabins is not known, though they were arranged in rows, a common placement, near the big house. Davis did want adequate housing in his slave quarters, the usual designation for the structures as well as the area in which they were placed. In 1855, from Washington, he detailed for Joseph the additional construction he had ordered for Brierfield to address what he saw as overcrowding in the quarters. An illustration of a portion of Brierfield’s slave quarters appeared in Harper’s Weekly just after the Civil War; it pictured typical clapboard cabins of both one story and a story and a half.82

  In particular cases Davis treated his slaves with dignity. Perhaps this attitude came in part from his long close association with James Pemberton, whom he entrusted with substantial responsibility and considered a friend, always handing him a cigar when they parted. Complementing his experience with Pemberton, he also maintained close relations with his brother’s slave Ben Montgomery. When in Washington, he corresponded with Montgomery, who forwarded Davis mail and apprised him of affairs at the Bend during Joseph’s absences. Although the circumstances are completely unknown, in 1859 Jefferson took out a life insurance policy for $3,500 on Ben Montgomery and a female slave. In addition, the assignments and leeway Joseph gave Ben Montgomery clearly attest to the eldest brother’s conviction about the ability and worthiness of at least some slaves. Many years later Varina recalled other instances such as her husband’s permitting slaves to choose their own names and calling them by their chosen name.83

  Slave cabins at Brierfield.

  From Harper’s Weekly, September 15, 1866 (photo credit i8.2)

  Davis, of course, owned slaves chiefly for labor—and labor they did. As on all large plantations, the work seemed unending. The cotton crop consumed the greatest exertion, from preparing the soil and planting in late winter and early spring through cultivation in late spring and summer to harvest in fall and early winter. In addition, corn and other grains demanded attention, as did the hundreds of animals. In slower periods, efforts were directed toward construction and maintenance of buildings, fences, and ditches, and, in the Mississippi floodplain, levees. To ensure that all able-bodied men and women were available for physical work, the plantation had a nursery to care for young children.84

  In a most unusual assignment for bondsmen, Jefferson and Joseph in 1851 armed and led a contingent of their slaves in an attempt to halt the construction of a cutoff at the narrow eastern end of Davis Bend where less than one mile of dry land separated coils of the great river. Successful diversion of the river would have removed the riverfront from the Davis properties and isolated them. In 1850 Joseph had gone to court and obtained an injunction against the diversionary initiative. When his legal victory did not stop the digging, he and Jefferson undertook the use of force. Unfortunately, there is no record as to whether any actual clash occurred between the Davis-led slaves and the other side. No more confrontations or threats of confrontation seem to have taken place, though it appears that the attempt to create a cutoff continued sometime later, perhaps during the war. Then, in 1867, the river itself rushed across the narrow neck, turning Davis Bend into Davis Island.85

  The family tradition that both Jefferson and Joseph were benevolent masters for their time and place does generally fit the available evidence, but the familial story goes considerably further in holding up the Davis brothers as model masters running plantations on which the slaves barely realized they were slaves. According to this script, Joseph set the pattern of an unusually humane system, which his youngest brother and protégé followed. A key element in this version of slavery on both Hurricane and Brierfield involved the slave jury, where any slave accused of violating a plantation regulation was tried by a jury of peers, that is, by other slaves. The master intervened only to ameliorate harsh sentences, as when Jefferson supposedly reduced a penalty of 5,000 lashes to an extra hour in the field. In the same vein, the whip, the pervasive symbol of white authority in the slave South, was unseen, for Jefferson forbade corporal punishment, specifically whipping.

  This view of slavery under the Davis brothers originated with Varina in her Memoir, published in 1890, and in her subsequent correspondence and in letters written by Joseph’s granddaughter almost two decades later. Although these two women should certainly have been excellent witnesses of slavery at Brierfield and Hurricane, they were both looking back from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when southern whites were romanticizing old plantation days, including slavery. Additionally, no other contemporary documents verify this plantation Eden. That such a fascinating system of slave management run by two such prominent individuals in such an accessible location completely escaped notice is puzzling.86

  The testimony of Jefferson Davis’s slaves generally affirms the family tradition, albeit with few details and some caveats. In late 1865 a group of Davis’s former slaves petitioned the governor of Mississippi, requesting the release from prison of their ex-master. Admitting that “he tried hard” to maintain slavery, the petitioners also declared, “Some of us well know of many kindness he shown his slaves on his plantation.” Much later, in the 1930s, several men and women who had belonged to him were interviewed by whites during an attempt sponsored by the federal government to obtain firsthand accounts of the slave experience. In these conversations extremely elderly people were trying to recall conditions and events of their early youth. Moreover, these black former slaves were being questioned by whites in Mississippi during the heyday of white supremacy and racial segregation. Under such circumstances, legitimate doubts can be raised about both accuracy and candor, but the dominance of certain themes lends credibility. The comments by former Brierfield slaves concentrate on three topics: they recognized that they had been owned by an important man; they described him as a kind master, especially to children; they remembered being bought or sold by Davis. One did mention the slave jury, bu
t gave no details.87

  In one area the Davis brothers were unusual, though not unique. Each gave substantive authority to certain slaves. For a decade and a half James Pemberton served as the only overseer on Brierfield, watching the number of slaves increase from a handful to more than seventy. Varina was surely accurate in her observation that her husband was never able to replace him. After all, seven white men served in the ten years after Pemberton’s death. Joseph’s dealings with Ben Montgomery and his sons matched Jefferson’s with Pemberton. There could have been others. Visiting the Davis plantations during the Civil War, a Union naval officer remarked that the slaves he encountered there “offer[ed] a strong contrast to many on the River,” observing that they “seem[ed] more intelligent than those I have seen elsewhere.” He found some “educated” and some possessing “quite a mechanical genius.” Although this officer specified neither numbers nor names, it seems likely that he encountered some of the Montgomerys.88

  When overseers stepped beyond the bounds of conduct Jefferson Davis considered acceptable, he acted, but the bounds are unknown, for no rules for overseers on Brierfield have survived. In 1855 he let an overseer go, calling him “a low man” because his unspecified “conduct disqualified him for the proper management of the people.” Two years later, Davis reported that after he had fired another overseer for improperly administering medicine which had caused the death of a slave girl, he learned “so much more that is mean & vicious in his past conduct.”89

  Despite his honest wish that his slaves receive decent treatment, Davis understood that slavery did not exist without punishment. He evidently was “averse to bodily castigation,” except when unavoidable. And, of course, he or his agents made that decision. In penalizing slaves Davis could be inventive. One of Davis’s male slaves who “annoyed him greatly” for an unknown offense ended up in his master’s version of solitary confinement. Davis had the offender placed in “a little prison-house of logs, with top door to hand his victuals through.” After being incarcerated for two weeks, the slave was released, “fully subdued and never gave his master more trouble.” In January 1861 Joseph discovered that slaves from both Hurricane and Brierfield had been involved in a “contraband trade in corn & whiskey,” which meant buying and selling or bartering illegally with whites or other blacks. Joseph told Jefferson in Washington that the slaves judged guilty had been punished, but he did not give details.90

  Jefferson Davis’s almost continuous absence from Brierfield between 1853 and 1861 and his incessant difficulties with overseers, along with complaints about conditions, do not correlate with the traditional view of Brierfield as a plantation paradise. His hiring of overseers whom he subsequently dismissed for misconduct meant that at times his own actions resulted in the mistreatment of his slaves. Back at Brierfield in mid-1855 after an absence of almost two and a half years, Davis revealed that “the place had fallen into bad condition but under the present overseer promises better hereafter.” That promise was not kept, however, because when Varina returned home in the spring of 1857, she found abject neglect: “All the locks spoilt, sheets cut up for napkins, towels and napkins swept from the land—nothing even to cook in.… I just sat down and cried.” That a perfectly run plantation would have witnessed an almost perpetually revolving door of overseers and occasioned such laments from the owners seems most unlikely. That thoroughly happy slaves would have participated in contraband trade and other activities requiring solitary confinement seems equally improbable.91

  In sum, judging by both the standards of his time and the findings of modern scholarship on slavery, Jefferson Davis was a reasonably humane master, but no evidence presents Brierfield as unique or as some idyllic garden for its enslaved inhabitants. Brierfield slaves worked very hard, and they felt the arbitrary and, at times, intemperate authority of ever-changing overseers. Moreover, the reported activities and punishments clearly demonstrate that the restrictions and rigors of bondage chafed at least some of them.

  Davis deemed the slaves themselves an unfortunate race that he and his fellow masters had to tutor and care for. He believed bringing Christianity to the transplanted Africans the greatest missionary work of all time. Whether he concurred in the opinion of his friend Dr. Samuel Cartwright that blacks composed a distinct species cannot be ascertained, yet it is unlikely that he shared such an extreme view. At the same time he did think that God had created blacks to become “tillers of land and drawers of water,” though he was obviously just as convinced that some slaves had special capabilities, as witness his dealings with James Pemberton and Ben Montgomery. According to Varina, in 1846 he talked with Pemberton about freedom. Varina says that the slave wanted to “take care of his mistress” at his master’s death; but if she died also, he would want his liberty. No existing record suggests that Davis ever contemplated emancipation for any other slave.92

  Davis envisioned no early end to slavery. His long-term hope seems to have been that somehow westward migration would take slaves out of the United States by way of Mexico and Central America. Such a fanciful dream certainly included an open-ended time frame for slavery, for in the unlikely event such an exodus took place, it would only happen in the unforeseeable future. In his fundamental outlook on race and race relations, Davis shared much with almost every other southern white and a considerable number of northern whites as well. He believed blacks inferior to whites, and also that where blacks were present in large numbers, social peace required the superior race to possess absolute legal control and power over the inferior. Thus, slavery must remain in place.93

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I … Have a Field of Usefulness”

  Just after his gubernatorial defeat, Jefferson Davis told a former Senate colleague that he was “separated from the exciting strife of politicians…,” but he exaggerated. Reestablishing himself at Brierfield did not mean retirement from politics, only from public office. In December 1851, one month after his defeat, Warren County State Rights Democrats named him as a delegate to the party’s state convention, scheduled for Jackson early in the new year. Informing Davis that they wanted him to speak to the assembly and counsel with them, party leaders expected him to attend.1

  Despite their setback in November, Davis and his fellow Democrats were not at all despondent, even though their nemesis Henry Foote was about to occupy the governor’s chair. Events in Washington contributed notably to their positive outlook. Leading southern Unionists tried but failed to make local parties national by restructuring the Whig party into a national union organization that could attract conservative Democrats as well as Whigs. Sectional rivalry and ingrained partisan loyalties proved too powerful, however, for southern Unionists to effect a reorientation of parties on the national level, matching what they had accomplished in their states. At the same time State Rights Democrats worked strenuously and ultimately successfully to make sure that the national Democratic party recognized them and their organizations as the legitimate Democrats in their bailiwicks.2

  The conjunction of these two results placed Democrats who had signed on with Union parties in a precarious political position. Their hopes as Unionists were dwindling because national occurrences signaled the permanent localization of Union parties. Moreover, as State Rights Democrats succeeded in winning acknowledgment as true Democrats, the Democrats-become-Unionists found their status with their old party in jeopardy. As one State Rights chief in Mississippi chortled to Davis, Foote was having “to chew the cud of disappointment.”3

  In this environment, Davis took as his major task the promotion of Democratic reunification in Mississippi. Addressing the state convention, he emphasized his identity as a lifetime Democrat, merging the Democratic and State Rights parties. He said that all who desired to be Democrats were welcome and should come into the party. He announced to Union Democrats that if they wanted the traditional policies of a low tariff, strict construction, and states’ rights, they had to rely on the Democratic party.

  Underscoring hi
s party loyalty, he advocated selecting delegates for the national Democratic convention and denied as false charges that he would not support the national ticket. He assured the assembled party activists that he had always backed the Democratic candidate for president and surely intended doing so in 1852. He stressed his belief in certain hallowed principles that only the Democratic party upheld. In a public letter following the state gathering, he made clear his sense of the relationship between party and principle: “Party consultation and party organization are the means, not the end. Principles alone can dignify a party, and party allegiance can rightfully claim no more than the just application of its principles to measures and men.”4

  On the eve of the state convention, the leading Democratic newspaper had sounded the trumpet of reunification. “Let it be a gathering of the olden time,” cried the Mississippian. “Political brethren, who have been for a time estranged upon settled issues, have met together in the preliminary meetings, and now let them meet in the old wigwam, with the hatchet buried as the questions are buried which caused it to be uplifted, resolved to do all for the cause of Democracy.”5