Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  Profoundly loyal to the United States, Jefferson Davis did not hide his sentiments. Affirming his devotion to the Union, he told an Indianapolis editor he had never advocated disunion. He proudly pointed to what he saw as his unblemished lineage: his father had fought in the Revolution; three brothers had been with Jackson at New Orleans; he had served his country since entering West Point at age sixteen. When asked his opinion about establishing a southern military academy exclusively for southern youths, Davis answered directly, “I fear the tendency would be to create and increase sectional jealousies.” In contrast, he emphasized what he considered one of West Point’s greatest virtues: its alumni were “more free from purely sectional prejudices, and more national in their feelings than the same number of persons to be found elsewhere in our country.”93

  On the morning of March 4, 1857, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis tendered his resignation to his friend and chief Franklin Pierce. He went immediately up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. At noon he was sworn in as a senator from Mississippi. From his seat in the Senate chamber, he would confront a ferocious challenge to his vision of the Union.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “The Darkest Hour”

  The spring of 1857 found Jefferson Davis and his family bound for Mississippi. After the brief special session of Congress ended on March 14, and with the prospect of a long congressional recess, Davis prepared for the first time in almost four years to return to his home state with his wife and children. Acknowledging that the family would no longer be permanent residents of the capital city, Davis gave up the mansion at 18th and G, arranged to auction the furniture, and rented rooms until all the Davises were ready to travel. Although Davis had certainly enjoyed serving as secretary of war, he did not find the assignment profitable. To his eldest brother he quoted Charles Dickens, saying he looked on his cabinet position “somewhat as Mrs. M’Cawber did on the corn trade,” which she found “gentlemanly, but it is not remunerative.”1

  Neither departure from Washington nor the actual trip home ended up as a simple matter. Because Varina was still quite weak from bearing young Jeff only two months previously and by her own admission worn out “in spirits and energy” from the auction, her husband decided she could not leave immediately, and the Davises took temporary rooms with a friend. With the weather cold outside, Varina reported a suffocatingly hot house inside. In addition, severe colds afflicted father and children, with Jeff Jr. ending up with pneumonia. A debilitated Varina experienced great difficulty in nursing her baby. Finally, on April 24, the Davises boarded a train for Wheeling, Virginia, on the Ohio River, where they transferred to a steamboat for the journey on to Mississippi. Even before departing, Maggie contracted chicken pox, and along the way her little brother broke out with it. Describing herself as “weary, weary,” their mother wrote about the incessant crying of both. In early May, the landing at Hurricane on Davis Bend was a welcome sight.

  Even so, arrival at Brierfield did not mean rest for the tired travelers. The house had suffered from the absence of its owners. Cataloguing the disarray in her home, Varina listed such things as sheets cut to make napkins and the disappearance of pots. To her mother, she confessed, “I just sat down and cried.” As for Jefferson, his plantation needed his attention, and he set out to get it in order.2

  Even as Davis faced reordering his plantation, including the hiring of a new overseer, he did not neglect his political duties. On May 18 he went to Vicksburg for a reception given him by the town. After a procession headed by a military contingent reached the courthouse square, Davis spoke to a large, enthusiastic crowd. Later in the month he journeyed to Jackson for a much larger event. Sixteen guns heralded the honored guest’s arrival in an open coach drawn by four white horses. It moved toward the statehouse through massive portals adorned with a garland banner carrying the inscription: “Welcome Jeff Davis.” With 3,000 people crowding around, Davis’s speech scheduled for the House chamber in the Capitol was relocated to a hastily constructed platform on the grounds.3

  Davis’s speech in Jackson expanded upon themes from his remarks in Vicksburg and laid out what he would be saying through the autumn in numerous Mississippi towns. “Profoundly grateful” to Governor John McRae for his generous introduction, Davis identified himself completely with his state. Proclaiming “he was thrice and four times happy to meet again his fellow-citizens…,” Davis declared he had returned from Washington “unchanged in heart. Its pulses were ever with Mississippi.” He also defended the Pierce administration as “unflinchingly true” to the principles of states’ rights, which he correlated directly with defense of southern interests. Additionally, he presented President Buchanan and the Democratic party as bastions of the Constitution and southern rights. In contrast, he pictured the Republican party as a danger and a threat to the South and slavery. Denying that he intended to alarm anyone, Davis predicted that 1860 would bring “the monster crisis,” what he termed “the ordeal of fire” for American patriotism. He hoped for the best, but charged Mississippians to prepare for the worst. As a Mississippian he would stand fast: “If there was danger he would share it; Mississippi’s peril was his own. He would aid her in averting or overcoming it, or with her he would perish.” Three weeks later he appeared with Senator Brown and Governor McRae at the state Democratic convention in Jackson, justifying the policies of the Pierce administration to the largest party gathering to that time.4

  In the summer Davis thought about his family as well as plantation and politics. Varina had never fully regained her health following Jeff Jr.’s birth, and at the end of June he took her and the children to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where they hoped sea breezes and saltwater would foster restoration. Varina and the children remained for the rest of the summer, enjoying their beach vacation. Varina liked her stay so much that in the fall Jefferson spent some $2,000 for beachfront property near the village of Mississippi City.5

  Back amid the heat and cotton fields of Brierfield, an obviously lonely Davis expressed openly how much he missed his loved ones. Using an unpleasant personal experience to contrast the coast with his riverfront plantation, he told his wife, “I am the victim of gnats and I am now suffering from one which met me with an evil eye, yesterday evening, and straight rendered my eye so evil that I write with pain.” “Oh Winnie you cannot know how dreary the house seems,” he wrote. “When busy in it some unexpected noise seems like that of the children, and when coming back from the field or elsewhere every thing there is wanting which constituted the place’s charm and made it home.” But the pleasure and revival of health stemming from the coastal sojourn reconciled him, making him “happy in the deprivation which is necessary to those great goods to us all.” To his little ones he sent special greetings: “Kiss my dear Daughty and sweet little Boy for their old Tady who loves them ‘too much.’ ” He closed, “Farewell my dear Wife until a happier hour, but in all hours bright or gloomy you are the unclouded object of your husband’s love and he prays for your welfare and our speedy reunion.”6

  Varina stayed in touch with her husband, corresponding in a similarly endearing tone. She often emulated the language of her babies. “Jeffy!!! bit boy, smart boy, grand old boy, big as him’s Fader—him was big again as when his Fader left him and not a single tooth.” Varina called Jeffy especially sweet and good, but not “precocious however—and I am thankful for it.” Mother thought Maggie “the smartest thing I ever saw,” and she played about in the sea “like a fish.” She left no doubt about her feelings for her husband: “Take care of yourself my own old Ban, and write when you can. God bless and keep you is the prayer of your devoted wife.”7

  While his family delighted in the holiday, Jefferson’s mind never strayed far from politics. As so often, his attention focused on central and northern Mississippi, the part of the state essential for his party and for his own success. Preparing for a lengthy speaking tour, he altered his plans upon discovering that no notices of his schedule had been distributed from Jackson. A care
ful politician, Davis knew that without advance notice he would draw small crowds in rural areas, which in his mind would mean a “valueless” exercise. As soon as he could, he telegraphed notices to the northernmost counties, informing Joseph he would travel rapidly by public transportation, then get a horse and buggy for places “I must visit.”8

  He left Jackson on September 1 and spent two weeks in the northern counties speaking in towns like Hernando and Holly Springs. He basically repeated the themes of his earlier address in Jackson, though he specified preparations he thought the South should make, such as not hiring northern teachers and encouraging southerners to write school-books in order to preclude “abolition poison.” Democratic partisans were delighted with his appearance among them and with his platform performances.

  On September 15 he left Memphis for Davis Bend and then went on to retrieve his family on the coast, where he arrived on September 27. He remained there for around three weeks before returning to Brierfield. While on the coast he made two additional speeches, at Mississippi City and Pass Christian. The addresses repeated what he had said at the other end of the state, but he also dwelled on material progress. Heretofore he had expressed pleasure at the agricultural and commercial prosperity he saw, and he had called for more factories in the state. But the disappearing wilderness along the Gulf brought forth full expression of his convictions: “The ring of the saw and the hammer, the hum of the manufacturing village … give life and activity to the scene, and the solemn dirge of other days is made pensive in our ears.” But this was only “the first step in the line of progress which lies before us.” Praising the timber industry and the anticipated railroad that would connect the coastal region to the interior as well as to the commercial worlds of Mobile and New Orleans, Davis depicted them as not only vehicles of economic growth but also harbingers of the future. That future too necessitated state pride and self-reliance for “the feeling of State independence, to sustain the rights and fulfill the destiny which we were permitted to hope Mississippi would realize in the future.”9

  At Mississippi City, Davis spoke in more detail about slavery. He told his audience that during the presidential campaign of 1856 the slavery question “had acquired a distinctness and a gravity which he had not seen equaled.” And although all the speeches and editorials had not silenced the enemies of slavery, he discerned at least one powerful benefit. “They had relieved us of Southern apologists who prayed for toleration to African slavery as an admitted evil, but one for the introduction of which we were not responsible, and of which we could not get rid—an admission which not only excused abolitionists, but which, if true, demanded of every honest man among us that he should cooperate in all well directed efforts for its abatement.” As for Davis, he did not deny that “this relation of labor to capital had defects” and admitted it was abused by “the vicious, the ignorant and the wayward,” but he hastened to add that the same situation obtained even with parents and children and husband and wife. Yet, in any comparison, Davis maintained that slaves fared better than apprentices, day laborers, pensioners, and asylum or prison inmates. He discovered the reason in “the universal principle of self interest,” which made the master “usually kind and attentive to the wants of his slave, who, in the language of Holy Writ, ‘is his money.’ ”

  Davis defined the institution of slavery as “the most humane relations of labor to capital which can permanently subsist between them, and the most beneficent form of government that has been applied to those who are morally and intellectually unable to take care of themselves.” Black Africans had been transferred from barbarism to civilization, taught “useful arts,” and introduced to Christianity. By any practical standard, he declared, “African slavery, as it exists in the United States, [is] a moral, social and a political blessing.”10

  In mid-October the Davises packed up for the return to Brierfield, where they prepared to go north for the opening of Congress. Before leaving Mississippi, Davis on November 4 made yet another appearance in Jackson before the state legislature, but he added nothing significant to what he had been saying across his state for the past six months. His address displayed confidence in slavery, progress, prosperity, and the Democratic party balanced by wariness toward antislavery politics and concern about preparations against potential hazards. He left no doubts in the minds of Mississippians that in him they had a loyal, watchful guardian of their rights and their social system.11

  In late November, the Davis family left Mississippi by steamboat heading upriver, and arrived in the national capital after a trip of some ten days. The Davises rented for $400 annually a house at 238 G Street, between 17th and 18th Streets, close to their former residence, but considerably smaller. This dwelling had two good parlors and bedrooms, but Jefferson found it cramped, cold in winter and hot in summer. Even so, during congressional sessions the family lived in it until late 1859, when they made what would be their final move in Washington, two blocks north to 249 I Street.12

  When Senator Davis took his seat for the first session of the Thirty-fifth Congress, he was a consequential man in his state, in his party, and in his country, a status he clearly recognized. A contemporary photograph captured that status. Although the deepened lines on his cheeks indicated aging since 1853, his pale eyes were still luminous. They peered ahead confidently even while the face evinced care. This face had a past and a future written on it. In a Senate dominated by Democrats, Davis was named chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, and in President Buchanan he counted a longtime friend. They were political confidants; Buchanan had even consulted him on cabinet appointments.13

  To underscore Davis’s political stature, at the beginning of 1858 a national news publication, Harper’s Weekly, devoted its entire front page to him, with a photographic representation, a biographical sketch, and a commentary. The reporter stated that Davis was beloved in his home state, though many northerners thought of him as a sectional extremist or fire-eater. Contradicting that perception, the writer depicted a quite different Davis. He described the Mississippian as precise, cool, even cold, full of statistics and principles, without emotional excitement, though with a “kind and gentle disposition.” According to the article, Davis was the last person in Congress a visitor would pick out as a fire-eater.14

  As the Senate began conducting business, Senator Davis seemed almost like Secretary Davis. He brought to the floor a measure increasing the size of the regular army. Advocating the addition of two companies to each regiment, Davis said the demands of the frontier required action. He argued that even with the additional regiments authorized during the Pierce administration, the army was still stretched far too thin, with too many posts to garrison and too much territory to defend. He also maintained that augmenting existing regiments with new companies was more efficient than creating more regiments. Although Davis made a logical, solid case, the Senate was in no hurry to make the army larger. There was the traditional American reluctance to a strong standing army, but many Republican senators also feared the thwarting of their free-soil goal because they envisioned the troops aimed at Kansas.15

  Jefferson Davis, c. 1858.

  (McMlees’ Gallery of Photographic Prints), The Rhode Island Historical Society (photo credit i10.1)

  Kansas, which had devoured the Pierce presidency, remained voracious, reaching for the new Buchanan administration. Before the initial session of the Thirty-fifth Congress, Kansas appeared in the form of the Lecompton Constitution, which had emerged from the turmoil and bitterness of Kansas politics. Territorial politics were so inflamed that the proslavery and free-soil camps refused to participate in the same political process. Attempting to cope with this volatile situation was Robert J. Walker, newly installed as territorial governor by President Buchanan. A former United States senator from Mississippi and cabinet officer under James K. Polk, Walker had long been a political friend of Jefferson Davis. But at the outset of his governorship Walker alienated many southerners when he announced that cli
mate would prevent Kansas from becoming a slave state. He also declared that the constitution prepared for Kansas should be submitted to a popular vote, with the issue of slavery submitted separately.

  In 1857, when proslavery forces decided to hold a constitutional convention to prepare for statehood, free-soilers boycotted it. Meeting in Lecompton, this convention drafted a proslavery constitution to accompany the application for statehood. Aware that the free-soilers significantly outnumbered them, the proslavery men, in opposition to Governor Walker’s promise and wish, did not submit either the full constitution or the issue of slavery to a general vote, in which both would have undoubtedly failed. Instead, they provided for only a partial referendum. Kansans could vote on a provision governing the future admission of slaves in the territory, but they could not express their opinion on the slaves already there. Holding true to Kansas form, the free-soilers did not participate in the December referendum, in which the constitution with slavery won easily, 6,226 to 569. Meanwhile, a new free-soil legislature called for another referendum in which voters could say aye or nay to the entire constitution. The proslavery forces boycotted this January 1858 polling, which rejected their constitution by more than 10,000 votes. These facts were as well known in Washington as in Kansas.16

  For President Buchanan and his party, the Lecompton Constitution demanded a major decision. On the face of things, it was a fruit of popular sovereignty, the gospel of their party. But popular sovereignty meant the wishes of the majority, and everyone knew full well that no majority in Kansas desired the Lecompton Constitution, that it had been engineered by a minority. Many northern Democrats therefore could not help but see Lecompton as a mockery of the popular sovereignty they espoused, and simply could not accept it—a feeling reinforced by the continuing and politically potent cries of Republicans for free soil. If the president and southern Democrats nonetheless made an all-out effort for Lecompton, the ensuing struggle could fracture party unity.