Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  Still, the forces ripping the Union apart appeared unstoppable. In the Senate on December 10, an almost desperate Davis said that appeals to sentiment would no longer suffice and pleaded for evidence from Republicans that southerners erred when they perceived only hostility. He was eager to see signs of friendship, and ready to trumpet them to the South. Although the Republicans sent Davis no satisfactory signal, the Senate on December 20 did establish a Committee of Thirteen to find a settlement, if possible. When appointed to this committee, Davis declined, saying it was useless; but he was urged to reconsider. On the next day he agreed, “avowing my willingness to make any sacrifice to avert the impending struggle.” Even at this late date, he did not concede. A reporter for the New York Herald characterized him as “moderate but firm.” A hometown newspaper headline read: “Jefferson Davis for Moderation,” and a Republican congressman reported his information did not locate Davis among the seceders.105

  Meeting immediately, the Committee of Thirteen took up as its main order of business the Crittenden Compromise, a series of proposals named after their author, Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. A veteran Whig who had never given up his loyalty to the dead party, and a protégé of Kentucky’s most famous political son, Henry Clay, Crittenden attempted to emulate the great compromiser. Although Crittenden’s complete package contained ten individual propositions, the critical item recommended restoring the Missouri Compromise line and extending it to the Pacific Ocean, leaving California intact. In order to get around the Supreme Court’s declaration that Congress could not prohibit slavery in any territory, Crittenden presented the extension as an amendment to the Constitution. While a longer Missouri Compromise line addressed southern demands for equality, it repudiated the central plank in the Republican platform by permitting the possible extension of slavery.

  The Committee of Thirteen would decide the political life or death of the Crittenden Compromise. The membership consisted of Crittenden, who became its leader, though not officially chairman; five Republicans; and seven Democrats, including prominent men like Davis, Douglas, and Seward. At the outset the committee adopted a procedural rule, moved by Davis, that it would take action and report favorably to the full Senate only with the concurrence of both a majority of Republicans and a majority of the other members. From Davis’s perspective, any measure without Republican agreement had no meaning at all. From its initial meeting on December 22 until its final gathering six days later, the committee remained totally divided. The Democrats, including Davis and the other Deep South member, Robert Toombs, along with Crittenden, gave their ready assent to the program. Davis was sincere in his willingness to accept Crittenden’s plan, a sincerity noted by many witnesses, Crittenden and Douglas included. But the Republicans absolutely refused. Repeatedly, they declined to move at all from their platform declaration against slavery in any territory. Taking a slightly different tack, Davis offered a resolution to amend the Constitution stating that slave property was like all other property and neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could discriminate against it. Again, all Republicans voted no. An exasperated Douglas finally asked the Republicans to spell out what settlement they would accept. Nothing was forthcoming. Recognizing its failure, the committee on December 31 reported to the Senate that it could not agree on the Crittenden Compromise or on any other measure.106

  At this point, Davis gave up. A few years later he wrote, “My hope of an honorable peaceable settlement was not abandoned until the report of the Com.” He agreed with Judah Benjamin that the Republicans “will make no Compromise, agreement or concession whatever.” The new Republican chieftain, Abraham Lincoln, stood ramrod-straight on the territorial issue, telling Republicans in Congress to stand fast and make no compromise on this key point. Lincoln knew little of the South; if he had known more, he would have been aware that men like Davis, Benjamin, and numerous others were not radicals. Moreover, they were receiving ferocious pressure from their states, where the fervor for secession dominated public opinion. Whether such knowledge would have made any difference to Lincoln’s posture is impossible to know, but he was fundamentally ignorant of his southern political foes.107

  While paralysis gripped Congress, the slave states bustled with activity that commanded Davis’s attention. Elections for delegates to secession conventions occurred in several states in addition to Mississippi. Even more important, on December 26, Major Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. Army garrison in Charleston, moved his men from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, at the mouth of the harbor. This transfer outraged South Carolina authorities, who, following the state’s secession, believed they had an understanding with the Buchanan administration that the military situation in Charleston would not be altered. The Carolinians, along with southern congressional leaders, including Davis, pressed Buchanan to order the soldiers back to Fort Moultrie. The president was under heavy pressure from his southern friends to countermand Anderson, and from northern members of his cabinet, joined by an increasingly strident northern public opinion, to hold fast. A vacillating and wavering Buchanan ultimately decided against the southerners. A disgusted Davis called the president’s treatment of South Carolina “perfidious.” According to Davis, Buchanan’s “weakness has done as much harm as wickedness would have achieved. Though I can no longer respect or confer with him and feel injured by his conduct,” Davis explained, “yet I pity and would extenuate the offences not prompted by bad design or malignant intent.”108

  Davis and other southern leaders worried about a collision in Charleston Harbor between South Carolina and the United States. Attempting to negotiate for Fort Sumter as well as other posts, the state sent a mission to Washington. Although the president would not enter into negotiations, Davis and others extracted a promise from him not to use force. Thereupon the southern leadership set out to persuade the eager Carolinians not to initiate hostilities. The Carolinians left no doubt they considered the occupation of Fort Sumter an affront which they intended to remedy, by force if necessary. When Governor Francis W. Pickens asked for advice, Davis in frequent messages implored him not to act and maintained that a premature strike would only hurt the southern cause. He reminded Pickens, “the little garrison in its present positi[on] presses on nothing but a point of pride, & to you I need not say that war is made up of real eleme[nts].” Moreover, Davis assured him that “we shall soon have a Southern Confederacy that shall be ready to do all which interest or even pride demands.”109

  Throughout December, as chances of a settlement acceptable to them receded, southern senators and congressmen talked about their future options. Davis was certainly involved in these conversations, a number of which took place in his home on I Street. After the Committee of Thirteen failed, the southerners set their course. On January 5, 1861, with Davis present, a caucus of senators from the states moving toward secession made the decision to call for the creation of a Southern Confederacy. The formative meeting was to be held in Montgomery, Alabama, in mid-February, by which time delegates from all the Deep South states from South Carolina to Texas could be chosen and travel to Montgomery.110

  The chief concern prompting this timing was the desire to have concrete action taken before March 4, presidential inauguration day; these southerners wanted no part of a United States with Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party controlling the executive branch of the federal government. Initially they thought they needed to maintain their presence in the Senate to block measures designed to strengthen federal powers that Lincoln might use to intimidate or even force back the seceded states. But, as Davis informed Governor Pettus, careful counting revealed that a sufficient number of Democrats, northern and southern, would remain to stop any such initiatives before March 4 and even after, should Lincoln call a special session of Congress. They failed to consider that Lincoln might do what he actually did—act unilaterally, without Congress, which he did not bring to Washington until the summer.

  Davis had serious reservations about remaini
ng in his seat after his state went out. He repeated his argument of 1850 that a sitting senator should involve himself in the constructive work of the government, not devote himself to obstruction. He asserted he would have no legitimate role after his state left the Union. If this conviction had come into conflict with the need temporarily perceived by the southerners for the necessary votes to defeat augmentation laws, it is impossible to know what Davis would have done. But he never faced that quandary. He let it be known that he would hold his seat in the Senate until he received official notification of Mississippi secession, then he would leave.111

  From the time he left Jackson in late November until he departed from Washington two months later, Davis kept in close touch with his constituents. From as early as December 1859 he was active in advising the governor on the purchase of weapons for state forces, even corresponding directly with manufacturers. He also kept state officials apprised of his interpretation of events in Congress. In addition, he advised on the secession convention and on the ordinance of secession itself. Realizing that his state with its new status would call on him, on January 9, he telegraphed Governor Pettus: “Judge what Mississippi requires of me and place me accordingly.” On January 23, the governor issued a proclamation announcing the appointment of Jefferson Davis as major general of the Army of Mississippi.112

  The weeks after Davis’s return to Washington were tense for him and for his wife, as the sectional tension and polarization also affected Washington’s social life. In early December, Varina confided to a friend that she would no longer associate with Republicans, but she spurned secessionists, having little use for what she called the “blathering” of disunionists. And she also noted that the uncertainty spawned fear. “Everybody is scared,” especially the president, she informed her husband.113

  Varina still relished Washington society, where she had an almost regal presence. She was quite close to Buchanan, and even when her husband lost faith in him, she confessed that she still “love[d] the dear old man.” Presenting him with her Christmas gift, a pair of slippers, she told him she hoped “they may sometime remind you of the great regard with which I shall ever remain faithfully your friend.” One of her closest friends began calling her “Queen Varina,” which delighted her. The appellation caught on. “Warmly attached” to the capital city, she told her seamstress and a group of confidantes that she preferred to stay in Washington than to go south. On New Year’s Day 1861, she described the disruption: “This town is like some kind of mausoleum, comparatively, no one visiting, no dinners or parties—just a sullen gloom impending over all things.” Not wanting to give up all of the attractions in Washington, Varina unsuccessfully implored her free black seamstress to go south with her.114

  Jefferson carried on under terrible strain. What he had dreaded for more than a decade had finally come to pass; his Union was no more. He did not exaggerate when he claimed he had been not only “conciliatory in spirit, but deeply anxious to avoid the issue if it could be consistently done with due regard to the rights the safety and the honor of the South.” Yet, as a politician, he recognized that opinion in Mississippi had rushed beyond him. He could not and would not let his state embark in this radically different direction without him. Moreover, he did believe deeply that fundamental constitutional rights of the South had been violated. In addition, Republicans did frighten him because their vision of America excluded him, his state, and his region. What he viewed as Republican unwillingness to accept the Dred Scott decision, to honor constitutional precepts, and to compromise, along with the sustained Republican attack on southern institutions and on southerners as Americans, persuaded him that his beloved Mississippi had no other recourse. By the turn of the year, Davis’s health gave way, his body no longer able to carry the burden. On Christmas Eve, Varina’s seamstress depicted him as “careworn, and his step seemed to be a little nervous.” In early January he went to bed under a physician’s care, afflicted chiefly with painful facial neuralgia.115

  Just before he succumbed to physical and emotional pain, on January 10, Davis gave his last major speech in the Senate. Although he uttered still another paean to the Union he loved and held forth on what he termed the “wailing cry of patriotism” heard through the land, he knew the end had come. “To-day, therefore,” he announced, “it is my purpose to deal with events.” As for the dangerous situation in Charleston Harbor, he blamed President Buchanan for a “perfidious breach” of promises made to him and others that had brought South Carolina and the federal government almost to the point of conflict. To the Republicans he spoke harshly. Despite warnings by responsible southerners that continued enmity toward institutions and deprivation of rights would generate a powerful southern reaction, Republicans had refused to listen. Attributing much of the responsibility to Republican ignorance of the South and southern politics, he informed them they fatally misjudged when they deemed secession “a mere passing political mood” and “a device for some party end.” Instead, something fundamental was at stake. Republicans, Davis charged, had forced upon the South a choice it did not want to make: “the destruction of our community independence or the destruction of the Union which our Fathers made.”

  In concluding, Davis acknowledged that he was probably making his last argument in the Senate. He maintained that the southern determination not to accept a coercive government did not mean the failure of self-government. It remained in the states. Separation had now become inevitable; two confederacies would exist. He saw one critical issue, how best to effect that separation. He hoped for a policy of peace, which would make possible the reconstruction of the Union when all had the will to do so. But he left no doubt that if peaceful separation were not permitted, “then it is an issue from which we will not shrink; for, between oppression and freedom, between the maintenance of right and submission to power, we will invoke the God of battles, and meet our fate, whatever it may be.” He told his Republican antagonists, “I leave the case in your hands.”116

  Now he waited only on Mississippi, and on his health. Official notification of his state’s secession reached him by telegraph on January 19, with the information that his “immediate presence” was required in Jackson. His illness had caused him to cancel a proposed trip through South Carolina to consult with Governor Pickens and his advisers. Yet, in spite of his physician’s protests, on the twenty-first he left his sickbed to join four other colleagues in bidding farewell to the Senate he loved and the country he cherished. When, the next day, Jefferson Davis boarded a train with Varina and his children, he departed from Washington and from the United States.117

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Our Cause Is Just and Holy”

  The Davises’ homeward journey took them southwestward through Virginia, Tennessee, and northern Alabama into Mississippi. Along the way Jefferson conferred with political leaders, made several speeches defending secession and warning about the prospect of a bitter war. In Jackson at the end of January 1861, he accepted his commission as major general of the Army of Mississippi, began organizing the force, and repeated his fear that war loomed. After a brief stay, the family made the final leg of their trip, reaching Vicksburg on February 1 and heading immediately for Davis Bend.1

  At Brierfield with their children for the first time since the fall of 1857, Jefferson and Varina expressed pleasure at their return home. To a friend back in Washington, Jefferson reported, “I found much to be done and have entered upon to me the most agreable of all labors planting shrubs and trees and directing the operations of my field—… ploughing and cleaning up for another crop.” Settling in, they sent instructions for the shipment of possessions they had not brought with them.2

  Yet, simultaneously Davis also looked toward the state capital of Alabama, a quiet riverport of around 9,000 people, half of them black. At Montgomery on February 4, delegates from six Deep South states gathered to create a southern confederacy. Davis awaited word from that conclave, for he knew his name would be considered for a major p
osition in the new country, either commanding general of the army or chief executive. Among leading politicians he possessed unique credentials; no one else could match his combined political and military experience. Writing to a Mississippi delegate, he discussed both the presidency and command of the army. After the ritual disclaimer that he wanted neither, he concluded, “in this hour of my country’s severest trial [I] will accept any place to which my fellow citizens may assign me.”3

  The men who met in Montgomery assumed three distinct identities, performing tasks matched by no other single group in American history. Initially, they organized as a constitutional convention to draft the document that would provide the foundation for their new republic. Then, they constituted themselves as an electoral college to select a provisional president and vice president. Finally, they designated themselves a unicameral Provisional Congress to enact statutes that would give substance to the Confederate States of America.

  Their organic law illustrated their commitment to the Constitution of the United States, which in their minds the Republicans had subverted. In fact, some among them wanted simply to replicate the document they had cherished. But alterations were made to clarify points most southerners claimed were at least implicit in the federal Constitution. The Confederate Constitution explicitly protected slavery and raised states’ rights to a first principle. It also prohibited a protective tariff. To cleanse what they deemed the corruption of the system they had left behind, the delegates provided for a single six-year term for the president. With no possibility of reelection, politicking would not be the hallmark of a Confederate president’s administration. Satisfied that they had depoliticized their chief executive, these constitution-writers then set out to rein in the rapacity of legislators. In an effort to prevent logrolling and pork-barrel projects, the president received a line-item veto on appropriations bills. Moreover, a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress was required for any appropriation not requested by the president. In their handiwork they underscored that their president “should not be a party leader but instead should stand as a patriot rallying the people to the cause of Southern independence.”4