Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  In so doing, Davis acted both boldly and timidly. He did not launch a great public campaign pointing out the sharp divergence between the country’s need and the citizens’ willingness to meet it. In contrast, he acted almost stealthily, albeit resolutely. On March 28, he sent a special message to Congress, decrying the patchwork system for raising armies. “Frequent changes and amendments,” he wrote, had made things “so complicated as to make it often quite difficult to determine what the law really is.” Then he proposed legislation declaring that all persons between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five legitimately eligible for military service “shall be held to be in the military service of the Confederate States.” He requested that “some plain and simple method be adopted for their prompt enrollment and organization, repealing all the legislation heretofore enacted which would conflict with the system proposed.” Jefferson Davis had quietly advanced the first national conscription law in American history.29

  In less than three weeks Congress, by a two-to-one margin in the House and almost four to one in the Senate, passed the Conscription Act, which basically followed Davis’s sketchy outline, the initial draft of the statute having been prepared in General Lee’s office. Every white man between eighteen and thirty-five would go into Confederate service unless exempted, and those already serving would have to remain for three years dating from their initial enlistment. There were some loopholes and exceptions, however. Following the time-honored practice applied to militia service in previous wars, including the Revolution, a drafted man could hire a substitute from the pool of men not drafted. Then, in a supplementary law, Congress exempted men in several occupations judged critical, including Confederate and state civil officials, railroad workers, miners, telegraph operators, teachers, and clergymen.

  While conscription preserved the armies, it generated considerable public discussion, and led to the hardening opposition of the wiliest and most intransigent of Davis’s political foes. Opponents in and out of Congress cried despotism. They depicted states’ rights trodden underfoot by the march of consolidation and individual liberty throttled by a power-mad state. Those who sustained the president and the new departure emphasized the absolute necessity of drastic measures required by the mortal threat to the country.

  Davis himself accented both the constitutionality of conscription and his continued devotion to states’ rights. He never saw the Confederate government as abolishing state governments or even empowered to intrude into the particular affairs of states. Moreover, in his message requesting a draft law, he praised “the entire harmony of purpose and cordiality of feeling” between himself and the chief executives of the states. But he was convinced the Constitution made the central government responsible for national defense; specifically, it authorized Congress to organize and maintain armies. In his view, the constitutional brief for conscription permitted no dissent. If in individual instances the government abused its authority, then the courts could protect the rights of those involved.

  Although many Confederates were concerned about the potential hazards of governmental power embedded in conscription, they generally muted or greatly moderated their reservations. One did not. Governor Joseph Brown denounced conscription as the most heinous kind of power grab; he denied that conditions warranted such an extreme act. Brown alternated between constitutional objections and concern about his prerogatives in Georgia, wanting no challenge to whatever authority he chose to claim or exert in his state. Even though he promised not to place obstacles in the way of implementing the law, he asserted that every draft-age male in Georgia belonged by definition to the state militia, precluding any call to service by the national government. The governor pursued his demurrals in several venues, including long, windy, demagogic letters to the president.

  Davis believed he had to respond to Brown’s missives. His silence could signal an unwillingness to rebut an opponent’s arguments or an admission that the government had no case. Although he penned letters almost as long, his were not quite so windy and not at all demagogic. Instead of using general but succinct language to make his case, Davis went over his interpretation of the constitutional issues in painstaking detail. In the summer a fifty-two-page pamphlet appeared containing the correspondence between the two men. It did not help the reputation of either, nor did it become a catechism of Confederate constitutionalism.30

  The same session of Congress empowered Davis to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in parts of the country endangered by enemy attack. Aware of the ingrained southern commitment to the individual liberty of whites, both Congress and president moved cautiously. When the same kinds of states’ rights and constitutional objections to conscription were leveled against suspension, Congress amended the original law with a provision that the authorization would expire thirty days after the beginning of the next congressional session. This authority did lapse on September 17, but was reinstated to last until February 13, 1863. Davis, in turn, employed this power sparingly and judiciously, much more so than his counterpart in the United States. Davis never invoked it without prior congressional approval. He immediately put portions of the Peninsula under martial law and quickly extended military control to Richmond, yet Davis regularly overruled generals who tried to impose martial law without his permission. Neither did the Confederacy try civilians by military commissions, though the War Department did imprison civilians.31

  Passing a conscription law and giving the president power to suspend habeas corpus did not stave off military disasters, however. At the end of April the largest city and the most important commercial center in the Confederacy fell, the worst defeat yet and all the more traumatic because so unexpected. Back in the autumn of 1861, Davis had assigned vigorous young Major General Mansfield Lovell, a Maryland-born West Pointer, to direct the defense of New Orleans, though the president explicitly refused to give him authority over the naval elements. Lovell worked energetically to build up the defenses both near the city and downriver at Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip, designed to protect against a river attack. In cooperation with Governor Thomas O. Moore, some 30,000 troops were raised to oppose any invasion.32

  President Davis had given little thought to any danger at New Orleans. He was so much more concerned about Virginia, Tennessee, and the upper Mississippi River that he did not hesitate to transfer the bulk of Lovell’s defense force to points he considered more threatened. Even the flotilla of armed steamers outfitted to help protect the water approaches to the city was ordered upriver to aid in holding the area above Memphis. To defend New Orleans, Davis confidently relied on the two forts on either side of the Mississippi some seventy river miles below the city. As late as April 17, he assured Governor Moore that those bastions could prevent any naval force from ascending the Mississippi. He did not comprehend that river forts would have an extremely difficult time turning back a powerful, determined fleet. After midnight on April 24 just such a force successfully passed the forts. Nothing stood between the victorious Union navy and a practically defenseless city. On the twenty-ninth the Stars and Stripes again flew over the Crescent City.33

  The surprising news from New Orleans stunned the capital and tore at the president. A niece of his visiting at the White House disclosed that the shock “like to have set us all crazy here.” She described Richmond as “depressed,” anxious that “the cause of the Confederacy seems drooping and sinking.” Varina recollected the tidings as a “terrible disaster.” When Davis was informed, he reportedly “buried his face in his hands.”34

  The disappointment of Shiloh, the devastation of Sidney Johnston’s death, anxiety over manpower needs, the debate over conscription, McClellan’s inching inexorably closer to Richmond, the catastrophe of New Orleans—all bore down on the president. While he had to confront this cascade of troubles, he also had to keep a clear head amid the swirl of wild entreaties and suggestions generated by the desperation many felt. Two Confederate senators proposed a night attack on McClellan employing exotic tactics—“5000 [m
en] stripped naked to storm the camps of the enemy with the bayonet only & Kill everybody with clothes on.”35

  Davis struggled to cope. Portraying him as “miserable,” his niece confided to her mother, “I fear he cannot live long if he does not get some rest and quiet.” The constant reverses “distress him so much.” During these trying days Varina remembered an evening when he spoke about “the weight of responsibility distress[ing] him so he felt he would give all his limbs to have someone with whom he could share it.” Trying to comfort her husband, she began reading the adventure novel Guy Livingstone by the English writer G. A. Lawrence. The story of a magnificently courageous hero so captivated Davis that “he took no notice of time.” Previously he had spent little time with adventure novels, but Varina reported the book now helped “driv[e] out thoughts of more serious things.”36

  In this dark moment Davis also began to think about God and religion in more personal terms than ever before. As an adult Davis had often attended religious services, usually Episcopalian, the denomination of Varina and his brother Joseph, and in 1857 he had even purchased a pew in the Church of the Epiphany in Washington. By all indications he thought of himself as a Christian, and as Confederate president he regularly asked for divine blessing on his cause. Yet he had never become a member of any church and could not even recall whether he had ever been baptized.

  In the winter of 1862, he and Varina began talking seriously about his joining the Episcopal Church. He had grown close to the Reverend Charles Minnigerode, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, who told Davis: “I look upon you as God’s chosen instrument.” By the beginning of May, the president had made his decision. On May 6, at 9:30 a.m., the Reverend Minnigerode came to the White House and in a private ceremony baptized the president. Later that morning Bishop John Johns presided over a special confirmation service at St. Paul’s in which Davis and two others were confirmed. Just short of his fifty-fourth birthday, Jefferson Davis became a member of the Episcopal Church, publicly affirming his Christian faith. Varina later claimed that following his baptism and confirmation, “a peace which passed understanding seemed to settle in his heart.”37

  As Jefferson Davis moved toward making public confession of his Christian faith, he also prepared to send Varina and the children away from Richmond. Ever since McClellan’s arrival on the Peninsula he had worried; by May the approach of the Federal multitude seemed so ominous that he decided that to ensure his family’s safety, it must leave the capital. Although husband and wife wanted to share this moment of peril, rationality overcame emotion. Because Varina did not want to miss Jefferson’s confirmation, the service was scheduled just days before her departure.

  Several sites had been discussed as a refuge for the first family, but finally the decision was made for Raleigh, North Carolina, around 160 miles south of Richmond and a day’s journey by rail. On May 10, Varina left with her four children, Jefferson’s niece, servants, and blank checks to cover expenses. For the first six weeks she resided at the Yarborough Hotel, then moved to the campus of St. Mary’s School. Except for one brief return to Richmond, she would remain in North Carolina until mid-August.38

  This time apart cemented the emotional closeness that had been growing between husband and wife. They literally did not know whether the Confederacy would survive or whether they would ever see each other again. Jefferson even sent her a pistol with instructions to practice firing it. They wrote often and hid nothing. In his first letter Davis bared his emotional dependency: “I am quite desolate and at every look meet something of yours or the children to remind me that I am alone.”

  Throughout Varina’s absence he repeatedly expressed the pain of this forced separation. The day before she left he penned a brief note expressing what every letter repeated: “My heart is with you.” After three weeks he told her, “our separation seems to me very long. Our house is dreary at night and no loving sounds greet me in the morning.” He called on God to “give you to my arms and bring to us peace and freedom from further sadness like that we are now doomed to bear.” The sense of danger intensified his feelings: “Oh my wife how I long to be with you in this hour of our distress.” His constant prayer asked for the protection of God.39

  The four children, ranging from seven to less than a year, preoccupied their anguished father. “I go into the nursery,” he confided, “as a bird may go to the robbed nest, but man’s tenacious memory preserves the pain.” In every letter he wanted to know about them and entreated, “Kiss my dear children tell them to love one another and to be good always.” To his oldest, daughter Margaret, called affectionately “Polly,” he wrote directly, thanking her for her “sweet little letter.” He told her she and her brothers “must be good children so that Mother will tell me how happy the children made her when Father was away.” He shared his innermost feelings: “it is very lonely to me at night your little beds make me feel desolate when I see them without the dear ones I used to kiss in their sleep.”40

  Jefferson Davis wrote about more than his loneliness. He underscored the importance of his family. As for himself, “I belong to the country,” but his wife and children he did not count as public property. “My ease, my health, my property, my life I can give to the cause of my country,” he disclosed to Varina, but “the heroism which could lay my Wife and children on any sacrificial altar is not mine. Spare us Good Lord.” Davis described how his sense of his mission was plagued by struggles with others. “The great temporal object is to secure our independence and they who engage in strife for personal or party aggrandizement deserve contemptuous forgetfulness.” He admitted that when people he had trusted were “detected in secret hostility, I feel like mustering claws were in me, and that cramping fetters had fallen from my limbs.” “To me,” he claimed, “who have no political wish beyond the success of our cause, no personal desire but to be relieved from further connection with office, opposition in any form can only disturb me in so much as it may endanger the public welfare.”41

  Making clear that he now considered his wife his adult partner, Jefferson shared military information with her, including thoughts about upcoming battles. He often mentioned his determination to defend Richmond. After providing details on Seven Pines, he delineated his and Lee’s intentions. Applauding Lee’s entrenchment before the capital, Davis said every great general since Julius Caesar had made good use of the shovel. But the ultimate purpose was not to defend. He and Lee wanted to employ maneuver to force the enemy out of his works, “compel[ling] him to meet us on the field,” where the president had “much confidence in our ability to give him a complete defeat, and then it may be possible to teach him the pains of invasion and to feed our army on his territory.” And by late June he indicated a growing optimism about his army in front of Richmond and about its commanding general.42

  Varina responded with equal warmth and devotion to her husband’s declarations and concerns. She told him, “We have been so much together of late years that my heart aches when I can not kiss you good night, and feel that I have you to lay my hand on when I wake.” His “precious” letters she treasured. Regularly she used endearing names, spoke of how much she missed him and wanted to touch him. “A fond sweet tender good night, dearest Banny, shut your eyes and you will feel a kiss on your lids from your wife.” Her recurrent prayer: “May God keep you dearest free from harm and bring you safe to the arms of your devoted wife.…” Her supplication continued, “may God in his mercy spread over you his shield and bring you safely to me if not in triumph, well, and unharmed.”43

  Wife did not hide her anxieties from husband. Rumors of Confederate reverses upset her; news of fighting kept her awake at night. But most of all she worried about him. His description of his own worry and loneliness distressed her: “The vision of your beloved form wandering in our nursery among the empty beds is too much for me.” Her greatest consolation was their joint faith. “May God keep you in His Holy Keeping & bear you up in this your time of need.” She was con
fident that “the peace which passeth all understanding,” along with his “christian reliance,” would sustain him, no matter the difficulty.44

  On a more worldly level Varina gave wifely advice and also expressed gratitude to aides who had become partial substitutes. Aware that he often rode out to the army, she urged caution. She also reminded him not to expose himself either to too much sun or too much night air, and warned against smoking too much, his penchant when especially troubled. She had left two aides—his nephew Colonel Joseph R. Davis and Colonel William Preston Johnston, son of Sidney Johnston, along with Jefferson’s private secretary Burton N. Harrison—living at the White House. Noting their closeness to her husband, Varina both asked them to watch over him and thanked them for doing so, imploring Johnston to keep the president out of the night air and to let her know if a chill affected him.45

  Her letters were full of the children’s well-being and activities. Their health was a constant concern. The father read about Maggie’s hearty appetite and her getting a pony along with a sidesaddle. Then there was Maggie’s kitten, “Stonewall,” who rebuffed the attention of the young Davises. Varina reported on five-year-old Jeff’s pride in coming out victorious in a boys’ squabble, and recounted her glee at his claim to be in love and kissing the favored little girl. Young Joe desired to pack up and “do to pappa.” Devoted to her young ones, Varina clearly relished her role as mother, and wished to share her joy with her husband.46

  But joy turned into desperate concern over baby Billy, or “Witty Billy,” as she called him. Through May and into June she recorded a series of problems: feeding difficulties necessitated her finding a wet nurse, horrific boils plagued the baby, intestinal trouble became increasingly serious. Varina feared cholera. A deeply concerned father dispatched a Richmond doctor. Finally, in mid-June, Davis made a hurried trip to Raleigh to visit his “angel baby,” returning only when satisfied the child was getting better. Care brought continued improvement, and Varina happily related the baby’s growing strength. Mother and father felt an almost tangible relief.47