Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  The possibility that a legal proceeding could tarnish his reputation also concerned him. Attorneys and friends assured him “that there could be nothing in this suit from which your bitterest enemies could deduce any thing detrimental to your character as a gentleman.” Davis’s chief lawyer, William B. Pittman, a native Kentuckian who had moved to Vicksburg after the war, used language that resonated with his client: “Your reputation belongs to every Confederate and I should be untrue to myself and my late comrades if I knowingly did or suffered to be done any thing that could cast a blur upon it.” The suit was filed in the Chancery Court of Warren County on June 15, 1874.66

  The attempt to regain Brierfield did nothing to meet Davis’s need for employment. As he lamented to Preston Johnston, he felt “a drift.” There was talk of his accepting an American agency for a large English insurance company, which might require his going to England. The beginning of 1874 found Davis in New Orleans, where he contemplated the journey, but given his finances did not want to go unless he could see a strong chance for a monetary return.

  Pressure for the trans-Atlantic trip also came from another direction. The physician who had treated Davis in Louisville prescribed a sea voyage as essential to restore his strength. Equally concerned about his health, his wife pressed him to go. From New Orleans, where Davis was staying with his niece Mary Stamps, he went over the matter with Varina, still in Memphis.

  He also reported on his physical condition. Since his parting from her his cough had improved, but the swelling remained in his feet. Consulting a physician, he was assured that he had a strong heart. The doctor attributed the swelling in the feet “to some functional derangement, probably of the liver.” Davis also had swelling in his head, but was assured it had no connection with any of his other ailments. To relieve that problem, the doctor drew out about seven ounces of fluid and told the patient that as soon as the soreness wore off in the next few days, he would be well.

  While detailing his condition, Davis worried about his weak and nervous wife. Both plagued by debility, each worried more about the other’s well-being, and also made absolutely clear how much they meant to each other. Underscoring his concern, he wrote, “Oh my beloved Winnie how dark would be the future if deprived of your helpful, hope giving presence.” He called her “the love of all my mature life, the partner of all my great efforts, and more than equal sharer of all my trials and sorrow.” Varina matched his pledge: “How sweet it is to an old broken-hearted woman to be addressed by the love of her youth it is not granted to me to tell you. I do feel from the bottom of my heart that our souls are very near, and that there is no longer any lack of that love which casteth out fear.”

  Davis finally decided to take passage on the Alabama, which steamed from New Orleans directly to Liverpool. Varina sent his trunk and a welcome present of cigars from a Memphis friend. Then, fearing that her husband would back out at the last minute because of concern about money or the Brierfield suit, she went to New Orleans to make sure he sailed. She was convinced that only a sea voyage would salvage his health. On January 25, 1874, the Alabama departed with Jefferson Davis among the passengers. Varina gave him a parting note: “Love of my life farewell—would I could go with you but it must not be farewell my sweetest dearest & best love.”67

  The ship docked in Liverpool on February 16. Although the crossing had been rough, Davis thought he benefited, gaining both strength and appetite. On board ship, doubts about the uncertainty of what awaited plagued him, as did loneliness. Even before the Alabama crossed the bar at the mouth of the Mississippi, he confessed to Varina, “I won’t write of what I feel in this lonely hour, for there is nothing to give you joy in the recital.” Reaching England, he told her the loneliness of the ship suited him so well he was not eager to land.

  In Liverpool, Davis’s primary mission was to secure employment with the Royal Insurance Company, a fire and marine insurer. He stayed for the first few days with the Norman Walkers, and then moved in with Margaret Stoess and her family. Initially, Davis could feel some optimism about a job because the early inquiries generated positive responses. But hopes were dashed, and the stated reasons disturbed Davis. According to the manager of the company, the intention had been to open a southern agency in addition to the one in New York. But the agent in New York asserted that northern animosity toward Davis was so intense his appointment would adversely affect business in the North. Davis did not know whether other prospective employers shared this view, and he informed his wife he could not beg for a job. Frustrated, he stated, “I could hunt or fish or chop and hoe, but not in that way make enough to support our wants.”

  From Liverpool, Davis journeyed to London and put up with friends while he tried to find a position in an insurance company that wanted to open a branch or agency in the United States. Unwilling to make the first calls on his own behalf, he employed an intermediary to make inquiries. But the outcome did not change. No one wanted to enter the American market and no one wanted to hire Jefferson Davis. “I shrink from the recital of disappointments,” he confided to Varina, who was rarely out of his mind. All his letters carried vows of his love, and he implored Polly to watch carefully over her mother.

  Chagrined, he made a trip to Paris to see a thrilled Dudley Mann. Accompanied by a former aide, Francis Lubbock, who joined him in London, Davis was in the French capital by March 23. There he renewed acquaintance with the Slidells and others, whose company he enjoyed. On a memorable visit to the Hôtel des Invalides, he witnessed a ceremony with bemedaled veterans, flags, and a band of drummer boys. Slidell secured him a pass to the Chamber of Deputies, where Davis observed a session so raucous that he questioned the reputation of the French as a logical people. The tantalizing possibility of association with a land company organized to aid the southern people and promote emigration to the South kept him in Paris longer than he expected, but again, nothing.

  By mid-April he was back in London, where he waited for more than a week because of appointments to meet businesspeople. As before, “all the prospects thus opened have only been vague if not delusive.” Disheartened, he went back to Liverpool. But before turning toward the United States, he accepted an invitation from his friend and former host, James Smith, in Glasgow. On this third trip to Scotland, Davis acquired “many pleasant memories.” He took special delight in a ramble through the countryside of Robert Burns, visiting sites associated with the poet, including his birthplace and a church, tavern, and bridge that had prominent roles in Burns’s poetry.

  Returning to Liverpool, he embarked on the Adriatic on June 4 for New York. On the sixteenth he arrived there and set out immediately for Memphis. Although his efforts to become employed had failed, his time on the ocean and in Europe had improved his health. He reported that upon his return he weighed a robust, for him, 142 pounds.68

  When Davis reached Memphis, he joined his wife and daughters in a different house, for during his absence Varina had moved across the street to 98 Court Street. She had written him that after considering more inexpensive quarters, including boardinghouses and even moving in with friends, she offered $60 a month for a house that had rented for $150. To her surprise, her proposal was accepted. She said the house was far too large, but they would live in only a small part of it. She calculated the family could make it on $110 per month, for food would cost $50. Davis responded that he knew she had done the best she could “in these days of our hard fortune.”

  Davis had no fixed plans. He did not know where he would ultimately settle, for that rested upon employment and he had no prospects. Travel was problematical because he needed business purposes, which meant expenses paid, and he had none. With his family unwilling to leave him alone in Memphis, he summoned Charles Dickens to illustrate their situation: “and so we wait like McCawber for something to turn up.”69

  While continuing his quest for stability, Davis had to cope with distress caused by his only living son, Jeff Jr. In his first year as a cadet at Virginia Military Institute,
a school he had chosen himself, young Davis had struggled, though he claimed to be trying. At the end of the year he had been found deficient in both academic work and conduct. Receiving the news, Davis reacted sternly: “Your instincts and pride as a gentleman will sufficiently impress you with the degree of mortification I feel at the fact of your having been found deficient not only in your studies but in your conduct.” He trusted the former could have been avoided and was certain the latter could have been. The father found it “humiliating” that his son remained in school through the forbearance of the institution rather than through his accomplishment. While assuring the boy that he would do anything for him, the son had his own “fortune to make or mar, summon your just pride to sustain you.…” His father closed: “you to whom I leave my name and in whom I fondly hope to see it reach higher distinction, will need no words of mine to stimulate you to manly effort, or to keep you in the path of truth & honor.”

  No turnaround occurred, however. The superintendent ascribed the cadet’s poor performance to a lack of willpower. Davis asked Preston Johnston, still in Lexington, to try to discover the problem. After a few more months with no visible improvement, Davis withdrew the unhappy young man from the school. “Jefferson’s course at the Institute has given me greater pain than he could have willingly inflicted,” a distraught father admitted. The boy returned to Memphis, where he enrolled in a commercial college. In this new endeavor Davis perceived a bittersweet irony. “When he learns the way to business success shall we not employ him to teach us.”70

  Despite personal turmoil and travails, Davis was not impervious to the world around him. His opinion of Reconstruction had not changed. As he saw it, the Republican-dominated federal government maintained a heavy hand of oppression over much of the South. In his mind, federal statutes to protect the freedpeople, political activity by them, the presence of soldiers, and the ostracism of leading whites mocked any idea of democracy or liberty. He especially grieved for his beloved Mississippi, groaning under what he denounced as “Yankee & Negro rule.” Even so, he held firmly to principle as he envisioned it. For his generation the task continued to be “to preserve the traditions of our Fathers.” Moreover, he evinced an optimism that his definition of the right would ultimately prevail because he considered the mass of the people sound. He could foresee “republican forms and despotic practice” clashing so violently that “we may see the exceptional case of a revolution rolling backward.”

  Yet, in spite of these deep feelings, he did not speak out. As he told a Vicksburg group, because of his “peculiar situation” nothing he said could help the people or principles he loved. Quite to the contrary, his enemies might seize upon his words to harm those he cherished. Asserting he had made that resolution upon his release from prison, he recognized that any departure from it could result in a furor. In brief remarks at a Virginia resort in the summer of 1873, Davis contended that because the Union had turned the war into an antislavery crusade, the South had been cheated, not conquered. Confederates would have never given up if they had been able to foresee the peace that was now shackled upon them. Having made those extreme statements, he criticized northerners and especially southerners who accepted the imposed tyranny. These emotional assertions caused a minor newspaper uproar, with defenders and opponents warring over his words, their appropriateness, their meaning, and the reaction to them, as well as an alleged damaging interview given by Davis.71

  Davis understood his special place. “A less noble people than our own would in the depths of their desolation have turned upon their leaders with reproaches instead of affectionate consolation,” he wrote. “To me it has been the greatest comfort, has made me more proud of those I served faithfully, and makes me humbly wish I were more worthy of such lasting regard.” Such esteem he absolutely enjoyed. The poet Sidney Lanier spoke for countless thousands of white southerners: “Believe, dear Mr. Davis, that you are always President of a very large and wholly unconquerable Republic that lies in the hearts of your grateful countrymen.” Davis was also singled out in Congress: he was always excluded in any bill removing disabilities imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment. But Davis said that compliments given him for bearing his personal trials were “not fully deserved, for in the magnitude of our people’s loss and oppression those of an individual are obscured even from the eye of selfishness.”72

  Race was at the heart of what Davis designated “the night of despotism” that had enveloped the South. He believed the effort to make blacks enfranchised members of the body politic both politically motivated and utterly misguided. To him as to almost all white southerners, blacks remained an inferior race displaying traits unchanged from their time as slaves. He never shared his brother Joseph’s conviction that the Montgomerys, as talented as he admitted they were, possessed qualities that would enable them to succeed apart from white oversight. Calling blacks “poor creatures,” Davis feared that Republicans’ pushing political rights on blacks would make them “more idle and ungovernable than heretofore.” He had “little faith” in “the fidelity of the free Negro.” What he termed “the obtrusive insolence of the Negroes” greatly troubled him. From that perspective he justified strong actions by southern whites, including violence, to restore what he saw as the appropriate social order in the South. Although Davis recognized that slavery had been destroyed, his vision of the proper southern social order remained steadfastly Jacksonian—a democratic white polity based firmly on dominance of a controlled and excluded black caste.73

  Although Davis mostly kept quiet on public issues, he diligently pressed his quest for Brierfield. Amassing evidence to demonstrate that it in reality had belonged to him, he called on a wide range of witnesses who had known antebellum Brierfield to attest to his ownership. Public officials, former slaves, factors, overseers, white craftsmen, and relatives all affirmed they considered the plantation Jefferson Davis’s—he paid the bills and taxes; the cotton was sold in his name; proceeds were placed in his account; supplies were shipped in his name. Meeting often in Vicksburg, he participated actively with his attorneys in collecting depositions and fashioning arguments that supported his case. Davis explained the circumstances surrounding the sale to the Montgomerys and emphasized that the part of the deal involving Brierfield was to be rescinded if he wished, a condition Ben Montgomery confirmed. He also claimed that in Joseph Davis’s will the unassigned $70,000 from the land sale represented the accepted value of Brierfield, which his brother understood he could not bequeath.

  His opponents, Joseph’s grandchildren, fought their great-uncle at every step. The once-close relationship between Jefferson Davis and Lise Mitchell Hamer deteriorated. She was now “our enemy” and her husband “a greedy knave,” who misrepresented the relationship between him and Joseph and refused to acknowledge what Lise had known about her grandfather’s view of Brierfield. Lise and her husband asserted that Joseph had never given Jefferson title because he wanted always to retain ownership. As for the unassigned $70,000, they argued that it simply represented the difference caused by declining land values between the sale price of $300,000 and the value at the time the will was written, and that they had residuary rights to all of it. The Hamers had three notable lawyers, all Mississippians and two of them former Confederate officers, who gave their old leader no special consideration. They hurled about the courtroom accusations of “concealment,” “double dealing,” and “cruel and misleading” words and actions.

  In January 1876 the Chancery Court dismissed Davis’s suit. Employing the doctrine of estoppel, the court ruled that Davis could not legally claim the land because his acting as an executor for four years before filing suit meant that he effectively accepted the terms of the will. To Davis, the decision smacked of political favoritism or even bribery. In his opinion the judge had misstated the evidence and omitted everything favorable to his side. He fully expected his attorneys to appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Still, at this point he did not own one acre of Davis Island.74
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br />   While Davis energetically pursued his claim to Brierfield, he was also constantly seeking ways to generate income. His suit made that search even more imperative, for after its filing he no longer received any disbursements from Joseph’s estate. And no matter how uncertain those payments, they had been most welcome. He tried a variety of enterprises. He investigated the possibility of mining in Arkansas, even going to look at the property. But those prospects seemed unpromising and stayed that way. Over the course of several years he also attempted unsuccessfully to sell the wild, still unsettled land in that state he had bought before the war. In addition, he backed an attempt to build an ice-making machine. Despite early optimism and sporadic good news, the project eventually failed, and Davis lost his entire investment.75

  In the midst of these efforts, Davis accepted an invitation to visit Texas. Pressed to make an appearance at the state fair in Houston, he decided to attend, and in mid-May arrived to a cheering welcome. Urged on by his hospitable hosts and provided a special train, Davis went on to Austin and Dallas before returning through Little Rock to Memphis. He liked what he saw on what was his first trip to the state, except for his time in the Rio Grande Valley during the Mexican War. He commented on the beautiful countryside, especially remarking on the lovely spring flowers. He was delighted to find a number of Mississippians and their descendants. “The people have a robust, healthy look,” he observed, “and are cheerful and confident of their future.”76

  Back in Memphis, Davis did not welcome the hot summer. Worried about Varina’s health, chiefly what he described as “sudden attacks which for the time, say 15 to 30 minutes cause partial suffocation and is followed by intense pain in the head,” and the effect of the heat on her, he wanted her and the children to move to a less torrid climate; but they would not leave him. He stated that he had no money to go anywhere. Thus, they all faced the heat together, though Winnie eventually accompanied a friend to a North Carolina spa.77