Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  It is impossible to ascertain how much money the book made for Davis. Appleton had put forth a significant advance that had to be repaid. Still, Davis paid close attention to what he did receive, and in the last year of his life he sued Appleton over royalties. The contract specified that when 20,000 copies had been sold, the royalty would increase from 10 to 12.5 percent. Davis correctly argued that in 1876 his publisher had agreed when sales reached 20,000, the 12.5 percent would be paid on all copies sold, not just those over 20,000. Clearly Appleton had not been fulfilling that provision, but the case was not settled in Davis’s lifetime.19

  While Davis viewed Rise and Fall as his personal monument, he looked to the Southern Historical Society and its publication, the Southern Historical Society Papers, as the institutional guardian of truthful Confederate history. The society was organized in New Orleans in 1869, but remained basically inchoate from its birth until 1873. In that year a group of Virginians determined to shape the interpretation of the Confederate past took it over and transferred its headquarters to Richmond.20

  The two key individuals in the revitalized Southern Historical Society were the Reverend J. William Jones and Jubal A. Early. An ordained Baptist minister, Jones had been a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia. In that same army Early, a West Pointer and opponent of secession, served as a combat officer throughout the war, rising to the rank of lieutenant general. Like Davis, both Jones and Early extolled the Confederate experience as virtuous and patriotic. They were also committed to safeguarding their sense of the proper or positive view of its heritage. Jones became the paid secretary of the society and editor of the Southern Historical Society Papers, which began publication in 1876. Early was chosen president and led the executive committee.

  Davis and the Southern Historical Society exalted each other. For the Virginians, having Davis as a major supporter sanctioned their claim that the Southern Historical Society represented more than the state of Virginia. The society made Davis a life member and sent him all its publications. In 1877 Jones wrote Davis: “I need not assure you again that your fame is dear to our Virginia people (whatever the few may say)—that the President of our Society, Genl. Early, and the members of the Executive committee are your warm admirers.” Courting Davis, Jones added, “nothing will give us more pleasure than to do everything in our power to put right on the record the able statesman, gallant soldier, pure patriot, and accomplished gentleman who presided over the Confederacy.” Providing material to Davis during the preparation of Rise and Fall, Jones deemed it “a high privilege” to aid in “your grand work.”

  In 1882 Jones also tried to get Davis to undertake a speaking tour across the South to raise money for the Southern Historical Society. In wooing Davis to accept this task, Jones employed limitless flattery. He told Davis that after canvassing opinion all over the South on the best way to generate funds, one conclusion stood out. “The universal verdict is: If President Davis will consent to speak at prominent points in the South in the interest of the S.H.S. you can raise all of the money you need.” Jones went on to say that he hated to ask anything more of someone who had sacrificed so much for the cause, but felt he had nowhere else to turn. Yet despite such blandishments, Davis never went on the road for the society. The aftermath of a yellow fever epidemic around Beauvoir, and his own physical limitations, kept him at home. Still, Davis was vitally interested in a secure financial future for the society, and did make one address in New Orleans in its behalf.21

  He often heaped accolades upon the society and its leaders for their great labor in preserving the record and the memory of the Confederate past. According to Davis, the Southern Historical Society Papers had an especially critical place. He said the collection of “scattered records and unwritten recollections” and their publication in the Papers would enable “the future historian, to do justice to our cause and conduct.…” Finding an error in the pages of the Papers distressed him mightily, “especially because I have regarded them as to be the depository of authentic facts in regard to the ‘Confederate States of America.’ ”22

  Although Davis communicated with Jones and the society mostly through correspondence, he built up a warm personal relationship with Early. He had not before known Early personally, but a shared commitment to the glory of the Confederacy and a passion for upholding and maintaining its legitimacy brought them together. Early’s position as a paid supervisor in the Louisiana State Lottery Company made possible relatively frequent personal contact because the Virginian had to appear regularly in New Orleans. On trips between Virginia and the Louisiana metropolis, Early occasionally stopped at Beauvoir. Davis also visited him in New Orleans. Early always treated Davis with the utmost respect; Davis was still president and commander in chief. Additionally, in small ways Early endeared himself to Davis. He always wore a simple gray suit, which Davis had begun doing. Davis also sincerely appreciated and thoroughly enjoyed presents that Early regularly brought or sent, especially excellent pipe tobacco. The two men discussed the characteristics of different brands. On one occasion Early gave Davis a cigar holder he himself had made from Virginia buckeye wood.

  Davis came to think quite highly of Early and took pleasure in his company. He viewed the Virginian as a fellow soldier in the ongoing struggle to ensure the survival of the true faith of the Confederacy. He told Early that he had many topics he wanted them to talk over, “because there are few with whom I can agree so fully.” The two men spurned other southerners, including ex-Confederates, who in their minds had become too friendly with the Yankee enemy. Davis and Early despairingly termed such people “harmonizers” because they placed reconciliation ahead of insisting on the rightness and virtue of the Confederate cause, including the constitutionality of secession.23

  Publication of Rise and Fall did not fundamentally alter Davis’s engagement with Confederate topics or emotions. Even though he felt a strong desire to establish his definition of an accurate Confederate record, he did not relish conflict with other Confederate veterans. “I certainly wish to say nothing but good of any who wore the gray,” he wrote Early. In his book he asserted he tried “to treat with gentleness any conduct of a confederate which I could not approve and necessarily regretted.” Though possessing “fixed ammunition,” he did not use it; he insisted he was “very forebearing to some who have been unfair and even indignant to me.” Davis’s assertion that putting down others had nothing to do with his writing Rise and Fall was substantially correct. Of course, he did not consider his insistence on the correctness of events as an attack on anybody. He was as convinced after the war as during it that he had only the purest of motives. Thus, if anyone assaulted his interpretation, this simply showed that that person’s ambition and selfishness had once more surged forward.24

  Davis received constant advice not to participate in old battles and personal vendettas. Old friends like Judah Benjamin and new ones like Early told him that to do so would be unproductive and even injurious to him. Conscious of his position and enormously proud of widespread southern esteem for him, Davis did generally refuse to enter a public fray with any other Confederate. He did want his stance vindicated, but he was usually willing to let surrogates take on those who challenged either his sense of selfless loyalty to the cause or his interpretation of disputed decisions.25

  His old battles were chiefly with the two generals he had been at odds with since 1861, Pierre Beauregard and Joseph Johnston. They in turn held Davis in contempt. Beauregard said, “he has no elements of greatness about him.” As sensitive to criticism as Davis, but without the security of his standing in the South, both men openly condemned his leadership, going so far as to imply that his incompetence alone caused the Confederate disaster. In their memoirs—Johnston’s published before Rise and Fall and Beauregard’s after—and in articles that appeared chiefly in Century Magazine and were reprinted in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, a popular compilation of pieces by notable people on both sides, they lambasted him and booste
d themselves. A pet topic was the aftermath of First Manassas: Davis had prevented what would have been a successful Confederate attack on Washington. His shortcomings at Vicksburg and Atlanta were also highlighted. In a newspaper interview Johnston even suggested that Davis had raided the Confederate treasury during the final retreat. Beauregard’s former chief of staff underscored the personal motives behind these diatribes when he urged that his former commander and Johnston should together demonstrate “that in [Davis’s] constant inexorable hatred of both of you and the effort to gratify that passion of his soul, he wrecked the cause unhappily entrusted to his hands.”26

  While Davis did not publicly slam either Beauregard or Johnston, his correspondence bristled with fury at their attacks upon him. To him they were small men trying to camouflage their own shortcomings, which had contributed significantly to Confederate defeat. He said that in both the Narrative and wartime reports Johnston’s “forte [was] the suppressio veir.” Davis decried Beauregard’s “egotism & malignity”; Varina encapsulated her husband’s opinion of the Louisianian in equating him with another person who “ ‘had a firm and immutable faith in himself,’ and but little in the capacity of anyone else.” But at times Davis also forgot the reality of the war years, as when he strove to obtain material indicating that Beauregard and Johnston bore responsibility for restraining a Confederate advance on Washington after First Manassas. Yet he did not personally take up public cudgels against these two unhappy men. He even refused an invitation from the editors of Century Magazine to respond in their pages to the articles of Beauregard and Johnston, in part because he could not get a guarantee that whatever he submitted would appear unedited.27

  There was one notable public manifestation of his displeasure. In mid-1882 he accepted an invitation to speak at the dedication of the Lee mausoleum in Lexington the following year. But when he learned a few months later that Joseph Johnston would preside over the event, he reneged, making clear that Johnston’s participation rendered his own impossible. He declared he had “no desire to make any demonstration in regard to Genl. J. E. Johnston,” yet he wanted all involved to understand the reason for his absence. Although Early tried to persuade him to come, the Virginian said he understood and empathized with Davis’s position. The ceremony took place as scheduled, without Jefferson Davis.28

  Davis did not spend time on war-related struggles only with old Confederates. On two occasions he took issue with northern men over his sense of personal honor and his belief in immutable principles. In a November 1884 address in St. Louis, William T. Sherman asserted that he had read letters proving Davis did not really believe in secession; instead, Davis left the Union to use the South to strike violently at the North; furthermore, he would even have used force to prevent the secession of any state from the Confederacy. Then, in January 1885, the Senate debated a similar report supposedly filed with the War Department. Davis erupted with a long letter to a St. Louis editor in which he denied Sherman’s accusation, preached his gospel of principle along with Confederate purity, and challenged Sherman to produce the documents or “wear the brand of a base slanderer.” Waving aside Davis’s challenge, Sherman replied that he and Davis would settle the matter between themselves. Sherman never contacted Davis, who was outraged. Sherman, he wrote, “is remarkable in this; that he is not only willing to lie, but does not feel degraded by the detection.”29

  In obtaining an apology or a recantation Davis fared no better with a rising young New York politician, Theodore Roosevelt. In an 1885 article Roosevelt publicly associated Davis with Benedict Arnold, asserting that the only American traitor who could compare with Arnold was Davis. An angry and hurt Davis riposted: “You must be ignorant of American history if you do not know that the career of those characters might be aptly chosen for contrast, but not for similitude; and if so ignorant, the instinct of a gentlemen, had you possessed it, must have caused you to make inquiry before uttering an accusation so libelous and false.” Although Davis wanted Roosevelt “to repel the unproved outrage,” he added that he had “too low an estimate of you to expect an honorable retraction of your slander.” The cocky young New Yorker did not disappoint the offended old Mississippian. “Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is in receipt of a letter purporting to come from Mr. Jefferson Davis, and denying that the character of Mr. Davis compares unfavorably with that of Benedict Arnold.” Roosevelt went on to say that he did not find it surprising that his view of Davis differed markedly from Davis’s own sense of himself. Then he closed: “Mr. Roosevelt begs leave to add that he does not deem it necessary that there should be any further communication between himself and Jefferson Davis.”30

  Davis would never bend on the constitutional right of secession. As he perceived it, he was always a patriotic constitutionalist, never a law-breaking rebel. He had spent much of Rise and Fall making and buttressing his argument, but he also regularly made it elsewhere. Clinging to that faith and considering himself an apostle of the Founding Fathers, he rejected any notion that either a rebellion or a civil war had taken place. “The States are the sovereign parties to the compact of union,” he intoned, “& sovereigns cannot rebel.” According to him, the states under the Constitution remained “sovereign communities, and war between them was not as if parts of the same body were contending with each other, it was not therefore a ‘Civil War.’ ” That term, he maintained, could apply only “to a conflict between factions in a State such as the wars of the Roses in England, but ours was a war between sovereigns—no more a civil war than that between Germany & France.” The states in the Confederacy wanted what was their constitutional right, their independence. That effort, which commenced in 1861, ended in defeat, and Davis did not anticipate it would ever be attempted again. He certainly would never advocate secession. The fact of defeat simply “showed it to be impractical, but this did not prove it to be wrong.”31

  Davis’s absolute conviction that he had done nothing wrong in 1861, that he was not a rebel but a constitutional patriot, underlay his refusal ever to ask for a pardon or for the removal of the political disabilities imposed by the Fourteenth Amendment. That men he admired and even revered like Robert E. Lee and his brother Joseph did so did not budge him. He admitted that he had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, and he insisted that he had done so even in supporting secession. When, in 1876, Davis learned that wrangling over his inclusion or exclusion was jeopardizing a general amnesty bill in Congress, he urged the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, a Kentucky Democrat, not to allow any former Confederates to suffer because of him. He did not mind exclusion. “Further it may be proper to state,” he continued, “that I have no claim to pardon not having in anywise repented or changed the conviction on which my political course was founded as well as before as during and since the war between the States.” But there was more. To those who asserted that a petition for removal of the disqualifications stipulated by the Fourteenth Amendment did not necessarily mean admission of wrong, he was equally adamant. “Now sir,” he lectured a friend, “if I were to ask having my disabilities removed, it would not be a confession of wrong on my part, but it would be to that extent an admission of right to impose the disability I asked them to remove. That neither you nor I can concede.” He clung to those creeds as long as he breathed.32

  While Davis labored to perpetuate his vision of Confederate history, in family matters he experienced both joy and deep sadness. In March 1877 Polly presented him with his first grandchild and namesake. Grandfather Davis was delighted. He and an unemployed Jeff Jr., who was living at Beauvoir while looking for a job, traveled to Memphis to see Jefferson Davis Hayes. This happiness was short-lived. When Davis saw the infant, he described him as “plump as a partridge.” Yet in June the baby fell ill and died.

  With Varina still in Europe, a distraught father wanted especially to comfort his devastated daughter. “My beloved daughter has never to me outgrown her childhood,” he remarked, “and when she is suffering I feel that she
should be with me.” But his Christian stoicism governed his advice to his son-in-law: “My dear Son, we must all submit to the chastisement visited upon us. It is the highest stage of Christian culture which enables one, when most severely stricken, to say in true resignation, God’s will be done.” To help everyone through this sad time, Davis persuaded the Hayes family to come to Beauvoir for an extended visit. They stayed in the cottage just west of the main house, which had been prepared for them. For a time Davis had his older daughter, his son-in-law, and his son with him. It was a period of relaxation—reading, fishing, bathing, and driving. Davis was pleased with the restoration of his daughter’s vitality and spirit.

  In March 1878 joy returned when Polly gave birth to Varina Howell Davis Hayes. A thrilled grandmother was in Memphis for this event. Everything went well, and she happily informed her husband, “The baby is splendid, so good & so hearty, and she laughs what her father calls a large laugh every time she wakes.”33

  Although the Davises were quite pleased with their healthy granddaughter, another blow struck the family in the autumn of 1878. That summer, a virulent epidemic of yellow fever swept through the lower Mississippi Valley, even stretching to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Decrying the “terrible scourge,” Davis blamed the excessively hot weather for its severity and the rapidity of railroad travel for the fever’s unusual geographic reach.

  News that the frightful disease had arrived in Memphis caused alarm at Beauvoir. Not only did Addison, Polly, and their infant daughter live in that city, but also Jeff Jr., who had recently obtained a position in a bank. “Painfully anxious” about their children, Jefferson and Varina urged them to take every precaution. And they did move about ten miles out of the city, though Addison often went in on business. The elder Davises had an added concern when William Walthall voluntarily went to the beleaguered city to assist in caring for the sick. By late September, reports that the disease was tapering off in Memphis offered some comfort to the worried people at Beauvoir.