Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  Visitors found their host a man who showed his years but remained vigorous and alert. When observers first encountered Davis, they noticed his bearing. Though a bit stooped, he walked with a “steady” step. His hair and short beard were “deeply silvered.” As always his eyes captured attention, even though the useless left one revealed a “slight cast,” akin to a cataract. His wide-ranging and friendly conversation impressed, and on occasion surprised, northern journalists who had come expecting to find an angry, bitter old man. Although he eschewed contemporary events, Davis talked freely about the war and about what he saw as a prosperous future for the South and the country.6

  During these years, Davis’s health did not undergo any fundamental change, except for his becoming increasingly infirm, especially toward the end of the decade. His old nemeses, malarial fever, bronchial difficulties, which resulted in prolonged deep coughs, and neuralgia, continued to bedevil him. Rheumatism also appeared as a frequent companion. At times severe attacks struck him, and an assault of fever in 1885 caused Varina to fear for his life. Yet he rallied, and as late as 1887 she described him as “unusually well.” Not at all housebound, Davis traveled regularly to New Orleans and to Brierfield, and on three occasions took trips out of the state. In the final year of his life, he thought seriously about going as far away as North Carolina. He did, however, mostly give up writing, and Varina became his amanuensis. She could copy his handwriting so perfectly that, according to her, he could not tell whether he or she had written a particular letter.7

  At Beauvoir, nothing equaled the joy that children and grandchildren brought to both Jefferson and Varina. She admitted that she lived for her daughters. Having lost all four of her sons, she could not contemplate anything happening to her girls. Winnie lived with them throughout the decade, except when traveling. Polly and her family continued to reside in Memphis until late 1884 when, because of her husband’s health, they moved to Colorado. Although the Hayes family move took them far from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Polly returned with her children for visits that exhilarated her parents.

  Jefferson was a doting grandfather, constantly telling his grandchildren that their “Bampa” was eager to see them. He wrote his oldest granddaughter that he could never have “fullness of joy” while she was away. “The sheep bleat around the house, the lambs skip over the lawn, the little collie barks, but the music dearest to my heart is wanting, for the voice of my ‘daughtie’ is not heard.” By this time Polly had three little ones, two girls and then a boy, Addison Davis Hayes, born in 1884. When his grandchildren were at Beauvoir, Davis especially liked “the loving embraces you all habitually gave me.” His play with them included card games and toy soldiers. In the summer of 1889, he rejoiced at the news that Polly had given birth to a second son. Varina captured the keen sadness she and her husband felt upon the departure of their loved ones: “Our great empty rooms will answer in their old dreary way to my halting pace and to Mr. Davis’s cough.”8

  Mother and father were also quite proud of their younger daughter and her achievements. To the mother, Winnie was “so faithful, so delicately modest, and so conscientious, and has such a brilliant and responsive mind.” She became her father’s close companion, accompanying him on trips to public gatherings and Confederate reunions. A great favorite with the veterans, in Atlanta in 1886 she was publicly christened “Daughter of the Confederacy.”

  Then Winnie fell in love. In 1887, while visiting family friends in Syracuse, New York, she met Alfred Wilkinson. An attorney some six years older than she, Wilkinson came from an established family, but a northern one with a notable abolitionist lineage. For a time Winnie kept her romance to herself. When she finally informed her parents, they expressed bewilderment and disappointment that their daughter could even consider marrying a Yankee. At first Davis was adamantly opposed; according to Varina, he announced: “I will never consent.” But when, in the late summer of 1888, Wilkinson appeared at Beauvoir to ask for Winnie’s hand, their opposition weakened, then disappeared. He charmed them both. Varina noted that her husband was particularly taken with the suitor. She satisfied herself that Wilkinson had the financial means to provide amply for her daughter. Besides, mother and father observed how devoted the two young people were to each other. They saw a radiant Winnie. Jefferson and Varina withdrew their opposition, and at age twenty-four Winnie became engaged. Yet the engagement did not lead directly to marriage. Winnie was conflicted. Although she had received her parents’ blessing, she knew that many southerners strongly opposed the Daughter of the Confederacy’s marrying a son of their former enemy. At the time of her father’s death she had made no final decision. Ultimately she did not marry Wilkinson, or anyone else.9

  Although Beauvoir provided Davis a comforting home, it did not produce an income. Neither did the other property he inherited from Sarah Dorsey generate any significant revenue for his use, though he did spend time managing the estate. His hopes that royalties from Rise and Fall would supply significant funds did not materialize. In 1877 he obtained $2,500 from the Montgomerys, but that payment would not be repeated. Despite having to struggle to get by on his available income, Davis’s pride caused him to spurn monetary gifts from ardent supporters. In late 1877 and 1878 friends of Davis, spurred by William Walthall, collected $1,000 for him. Acting as their agent, Governor Alfred H. Colquitt of Georgia forwarded the money to Davis as “an insignificant token of a debt due you by a grateful people.” Colquitt also said he expected to send more in the future. But Davis told Colquitt that his “sense of duty” forced him to refuse that donation and all others.10

  Davis’s hopes for financial rebuilding rested on Brierfield. After regaining the plantation, Davis hoped he could turn it into the profitable enterprise it had been before 1861. It still had the fantastically rich soil. As early as 1879, he had begun exertions toward that end. He initially concentrated on the construction of new cabins for black workers who would be essential for the success of his plans. He also renewed the business connection between Brierfield and the New Orleans factor Jacob Payne, his good friend whom he saw often when in the city.

  While attempting to rejuvenate Brierfield, Davis would be an absentee planter. He did not believe his health would permit him to live permanently in what he called “the swamp.” And reaching the plantation was more difficult since Davis Bend had become Davis Island. In its former configuration, the steamboat landing was directly in front of the Hurricane mansion. After the river changed course, the closest landing to Brierfield was on the southeastern part of the island, some half dozen miles through wooded lowlands from Davis’s plantation. Even though Davis said that placing an agent in charge could result in difficulties, he did not believe he had any choice. He would visit regularly, especially in the late fall, after the bulk of the cotton harvest and the first frost. After all, between 1853 and 1861 he had basically run Brierfield from afar. In addition to his own well-being, he knew his wife wanted nothing to do with living at Brierfield. She had not much liked it before the war, and in 1880 it was truly isolated. Furthermore, instead of an agricultural showplace, it was downtrodden and dilapidated. Varina did not even like to visit. Contemplating a trip, she wrote, “I dread the heat, the worry and complaints of the Negro tenants, the swampy miasma and seven mile drive in the mud before we get there.”

  Finding the proper on-site manager for Brierfield proved elusive. Davis started off with Owen B. Cox, who in the prewar period had been an overseer for him as well as for Joseph. But Davis did not find Cox satisfactory. A key problem involved what Davis saw as Cox’s conflicting responsibilities.11

  Just like antebellum overseers, Cox had responsibility for directing the workers and making the crop, but he also ran the new plantation store. With slavery gone, free blacks had to have access to supplies ranging from food and clothing to agricultural necessities. To service his employees and tenants, Davis established a store, as did other planters across the South. They envisioned these as also potential moneymakers.
Because black laborers usually had little or no cash, plantation stores extended credit, with settlement coming at the close of the crop year. Concluding that Cox had concentrated on the store and its sales rather than on the farming operations, Davis decided that two white men were necessary—one for the field, the other for the store. Cox concurred, and thereafter Davis hired two people to handle affairs at Brierfield. By the end of the decade his system not only involved an overseer and a storekeeper, but also a provision that both had to sign any order for supplies, which then had to be sent to him for final approval.12

  To assist him in the overall direction of Brierfield, Davis called on his son-in-law. He even asked Addison Hayes to reside at Brierfield; his wife and children could stay at more healthful Beauvoir. Although Hayes declined to live at Brierfield, he did become central in Davis’s management. He visited the plantation, bought materials, and became responsible for the annual reconciliation of accounts. At first Davis had the store accounts sent to him, and the plantation’s to Hayes. Eventually all went to the latter. For as long as Hayes dwelt in Memphis, he remained intimately involved in Brierfield affairs.

  Jefferson and Varina Davis at Beauvoir with daughter Margaret, grandchildren, and unidentified servant.

  Library of Congress (photo credit i19.1)

  Neither Davis nor his son-in-law ever discovered satisfactory overseers or storekeepers. Davis experienced trouble with his hires on myriad issues ranging from treatment of blacks to personal honesty. For Davis the 1880s replayed the 1850s. New overseers and storekeepers appeared almost annually, including, briefly in 1882, a brother of Varina’s who died after a few months on the island. The inability to secure stability in those two critical positions distressed Davis. As early as 1884 he said, “the opinion grows on me that a plantation given over to agents is worse than nothing.” He kept trying, to no avail. Three years later, he lamented that things had gone “from bad to worse.”13

  Frustration about agents was only one of Davis’s problems, however. On an 1884 trip to Brierfield, he recounted to his wife, “since my arrival one trouble has chased another like waves, each being the herald of one to come.…” These included pests that attacked the cotton plants and workers who neglected the mules, essential for planting and cultivation. But Davis’s most arduous and hopeless struggle was with the Mississippi River. The battle with the river was ongoing, and the flooding river usually won, adversely affecting his crop in 1882, 1883, 1884, and 1886. Only levees could protect land and crops from flood-waters. Davis strove to construct adequate levees on Brierfield, but by themselves they would not secure his acres. Other plantations on the island had to have similar protection, or Brierfield still flooded. Throughout the 1880s Davis worked with his fellow property owners to find a mutually agreeable way to share costs and devise a system that would shield all. But it never happened. There was even talk that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had a plan. Yet safe levees would not come for almost another half century, not until after the great flood of 1927.14

  Farming at Brierfield brought Davis in close touch with his grandniece Lise Hamer, who with her husband and brother operated Hurricane. As part of the foreclosure on the Montgomerys, a survey had been ordered to divide the two plantations. Davis was unenthusiastic about its outcome, and the bitterness between the old man and young woman remained. Strapped for money, Lise offered to sell Hurricane to her great-uncle, who said he could not afford it. Yet Davis did work with her on levees, helping her to obtain financing, and a warmth eventually returned to their letters. Almost twenty years after Davis’s death, however, his younger relatives evinced some resentment about his lawsuit.15

  While inadequate levees and imperfect white agents caused Davis serious difficulties, those troubles were matched by problems with black labor. At the outset of his second career as a planter, Davis assumed he would have no difficulty finding an ample number of blacks to cultivate his acres. He also thought many he called “old Negroes,” or his former slaves, would again want to live and work at Brierfield. But he soon discovered that recruiting and retaining a sufficient labor force would be a major endeavor. The end of slavery meant freedom of movement for the emancipated slaves; they could no longer be compelled to remain in locations specified by white landlords. When he began actual operations at Brierfield, Davis reported that few of his former slaves were still there, and by 1884 there were none.

  He finally understood that the demand for agricultural labor in the cotton counties along the Mississippi outstripped the supply. Moreover, the isolation of Davis Island made the task even more arduous. Blacks who left one plantation for another disturbed Davis; he condemned them for what was to him an absence of loyalty. As a result, he tried to prevent his workers from departing. First, he offered several types of labor arrangements. He hired day laborers who would receive wages. He also set up three classifications of tenants: those who had their own mules and farmed a piece of land at a fixed annual rate, in cotton or cash; those who worked for an agreed-upon share of the crop; and those who leased for a term of not less than five years, with allowances for improvements that benefited the proprietor.

  Then he urged proper treatment of all, wage earners and tenants, to encourage their staying on. “The only way to prevent tenants from being dissatisfied & removing to other places,” Davis wrote, “is to make them feel that they cannot better their condition by a change, & above all things, to prevent them from getting in debt to such an extent as to induce them to get rid of it by a change of their home.” Davis wondered whether it would be better to cancel debt than carry it over for another year. But carrying over entailed two risks: the debt would never be paid; and, more critical, the debtor would abscond.

  He also took other steps to keep his laborers. A key element in Davis’s hiring and firing white agents had to do with their success or lack of success in dealing with the black laborers. He tried and failed to get the planters on the island to unite on certain labor concerns, such as fixing compensation and respecting the agreements between employers and employees. Davis experienced as much instability with black workers as with white managers.16

  Still searching for workers, he turned to a new source—blacks coming west as part of an organized effort to meet the desperate need for labor on the vast cotton plantations of the lower Mississippi Valley. Agents promising better wages and conditions arranged rail transportation for travel west to huge numbers of blacks from Atlantic states like South Carolina. To secure some of them, Davis dealt with his old West Point classmate and former Confederate general Thomas F. Drayton, a South Carolinian living in Charlotte, North Carolina. Davis told Drayton he wanted healthy workers with positive traits and preferably families. When Drayton dispatched a consignment of blacks toward Mississippi, he sent a telegram informing Davis, for at the western end of the trip, especially in Memphis, competition was quite keen among prospective employers. The blacks did not always end up precisely where they were supposed to. Even participating in this interstate labor trade did not suffice. Although Davis had several rough years as a planter, even in good seasons the shortage of labor posed an insurmountable hurdle. He reported having to leave one-third of his land unplanted; but despite that kind of cutback, he found cotton left on the stalk and the ground white with cotton that would never be gathered.17

  Although Davis periodically expressed optimism, he admitted in 1889 to a longtime Mississippi farming friend that “the result is very meager compared with what attended efforts on the same land in former times.” He began thinking about leasing his plantation instead of operating it himself. That would be his “last resort,” one he believed would at least check the growth of debt. But he did not lease in his lifetime. Although Davis did not make Brierfield profitable, he did not lose the land. The benefactions of his friend and factor Jacob Payne contributed significantly. Family tradition also holds that a fortuitous sale of his wild lands in Arkansas helped him handle his debt problem. In the end, he hung on. Writing in November 1889 fro
m Brierfield, he mourned, “Nothing is as it should be, and I am not able even to look at the place.”18

  Davis’s attempt to replicate his antebellum success utilizing black labor failed. Like many other former slaveowners, he found the transition to free labor fraught with difficulties. Also like many of them, he could never regain the prosperity he had enjoyed under slavery. Much of the situation was beyond their control. Seemingly intractable problems, such as overproduction of cotton and declining prices, beset the agricultural economy of the late nineteenth-century South. Nevertheless, Davis viewed his free labor force as a major reason that he was unable to make Brierfield as productive as he thought it ought to be.

  Although slavery had been abolished for a decade and a half when Davis began anew as a planter, his view of the basic relationship between whites and blacks had not altered. He still believed that blacks were inferior to whites, and he did not envision any foreseeable change in the racial order. To his mind, white tutelage had always been central in any advance the subordinate race made. Thus, he had always expressed serious doubts that even the able Montgomerys could succeed on their own. His experience with free black labor at Brierfield confirmed his opinion that blacks lacked crucially important traits. He told Thomas Drayton, “The habit of drinking & gambling is so common among our negroes that for the sake of such indulgence, a large proportion of them prefer to work as day laborers instead of waiting for the larger sum they would get by making a crop & that class are always ready to drift away just at the time they are most needed.”

  In his general attitude about the supremacy of the white race, Davis was not at all unique. Almost every white American, as well as Western European, considered blacks an inferior race. The late decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the onrush of imperialism and the conviction that whites carried the “burden” of the lesser black, brown, and yellow peoples. Whites believed that political and economic power must reside with them and social equality was out of the question. Yet not all whites agreed on the future of blacks. Some trusted that education and the Christian religion would bring steady improvement; others were convinced that nothing could change what they viewed as the divine or natural arrangement.