Jefferson Davis, American Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR WILLIAM J. COOPER, JR.’S

  Jefferson Davis, American

  WINNER OF THE JEFFERSON DAVIS AWARD FROM THE MUSEUM OF THE CONFEDERACY

  “[A] first-rate book.… Cooper deftly humanizes Davis—not just as statesman and failed Confederate, but as father and husband.”

  —National Review

  “Definitive.… Bring[s] Davis back to life in all of his complexity and subtleties.… Compelling.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Cooper’s is the definitive biography; readers will be particularly pleased to discover the compelling power of his narrative.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Poignant.… In telling the story of this complex man, Cooper skillfully weaves together details of Davis’ public and private lives.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Important.… Cooper constructs his straightforward, detailed biography of Jefferson Davis around a central question: ‘How did a patriotic American come to lead the great struggle to destroy the United States?’ ”

  —Booklist

  “[Cooper’s] success is evident in the subtleties of his portrayal of Davis.”

  —The Times-Picayune

  FIRST VINTAGE CIVIL WAR LIBRARY EDITION,

  NOVEMBER 2001

  Copyright © 2000 by William J. Cooper, Jr.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 2000.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Civil War Library and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Cooper, William J. (William James), Jr.

  Jefferson Davis, American / William J. Cooper, Jr.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77264-0

  1. Davis, Jefferson, 1808—1889. 2. Presidents—Confederate States of America—Biography. 3. Confederate States of America—Biography. 4. Statesmen—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E467.1.D26 C66 2000

  973.7′13′092—dc21

  [B]

  00-062006

  Author photograph © Jim Zietz

  www.vintagebooks.com

  FRONTISPIECE:

  Jefferson Davis, c. 1860 (photograph by Mathew Brady).

  Courtesy Library of Congress

  v3.1

  IN MEMORIAM

  Mamie Mayes Cooper

  1916–1998

  William James Cooper

  1903–1999

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  MAPS

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  “The Saddest Day of My Life”

  CHAPTER ONE

  “There My Memories Begin”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Put Away the Grog”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Ever Ready to Render My Best Services”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Located in a Very Retired Place”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “It Was What I Wished”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “It May Be That I Will Return with a Reputation”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “At Present All Is Uncertainty”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “The Cloud Which Had Collected”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I … Have a Field of Usefulness”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “The Darkest Hour”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Our Cause Is Just and Holy”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “The Noblest Cause in Which Man Can Be Engaged”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Lift Men Above All Personal Considerations”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “We Are Fighting for Existence”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “The Issue Is … Very Painful for Me to Meet”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I Have Not Sunk Under My Trials”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “These Days of Our Hard Fortune”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “The Duty of Doing Justice to the Cause”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “There Is Much Preparation”

  EPILOGUE

  “Esto Perpetua”

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  prl.1 Jefferson Davis, c. 1860

  1.1 Birthplace of Jefferson Davis

  4.1 Sarah Knox Taylor

  4.2 Joseph Davis, c. 1818

  4.3 Jefferson Davis as a young man

  5.1. Varina Banks Howell, c. 1844

  5.2 Jefferson Davis, c. 1845

  5.3 Wedding picture of Jefferson and Varina Davis

  6.1 First Mississippi Regiment at Buena Vista

  7.1 Varina Davis, c. 1849

  8.1 Brierfield

  8.2 Slave cabins at Brierfield

  9.1 Jefferson Davis, c. 1853

  10.1 Jefferson Davis, c. 1858

  10.2 Joseph Davis, c. 1859

  11.1 Varina Davis, c. 1860

  11.2 White House of the Confederacy, April 1865

  11.3 White House of the Confederacy in its wartime setting

  13.1 John Robertson’s painting of Jefferson Davis

  16.1 The Davis children in Canada

  17.1 Jefferson Davis in Scotland

  17.2 Joseph Davis, late 1860s

  18.1 Jefferson Davis at Beauvoir

  18.2 Beauvoir, c. 1880s

  19.1 Jefferson and Varina Davis with daughter and grandchildren

  19.2 Ruins of Brierfield

  19.3 Jefferson Davis, c. 1888

  MAPS

  North-Central United States, 1808–40

  South-Central United States, 1808–40

  Davis Bend

  Mississippi, c. 1845

  Seat of Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War

  Battle of Monterrey

  Battle of Buena Vista

  Mississippi, 1851

  Eastern Theater, 1861–July 1862

  Western Theater, 1861–Summer 1863

  Eastern Theater, July–December 1862

  Eastern Theater, May 1863–1865

  Western Theater, Summer 1863–1865

  PREFACE

  This is the story of a man of his time who had a significant impact on his time, and thus on history. Jefferson Davis is a major figure in American history whose principal importance comes from his role in the central event of the country’s history, the Civil War.

  Because of Davis’s significance, he has had many biographers. There have been at least sixteen accounts of his life, the first appearing in 1868, and they range from brief sketches to multivolume treatments. The authors, who have included two major literary figures and serious scholars as well as rabid partisans, have all taken their measure of Davis, a man who understood the importance of biography for historical reputation. “Men live in the estimation of posterity not by their deeds alone,” he wrote, “but by their historian also.”

  Overall, Davis has not fared well in the estimation of historians. He is generally portrayed as an ideologue with poor political skills and as a second-rate leader with a bureaucratic mind-set, who failed spectacularly in his star role, especially when compared to Abraham Lincoln. With a brittle, ill-temp
ered personality, the portrayal continues, he was unable or unwilling to grow with responsibility. According to this assessment, that shortcoming was particularly apparent and disastrous in his micromanagement of his generals and in his inability to appreciate the political dimensions of the war he was fighting. Of all the words written about Davis, perhaps the most influential appeared in an essay published four decades ago by the eminent historian David M. Potter. Addressing the question of why the Confederacy lost the Civil War, Potter concluded that Davis, because of the faults summarized above, bore the major responsibility. Potter made his condemnation even more explicit and damning when he suggested that if Lincoln and Davis had exchanged positions, the Confederacy might have prevailed.1

  I did not start my journey with Jefferson Davis to explain Confederate defeat, and that never became my chief interest. I did find a complex man, however. Even though Davis always professed his loyalty to the Constitution, he left the Union with his state, became president of the Confederate States of America, and directed the mighty effort to break up the Union. Although he and his cause failed, the vastness of the war and the profound consequences that issued from it assure its primacy and his prominence. How a patriotic American came to lead the great struggle to destroy the United States is a major issue in my book.

  Yet Davis was more than a war chieftain. By 1860, he stood as one of America’s most accomplished political leaders. A superb politician, he dominated his state of Mississippi. As a hero in the Mexican War, as a notable cabinet officer, and as a prominent member of the United States Senate, Jefferson Davis commanded respect across the nation. He was spoken of as a man who could legitimately aspire to his country’s highest office. And he did become president, but not of the United States.

  Although the defeat of the Confederacy ended Davis’s active political life, he retained influence in the postwar years. His two-year imprisonment endeared him to former Confederates, who saw him as suffering for their sake. In a fundamental sense he became the embodiment of the Lost Cause, an essential theme in the history of the South after 1865. Even more important, Davis articulated the outlook of the white South that shaped both southern and national history from the 1870s well on into the twentieth century.

  At the outset I want to address one matter. Race and the place of African-Americans in American society were central in Davis’s life. His stance on an issue that still vexes the nation more than a century after his death would win no kudos in our time. For his entire life he believed in the superiority of the white race. He also owned slaves, defended slavery as moral and as a social good, and fought a great war to maintain it. After 1865, he opposed new rights for blacks. He rejoiced at the collapse of Reconstruction and the reassertion of white authority with its accompanying black subordination. No reader of this book can condone any of these attitudes. But my goal is to understand Jefferson Davis as a man of his time, not condemn him for not being a man of my time. In his age his views were not at all unusual, much less radical. In Davis’s lifetime almost every white American and Western European believed that whites were superior to blacks. In addition, millions of Americans, northerners as well as southerners, accepted slavery as a constitutionally sanctioned and legal institution. I will not keep pointing out that his outlook is different from mine and from that of our own era. I should not need to.

  Davis constantly talked about liberty, its preciousness and his commitment to it. He also interpreted the Confederacy as the legitimate depository of constitutional liberty. He perceived no contradiction between his faith in liberty and the existence of slavery. From at least the time of the American Revolution white southerners defined their liberty, in part, as their right to own slaves and to decide the fate of the institution without any outside interference. While such a concept is utterly foreign to our thinking, it was fundamental to white southerners until 1865.2

  The story that follows centers on Jefferson Davis and how he interacted with the people around him, the world he lived in, and the great events he was caught up in.

  PROLOGUE

  “The Saddest Day of My Life”

  January 21, 1861, was cold, just above freezing, and partly cloudy in Washington, D.C. Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi did not relish his mission. “The saddest day of my life,” Davis called it. On this Monday Davis journeyed, as he had so often, from the house on I Street to the Capitol and its Senate chamber.1

  In that place he had flourished; it was his public home. With its paneled walls and mahogany desks, the new chamber, in use for only two years, bespoke the dignity Davis always associated with the Senate. The iron-and-glass skylights accented the institution’s importance by focusing light on the floor where senators sat and spoke while the surrounding galleries remained shadowy. That design feature surely pleased Davis, for he believed no other part of government more consequential.2

  Being a senator suited the fifty-two-year-old Davis. He prized being a member of that body more than any other public office he had ever held. In it he had risen to a position of authority and prestige. Acknowledged as a leader of the South, he had seen his reputation pass far beyond sectional borders. The New York Times designated him “the Cicero of the Senate,” while Harper’s Weekly identified him as “the Bayard of Congress, sans peur et sans reproche … emphatically ‘one of those born to command.’ ”3

  But this day offered Jefferson Davis no rewards. Severe facial pain caused by neuralgia, one of the maladies that had plagued him since his desperate struggle with malaria a quarter century earlier, left him greatly distressed and weakened. In fact he had been confined to his room for more than a week, and his physician feared him too unwell to speak in public. Physical discomfort was not the chief of his concerns on this Monday, however. “Unutterable griefs” afflicted him. Today would mark his final appearance in his beloved Senate. Mississippi had not voted him out of office, but neither was he leaving voluntarily.4

  Ever since Davis’s return from the Mexican War in 1847 and his almost immediate entry into the Senate, he had striven to preserve what he always called the Union of “our Fathers.” For him that phrase had a double meaning, actual and symbolic. He cherished the knowledge that his own father had been a Revolutionary soldier. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution he considered his political testaments. His faith in them, as he saw it, made him an ideological as well as a biological son of the generation that had created the United States.

  To this Union, Davis had given his full devotion. In 1824, as a youth of sixteen, he took a formal oath of loyalty on the plain at West Point. His four years at the Military Academy and the succeeding seven years on active duty as an officer in the U.S. Army gave form to his visceral feeling of loyalty. That commitment intensified in the Mexican War, where he participated in heavy fighting and sustained a painful wound.

  When Davis entered the Senate chamber that wintry January day, he knew that the Union he held dear was gone. The increasingly bitter tension between North and South over slavery, sectional power, and the nature of the Union had finally reached the breaking point following the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in November 1860. States in the Deep South immediately began moving toward secession.

  Congress had convened on December 3, 1860, and had at once become the epicenter of the crisis. Strutting southern fire-eaters eager for secession joyfully proclaimed that at last the perfidious Union was dead. Self-assured Republicans, savoring their victory, paid scant attention to the South, which they despised and knew little about. Still, the long history of sectional compromise, which stretched back to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, provided a tradition of political adjustment and gave hope to those, North and South, who were attempting to devise a plan that would mollify southern fears of a Republican administration and at the same time not deprive the Republicans of their sense of triumph.

  Americans crowded into the Capitol, both actually and vicariously. Everywhere newspapers were full of what was and was
not happening. Rumors abounded: settlement was at hand; no settlement was possible. In the Federal city, visiting the House of Representatives and the Senate became almost a full-time occupation. So much time was spent in the galleries that many ladies took “their sewing or crocheting.” And that was not all. A regular Senate watcher noted that “all of us who are not absolutely spiritual provide ourselves with a lunch.” The Senate gallery turned into “the fashionable place of reunion.”5

  One who often sat in the Senate gallery was Varina Howell Davis, the wife of Jefferson Davis for sixteen years. Varina Davis thoroughly enjoyed the bustle and excitement of Washington, where she had spent most of the 1850s. With her husband in either the cabinet or the Senate for all but eighteen months of the decade, she was more at home in the capital than in her native Mississippi. The thirty-four-year-old Varina, known for her sharp wit and rapier retorts, led an active social life revolving around several women friends, though she also enjoyed parties and the company of men. Some found her too prickly, however.

  Although they made strenuous efforts in December and on into January, advocates of compromise did not succeed. With Congress ensnared in political and sectional webs, events outside Washington swept to the forefront and deepened the crisis. Talk of secession was quickly transformed into the fact of secession. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina formally left the Union. The remaining Deep South states, west to Texas, seemed to be headed along that same course. Southern senators and congressmen started going home to stand with their states. In Mississippi a convention met to decide its fate and that of the Union; on January 9, 1861, the delegates voted 84 to 15 to take their state out of the Union. The news quickly flashed to Washington via telegraph.

  Davis had expected this decision, but even when he learned of it, he remained in Washington, pending his receipt of formal notification of Mississippi’s secession. By this time Davis also knew that in early February the seceding states would send delegates to Montgomery, Alabama, to form a southern confederacy. His lingering did not mean that he was unsure about his own path. He knew what he must do. “Now I come to the hard task of announcing to you that the hour is at hand which closes my connection with the United States, for the independence and Union of which my father bled and in the service of which I have sought to emulate the example he set for my guidance,” he told former president Franklin Pierce. “The stern conviction of necessity, the demand of honor” governed his action.6