Jefferson Davis, American Page 14
Even before he married, Jefferson Davis’s political world had expanded far beyond the borders of Warren County. On January 8, 1844, Davis interrupted his early romance with Varina to attend his third state Democratic convention. There his party named him an elector at large for the upcoming presidential race, one of six; each congressional district had an elector, and two, including Davis, were chosen for the state at large. At that time in Mississippi, accepting the post of elector involved considerably more than having one’s name placed on the presidential ballot. Electors were expected to campaign actively for the national ticket.20
The convention that chose Davis as an elector also endorsed a preferred slate—former chief executive Martin Van Buren for president and James K. Polk of Tennessee for vice president—and directed the delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore to support the nominations of Van Buren and Polk. In Jackson, Davis made clear that Van Buren was not his first choice, though he had been instructed by the Warren County delegation to vote for the former president. In one of the major addresses to the assembled Democrats, Davis announced that while he was aware of Van Buren’s claims on the party and he certainly recognized the New Yorker as a good Democrat, he preferred John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. But the preeminent states’ rights politician, who had mounted his greatest effort to gain the Democratic presidential nod, was stymied by Van Buren’s forces in the South as well as the North and had decided to withdraw from the contest by the time Davis presented his name to the Mississippi convention. Davis did not know of Calhoun’s decision because it did not become public knowledge until February.
Davis insisted that Calhoun merited the support of Mississippi because he was the best candidate on the critical issues: lowering the tariff, annexing Texas, reducing the size of the federal government, and redressing the niggardly treatment the South had received on coastal defense. Davis maintained that the coastal regions of both the South Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico had been “treated ungenerously and unjustly” in comparison with the Northeast. Although Davis specified four individual issues on which he believed Calhoun strongest, a single foundation underlay his preference. He wanted a southerner, and Calhoun was the obvious choice. Davis urged his fellow delegates to consider “the necessity we have for a Southern President” to secure the goals most important to the South. “The South has borne long,” he cried; “let her be true to herself, that justice may be done.”
Although the convention rejected Davis’s plea for Calhoun, it did not reject Davis. A Democrat in attendance remembered that the speech so impressed the assemblage it gave the speaker a standing ovation when he finished. Davis did get the convention to adopt unanimously a resolution stating that if “any contingency” should defeat the nomination of Van Buren and Polk, the Mississippi delegation should think of Calhoun as second choice. Then the convention moved on and with unanimity selected the delegates to the national convention and the presidential electors, including Jefferson Davis.21
Accepting his selection as a presidential elector propelled Davis into the center of Mississippi politics. A rowdy spectator sport that arose from the whirlwind of Jacksonian Democracy, this rough-and-tumble political world had thrived for more than a decade. White manhood suffrage had existed since 1832, and the sovereign voters required wooing and intermingling from their prospective officeholders.22
The equality of all white men was the bedrock of political Mississippi. This was emphatically not a political world in which rich planters controlled candidates and elections while sipping sherry and juleps in elegant drawing rooms. Energetic campaigning antedated Davis’s entry into the arena and did not diminish during his time as a participant. From 1844 until 1860, Davis participated fully and willingly in the demanding ordeal set up by Mississippi voters for those who wanted their allegiance. Braving abominable roads, poor transportation, nasty weather, uncertain accommodations, Davis and his fellow aspirants made their treks through towns, villages, and countryside.
Although Varina’s later claim that before the campaign no more than a dozen men outside Warren County knew his name was surely an exaggeration, Davis was in many ways still a political novice, and he knew it. He made his preparations accordingly. Assuming into the spring that Van Buren would carry the party’s standard, Davis wrote directly to him for information that would help in Mississippi. After identifying himself as a Democratic elector and mentioning that the two of them had met, though Van Buren probably did not remember him, Davis went straight to the point. “You will oblige me and many other Democrats of this section of the country,” Davis told the presumed candidate, “by giving your opinion” on three questions—the annexation of Texas, the constitutional power of Congress over slavery in the District of Columbia, and particulars about Van Buren’s vote on the Tariff of 1828. Davis expected these issues “to be opened” and thought they “could not be otherwise as well closed” as with the candidate’s own response. Davis also asked a companion from his Washington trip, Senator William Allen, for statements to counter charges of defalcation and extravagance during Van Buren’s administration as well as material on the tariff and the Bank of the United States. Confessing his inexperience, Davis admitted, “I have mingled but little in politics and as you perceive by this letter have an arsenal poorly supplied for a campaign.”23
Despite his doubts, Davis embraced his task: “Labor is expected of me and I am willing to render it.” He did not, however, work for Van Buren, who had never excited him, but for former Tennessee congressman and governor James K. Polk. The Tennessean snared the nomination when Van Buren was blocked by southerners distressed over his opposition to annexing Texas. The requirements of the campaign forced Davis to realize that politics at this level was a demanding calling. As he explained to his fiancée, he had discovered “as many have done before me that whilst attending to the public my private affairs had got much out of joint.” The party had set up a rigorous schedule that would take him to almost every part of Mississippi. From June until the election in November, he spent most of his time on the road. Davis usually traveled with other Democrats, often with Henry Stuart Foote, a fellow candidate for elector and another rising Democratic star, who would have a significant place in Davis’s political life for much of the next two decades.24
Highlighting the campaign, or the canvass as it was called, were the public speeches given by both Democrats and Whigs at every stop. The importance of these addresses cannot be exaggerated, for they were central to the political culture and to the success of an individual politician. “One of the most remarkable characteristics of the Southern people before the war was their universal enjoyment of public speaking and their intense appreciation of good popular oratory,” asserted a contemporary of Jefferson Davis’s, who also successfully appealed to Mississippi voters. “In consequence,” he continued, “the art of fluent speaking was largely cultivated and a man could hope for little success in public life unless he possessed this faculty in some degree.”25
Recognizing this truth about Mississippi politics and that “public speaking was a new thing to me,” Davis worked at becoming a more effective orator. He did begin with a distinct asset, what one political opponent described as “a musical and well modulated voice.” Throughout the canvass observers assessed his performance. A Democratic witness commented on his first appearance at Natchez in mid-June: “he rose gracefully and with a mild impressiveness of manner that commanded universal admiration.” For almost two hours Davis held the attention of his audience with a speech that “gave universal satisfaction.” According to this commentator, Davis adopted a particular style: “He addresses the reason, the judgement, the intellect; but has no words for the Passions. Convincing the head, he stoops not to warm the affections, or to fire the heart with emotion.” This writer wanted Davis to “animate the perfect, but somewhat inanimate statue of his eloquence with some of the strong outlines of passion.” Doing so, and in conjunction with “his inimitable style of passionless
argument,” would enable Davis to “rouse the will and the passions, enlist the feelings and captivate the imagination.” Then he “would rank among the foremost of our Mississippi orators.”26
Throughout the next five months of speechmaking, other critics made similar remarks about Davis’s chaste style. The “beauty of his style and the cogency of his reasoning” impressed one. Another described him as “an elegant, calm, and deliberate speaker” with “argumentative powers” of “the first order.” While praising these attributes, some wished for “more animation and warmth of action,” which after a time Davis began to provide.27
The heat of a long Mississippi summer evidently began to seep into his speeches. In Noxubee County in early August he gave a “soulstirring speech” of one hour; a week later in Aberdeen his oratory had an “elec[t]rical” impact on a large crowd. He could employ the vernacular to good effect: “the Whig party claim to be the decency party, raise their coons and roll their balls, but they remind me of a certain insect which rolls its ball backwards and down hill.”28
Davis had clearly improved, whether or not he had become what a Democratic partisan judged “the most eloquent and pathetic speaker in the southern country.” He also received exceptionally high marks from another aspiring Mississippi Democrat who first encountered Davis in late July at Holly Springs. Analyzing Jefferson Davis as an orator, Reuben Davis, who was not a relative, recalled that when Jefferson “made his salutation … there was nothing particularly imposing in his appearance or manner.” But “from the moment he began to speak with all the ease and eloquence of which he was so consummately master, he seemed to expand and etherealize into the very spirit of oratory.” Davis’s “soft and mellow utterance, his lucid argument,” delighted his listeners. “Dignified and commanding, soft and persuasive, his speech was from beginning to end a finished speech of logic and oratory,” which brought forth “rapturous applause” from the crowd.29
During at least sixteen speeches in eleven different counties, Davis concentrated on what he defined as the basic difference between the two parties. In his view, the central question facing Mississippians was as old as the country—constitutional interpretation and the power of the central government. He presented the Democratic party as the legitimate heir of Jefferson, “the sage and apostle of democracy.” Davis emblazoned states’ rights and strict construction on the Democratic banner, while the Whigs, as Davis represented them, embodied the consolidation and broad construction of Hamiltonianism and the Federalist party. The Democratic party, Davis emphasized, would always strive for lowering the tariff and would never permit the rechartering of the Bank of the United States because the Constitution did not specifically allow for either a protective tariff or a national bank. In contrast, Davis declared that the Whigs cared little about the words of the Constitution in their determination to aid manufacturers and augment the power of the federal government.30
During the campaign Davis did not focus on the issue that had brought down Van Buren and ignited the South, the annexation of Texas. Lying immediately west of Louisiana and just southwest of Arkansas, Texas had been on the southern political horizon for almost a decade.31 After successfully revolting from Mexico in 1836, Texas claimed to be an independent country. Because American immigrants, chiefly southerners, led the revolt and dominated the new republic, many in both Texas and the United States wanted Texas in the Union, but the existence of slavery in Texas put off many in the North and made acquisition a delicate issue. Such political considerations held back both Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren from advocating annexation. When the Virginian John Tyler became president in 1841, the political calculus changed. The southern-oriented Tyler administration believed with some justification that Great Britain had designs on Texas that included the abolition of slavery. It foresaw a threat to slavery in the South, and thus, in the administration’s perception, to the security of the entire country. Ambitious to remain in the White House, Tyler, who had been cast out of the Whig party for his opposition to its nationalist economic policy, also saw Texas annexation as a way to stir up political excitement in the South that might lead to a second Tyler administration. In the end Texas did create a furor in the South but did not keep Tyler president. Instead, it caused a southern Democratic revolt against the anti-Texas Van Buren, which cost him the party nomination in 1844 and led to the selection of the strongly pro-annexation James K. Polk.
Texas generated such a volcanic reaction in the South because it bore to the bedrock of southern values. Pro-Texas rhetoric linked annexation with southern honor by claiming that failure to annex would brand the South as inferior to the rest of the country: southerners must be unworthy Americans if only slavery, their fundamental social institution, barred Texas. Moreover, Texas symbolized the future. According to Texas proponents, only antisouthern and antislavery feeling in the North could prevent annexation, and therefore force the South to face a dismal political and economic future. Although tens of thousands of square miles in the Louisiana Purchase existed for more free states, little remained for additional slave states because the Missouri Compromise blocked slavery in most of the purchase. Texas provided the possibility of continued political parity for the South. If the North could exclude Texas, then the South would be confined within its boundaries and could anticipate becoming a weaker and weaker minority. The magnet of land was also wrapped up in Texas. From its beginning the American nation, including the South, had marched steadily westward—across the Appalachians, to the Mississippi Valley. Texas was next. Closing the gate to Texas shut out southerners from western expansion and from equal participation in the great American future.
The contemporary accounts of the canvass depict Henry S. Foote as the major Democratic spokesman for Texas, a division of labor that did not mean Davis was cool on Texas. As early as January 9, 1844, he joined Foote and John A. Quitman in addressing a public meeting in Jackson convened to call for joining Texas to the Union. In May, he served on a Committee of Twenty appointed by the Texas Annexation Association to prepare an address to Mississippians explaining the necessity for immediate annexation. When Davis did touch on the Texas issue during the canvass, his listeners “found him not one jot behind” the most enthusiastic boosters for turning the Republic of Texas into the state of Texas.32
To Mississippi voters, Davis made clear his concern about the South and the southern future. Connecting the South directly to the Democratic belief in strict construction, Davis argued, “We of the South are now in a minority, we must continue to be the minority, our only reliance is on the constitution as a barrier against legislative encroachment.…” In Davis’s judgment, expecting the majority to respect southern rights simply because it should made as much sense “as asking mercy of the wind and waves.” He hoped for a direct consideration of “whether the domestic institutions of the south shall be considered an objection to the extension of the southern states by the acquisition of adjoining territory.” In this wish Davis was unsuccessful, for the larger question of the extension of slavery never became a major campaign topic. Yet it stood at the center of the Texas matter because all, North and South, recognized that if Texas came into the Union, it would do so as a slave state.33
The strenuous efforts of Davis and his fellow Democratic warriors during the summer and fall of 1844 were rewarded. Traditionally Democratic, Mississippi remained safely in that column. Collecting 57 percent of the popular votes, Polk won easily over his Whig opponent Henry Clay and garnered Mississippi’s six electoral votes. Although all the Democratic campaigners won plaudits from the party, Davis received special notice. Even before the actual election, the major Democratic paper in the state heaped praise upon him: “He is a gallant soldier and has covered himself with honor in the present campaign.” A fellow Democratic activist reported that Davis gained “new laurels” whenever he appeared during the canvass. After the electoral triumph he served as one of the managers for a victory ball held in Vicksburg in early December.34
> The Democratic win in Mississippi was part of a national Democratic victory that made James K. Polk the eleventh president of the United States. Davis wasted no time in participating in the honored Jacksonian custom of seeking jobs for the party faithful. In early December he joined with other Democratic notables requesting President-elect Polk to appoint a fellow elector to a federal patronage post in Mississippi. That practice did not unsettle Davis, who later in the winter told one of his state’s senators that more Democrats than he had thought would be applying for positions. As a result, Davis “hope[d] our friends will not allow such of our enemies as shall have the impudence to place themselves in like attitude, to profit thereby.”35
At the same time Jefferson Davis found himself in the political limelight, he was beginning married life for the second time. When he and Varina returned to Davis Bend from their wedding trip, they took up residence at Brierfield in a cat-and-clayed house, in which straw and clay were melded for chinking, designed by Jefferson and built with the assistance of James Pemberton and other plantation slaves. As an architect, Davis did not match the man for whom he was named, Thomas Jefferson. Although located amidst a magnificent grove of oaks with slave quarters on both right and left, the house was not distinguished. Large rooms that “opened on a paved brick gallery, surrounded by lattice work,” characterized the structure. The windows were unusual because a “miscalculation” placed the sills at chest height. To admit as much air as possible and encourage circulation, Davis constructed outer doors six feet wide, which did help keep the house cool. Varina recollected that opening them seemed to make that entire side of the house disappear. To her, the deep fireplaces “looked as though they had been built in Queen Elizabeth’s time, to roast a sheep whole.”36