Jefferson Davis, American Read online

  Despite his wife’s obvious distress, Congressman Davis did not bend from his determination to become Colonel Davis. When the verdict from Vicksburg along with a tender of the commission as colonel of the First Mississippi Regiment reached Washington, he readily accepted. Even so, he kept his bargain with President Polk, not leaving Washington until July 4, the day after he had voted with the majority in the House for the Walker Tariff. The Davises returned home by the same northern route they had taken to Washington some eight months previously. This time, they had a most pleasant journey. Instead of snow and ice, Varina remembered, “the whole mountain sides were rosy with the blossoms of the laurel, and nothing could have been more attractive than the scenery.” On this trip Jefferson focused his attention on the three matters most crucial to him: his wife, his political career, and his return to uniform.8

  Varina’s well-being deeply concerned him. Her health still worried him as it had for the past month, and he really wanted her to remain in the North for the summer, but she was determined to go back to Mississippi with him. What to do with her while he was away at war also caused him anxiety. From a steamboat on the Ohio River, he wrote his beloved sister Lucinda that if “circumstances warranted,” he would send Varina to live with her. Acknowledging what he perceived as possible difficulties with his wife, he told Lucinda, “To you and your family alone of all the world could I entrust her and rest assured that no waywardness would ever lessen kindness.” But he indicated that Varina would “probably” live with her mother during most of his absence. Staying at Hurricane would not work, for Varina “could not be contented” with Eliza, “nor would their residing together increase their good feeling for each other.” That fact, Davis confided, “distresses me as you will readily imagine, but if you ever have an opportunity to understand Varina’s character, you will see the propriety of the conclusion, and I feel that you will love her too much to take heed of the weaknesses which spring from a sensitive and generous temper.”9

  Although he found making arrangements for Varina vexing, he never forgot that he remained a sitting congressman. He left Washington with Congress still in session, though he did not resign. From the steamboat the Star Spangled Banner, on July 13 Davis wrote a public letter “To the People of Mississippi,” explaining his early departure from the capital and reporting on his actions while there. First, his being chosen by Mississippians to lead them into Mexico accounted for his heading home early. He had accepted that post of responsibility because he believed his military education and experience meant both that his service was due his country and that he could help the Mississippi regiment. He hastened to add that he had not abandoned any critical measures that would face close votes. He had even stayed on after getting his commission to vote for the lower Walker Tariff, which did pass the House, and he was also certain it would gain approval in the Senate. Then he recounted his activities on subjects ranging from the Independent Treasury and Oregon to his support for the effort to obtain alternate sections of public land to aid in building the Mississippi & Alabama Railroad. Defending the administration’s Mexican policy, he maintained that it had tried to resolve differences with that country but had been spurned. When Mexico crossed the Rio Grande and attacked our troops, Davis asserted, the president and all Americans had to defend the flag. Defining his sense of the relationship between his constituents and himself, he announced that he had “acted upon all measures as seemed to me best to accord with the principles upon which I was elected, and most likely to correspond with the wishes and interests of the people of Mississippi.” He concluded by declaring that he had striven to be a good representative for Mississippi but that the voters would have the final judgment. “I will cheerfully submit to your decision.”10

  Traveling west and south, Davis also reflected upon and prepared for his return to the army. During much of the journey he “studied a little pocket edition of military tactics.” Varina recalled that when she protested his absorption, her husband “explained agreeably the mysteries of enfilading, breaking column, hollow squares, and what not.” To Lucinda he recounted how proud his election as colonel made him. He also unhesitatingly expressed his hope that his service might enhance his name and fame. If the opportunity arose, “it may be that I will return with a reputation over which you will rejoice as my Mother would have done.”11

  When Jefferson Davis reached home on July 13, he did not have much time to arrange his personal and business affairs. The orders he received before leaving Washington directed the First Mississippi to proceed immediately to the Rio Grande Valley and join General Taylor. In preparation for being transported to the war zone, the regiment had already gone downriver to New Orleans even before its colonel had officially taken command.12

  At Davis Bend, Colonel Davis, in consultation with Joseph and Varina, made arrangements for the settlement of his wife and the management of his plantation during his absence. Although Jefferson and Varina had undoubtedly discussed these matters on their way south, details of the decisions made en route and in Mississippi have not survived. Varina would spend much of her time at Brierfield, with a niece of Jefferson’s coming over from Hurricane to join her every night; the remainder chiefly with her parents in Natchez; but some time also with Joseph. To look after Brierfield, Davis decided to leave his slave overseer, James Pemberton, in charge. Davis and Pemberton discussed whether the slave should accompany his master to Mexico or remain on the plantation. According to Varina, her husband permitted James Pemberton to make the final decision, and he decided to stay at home. Of course, Joseph was just one mile down the road, if needed. Thus, the situation at Brierfield continued just as it had been with Davis in Washington, but for Varina’s sometime presence. After the decision about Pemberton, Joseph provided his brother with one of his slaves, Jim Green, as a servant, and a fine Arabian horse named Tartar. With wife and plantation secure under the watchful eye of Joseph, Colonel Jefferson Davis set out for his regiment.13

  Reaching New Orleans on July 17, Davis found his men encamped three miles below the city at Chalmette Plantation, the site of the Battle of New Orleans. Organized in ten companies, the regiment had an aggregate strength of 936 officers and men. Besides Davis, the other elected regimental officers were Lieutenant Colonel Alexander K. McClung, former federal marshal of the Northern District of Mississippi, and Major Alexander B. Bradford, the man who had a plurality on the first ballot for colonel. Davis found conditions atrocious; the troops were in open fields exposed to the rainy weather, with mud and water knee-deep. The awful sanitary conditions and neglected hygiene led to a lengthening sick list. Davis immediately got his unit moved to some empty cotton sheds closer to the city. This improved location did not completely satisfy volunteers eager to get to the war they had signed up to fight. Though chafing, the troops enthusiastically welcomed their commanding officer, for whom they had been waiting with “intense anxiety” and whom they believed would make a “gallant commander.” Davis set promptly to work getting his regiment on board ships bound for the war. He was distressed that the percussion rifles he had been promised in Washington had not yet arrived.14

  The avenue he took to prod delivery of the rifles revealed the army officer still operating as politician. On July 22, the date his first three companies sailed, he requested Secretary of the Treasury Walker to check on the whereabouts of the rifles. Walker evidently acted, for the rifles were eventually dispatched from New Orleans on revenue cutters controlled by the Treasury Department. In that same letter Davis also reported on Democratic political affairs in New Orleans. In Davis’s view, Secretary Walker had great strength in the city, but something needed to be done with “the Custom house officers,” who, Davis told Walker, “hang a dead weight upon you.” In addition, he advised Walker that the Democratic newspaper could accomplish “much good if unembarrassed—more harm if rendered hostile to us.” An observant, loyal, and ambitious Democrat, Jefferson Davis clearly did not want the Polk administration to forget about him.15
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br />   He also handled his own political position quite cautiously. Although he had accepted the commission as colonel, left Congress early, and actually assumed command of his regiment, he had not yet resigned his seat. His failure to do so did occasion some adverse comment in Mississippi, but the Democratic party in the state generally backed him on this point. The major Democratic newspaper pronounced that no obligation required him to depart officially; “on the contrary, we think he ought not resign.” According to the Mississippian, the current session of Congress would not last much longer, and plenty of time remained for Davis to resign and a successor to be chosen for the next session, should he remain in the army. Davis had obviously discussed this matter with party officials, for on July 15 the Mississippian announced, “we think we are authorized to say he will not.” Davis had left with Joseph a letter of resignation to be submitted at the appropriate time, if it came. Davis clearly did not want to act precipitously. If the war ended quickly and the First Mississippi disbanded, he wanted to redeem his congressman’s seat, not simply return to private life. Not until mid-October did Joseph forward Jefferson’s official resignation to the governor.16

  Although politics did not disappear from Colonel Davis’s field of vision, he focused on the military task at hand. Advance elements of the First Mississippi departed New Orleans on July 22 for Brazos Island, just north of the mouth of the Rio Grande, the staging area for reinforcements arriving from the United States. The next day, four more companies embarked; the remainder, with Davis amongst them, left on July 26. On the twenty-eighth the regiment came ashore, but it did not find the core of Taylor’s army.

  When Mexico did not give in or offer negotiations after Taylor’s initial victories, Polk decided to step up the pressure. After all, his goal from the outset had been California, especially, and New Mexico. Always willing to risk war, he would not be deterred because it had begun. Now the administration directed General Taylor to invade northern Mexico, with the purpose of occupying that portion of the country in order to press Mexico to agree to American territorial demands. With the city of Monterrey his major target, Taylor had decided to establish the base for his invasion at Camargo, Mexico, around 240 river miles up the Rio Grande. When the Mississippians arrived, the bulk of his army was either already there or underway. Back at the mouth of the river and Brazos Island newly arriving units gathered and awaited steamboats to transport them to Camargo.17

  The First Mississippi had come to a truly inhospitable spot. A treeless, sandy barrier key, Brazos Island was between three and four miles long and about two miles wide. In the middle of the summer the troops faced a merciless environment. When, after a few days, the regiment moved to the mouth of the river, conditions changed not at all. There were still no trees even along the low banks of the river. One soldier recorded, “I never experienced such heat from the sun in my life—never saw so many flies.” And in what another called “a lone and desolate beach,” there was no fresh water. Storms could bring welcome, though temporary, relief from the sun’s rays, but they also left an unwelcome legacy: “every thing one eats and drinks has its own portion of land intermixed.” Homesickness and diarrhea affected many of the young soldiers, who lived in tents pitched “on the ridge of serried hills which skirt[ed] the sea shore.”18

  The wait by the sea did not sit well with the regimental commander, who “chafed at delay.” To Secretary Walker, Davis complained, “We have met delay and detention at every turn.” Finally, the rifles arrived, but he asserted that the quartermaster at New Orleans had acted either “most incompetently or maliciously.” Then the percussion caps, essential for firing the rifles, were held up. One of Davis’s officers perceived that Davis’s disgust at inefficiency and the halt at the mouth of the Rio Grande was aggravated by “the Col.’s heart being altogether set on military glory.” For about a month, however, Davis had to cope with his own frustration and with an unhappy group of soldiers in a miserably hot and unhealthful place. In these weeks he concentrated on what he thought a responsible commander should enforce, the discipline and training of his troops. Unlike a number of the volunteer regiments where attention to the basics of military life was rare, the First Mississippi underwent a crash course in soldiering. Drill and then more drill occupied the men; guard was mounted and relieved in the regulation manner. At least one young soldier complained in his diary about this “strict Military Discipline.” Davis even developed a manual of arms for using rifles that employed percussion caps. Because of these special weapons the First Mississippi acquired an appellation that stuck: “the Mississippi Rifles.”19

  Seat of Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War.

  From Papers of Jefferson Davis, III, with permission of the LSU Press

  While struggling with conditions in his pestilential camp, Davis did not forget his young wife back in Mississippi. In a tender, hasty note from New Orleans, “your Hubbie” spoke “with a heart full of love to own Winnie,” a favored nickname. From southern Texas, their disagreement over his joining the army and his view of her proper conduct occupied his attention. Noting the “extraordinarily quiet voyage” across the Gulf of Mexico, he told Varina that the calmness of Gulf waters was fine, but her “agitation” concerned him much more. “May God have preserved you as calm,” he preached. Acknowledging an “affectionate letter” from her, he adopted his fatherly stance, expressing pleasure that she was engaged in “useful and domestic things.” He went on to lecture. “However unimportant in themselves each may be, it is the mass which constitutes the business of life, and as it is pursued so will it generally be found that a woman is happy and contented.” Then he urged that “the season of our absence may be a season of reflection bearing fruits of soberness, and utility, and certainty of thought and action.” He made absolutely clear his feeling that his reputation depended in no small part on her conduct. “My love for you placed my happiness in your keeping, our vows have placed my hono[r] and respectability in the same hands.” Two weeks later, he sermonized: “Be pious, be calm, be useful, and charitable and temperate in all things.”

  Their marriage was not simply patriarchal or one-sided, however. He reported that he had not forgotten Varina’s request “on the subject of profanity and have improved.” The genuine affection and playfulness they shared also shone brightly: “Hubbie would kiss the paper he sends to his wife, but is in the midst of men, who though talking & whistling and wondering … have time enough to observe any thing the Col. does—I send a kiss upon the wires of love and feel earth, air & sea cannot break the connection.”20

  One connection which Davis reestablished was with his former father-in-law and now commanding general, Zachary Taylor. Upon his arrival on the Rio Grande, Davis received a warm welcoming letter from General Taylor. The estrangement between the two men, which went back more than a decade to Davis’s army days and his courtship of Knox Taylor, had ended about two years earlier. In an apparently accidental meeting on a steamboat traveling between Vicksburg and Natchez, they reconciled their past differences and commenced what would mature into a sincere friendship. Taylor did not hide his feelings: “I can assure you I am more than anxious to take you by the hand, & to have you & your command with or near me.” But, Taylor said, the limited transportation meant that not all units could be moved inland at once, and those that disembarked on Brazos Island first were the first to leave. Hence, the script seemed to read, more waiting.21

  Yet Taylor did give the First Mississippi priority over several other regiments that had preceded it to the coast. He also evidently informed Davis that he would ensure that the Mississippi Rifles would always be with him. When orders to start upriver arrived, the men began going on board the steamboats that would convey them up to Camargo, and by August 26 all the companies were underway. But though the regiment had departed from its hated sandspit, it had hardly set out on a pleasure cruise. The regimental quartermaster recounted a wretched journey: “Everybody dissatisfied, unhappy, the boat fetid & stinking, & many, very many
, sick. I was suffering dreadfully with the universal complaint, diarrhea, so hot, such a dreadful stench from the necessities, biscuit half cooked, no place to poke one’s head in where a moment’s comfort could be found, night or day. The sick strewed about, some delirious & crying out for their friends. I became so weak that I could scarcely walk.”22

  At last the First Mississippi reached Camargo, a hot, dusty town with summer temperatures reaching well above 100 degrees. It rested on the San Juan River, three miles above its confluence with the Rio Grande. Though no paradise, Camargo was in Mexico, and there the Rifles joined the army poised for invasion. That force, which by September had swollen to 15,000 men, made its home in white tent cities outside the town.23

  As Colonel Davis got his troops ready for the advance to Monterrey, some 100 miles southwest of Camargo, the First Mississippi had already suffered substantially from disease. By the end of August, 108 men had been discharged for health reasons, another 70 were listed as sick, and a number had died. In sum, the Rifles had already lost between 20 and 25 percent of their strength. In the midst of all this sickness, Davis himself, despite his medical history, escaped any debilitating illness.24