Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back

Robert Penn Warren

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813114453
• eBook ISBN: 9780813146683
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Biographien

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis—"not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution." Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

Jefferson
Davis
Gets His
Citizenship
Back

THERE are two kinds of memory. One is narrative, the unspooling in the head of what has happened, like a movie film with no voices. The other is symbolic—the image, say, of a dead friend of long ago, with a characteristic expression of face, which may be called up by a name. When I think of my maternal grandfather, I see an old man with white hair and a rather pointed beard, wearing bluejean pants, with a black tie hanging loose from a collar open at the throat—for in that memory it is an unchanging summer. He is sitting in a sturdy split-bottom chair, with its arms broadening to wide, rounded ends—the kind of chair that in the old days appeared here and there among rockers of similar design on the verandas of summer hotels in the South, called springs, where people went to avoid malaria. But my grandfather’s chair is under a cedar tree, propped back against the trunk, and blue smoke from his cob pipe threads thinly upward into the darkness of the cedar.

I am a small boy sitting tailor-fashion on the unkempt lawn, looking up at the old man, and then, beyond him, at the whitewashed board fence, and then at the woods coming down almost to the fence. If it was getting toward sunset, the uncountable guinea fowl would be coming in from foraging to roost near the house, making a metallic and disgruntled but halfhearted clatter, not the full, outraged racket of morning. I would be waiting for the old man to talk. Or even to sing, in his old, cracked voice, one of the few songs that might rise from his silence, sung only for himself. “We’ll Gather in the Canebrake and Hunt the Buffalo”—but even then I knew that long before his father’s time the buffalo had found their classic habitat on the Great Plains out West. Or a sad song about “Hallie in the Valley,” which I later learned was the song the Confederate troops had sung down the streets of New Orleans to wind up at Shiloh. And there was the song that began, “I wandered today to the hill,. Maggie,” which, like the others, seemed to be backward-looking. For, in spite of the obvious knowledge that I would grow up, I had the sweet-sad feeling that the world had already happened, that history had come to an end—though life did go on, and people lived, died, went broke.

Certainly that sense of changeless-ness hung over the run-down farm and farmhouse and under the cedar tree. My grandfather had lost his wife, Mary, years back. His only son lived far off in Atlanta. His daughters were all married and gone far away—except the “beauty,” that is, who was now an old maid, and the youngest one, who remained there on the farm to keep house for the old man. She was a small, charming woman, full of gaiety, vigorous and competent. She could pick up a twelve-gauge by the kitchen door, step out on the back porch, and knock a chicken hawk out of the sky—all in one motion, it seemed—and step back in and resume whatever song she had been singing. And she had the spunk to stand up to her father’s awe-inspiring opposition to the man of her choice and run away and marry anyway—at the house of my parents, in the small town of Guthrie, Kentucky.

Then the old man let the new husband take over the running of the farm, and sought refuge in his books as long as his eyes held out. In the summer, when the married daughters came for a visit under his roof, and I came, too, I might hear them now and then remark, “Papa is an inveterate reader”—which I understood as “Confederate reader,” wondering all the while what a Confederate reader might be. The daughters might say, too, “Papa is not practical, he is visionary.” And this, I gradually learned, referred to his one venture as a businessman, years back, when he had apparently been fairly successful as a tobacco buyer but, if I have the family talk right, had forgotten to pay an insurance premium on a warehouse of tobacco consigned to him, and the warehouse, such was his luck, burned. I remember hearing my young aunt and her husband singing together night after night, out in a swing on the lawn, in darkness or by moonlight, and seeing the streak of lamplight under my grandfather’s door. He would be reading. All this long after I was supposed to be asleep. Nobody ever came to the farm—through “the big gate,” a mile off on the pike—except kin and a family named Rawls: a widow with two daughters and a son, my only playmate. The Rawlses would come twice a summer, for late Sunday dinner, and always after dinner the older daughter (who studied “elocution” and later became a college professor) would give a “recital,” with gestures and stances, of poems my grandfather liked. His own head was, in fact, full of poems, and under the cedar he would sometimes begin reciting to me. There might be the stirring lines of Fitz-Greene Halleck’s “Marco Bozzaris”:

At midnight, in his guarded tent,

The Turk was dreaming of the hour

When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,

Should tremble at his power.

On to the surprise attack by Bozzaris and his exhortation:

Strike—for the green graves of your sires:

God—and your native land!

Byron usually followed: “So, We’ll Go No More a-Roving” and bits of “Childe Harold.” And always Burns, in the old man’s version of the Scots tongue. But I remember, too, the expression of pitiful outrage when memory would leave him stranded with some eloquence already on his lips.

What I liked even better than the poetry, however, was the random tale of a war he himself had fought for four years. He had volunteered as a private but by Shiloh was a captain of cavalry, and in that rank remained. He was—for a time, at least—under the immediate command of General James Ronald Chalmers; Chalmers was later attached to General Nathan B. Forrest, the old man’s hero. His account of the war came in bits and pieces, sometimes bloody, sometimes funny. My grandfather was not a witty man, but he could boast of one retort that, after all the years, still pleased his vanity. In northern Mississippi, a patrol from his company surprised a Yankee patrol and brought in, among the survivors, a lieutenant who was rather swarthy but not Negroid. He spoke a very correct English, but with a strange accent. My grandfather asked what he was. He was a Turk, he replied, and my grandfather demanded what, in God’s name, he was doing in Mississippi. “I am here to learn the art of war,” the Turk replied proudly. My grandfather remarked that he had come to the right place.

By no means all tales were comic. He had been outside Fort Pillow, on the Mississippi River north of Memphis, when Forrest sent in a demand for surrender, ending with the statement that without surrender “I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command.” But the men of the Union garrison felt snug in there, the old man said, and they had a gunboat, too. (It also turned out, apparently, that the fort’s liquor supply was to become available.) The ramparts were built too wide for the defending artillery on top to lower muzzles to guard the fort’s moat, however; a solid curtain of hot lead from the rifles of sharpshooters stationed in convenient woods swept it clean of gunners while the attackers scaled the wall over a bridge of human backs in the moat and poured in; the garrison panicked, and the blue command went into such a funk that formal surrender was impossible. A great many men of the garrison, fleeing down the bluff to the protection of the gunboat—protection that was not forthcoming, since the men inside were afraid of opening the gunports—were cut down by rifle fire. Some of the men tried to surrender individually—often with little success, especially if they were black.

The river ran red, the old man told me, but he didn’t say that the battle was termed a massacre in the Northern press and in Congress, and that Lincoln ordered an investigation, so that retaliation could be made. General William T. Sherman was put in charge of the investigation, but eventually came to the conclusion that there was no ground for retaliation, even though the ratio of black troops killed among the defenders was definitely higher than that of white. Forrest had made every personal effort to stop the slaughterous disorder.

Generally, however, my grandfather’s accounts were more abstract, and concerned tactics and strategy, with now and then a battle plan scratched on the ground with the point of his stick, and orders for me to move empty rifle shells to demonstrate an action for his explanation. Not always were these battles of the Civil War, for a book that he read over and over was “Napoleon and His Marshals” (by J. T. Headley, published in 1846), and the battle plan on the ground might be that of Austerlitz or Lodi.

Time seemed frozen, because nothing seemed to be happening there on that remote farm except the same things again and again: there where nohody came, and newspapers meant nothing to me—not even the one my grandfather held in his hand while he read the headlines about the beginning of the First World War, before he crumpled it, and said, “The sons of bitches are at it again.”

In the ever-present history there was, however, a kind of puzzlement. I had picked up a vaguely soaked-in popular notion of the Civil War, the wickedness of Yankees, the justice of the Southern cause (whatever it was; I didn’t know), the slave question, with Lincoln somehow a great man but misguided. The impression of the Civil War certainly did not come from my own household, where the war was rarely mentioned, and where, aside from poetry, what my father read to the children was history—a “Child’s History of Greece” or a “Child’s History of Rome,” and, later, a history of France (with a red cover). No, I didn’t get my impression of the Civil War from home. I got it from the air around me (with the ambiguous Lincoln bit probably from a schoolroom). But my old grandfather, who was history, was often a shock to my fuddled preoccupations.

One afternoon, I almost jumped out of my skin when he musingly remarked that he had been a Union man. That is, he went on, he had been against secession—hadn’t wanted to see the country his folks had had a good hand in making (his folks, it later developed, had been Virginians) split up and get “Balkanized.” I didn’t know what the word meant, but he explained. Then he told me that his Great-Grandfather Abram had been a colonel in the Revolution, and an uncle (or was it a cousin of the same generation?) had signed the Declaration. The old man also said he had known that slavery couldn’t last—even if I gathered from conversation that there must have been slaves in the family. For instance, I knew Old Aunt Cat, who had been my grandfather’s nurse (and was to outlive him about twenty years), and who, I was told, had come with the family when they fled from Tennessee to Kentucky. But he said that when war came “you went with your people.” Sometimes, however, in speaking of the war in a different tone, he would call it “a politicians’ war.” Or say, “It didn’t have to be. It was just worked up by fools—Southern fire-eaters and Yankee abolitionists.” Perhaps he merely expected history to be rational—that most irrational of expectations.

For a long time, I have wondered how truly his random recollections corresponded to the views that he had held as a young volunteer. He was a loner, a man of great independence of mind, and a man who, though he must have considered himself a failure, maintained a dignity and self-assurance almost amounting to contempt for the way the world wagged or the cards fell. He even deplored segregation, simply because he felt it stupid and restrictive of his own freedom.

There was the question of Jefferson Davis. In my shadowy understanding of history, I assumed that since Jefferson Davis had been President of the Confederacy he was beyond reproach. But not for my grandfather—he could come close to saying right out that Jeff had thrown the war away. My first puzzlement arose, I imagine, from the fact that he called the President merely Jeff. When I was a small boy, there was a walking monument to Jefferson Davis back in my home town—years before the great monolith that now looms some miles to the north had been set up. This man, this walking monument, may have been named for the President of the Confederacy, for he was born in the middle of Reconstruction. He may even have been a kinsman, though my efforts to find some connection between him and the numberless siblings of Jefferson Davis have come to nothing, and I remember reading that there were two families named Davis in the early days of the county. This walking monument was always called Old Jeff Davis—the “Old” being almost part of his name, not because of years but because he seemed to have no age. The lowest of the low, insofar as a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back