Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era

William J. Cooper

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780807153116
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia della guerra civile americana

In his masterpiece, Jefferson Davis, American, William J. Cooper, Jr., crafted a sweeping, definitive biography and established himself as the foremost scholar on the intriguing Confederate president. Cooper narrows his focus considerably in Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era, training his expert eye specifically on Davis's participation in and influence on events central to the American Civil War. Nine self-contained essays address how Davis reacted to and dealt with a variety of issues that were key to the coming of the war, the war itself, or in memorializing the war, sharply illuminating Davis's role during those turbulent years.
Cooper opens with an analysis of Davis as an antebellum politician, challenging the standard view of Davis as either a dogmatic priest of principle or an inept bureaucrat. Next, he looks closely at Davis's complex association with secession, which included, surprisingly, a profound devotion to the Union. Six studies explore Davis and the Confederate experience, with topics including states' rights, the politics of command and strategic decisions, Davis in the role of war leader, the war in the West, and the meaning of the war. The final essay compares and contrasts Davis's first inauguration in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1861 with a little-known dedication of a monument to Confederate soldiers in the same city twenty-five years later. In 1886, Davis -- an old man of seventy-eight and in poor health -- had himself become a living monument, Cooper explains, and was an essential element in the formation of the Lost Cause ideology.
Cooper's succinct interpretations provide straightforward, compact, and deceptively deep new approaches to understanding Davis during the most critical time in his life. Certain to stimulate further thought and spark debate, Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era offers rare insight into one of American history's most complicated and provocative figures.

1

JEFFERSON DAVIS AND THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE OF SOUTHERN POLITICS

Before the Civil War, Jefferson Davis was a superlative politician. Such a claim smacks of heresy in the face of the legion of critics who have branded him as stiff-necked, unbending, doctrinaire, and overbearing. Jefferson Davis, either as an upright, dogmatic priest of principle or an inept, autocratic bureaucrat miscast in the role of politician, is a historical and historiographical staple.

That these robustly long-lived portrayals of Davis originated with both enemies and friends helps explain, perhaps, their seeming immortality. Characterizing Davis as cold, resentful, authoritarian, and despotic, Edward Pollard, an angry wartime opponent, summarized the views of Davis’s antebellum and wartime foes. Pollard asserted that Davis’s grievous faults caused the failure of his presidency and of the Confederate States of America. Although approaching Davis from a quite different perspective, Varina Davis, in her memoir of her husband published in 1890, added to this portrait of a man ill-suited for politics. She reported that he “did not know the arts of the politician and would not practice them if understood.” What he really knew about, according to Mrs. Davis, was soldiering, and that was the path he really wanted to take.¹

Historians, with few exceptions, have followed those leads. Bell Wiley depicted a man who did not see the need for “cultivating the elementary art of political maneuver” and who certainly did not exhibit the attributes of “the master politician.” In his mammoth history of sectional conflict and war, Allan Nevins found Davis’s gifts sadly lacking, though he finally did inch toward the view that Davis did about as well as anyone else could have during his Confederate ordeal. In probably the most damning indictment of Davis as a political leader, David Potter not only proclaimed that his shortcomings doomed the Confederacy but also suggested that if Abraham Lincoln had been in Davis’s place, the Confederacy might have succeeded.²

More recent students have not discovered a fundamentally new Jefferson Davis. In his stimulating After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism, Paul Escott states bluntly that the president shouldered much of the responsibility for Confederate defeat. Moreover, Escott emphasizes that Davis’s personal deficiencies were instrumental in causing the Confederate catastrophe. Likewise, in his path-breaking study of Confederate politics, George Rable finds Davis not up to the challenge, especially as a political leader. Rable argues that he lacked and was never able to develop crucial political talents essential for an effective president. A modern Davis biographer does not disagree. William C. Davis presents a president so unfit for national leadership and with a basic “contempt” for political arts that the reader can only come away amazed that any of Jefferson Davis’s contemporaries could ever have considered him an appropriate choice for the highest public office in the fledgling country.³

Of course, Davis is almost always compared to Lincoln. One inescapable truth is that Lincoln’s side won and Davis’s lost. Only that fact, in Ludwell Johnson’s mind, raises Lincoln above Davis. But Johnson has few fellow members in his “Davis is better than Lincoln” club. Those historians at all sympathetic with Davis in the comparison contest generally adopt Nevins’s eventual position: He had ability and did the best he could, and probably no one could have done better, but still he was no match for Lincoln. Even so, this stance drives people to look for Davis’s blemishes and inadequacies, for which the evidence apparently abounds.⁴

I have no intention here of challenging the overwhelmingly prevailing view of Davis’s political delinquency as Confederate president. Rather, I will ask why it occurred. Although the scholars above have largely concentrated on the war years, they have concurred, either openly or tacitly, with Roy Nichols that the antebellum Davis had “already indicat[ed] that capacity for political failure which was to be amply demonstrated by him when he became President of the Confederacy.” My contention is that the antebellum Davis was quite different from Nichols’s political cripple and from the consensus interpretation of the Confederate Davis. And if the consensus view of the Confederate Davis is correct, then something dramatic had to have happened to make it so.⁵

Just a glance reveals Jefferson Davis’s impressive antebellum political career. He started at the bottom with a failed run in 1843 for the Mississippi legislature. He moved to the winner’s circle with his work as presidential elector in 1844 and remained there the next year when he was victorious in a statewide race for the U.S. House of Representatives. In the summer of 1846, he left the House to fight in the Mexican War. Returning a hero, he entered the U.S. Senate in 1847, and from then until January 1861 he sat either in the Senate or the cabinet for all but eighteen months. In the 1850s he was easily the most prominent political figure in Mississippi. That is surely an enviable political record, though strange for a man supposedly a hater of politics and the antithesis of a politician.

A closer look at Jefferson Davis and politics, at Davis as a politician, is in order. I want to make clear what I intend with the term politician. First, it implies participation in the political process, from indicating the initial ambition for office to campaigning to behaving like a person who likes and wants to continue in office. Second, and perhaps more important, I refer to a mindset that understands politics as a means toward an end. In the American political system of the mid-nineteenth century, that meant working through institutions and with other people to attain goals. This description might sound like a truism, but too often southern leaders like Davis are thought of as men who stood up and announced their principles, shunning the give-and-take of political intercourse while preaching their version of political truth. In this scenario such men rode alone like political knights searching for an ideological grail. Of course, every age has its quota of such Galahads, but Jefferson Davis before 1861 absolutely never belonged to that band.

When Jefferson Davis emerged in 1843 from an eight-year self- imposed seclusion following the death of his first wife, his ambition for public office was evident. His wealthy and influential older brother Joseph provided him with entree to the local Democratic party. Jefferson grasped his opportunity. With legislative elections approaching and facing problems with candidates, Warren County Democrats turned to an untested, untried planter in his mid-thirties. Davis readily agreed, even though he expected to lose because of the heavy Whig majority in the county. He made a hard run that included his willingly debating Mississippi’s most prominent Whig, Seargent S. Prentiss. Despite his strenuous effort, he realized his expectation and lost.⁶ Still, it is hard to imagine a better way for an aspiring political neophyte to garner favor from both party notables and party voters.

Therefore, no doubt remained about Davis’s ambition for political preferment. Although in the style of his time he often asserted both that he longed for private life and that he would never put himself forward for office, his activities repeatedly belied such claims. Perhaps a senatorial antagonist exaggerated when he described Davis as “burning up with ambition.” But considerable truth resides in Andrew Johnson’s assessment. Davis’s vigorously effective performance as a presidential elector in 1844 so impressed the party faithful that the next year the state Democratic convention nominated him to run for Congress. Despite debilitation from illness, Davis did not hesitate to commence a rigorous campaign trip, a determination that greatly worried his new wife of seven months.⁷

Political ambition was paramount for Jefferson Davis. After less than a year in the House of Representatives, he left for the Mexican War, a decision blended of ambition and patriotism. Once again he rejected the pleas of his young wife that he not go. A few years later he was quite blunt, declaring to her, “your claim on my time though first could my heart decide.” But his heart did not command. Politics interfered. “Circumstances” have “pressed” me “immediately,” he explained as he informed her that another five months would pass before they could see each other again.⁸

Davis knew that his political success required his personal attention. He was never out of touch with his political friends and operatives while in Mexico. Returning a hero, he eagerly embraced an appointment to the U.S. Senate. Within a few months of his taking his seat in December 1847, the legislature would decide whether to retain him. From Washington he let an associate know that he was more interested in the legislature’s choice than if he had stayed in Mississippi, though admitting that he did not want to be recalled. Albert G. Brown, a major force in Mississippi politics and a man both envious and wary of Davis, testified to Davis’s successful cultivation of his political field. He reported that at the state Democratic convention of 1855, “Davis was there directing affairs in person.” And to good effect, for Brown lamented, “his friends got possession of the convention and managed every thing their own way.”⁹

Davis was not at all reluctant to have his story and his views placed before the voting public. In his failed run for governor in 1851, a campaign biography prepared by a political ally presented him in the most favorable possible light. A Sketch of the Life of Jefferson Davis, the Democratic Candidate for Governor contained much personal information that could hardly have been made available without his knowledge. Then in 1858 Harper’s Weekly published a supremely positive front-page profile complete with a large illustration of the Mississippian. Concerned about the political fallout from certain addresses on the sectional issue that he made in 1858, Davis agreed with advisers and brought out an edition of his speeches. And he worked hard to distribute it. Such exertions are certainly not what one would expect from a man who really wanted to return permanently to private life in Warren County.¹⁰

No other activity demonstrated more clearly Davis’s determination to triumph as a politician than his unceasing speaking tours through his state. The Mississippi political arena of the 1840s and 1850s was home to a rowdy, rough-and-tumble spectator sport. White manhood suffrage had existed since 1832, and the sovereign voters required wooing and intermingling from prospective officeholders. This was emphatically not a political world in which rich planters sipping sherry and juleps in elegant drawing rooms controlled candidates and elections. Although energetic campaigning accompanied by constant speech-making and “pressing the flesh” antedated Davis’s entry into the arena, no diminution took place during his time there.

From the very beginning Jefferson Davis participated fully and willingly in the demanding ordeal set up by Mississippi voters for those who wanted their allegiance. Abominable roads, poor transportation, nasty weather, and uncertain accommodations notwithstanding, Davis and his compatriots made their required treks through towns, villages, and countryside. In his initial statewide campaign as a presidential elector in 1844, Davis gave at least sixteen speeches in eleven different counties. Possibly his wife overstated the case when she later claimed that before the campaign no more than a dozen men outside Warren County knew her husband’s name. There is no doubt, however, that Davis’s performance catapulted him toward the front rank of his party. The very next year, in his victorious race for Congress, he spoke in at least twelve counties. During 1851 as Mississippi debated fundamental issues resulting from the Compromise of 1850, Davis seemingly lived on the campaign trail. From early May to mid-June, he made twenty-four stops in central and northern Mississippi. From the end of June through mid-August, he mounted podiums some thirteen times from Natchez to Oxford.¹¹

When he served for a second time in the U.S. Senate between 1857 and 1861, Davis did not alter this active, engaged pattern. He planned a tour through the upper half of Mississippi for the fall of 1857. In the presidential contest of 1860, he spent the final six weeks traveling and speaking throughout the state. But these oratorical journeys often left him physically spent. On several occasions exhaustion and illness forced him to delay or curtail his schedule. Never, however, did he jettison this essential, albeit physically debilitating, part of the Mississippi politician’s life.¹²

Although Davis made sure that he often personally appeared among Mississippi voters, he also recognized that many of them expected tangible results from officeholders. He never let them down. Reporting to a constituent in December 1845 that he did not have the answer to a land problem, the new congressman continued, “not willing to delay any longer I write now to assure you that your case shall not be neglected.” Davis used whatever tack he thought would be effective with the Washington bureaucracy to help his constituents. Attempting to get a midshipman’s warrant in the U.S. Navy for a young Mississippian, Davis reminded the secretary of the navy that “we of Mississippi have less than our proportionate share of navy appointments.” Sending government publications such as the surveys of possible transcontinental railroad routes and reports of the Patent Office to political friends, and at times even to opponents, kept him in touch with voters and imprinted his name on their minds. His diligent efforts on this front had the desired result. When “a common farmer,” James B. Smith, who led “a humble life” thanked the senator for several publications, he identified Davis as the only member of the Mississippi congressional delegation who had “so far condescended from his high pinnacle of Congressional Glory, so as to favor me with anything of importance from Headquarters.” Davis thereafter had a loyal champion.¹³

Jefferson Davis took a systematic approach to constituent service, a task to which he obviously attached considerable importance. When he returned to Washington as a senator in 1847, he could not locate certain books and papers he had left behind when he headed to Mexico in the summer of 1846. The ensuing problem, as he told a colleague back in Mississippi, was that he had no list of correspondents. To remedy this unacceptable situation, he asked his fellow Democrat to send him a roster of appropriate names. Senator Davis used a ledger to keep track of his political base. The ledger of more than four hundred pages, with around 80 percent filled, begins with a catalog of Mississippi newspapers by town and county. There is also a roll of correspondents, individual and institutional, again by town and county, with an alphabetically arranged table of contents.¹⁴

For Jefferson Davis, loyalty to the Democratic Party remained a touchstone through the antebellum years. When he began his political career as a legislative candidate, the Democratic newspaper in his county called him “a sterling democrat.” Two years later during his race for Congress, that same newspaper described him as “a Democrat to the core.” His party identity and loyalty never wavered. As late as 1860 he vigorously exerted himself to get the national Democratic convention to stay together and choose a nominee who could heal intraparty wounds and lead the party to victory.¹⁵

Davis’s sense of political fealty underscored his bond to the Democratic Party. To a friend he wrote in 1851 “that my political life has been devoted to the democratic cause.” In a campaign speech the following year, he identified himself as “a party man, [who] had been bred in the paths of Democracy, and had never deviated from them.” Repeating those sentiments before the U.S. Senate in 1858, Davis declared that his “relations to the party are those of a common opinion and unity of principle.” To the Mississippi Democratic Convention of 1859, he portrayed the party as “sacred to us as the cause of truth and of our country.”¹⁶

Simultaneously the party had a profound call on Davis. He loved being in the Senate, yet he voluntarily left in 1851 for a considerably less attractive alternative, running for governor of Mississippi. His explanation for this action testified to the power of the party. “It was in accordance with that rule of conduct which required me as a democrat to serve my party where they require me, not where my taste or ambition might dictate.”¹⁷ Not even the most stalwart party man, not even James K. Polk, for example, could have come forth with a more ringing credo.

For Davis, however, party loyalty was not an end in itself. As he proclaimed in a public letter, “party consultation and party organization are the means, not the end.” A party could be justified, in Davis’s mind, by adherence to “principle alone.”¹⁸ To him the Democratic Party stood for his most cherished principles: strict construction of the Constitution and states’ rights. Those two fundamental precepts had, of course, a variety of manifestations.

The presidential election of 1848 provides an apt perspective on Davis’s view of party loyalty. In that year the Whig presidential nominee was Zachary Taylor, his first father-in-law, his former commanding general in Mexico, and his close friend. Personally Davis overwhelmingly preferred Taylor; in fact he had been involved in discussions aimed at making Taylor the Democratic stan...