Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back Read online

  Life settled down into small-town routine, with the major excitement the almost annual fight between a new school principal and the biggest bully among the pupils. I recall that one year a frail-looking new principal dramatically, with what amounted to karate expertise, threw Charlie Parham, who probably had fifty pounds on the assailant, through the glass of a window fifteen feet above ground. Charlie, a good-natured oaf, turned up the next morning smiling, saying, “I thought the son of a bitch was coming right after me, so I hit running and ran all the way to town.” A few doting fathers, in similar instances, brought suit against winners, but regularly lost. In an instance before my time, so James Groves (clerk of the Circuit and District Courts and past president of the county historical society) writes me, the locomotive of the little evening train for the seven miles from Elkton to Guthrie, bearing news of the day’s legal proceedings and the person of the lately accused pedagogue, burst into wild toots of triumph to celebrate acquittal and law and order. Another year, a boy in the tenth grade (my grade then) flattened a street-carnival hand with a tent peg, was tried for murder, was acquitted on the ground of self-defense, and came back to school to bask in his glory—but this is now memory, for Groves tells me that the records of any such incident, if there ever were any, cannot be found. The days of semi-frontier violence were, however, soon to pass. When the First World War began, male principals were called to the colors, and a stern female professional of middle age and little mercy took over. The germ of primitive chivalry lurking in the breast of local roughs did the rest.

  By this time, Guthrie was beginning to doubt its own future, for fewer and fewer trains were stopping, and some even dashed contemptuously through. The automobile was beginning to destroy the “Sat’dy traden” of a market town in favor of trips to larger and more glamorous places, which for the first time were now seeming close. What sense of history had existed in the region was in the old farm families, who had long memories. (One old man—my brother’s father-in-law, in fact—used to tell how his father had ridden off wearing the gray, a body servant following on a second horse with a little trunk of fresh clothes and such things on the crupper.) In addition to long memories, a number of the farmers had a strong civic sense, and were sometimes bookish. One whom I knew very well—he was a rarity, I confess—would now and then take a university student who was about to fail Greek and tutor him all summer, just to keep his own hand in, he would say; the “boy” would have four hours of tutorial and four hours of physical labor. In later years, I met one of the boys when he arrived on his pious annual pilgrimage to see the old man who had “made” his life for him—the boy now a sartorially impressive figure and an impressive member of the bar in Chicago.

  I remember, in childhood, being taken by my family in a rented surrey to spend a weekend in the house of farm friends, and, when I was older, going out alone for a weekend or so. Perhaps in those days I picked up the Southern-ism that my grandfather now and then shocked. No reference to Jefferson Davis sticks in my mind from that period, however, and the visits to the farms ceased as the older people died off, leaving my family in a contracting circle.

  Toward the time I was ten or eleven, I began to hear the name of Jefferson Davis on the streets. This was scarcely a symptom of Southern chauvinism. There was “news” in the name of Davis now. The news was that, not many miles off, in the settlement of Fairview, a big monument was going to be erected to Jefferson Davis, whoever the hell he was—a monument taller, maybe, than the Washington Monument. A monument meant jobs—even if the First World War, before our entry, was already spurring the American economy. It meant jobs with no questions asked about the color of the uniform your grandfather had worn, or even whether he had been a bushwhacker. In truth, such questions had never been of burning importance in Guthrie, where to a certain number of contemporary citizens the Civil War seemed to have been fought for the right to lynch without legal interference.

  The monument project had been in the air for some time. In 1907, remnants of the Kentucky “Orphan Brigade”—Confederate troops drawn from a state that had not declared for the Confederacy—had organized the Jefferson Davis Memorial Association, which took an option on a tract of land near the site of his birth. Not on the site, for back in 1886 the solid brick structure of the Bethel Baptist Church (still standing) had preempted it. The Bethel Baptists, knowing that Jefferson Davis was a religious man (even if he was a fallen-away Baptist and, since Richmond and the Civil War, a communicant of the more tony Episcopal Church), had originally asked him for the site as a gift. But the land was not in his hands, and now he hadn’t the money to buy it back for a gift. Several of the more solvent parishioners bought the land and deeded it, in the name of Jefferson Davis, to the Baptists. The four-room cabin in which his father, Samuel Davis, had nursed his idle dream of breeding race horses before his wife’s well-regarded cookery made an inn a practical venture was carefully dismantled, and the components were later reassembled for the Tennessee Centennial of 1897, in Nashville. There the cabin vied for attention, somewhat unsuccessfully, with the newly erected replica of the Parthenon, which proved Nashville to be the “Athens of the South.” (The poet Randall Jarrell is reported to have served as the model for the Ganymede on the pediment—a chronological impossibility if we refer to the original structure of 1897, but not if to the permanent reconstruction of the early 1920s.) As for the Bethel Baptist Church, Jefferson Davis paid his last visit to his native state, and county, to attend the dedication of the building, in 1886. He made some rather ecumenical remarks at the dedication, and then he left his gift—a silver Communion service which is preserved there. After the death of Davis, in 1889, the land for the monument, in a tract that was to become “the Park,” was bought by the United Confederate Veterans. But it was not until 1917, a few months before the United States embarked on its first great world adventure, that the actual construction of an obelisk of poured concrete was begun.

  I was nearly twelve then, and months before, with a pillow at my back to make my scrawny legs reach the pedals, I had begun to drive the family Chevrolet. So, out of my as yet unclarified puzzlement and my confusion of feelings about Jefferson Davis, I drove several times, alone, the miles to the scrubby country of Fairview—then a scattered community, no longer the town of Davisburg or the later Georgetown, as it had been called until it sank back again to the level of a mere settlement. There I might stare at the building shacks and the debris of construction from which rose a gray-white shaft, unsure of my own feelings not merely about Davis (about whom I still knew little) but vaguely, I suppose, about the mystery of the pain, vision, valor, human weakness, and error of the past being somehow transformed into, glorified into, the immobile thrust of concrete (not even the dignity of stone), rising from thistle, mullein, poverty grass, and broken timbers against the blazing blue sky of summer or the paling sky of autumn. By this time, young men, some from the neighborhood, were dying far away across the ocean, but I can’t recall that the thought brushed my mind, however fleetingly, that this monument was already antiquated, and that spick-and-span new ones would soon be built to honor blood newly shed.

  Was the blank shaft that was rising there trying to say something about that war of long ago when young men had ridden away from the same countryside to die for whatever they had died for? Was the tall shaft, now stubbed at the top, what history was? Certainly these words did not come into my fuddled head. Childhood and adolescence do not live much by words, by abstractions, for words freeze meaning in its living surge, or come only as bubbles that rise and burst from the dark, unpredictable flow of feeling. And, looking back years later, we know how hard it is to sink ourselves again into the old dark wordless flow. We have more and more words now, and being truly adult is largely the effort to make the lying words stand for the old living truth. How often we learn in later life, for instance, that the love we long ago thought we had was a mask for hatred, or hatred a mask for love.

  In any case, as I fumble at recol
lection and try to immerse myself in the dark flow of that moment, it seems that in facing the blank-topped monument I was trying to focus some meaning, however hard to define, on the relation of past and present, old pain and glory and new pain and glory. For I then had only idiotic, infantile envy of those who were grownup enough to go over the ocean toward reality. And the shadow of Jefferson Davis somehow merged with whatever bubble belatedly rose from the dark flow—or it even seemed, now and then, to be part of the dark flow itself.

  The next summer, when news of the far-off fighting was the general topic of adult conversation, I went again to Fairview—only once, I think. I did go back in the fall, though, to find that work had stopped. The government had belatedly decided that the monument was not essential to the war effort. For several years, work was suspended. Then, on June 1, 1924, a bronze cap was set on the summit. Certain diehard Confederates, it is said, had wanted to push on to surpass the Washington Monument, but the common victory in France seemed to make such feeling antiquated, too.

  WHO was this Jefferson Davis? Eventually, I came to know something about him, and about the speculations concerning the inner man. In those early days when I visited the unfinished monument, I knew, of course, that he was born in my Todd County—though at the date of his birth, June 3, 1808, the county had not yet been carved from the larger entities of Christian and Logan Counties, now adjacently eastward and westward. Samuel Davis, born of an unsung line of Welsh immigrants who had drifted south from Pennsylvania, entered history by raising a company of frontiersmen in Georgia to take a whack at the redcoats, and then, catching the westward fever, he moved to Kentucky, finally to Christian County, where he settled on six hundred acres of scarcely improved land, built the four-room log structure, and dreamed of raising horses. Whatever limited worldly fortune Samuel had thus far gained, he was a man of philoprogenitive prowess. When a tenth child was born, the father named him Jefferson (for the President) Finis (to set a term to his own obvious talent on corn-shuck or other mattress) Davis (to place him in the line of blood). In the tissue of ironic symbolism that may be read into the later career of the infant, the first two names may be argued to have some unintended significance. With the end of the career of Jefferson Finis Davis came the end of the dream—already so often debauched—of the author of the Declaration. The new Davis son had long since, perhaps superstitiously, dropped the middle name, probably as early as he was put to his Latin, but who can so easily throw away his fate?

  Before the new child was more than a toddler, Samuel had been caught by a new fever: cotton-growing in Mississippi. There, somewhat southeast of the town of Natchez, soon to be the glamorous capital of King Cotton, he came in for modest prosperity, having got in on the cotton boom early enough to acquire slaves, even if never to hold a great plantation with the mandatory Greek columns. But one of his older sons—Joseph Davis, twenty-three years older than little Jeff—who had become a successful lawyer, did have a great plantation, Hurricane, and this older brother, bit by bit, assumed the paternal role and defined the character and aspirations of the boy.

  Less than a year after little Jeff’s birth—before he could have character or aspirations worth mentioning, of course—another man-child was born, some hundred miles away in Kentucky, in another log cabin, to even poorer parentage. The parents of Abraham Lincoln were somewhat ambitionlessly caught up in a drift northward, across the Ohio and into frontier country, where, in spite of poverty and hardship, the boy, driven by some remorseless will to excel, reached out for learning and for a place in the world of power which would be worthy of the self he felt he was. By early middle age, the boy born in the frontier cabin was a success, living in a spacious white house in town, practicing law for good fees, and dabbling in politics. Lincoln was also a man of remarkable physical strength—a strength that was to sustain him in the strenuous years between 1861 and 1865, while Davis, not far away, in Richmond, was being tortured by ill health, sleeplessness, and neuralgia. What would have happened if Thomas Lincoln had followed the drive to Mississippi as the land where energy and cunning in a new fluidity might make a man great—the same land that William Faulkner’s great-grandfather came to as a penniless youth and that Faulkner himself was to write about? Or what would have happened if Samuel Davis had sought his luck northward across the Ohio? How much is a man the product of his society?

  In any case, Joseph Davis—now an aristocrat and a “cotton snob”—sent his youngest brother up to a famous Catholic monastic school in Kentucky, where, at the age of about seven, he might begin the education of a gentleman, and where he precociously decided that he wanted to become a Catholic. His request to adopt that faith was refused as premature, and a kindly father offered him a sandwich of good Catholic cheese in consolation, but there he may have absorbed the germ of rigid logic that later marked his mind and his views of history, law, and politics. This, however, is speculation. Another piece of speculation: the man who conducted the party to Kentucky was a Major Hinds, a friend and old companion-inarms of Andrew Jackson, and on the way north the party spent some time at the Hermitage, near Nashville. There the boy saw his first “great man.” Young Jeff had actually seen the human image of greatness.

  Later, after Jeff had returned to Mississippi and had spent a few years in local schools there, Joseph sent him back to Kentucky—to Transylvania University, at Lexington, an institution that was then renowned as one of the best universities in the country. There the young Davis pursued his study of the classics. But this was interrupted by an appointment to West Point, a training ground for greatness. The document of appointment was signed by none other than John C. Calhoun, the Secretary of War, and thus Davis was first linked with the statesman whose mantle as the premier champion of states’ rights he eventually assumed. But once at West Point the young man was associating with many to whom his fate would be linked, whom he would know as commanders of friend or foe—a few of whom wearing Confederate gray were not to see eye to eye with their President.

  As for Davis himself, he was no Robert E. Lee—for Lee was the perfect cadet, already moving in the subtle aura of greatness. It is hard, in looking at later photographs of the tall, hollow-cheeked man whose face twitched with neuralgia and whose left eye was bleared in blindness, to remember that the young Davis was vigorous, agile, poetically handsome, high-spirited, somewhat rebellious, given to off-grounds carousing and eggnog parties, and liberally decorated with demerits. And later, at an Indian outpost, now with a lieutenant’s commission, the irrepressible young man—this according to the report of a Potawatomi Indian chief presumably present—seized an extraordinarily handsome young squaw, who was respectably dancing a quadrille, and converted the dance into a waltz so that he might slip an arm around her lissomeness. Then, in his excitement, he detached himself from the charmer to dance alone, to “jerk and wiggle” and leap and yell like an Indian. Eggnog, firewater, concupiscence of the flesh, or manly high spirits—whatever it was—might well have led to a bloody affray, for the young squaw’s brother, sensing insult, came at him, scalping knife against pistol. But the commanding colonel, who had just been laughing at the lieutenant’s antics, intervened.

  Such a young Davis did in truth exist—a cadet who graduated twenty-third in a class of thirty-three. And these are not the only glimpses we catch of him, for he was on active duty in 1832, during the Black Hawk War, on the old Northwest Frontier in Illinois and Wisconsin. It was a war of which he was fair-minded enough to report that the only heroes were the Indians, and that if one action (that of holding off pursuing troopers while a river could be crossed) had been “performed by white men” it “would have been immortalized.” He himself carried out his military duties well enough to be given, after the somewhat shabby victory at Bad Axe River—little more than a massacre—the honor of having in his personal charge Chief Black Hawk and other captives. Black Hawk, in a dictated narrative, referred to his captor as “a good and brave young chief, with whose conduct I was much pleased”—at
least when Davis saved him and his warriors from the japes of gaping crowds. But at St. Louis Davis turned his charge over to Brigadier General Henry Atkinson. Acting under orders to take strictest measures to guard the prisoners, Atkinson saw to it that irons were put on. One cannot but wonder if the image of the manacled Black Hawk, who had long ago said that “a brave war chief would prefer death to dishonor,” flashed before the mind of Davis when he, old, sick, and defeated, struggled as his captors applied the outrage of superfluous shackles.

  While Davis was doing his Indian fighting, another name known to the record was that of a young elected captain of a company of raw recruits being mustered in—a captain who was years later described on hearsay by Varina Davis in her memoirs as “a tall, gawky, slab-sided, homely, young man.” This was Abraham Lincoln, and, again according to Mrs. Davis, one of the two lieutenants administering the oath to the captain and his men (these were conscripts, according to the historian A. J. Beveridge) later became the Major Robert Anderson “who fired the first gun at Fort Sumter,” and the other was, “in after years, the President of the Confederate States.” Of course, in relation to Anderson the use of the words “first” and “at” is deceptive, for Anderson fired from the fort against the attack from shore batteries. Defective proof further impairs the anecdote, and Mrs. Davis admits in her text that her husband remembered swearing in the recruits but not Lincoln. Of the Black Hawk War, Lincoln said only, “I fought, bled, and came away.” But the bleeding, he added, with characteristic humorous understatement, was “from bloody struggles with mosquitoes.”