Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back Page 3

  Whatever the full truth, the thread of irony, and of pathos as well, runs through the event. Encounters, friendships, family blood were the woof of which the Civil War was the warp. For instance, Simon Bolivar Buckner, the friend of Ulysses S. Grant at West Point who later encountered him on the street in New York, nearly a drunken wreck, and paid his board bill and other debts and gave him encouragement, was to become the Confederate general who officially surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson—where Grant, superfluously, offered him his private purse. And when Grant, after his disgraceful Presidency, struggling to rehabilitate himself and leave his family something by writing his memoirs, was, at the end, dying of cancer, it was the same old friend, Simon Bolivar Buckner, now with a thriving career and a young bride, who came to make, after all those years, a last, private visit. When, a day later, he emerged to face the congregated reporters, to their importunities he gave little satisfaction.

  In the years before these friendships were broken or sealed, and familial blood was shed, young Davis fell in love with the sixteen-year-old daughter of the officer in command of his frontier post, Colonel Zachary Taylor. The young girl had an eye for the handsome young officer with the deep, poetic glance, but the father offered objections, the official one being that he did not want his daughter married to a military man. If the record of the Potawatomi chief is accurate, however, Colonel Taylor had also seen the squaw episode, and he may not have wanted such high spirits in the family. But Sarah Knox Taylor, usually called Knox, had a mind and heart of her own, and on June 17, 1835, with her father absent from the ceremony, she was married to her lieutenant at the house of an aunt in Kentucky.

  She was not, however, marrying a military man. Brother Joseph had given Jefferson a plantation—Brierfield—adjoining his own Hurricane, and had given him credit on generous terms, enabling him to buy fourteen slaves. So the lieutenant was now a planter, even if his house was far from imposing and much of his land was yet to be brought under cultivation. The idyll at Brierfield was short. By fall, both bride and bridegroom were down with a virulent fever. The gift from the generous Joseph had been a gift of death—and perhaps, as it turned out, a gift of destiny. By September, at Locust Grove plantation, in Louisiana, where one of Jefferson’s sisters lived, both bride and bridegroom were at the point of death, neither knowing of the serious plight of the other. One night, the bridegroom, waking from his stupor, heard the distant sound of the bride’s voice singing “Fairy Bells,” a song of their courtship. He struggled toward the voice, but by the time he reached her room she had passed from her delirium into a last coma. The stubborn little Knox had had her will and her love, and this was what had come of it.

  One thing that may have come of it was to make Jefferson Davis great. Shaken in soul and body, he sought recovery in Cuba, then distraction in New York and Washington. The great world, however, was not for him now. To reclaim Brierfield was a passion and an anodyne. There was another anodyne. No longer the high-spirited youth who had accumulated demerits at West Point, Davis filled his lonely evenings with grinding study of great literature: Shakespeare, certainly; and the English Romantic poets and eighteenth-century prose, barbed or eloquent. He read history and the works of such theorists as John Locke and Adam Smith. He sank himself word by word into the literature of our national origins, of the philosophers and the politicians. He practically memorized the Constitution. Nor did he forget the classics.

  The new emptiness of the house at Brierfield was too much for him now. He spent much of his time at Hurricane, and there, with Joseph, he found the clash of minds and interests, collaboration in ideas, and a never-ending tide of speculation. There, too, he found new books, for Joseph was reputed to own the finest library in the state. So Joseph added his services as tutor to his already numerous benefactions.

  Undoubtedly, the pure pleasure of intellectual adventure was involved in the relationship, but both Joseph and Jefferson had proved themselves as men of action, too. Joseph had cut a figure as a lawyer and a planter. As for Jefferson, in addition to the ordinary military career, he had seriously considered challenging his commanding colonel to a duel, feeling that the colonel’s opposition to the marriage with Knox amounted to an affront to honor. But the challenge was never given; the young lieutenant must have finally realized that this was a peculiar way to carry on a courtship. (Later, Davis challenged a fellow-senator in deadly earnest, and only the interposition of friends prevented the encounter.) The impulse to action may well have lain latent behind those evening hours of study or debate. Times had been changing. John C. Calhoun, for instance, had long since fathered the doctrine of nullification in South Carolina. (As it happened, though, secession had previously been a popular sentiment in New England, and on the verge of the Civil War it reappeared in the Northeast.) Southern Whiggery had been based on the sense of a solidarity of interests among moneyed men of whatever section, but now it was beginning to wither on the local vine, for planters were becoming aware, tardily, of what the tariff question held for them. The North was more and more committed to manufacturing, and wanted high tariffs on imports of competing goods to maintain the domestic price; the South, with a mainly extractive economy, wanted to buy manufactured goods cheap, and therefore favored low tariffs. In addition to this split, that in regard to slavery was increasing. There had been considerable emancipation sentiment in the South, and even emancipation societies. Emancipation barely missed in the Virginia Legislature in 1830—31, but new events, some economic, and some more complex—Nat Turner’s Rebellion, rebellion in the West Indies, the rise of frenetic Garrisonian abolitionism—gave new tensions to the slavery question, and emancipation sentiment in the South receded.

  Jefferson Davis, like many Southerners of the early era, had been a somewhat unself-conscious Southerner, a wanderer in many states, with a grave oath taken long back to affirm a national loyalty. Besides, the South he had been born in lay far to the north of Mississippi. Now, however, Davis, the wanderer, was becoming a Mississippian. He was being “Southernized” not only by association and study but by occupation: he was a planter and a slavemaster. Even so, the kind of slave-master he was set him apart from many others. Apparently, he did not conceive of slavery as an-eternal institution justified by the Holy Writ—or did not conceive of it that way consistently. With no date of emancipation perceptible in the drift of history, he did organize Brierfield for a kind of training that would help protect the black man, once freed, from being exploited by ruthless white competition. This is not to say that Davis—any more than Lincoln, a number of abolitionists, and a large majority of the white population—believed that the black man and the white were equally endowed. But he did believe, within undefined limits, in educability and progress for the black.

  The overseer of Brierfield was an extremely efficient black man who had been with Davis since early in his military career and whose intelligence and sense of duty were never doubted. At Brierfield, too, work was assigned according to capacity and taste. Festivals like marriages, births, and Christmas were provided for, and so were rituals of grief. Careful attention to health (including regular dental service) was maintained. Free time was allowed for personal projects for profit, such as gardening, animal raising, crafts, and storekeeping, with the master’s household and, presumably, others as customers. Discipline and decency were maintained by requiring appearance before a jury of blacks with a black judge, and there was cross-examination of witnesses. Punishment was set by the court and administered by blacks. The master reserved one right: to reduce a sentence. In other words, Davis was the type of slaveholder that to the true-blue abolitionist was the deepest-dyed villain: the master who tried to treat his slaves decently tended to make slavery acceptable both to the slave and to the moral sensibilities of the general Northern public. A man like Davis, whatever his deepest unconscious motives, struck at one of the cherished notions of the hard-core abolitionist—the cherished doctrine that the South was one great brothel and the slaveholder a rac
ist fiend who chuckled before he quaffed his wine from a bowl that had lately been the skull of a black man. (Even the gentle John Green-leaf Whittier, in the poem “Amy Wentworth,” accepted this useful myth.)

  Selfish though his unconscious motives may have been, Davis realized that emancipation as such worked no magic—something that is clear from this morning’s newspaper and will be from tomorrow’s. Lincoln, the signer of the Emancipation Proclamation, was also perfectly aware of this. When asked, toward the end of the Civil War, what the ex-slave would do, he replied, “Root”—an echo of the old saying “Root, hog, or die.” It is a pity that we cannot know the expression on Lincoln’s face and in his voice—cynical detachment or outraged sarcasm—as he uttered the all too astute prediction.

  But history rolled on in its tragic way, though one thing along that way was not tragic. Joseph, as watchful as ever, invited a marriageable young lady named Varina Howell to visit Hurricane. Half his brother’s age, she had had a good classical education; had raven-black hair, a cream complexion, and the most lithe and grasp-able of waists, in an age that greatly admired such a thing in a nubile female; and was charming and well connected. In a letter to her mother after first laying eyes on Jefferson Davis, she wrote that she couldn’t tell whether he was young or old (he was thirty-five, and the nearly fatal fever had left his cheeks somewhat gaunt); and she observed a certain dogmatism in his opinions. How shrewdly the girl half his age summed him up! She thought him to be “the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk, but to insist upon a stoical indifference to the fright afterward.” She wound up, rather ambiguously: “Would you believe it, he is refined and cultivated and yet he is a Democrat.” But she had already noted that he had “a peculiarly sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself.” This blossom, whose accent in Latin both Joseph and Jefferson admired, came from Natchez, where, with wealth, Whiggery still reigned, and to indicate her political preference she wore a cameo brooch exhibiting a strongbox, undoubtedly full of money, and a great beast of a dog couchant to guard it. But the “peculiarly sweet voice” did its work, and one day the brooch wasn’t worn. Politics was not to make strife, however muted, in bedchamber or at breakfast table.

  Davis soon went to Congress, where he quickly proclaimed the doctrine of states’ rights and offered a resolution that, though it was then shelved, seems fatefully prophetic of the first shell to burst over Fort Sumter—a resolution that state troops should replace national troops in all federal forts situated within the bounds of a state.

  The new congressman quickly relinquished mere talk for an active hand in promoting another cause dear to the Southern heart—the extension of the country’s frontiers to the west and south. Not that expansionism and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny were limited to the South. The flood of immigration to the Oregon country and the near-war with Great Britain were not the work of “the slavocracy.” John Jacob Astor and his fur company were not slaveholders, nor was John Quincy Adams, who proclaimed that it was the American duty to make “the [Oregon] wilderness blossom as the rose . . . and subdue the earth, which we are commanded to do by the first behest of God Almighty.” In other words, neither South nor North had much concern with the ethics of conquest. The two merely had a private quarrel about the disposition of spoils.

  The Mexican War came. Davis resigned from Congress and accepted a colonel’s commission from the State of Mississippi as commander of the regiment of Mississippi Rifles—a volunteer organization, which was armed with a new percussion rifle, and to which he gave the spit and polish and cutting edge of West Point. The regiment served under the command of General Zachary Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, who years before had briefly been the recalcitrant father-in-law of Davis. The war Davis had was a fighting war, and he did well at it: well at Monterrey and famously at Buena Vista, where, at a crucial point in the battle, his Rifles received the powerful charge of Santa Anna’s lancers—red jackets and wind-whipped pennons—that was supposed to give the coup de grace. But Davis received the charge at the upper end of a gorge, his troops in a V-shaped disposition with the lower end open to the assault, and the V became a death trap as the lancers piled into it—against riflemen they could not well reach, who were marksmen from a state where a bad marksman was almost as difficult to find as a hen’s tooth.

  Davis even had the glory of a wound—in the foot, with blood welling in the boot as he continued to command; and later he had crutches on ceremonial occasions when he was received as a hero. It is reported, though not on incontrovertible authority, that after Buena Vista Old Rough and Ready grasped the hand of the hero and declared that his poor dead daughter had been a better judge of a man than he himself had been. Other honors are, however, beyond dispute. President James Polk raised him to the rank of brigadier general of volunteers, only to have the document decorously thrown back into his face with a lesson in constitutionality: no one but the governor of Mississippi could legally promote a colonel of the Mississippi Rifles.

  Davis heard himself toasted as “the Game Cock of the South,” and as such he was soon appointed senator. But the game of politics he had not learned (and never did learn): the deal; the nature of combinations; easy fellowship; compromise; the slipperiness of logic; humor; patience; generosity; the ready smile. His weapon was forged of his learning, his devotion to principle, his frigid dignity, his reputation for heroism and honor, and, most of all, his logic—cold, abstract, and sometimes inhuman. He would have been incapable of grasping what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had in mind when, years later, he said, “The life of law has not been logic: it has been experience.” And the incapacity of grasping such an idea was the tragic flaw in the midst of the hero’s multifarious endowments.

  In however ironical a way, time was on the side of Davis. Though he was defeated when he left the Senate to run for the governorship of Mississippi—and defeated as a secessionist—the application of “squatter sovereignty” to the territories and to “Bleeding Kansas” waited just over the temporal horizon. Meanwhile, Davis was snatched from his cotton planting to become Secretary of War under the new President, Franklin Pierce—a role that even unforgiving enemies had to admit he performed with brilliance (and with ingenuity, suggesting that camel corps be established to handle the Indians of the arid Southwest and improve communication with California). Strangely, his labors as Secretary of War were undertaken for the Union. Had Davis, after reading the political temperature of Mississippi in his defeat as an immediate secessionist, modified his doctrine of states’ rights?

  No. Davis was still a Southerner, and presumably hoped that he could exercise power best in the framework of the Union. Even after he returned to Mississippi, just on the eve of the Civil War, as a leading exponent of Southern rights, he found it hard to face the logically ultimate step of secession. Only with the disintegration of the old Democratic Party, the election of Lincoln, and the secession of South Carolina did Davis accept the conclusion—accept it as expedient, that is, for he had never doubted its constitutionality. In departing from the Senate (to which he had been elected after his stint as Secretary of War), he made himself amply clear: “If I thought that Mississippi was acting without sufficient provocation ... I should still . . . because of my allegiance to the State of which I am a citizen, have been bound by her action.” Many men, most notably Robert E. Lee, staked their lives and their sacred honor on this point. How odd it all seems now—when the sky hums with traffic, and eight-lane highways stinking of high-test rip across hypothetical state lines, and half the citizens don’t know or care where they were born just so they can get somewhere fast.

  IN any case, Davis had come a long way from Fairview, Todd County, Kentucky. On February 10, 1861, he was standing by his wife in a rose garden at Brierfield, where they had been pruning bushes. A telegram informed him that by the convention called in Montgomery, Alabama, he had been unanimously elected President of the Provisional Government of the Confederacy. On the evening of Februa
ry 17th, under the light of torches, amid a great crowd, an old-time fire-eater, William Yancey, announced, “The man and the hour have met!” Davis would have preferred the commission of a general. The memory of the famous V formation and the victory at Buena Vista remained with him.

  What kind of President was Davis? It is hard to answer that question, for it evokes multitudinous considerations, most of which doubtless never crossed the mind of the old man under the cedar tree, meditating on the past while an ignorant little boy sat there tailor-fashion on the ground. Some historians will sum the matter up by saying that if Lincoln had been at Richmond and Davis at Washington the South would have been free. That is, in spite of the many advantages the North enjoyed, Lincoln would have been as head of the Confederacy a crucial factor, and in the South could have psychologically molded a national spirit out of the paradox of states’ rights, which, of course, naturally denied the possibility of nationalism. But this is the wildest of ifs.