Jefferson Davis

...He had a modern-style upbringing: his father rejected any kind of corporal punishment, and the boy was cosseted by big sisters, and brothers, three of them old enough to have served in the War of 1812...

...Lincoln's struggles to find reliable and aggressive generals are well-known...

...The president's property in Mississippi was seized by the Union army and the whereabouts of his and Varina's hidden treasures betrayed by one of their own slaves...

...To his cause he brought a passion "concentrated into a white heat, that threw out no sparks, no fitful flashes, glowing [instead] with an intense but not an angry glare...

...The slaves judged and punished themselves...

...That was Varina's view: "He did not know the arts of a politician and would not practice them if understood...

...Davis was described by General Bliss, Taylor's chief-of-staff, as "the best volunteer officer in the army," and President Polk offered him a general's commission...

...Davis took no steps to give his state and government the legitimacy enjoyed by Lincoln, and his failure explains the belief of many senior Unionists, especially generals like Grant, that a rich, militant minority had hijacked the South...

...He said to Northerners: "You were the men who imported these Negros into this country...

...Our slaves are happy and contented...

...The fighting among the American regiments and their The American Spectator July 1992 55 officers for the lion's share of the glory was much fiercer than their animosity against the Mexicans, who were mere pawns in a battle for fame and political kudos...

...This may have raised his reputation as a conciliator and a statesman, but after Lincoln was elected on a minority vote and the Southern states began to bolt the union, Davis's instinct was to become a general in the Mississippi contingent or, if pressed, commander-in-chief of the Southern Army...

...D avis did not seek, from the start, to mold the South into a war-nation, because he felt it unnecessary...

...That was the argument for dismantling Mexico, turning its territories into new states, and making slavery lawful there and even north of the Missouri line...

...The Mexican War, a rather disreputable affair if the truth were told, was the great proving ground for future American bigshots, both political and military...

...The politicians have been pushed into the shadows...

...So 697 men, with no popular mandate, decided the fate of 9 million...

...T he conventional portrait of Davis as an old-fashioned Southern politician is inexact...

...Families were kept together...

...Johnson wanted Davis to apply for a pardon, and when he proudly refused, allowed Dr...

...No slave was ever flogged...

...As his biographer points out, no state held a referendum on the issue, and it was decided by the 854 members of the various secession conventions, all of them selected by legislatures, not by voters, and 157 of whom voted against...

...The soldiers cut his carpets into bits as souvenirs, drank his wine, stabbed his portrait with knives, and read all his private papers, selections from which were published by a lip-smacking Northem press...

...But there was no response at the time, and his biographer finds no evidence that Davis followed up his appeal with practical schemes...

...It is significant that he never saw himself as an extremist, especially over breaking up the union...

...Though brother Joseph at one time planted 11,000 acres and was a wealthy man, Davis never owned outright his 800-acre Hurricane estate, and never possessed more than seventy-four slaves...

...It is a struggle for political power...

...When his father died, Davis's eldest brother Joseph, a successful Mississippi cotton planter, took over the role of mentor and guardian...

...He made a point of returning any salute from a black with an elaborate bow: "I cannot allow any negro to outdo me in courtesy...

...You enjoyed the benefits resulting from their carriage and sale...

...The Constitution was on their side...

...He assumed the treatment of slaves at Davis Bend was typical and refused to believe stories of cruelty: that was simply Northern malice and Abolitionist invention...

...The only Southerner who suffered the death penalty was Major Henry Wirz, commandant of the Andersonville Prison Camp...

...1 The American Spectator July 1992 57...

...The ladies noted Varina's dark color and thick lips, compared her to a "refined mulatto cook," and called her "the Empress," a reference to the much-despised Eugenie, Spanish spouse of Napoleon III...

...As he put it to his second wife, Varina: "I cannot bear to be suspected or complained of, or misconstrued after explanation...

...I was slower and more reluctant than others," he wrote...

...The men who actually set it up were, for the most part, second-rate and unmemorable...

...This sprang not just from his Southern conditioning but from a dominant streak of self-righteousness in his character...

...These judgments by contemporaries were endorsed even by critics and enemies...

...Davis paid JEFFERSON DAVIS THE MAN AND HIS HOUR: A BIOGRAPHY William C. Davis HarperCollins/784 pages/$35 reviewed by PAUL JOHNSON 54 The American Spectator July 1992 only one visit to New England and was surprised to find the people friendly...

...So he went on to outlive virtually all his opponents, half of his own family—including all four of his sons—to meet further misfortunes, to write rambling and inaccurate memoirs, and to end up the grand old man of the South, dying at the age of 82...

...That is not surprising...

...He was elected colonel of a regiment of Mississippi volunteers, had the foresight to equip them with the new Whitney Rifle, was favored by his commanding general and former father-inlaw, Taylor, in seeing action at Monterrey and Buena Vista, and distinguished himself in both these much-publicized battles...

...Joseph had dinned into him the fundamental axiom: "Any interference with the unqualified property of the owner in a slave was an abolition principle...

...BOOK REVIEWS / t is now over 130 years since the Civil War began, and with the political and economic transformation of the South during the last generation, ghosts have been laid and passions forgotten, and folk memories have become impersonal history...

...But that was not true...

...Davis had to sell all his remaining possessions, including carriage and horses, just to live (off ersatz coffee, corn cakes, a bit of bacon...

...He feared hanging, many holding him responsible for the assassination of Lincoln, but as he himself argued, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, was a far more bitter personal enemy...

...He was essentially his brother's dependent...

...He treated his black body-servant, James Pemberton, with exquisite courtesy and put him in charge of the plantation in his absences...

...Three of the best, Jackson, Stuart, and Davis's own favorite, Sydney Johnston, died in battle, leaving only Lee, who could not be everywhere at once...

...n politics, Davis found it natural to be called "the Calhoun of Mississippi," and, when the old fire-eater died, to assume Elijah's Mantle...

...Davis didn't help matters when he took his oath of office at face value and tried to defend all the frontiers of the Confederacy...

...and you reaped the largest profits accruing from the introduction of the slaves...

...He did not see the arrangements of 1820 and 1850 as "compromises": they were Southern concessions, the limit to which the South could reasonably be expected to go...

...Grant and Sherman, Lee and Bragg were there...

...So, the more slavery spread out, geographically, the more humane it would be...

...One of Davis's letters to Scott ran on for twenty-seven foolscap pages and was contemptuously described by its recipient as "a book...

...After an education under Roman Catholic Dominican friars at Wilkinson County Academy and at the famous Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, Davis went to West Point on the nomination of the War Secretary, Calhoun, thereafter his political model and leader...

...When the war started, the North held all but one of the economic-demographic cards, and the odds in its favor were lengthening steadily...

...Slave-owners must be able to take their slaves with them into the new territories just as immigrants had always taken any other form of property, such as cattle or wagons...

...As a planter, Joseph was enlightened...

...Prejudices formed at West Point, in Mexico, and at the War Department, plus his own obstinacy, unwillingness to admit he was ever in the wrong, professional dislike of pushing younger men above their seniors, however incompetent, and a chronic inability to delegate made Davis a disastrous war leader...

...When his first wife died of malaria, he acquired a sadness that never left him, though he eventually married again, a girl half his age...

...The federal government had no natural authority: "It is the creature of the states...

...As such it could have no inherent power, all it possesses was delegated by the states...

...His biographer skillfully disentangles the complex events that made him just that...

...There were bugs in his mattress, and he had to drink water from a horse-bucket...

...Davis said in his inaugural that the Confederacy was born "of a peaceful appeal to the ballot box...

...Davis not only believed this but, never having traveled, he assumed Europe would rally to the South and made no attempt to woo it by conciliatory diplomacy—with hardly an exception, the men he sent there were inept extremists...

...Jeff Davis shared to the full Joseph's attitudes, and was anti–blood sports to boot...

...That meant not only protecting 3,500 miles of coastline without a navy but also distributing limited military resources over vast border areas-1,200 miles in Texas alone—which had no natural river or mountain frontiers...

...If cruelty occurred, it was because sheer numbers undermined the personal owner-slave relationship...

...Six feet tall, slim, ramrod-straight, "a soldierly bearing, a fine head, and intellectual face . . . a look of culture and refinement about him," he could "infuse courage into the bosom of a coward, and self-respect and pride into the breasts of the most abandoned...

...This philosophy, derived from Joseph and Calhoun and his own lonely musings, polished and consolidated over the years, Davis held as axiomatic...

...Having ruled himself out as the Democratic candidate in 1860, Davis made a last-minute and foredoomed attempt to avoid a three-way split in the party's vote by trying to persuade Stephen Douglas to stand down...

...As a result, a writ of habeas corpus got Davis released in May 1867...

...Blacks, he maintained, were better off as slaves in the South than as tribesmen in Africa: "I have no fear of insurrection, no more dread of our slaves than I have of our cattle...

...Yet Davis must have had someawareness of Southern weakness...

...thereafter Wig-fall became an enemy, preaching mutiny and sedition, often while drunk, in the Confederate congress...

...Throughout the war, it remained difficult to persuade a regiment from one state to serve under a general from another...

...But there was one exception...

...Abolition was nothing but "perfidious interference in the rights of other men...

...The episode suggested that Davis was not a man fit to hold supreme office at any time, let alone during a war to decide the fate of a great nation...

...One testified: "We had good grub and good clothes and nobody worked hard...

...Along with the benevolence of slavery, and the theory of states' rights, he had swallowed the myth that cotton was king: an independent South would flourish as the world beat a path to its doors for "the Great Staple," while the industrial north, "like Venice, Carthage and Tyre will perish: grass will grow on the pavement now worn by constant tread of the human throng which waits upon commerce...

...His funeral in 1889 was the biggest ever held in the South, attracting 200,000...

...The greatest of the South's statesmen, John C. Calhoun, the man who gave it the ideology of states' rights, who taught it that slavery was a benevolent institution, and who laid the political foundations of the Confederacy, died a decade before it came into physical existence...

...Enduring states are built on the solid facts of demography, economics, and social need, not on dogmas that ignore them...

...Scott closed his last letter, "Compassion is always due to an enraged imbecile," to which Davis replied that he was "gratified to be relieved of the necessity of further exposing your malignity and depravity...

...D avis, then, believed the Southern case for slavery and its extension rested on firm moral foundations...

...Not only was it in the interest of blacks to be slaves, it was likewise to their benefit that slavery be extended...

...His biographer shows in great detail from a variety of incidents in his early life, in the army, in his domestic and public quarrels, that once he had made up his mind and adopted a position, he treated any attempt to argue him out of it as inadmissible, an assault upon his integrity...

...He got into a series of arguments with his general-inchief Winfield Scott, mostly over trivialities...

...But his weakness quickly made its appearance...

...The ratio in population was 2:1, in free males aged 18-60 no less than 4.4:1...

...Wealth was 3:1, railroad mileage 2.4:1, merchant-ship tonnage 25:1, factory production 10:1, textiles 14:1, iron 15:1, coal 38:1, firearms production 32:1, farm acreage 3:1, draft animals 1.8:1, livestock 1.5:1, wheat 4.2:1, corn 2:1...

...Consequently, the South was never able to concentrate sufficient strength for a sustained push northward, and the defensive strategy began to break down as early as the spring of 1862, 56 The American Spectator July 1992 when Admiral Farragut took New Orleans and the Western defenses began to crumble...

...William Davis gives a somber, enthralling account of the last months of the confederacy...

...But he was not small in any sense of the word...

...full-scale biography by one of the most experienced of Civil War historians...

...Beau-regard and Bragg proved useless, Joseph E. Johnston, like George B. McClellan in the north, timid and irresolute...

...On this narrowness of vision he built a political philosophy that did not admit of argument...

...Davis got into politics in his late thirties, but the Mexican War offered a chance to resume his army career...

...As the fronts collapsed in the spring of 1865, Davis sent Varina off like a tigress, giving her a small Colt and fifty rounds, and the rest of his coinage (the Confederate paper was now worthless), keeping one five-dollar gold piece for himself...

...Another: "Dem Davises never let nobody touch one of their niggers...

...The overriding weakness of this seemingly civilized and well-meaning man was lack of imagination, compounded by ignorance...

...It presented him as a tragic hero, and suited Johnson's purpose to rebuff the radical Republicans, who wanted revenge...

...He spent 720 days, a charge of treason hanging over him, in a dungeon in Fort Monroe, opposite Norfolk, Virginia, the first five of them in leg-irons...

...The popular elections held at the end of 1861 were a non-event...

...Jefferson Davis (1808-89), Calhoun's political heir insofar as he had one, president of the Confederacy from its reckless birth to its pitiful death-agony, was flawed and blinkered both as man and statesman, with huge weaknesses of judgment and capacity...

...America in the 1840s and 1850s was already an immense country, but travel was still difficult and expensive, and it is hard for us to grasp how little most Americans knew of the societies outside their region...

...The South lives on mainly through its generals, Lee, Jackson, and Stuart, even through its bad ones, like Beauregard and Bragg...

...John Craven, who visited the fallen leader many times in 1865, to have his diaries, recording their conversations, written up by a popular writer called Charles G. Halpine as The Prison Life of Jefferson Davis...

...Everything fell into the hands of the press and made amazing reading...

...Until he became president of the Confederacy, he knew little of the South beyond his own part of Mississippi...

...Any long war was thus lost before it began, and the South's one chance was to concentrate all its resources on a quick gambler's thrust north that would take Washington, overthrow the Lincoln Administration, and force a compromise allowing the South to go its own way...

...Thorough, fair-minded, and perceptive, William C. Davis (no relation) resolves most of the mysteries about his subject: how he rose, why he failed, the reasonings of his mind and the sources of his appeal...

...Indeed, he was morally aggressive, accusing the North of hypocrisy...

...It was equally natural, when his friend Franklin Pierce became President, to accept office as War Secretary (1853) where he became perhaps the most powerful voice in the cabinet and a forceful administrator...

...creating an industrial base to manufacture its own cotton goods, shoes, hats, blankets, and so forth...

...His only real rival, Tooms of Georgia, wrecked his chances by getting publicly drunk several nights running, and Davis was chosen more or less unanimously...

...Not for him the swaggering society of New Orleans or Charleston...

...He suffered from insomnia, and his chief pleasure was reading—Virgil, Byron, Burns, Scott...

...But, just as the politics of the antebellum South were defensive, seeking to perpetuate a static social system, so its military strategy was fatally defensive as well...

...Davis himself said he ignored press criticism: "Proud in the consciousness of my own rectitude, I have looked upon it with the indifference which belongs to the assurance that I am right...

...Scott was arrogant and self-righteous too, but Davis, as his political superior, might have been expected to behave with more sense and dignity...

...Davis, the man made by will-power, has now been searchingly examined in a Paul Johnson is the author of The Birth of the Modern and Modern Times (HarperCollins...

...Instead, when the first six states to secede—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama—met early in February to draw up a constitution, Davis was already talked of as the obvious choice for president...

...But if his basic assumptions about slavery were challenged, he responded with paranoia...

...A decade before the war, he had urged that the South prepare itself not only by stockpiling arms and munitions but by encouraging immigration from the North...

...In the process, the author gives us shattering insights into the weaknesses of the Southern cause and its doomed struggle...

...Davis had the same problems, recounted by his biographer in painful detail...

...Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas was a strong Davis man until their wives fell out, and Charlotte Wigfall, a South Carolina snob, called Varina "a coarse western woman" with "objectionable" manners...

...A wise remark from a man who usually lacked sound judgment...

...The question is before us...

...When he married the daughter of General Zachary Taylor, he left the army and Joseph set him up as a planter...

...In cotton the South had the advantage of 24:1, but it was largely thrown away by overproduction and stockpiling in the endless build-up to the crisis...

...In fact, Johnson never intended to execute Davis, as a murderer, traitor, war criminal, or anything else...

...building railroads to transport its agricultural products itself...

...Thomas Cobb of Georgia said, "He is not great . . . [but] the power of will he has, made him all he is...

...This is a workmanlike, sound, brass-and-mahogany book, the stuff of which convincing history is made...

...He was infuriated by the book, which he found vulgar, and frustrated by the failure of his enemies to bring him to trial, being sure—as always—that he could have vindicated himself and proved the absolute legality of his actions...

...It was wrong for whites to own more slaves than they knew well, as he did...

...His only genuflection to Southern male habits was a propensity to challenge critics to duels, though he never actually fought any...

...Thus put to the test, Southerners must (in his brother's phrase) "be prepared to act as men...

...Taylor went on to the White House, Campbell, colonel of the Tennesseans, to become governor of Tennessee, many of the volunteer officers to the House and Senate...

...Society in Richmond, chosen as Confederate capital to make Virginia secure to the cause, looked down its nose at the Davises...

...His middle name was Finis because he was born when his mother was 47, the last of ten...

...Davis's handling of his military men was in every way inferior to Lincoln's, who learned slowly but surely from his mistakes...

...His career as a professional army officer was checkered by rows with his superiors, courts martial, and frustration at slow promotion...

...It is important, as his biographer shows, to grasp the nature of Davis's involvement with the cotton economy...

...It is a curious paradox that ordinary Southerners, who had not been consulted, fought with extraordinary courage and endurance, while their leaders, who had plunged them to Armageddon, were riven by rancorous faction and disloyalty, and many left the stricken scene long before the end...

...He was treated with great cruelty...

...As the South's cause faltered, every kind of vicious intrigue, military, political, and social, developed...

...If what Davis called "the self-sustaining majority" continued its oppressive and unlawful campaign against the South, the "Confederation," as he called it, should be dissolved: "We should part peaceably and avoid staining the battlefields of the Revolution with the blood of a civil war...

...But he had been badly wounded in the foot at Buena Vista and chose instead to be nominated to the Senate...

...Davis made enemies and waged vendettas on his own account, too...

...and providing state support for higher education so that its cleverer youths were not forced to go North and adopt its ideas...

...He planned to wage guerrilla warfare but was captured on May 8, the Union soldiers singing "We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree" and spreading a rumor that he had tried to flee dressed as a woman...

...The community at Davis Bend on the river, said General Taylor, was "a little paradise...

...All this suggests that Davis was better suited to military command than to politics...

...His melancholy was aggravated by poor health, including terrifying facial pains and chronic hepatitis that eventually left him blind in one eye...

...His acrimonious letters, often about points of military status that had nothing to do with the struggle, contrast sadly with Lincoln's wise and noble epistles...

...He speaks with an air," said Senator Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin, "which seems to say 'Nothing more can be said, I know it all, it must be as I think...

...But his epitaph he had pronounced long before, in the last days of the Confederacy: there should be written on his tombstone, he said, "Died of a Theory...

...Nor did Davis try to resolve the constitutional dilemma that underlay and undermined the South's war effort: that here was not a unitary nation but a coalition of sovereign states whose ideology compelled them to contribute to their collective defense purely on a voluntary basis...

...Further limitations on slavery were merely Northern attacks on the South motivated not by morality but by envy and hatred: "The mask is off...

...I was behind the general opinion of the people of [Mississippi] as to the propriety of prompt secession...

...What was to happen to the South in the 1950s and later, Davis called for in the 1850s...

...Colonel Abraham C. Meyers, the Quartermaster General, had to be sacked when his fierce wife termed Varina "an old squaw...