Jefferson Davis

President of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865)

• Born: June 3, 1808
• Birthplace: Christian County (now Fairview, Todd County), Kentucky
• Died: December 6, 1889
• Place of death: New Orleans, Louisiana

Davis served the U.S. government ably as a senator and as secretary of war; however, his commitment to Southern secession led him to accept the presidency of the Confederacy and attempt to preserve Southern independence against bitter opposition and overwhelming odds. Both reviled and idealized as a symbol of the Confederacy, Davis maintained a consistency of principle and perseverance that balance out the fact that he was not well fitted for the demands of the times and the position he held.

Early Life

During the turbulent decades of the early eighteenth century, a son of Welsh immigrants moved his family from Philadelphia to the Georgia area; Evan Davis’s son Samuel, as reward for his services as a Revolutionary War guerrilla captain, was granted land near Augusta. He was chosen county clerk and in 1783 married Jane Cook. Continuing the family pattern, Samuel migrated often; in 1792 he moved to Kentucky, where his tenth and last child, Jefferson (Finis) Davis, was born at Fairview in Christian (later Todd) County, on June 3, 1808. By 1811, the family was living in Louisiana but later moved to Wilkinson County, Mississippi Territory. In these frontier areas, owners worked in the fields with their slaves; Samuel Davis was able to give only a single slave to each of his children when they married. His eldest son, however, Joseph Emory Davis, demonstrated in his life the “flush times” and upward mobility of the lower South: He became a lawyer, the wealthy owner of a great plantation, and a “father” to his youngest brother.

In his youth, Jefferson Davis spent two years at the Roman Catholic St. Thomas’s College in Kentucky and then attended local schools near home; in 1821, he studied classics at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Just after his father’s death, late in 1824, he entered West Point Military Academy. He was over six feet tall, slender, an active, high-spirited young man, with brown hair and deep-set gray-blue eyes, a high forehead and cheekbones, and an aquiline nose and square jaw. In 1828, twenty-third out of a class of thirty-three, he was graduated as a second lieutenant. For the next seven years he was on frontier duty at the dangerous and lonely posts in Wisconsin and Illinois, acquitting himself well and with initiative; in 1832, he briefly guarded the captive chief Black Hawk. In 1833, at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, he met Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of the commandant, Colonel Zachary Taylor; despite the latter’s objections, they were married June 17, 1835, at her aunt’s home in Kentucky.

Despite Davis’s belief that he had an aptitude for the military, he resigned his commission; Joseph gave the young couple an adjoining new plantation, Brierfield, and fourteen slaves on credit. As neither was acclimatized, they left for the Louisiana plantation of a Davis sister, but they both contracted malaria, and Knox Davis died on September 15, 1835. A grieving Jefferson Davis, convalescing in Havana and New York, spent some time also in a senatorial boardinghouse in Washington, D.C., but soon returned to Brierfield.

For the next eight years, Davis led a solitary and reclusive life, reading extensively in literature, history, and the classics and associating primarily with his brother. During this period he developed the basic system of Brierfield, which was almost an ideal plantation: benevolent master, slaves trained and working according to their abilities and making many decisions concerning their labor and earnings, and Davis’s personal slave James Pemberton as overseer with a practically free hand. During these years Davis developed his attachments, both theoretical and personal, to the soil, the South, and the new aristocratic society of the lower South.

Davis’s identification was completed and symbolized by his marriage on February 26, 1845, to Varina Anne Banks Howell; she was half his age, a black-haired beauty of Natchez high society, with a classical education and a vivacious temperament. Throughout her life, “Winnie” Davis was high-strung, demonstrative, and emotionally turbulent, a determined woman who fought fiercely for those she loved and who was not always either tactful or forgiving.

By this stage of his life, Davis’s personality had been formed. Despite his military experience and life as a planter, he had never really had to fight for place and position; he was more of a theoretician than a realist. He was affectionate with family and friends, essentially humorless, coldly logical, with a deep-rooted egotism and a sense of his own merit; he was never able to believe that others’ criticism or disagreement could be sincere or impersonal. Committed firmly to aristocracy and slavery, state sovereignty and states’ rights (under the Constitution and within the American nation), always a Democrat, Davis moved into politics. In 1843, he lost an election for the state legislature to a well-known Whig; in 1844 he was a Polk elector. In 1845, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Davis entered into marriage in February, 1845, and entered Congress in December; in June, 1846, on the outbreak of the Mexican War , he resigned from the House to become colonel of the volunteer mounted First Mississippi Rifles. He trained his regiment and equipped his men with the new percussion rifles, and under Major General Zachary Taylor it participated creditably in the victory at Monterrey. When, in the following February, General Antonio López de Santa Anna led fifteen thousand men across two hundred miles of desert to confront Taylor’s five thousand at Buena Vista, Davis’s Mississippi Rifles fought off a Mexican division in an action (the famous V-formation) that may have been decisive for the American victory. Davis led the regiment despite a wound in the foot that kept him on crutches for two years and in intermittent pain for the next decade. This episode gained for Davis a popular reputation as a military hero and reinforced his already ineradicable conviction of his own military capability.

After Buena Vista, with Taylor’s influence waning and the regiment’s enlistment expiring, Davis again resigned a military commission, and in December, 1847, was appointed to a vacancy in the Senate. An expansionist, he supported President James K. Polk on the Mexican Cession, even suggesting American acquisition of Yucatan; although he acquiesced in extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, he asserted that there was no constitutional power to prohibit slave property in any territory. The complex politics associated with the Compromise of 1850 included several southern groupings: Unionists, radical states’ righters (in favor of immediate secession), southern “nationalists” (or “cooperationists,” anticipating possible later secession by the South as a whole).

When his fellow Mississippi senator Henry S. Foote ran for governor on a Union ticket (a coalition of Whigs and some Democrats), Davis was persuaded to resign from the Senate (in September, 1851) and oppose him on the Democratic ticket; Davis lost by a thousand votes. Political defeat was offset by the birth of the Davis’s first child, Samuel Emerson, on July 30, 1852.

Having aided in the campaign to elect Franklin Pierce, Davis was appointed secretary of war in March of 1853. Ironically, these four years were to be the most congenial and productive of his life. He was in good health and spirits; “Winnie” Davis was a charming and vivacious hostess and the Davis house was the social center of official Washington circles. There was a growing family: Although Samuel died on June 30, 1854, Margaret Howell (Maggie or Pollie) was born on February 25, 1855, and Jefferson, Jr., on January 16, 1857.

As secretary of war, Davis supported the concept (developed by John C. Calhoun during his tenure of the office) of an expansible army; infantry units were issued the new percussion-cap muzzle-loading rifles and Minié balls; infantry tactics were made somewhat more flexible; West Point officers were encouraged to study in Europe and to develop military theory; and the regrettable system of army departments was strengthened. Davis urged the use of camels in the Southwest, but the experiment failed. Davis was unable to influence the administration on the issues of the Black Warrior seizure and the Ostend Manifesto, but as a southern expansionist he enthusiastically organized a research expedition to the Southwest to provide data that led to the Gadsden Purchase .

The end of Davis’s term in the cabinet was soon followed by his election to the Senate; he took his seat in March, 1857. Another son, Joseph Evan, was born on April 18, 1859. Davis’s time as senator would have been the peak and epilogue of his political career, had it not been prologue to suffering and defeat. Nearly fifty, he was gaunt and neurotic; he suffered from dyspepsia and neuralgia and lost the sight of his left eye. He was an effective orator, aided by the obvious intensity of his convictions, and he strongly supported the South’s interests in the increasingly bitter sectional confrontations of the 1850’s. Within the Democratic Party, he fought the popular sovereignty position of Stephen A. Douglas and worked to prevent the latter’s nomination as Democratic candidate in 1860.

Abraham Lincoln’s election and nonnegotiable stand against expansion of slavery into the territories convinced Davis of the necessity and inevitability of secession; on January 21, 1861, upon learning of Mississippi’s secession, he resigned from the Senate. Like few others at the time, Davis expected war, probably anticipating a command position; he was indeed appointed major general of Mississippi’s troops. The Montgomery convention, which established a provisional government, however, needed a president more acceptable to the moderates (or earlier “cooperationists”) and early in February, 1861, elected Jefferson Davis.

Life’s Work

On October 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederate States of America , for the constitutional six-year term. On December 16, William (Billy) Howell was born. Davis was inaugurated in the official Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, on February 22, 1862. On March 6, 1861, the Confederate Congress had authorized a hundred thousand volunteers for a twelve-month enlistment, but even after Fort Sumter, Davis did not move to ensure an adequate munitions supply or a financial base (for example, the use of cotton supplies to secure paper currency).

The emphasis on protecting the capital at Richmond effectively divided the eastern and western Confederacy; Davis retained the system of military departments, their heads responsible directly to him, and therefore eliminated the possibility of unified strategy or well-coordinated action. His military strategy was only to defend, meeting Union forces wherever they might move. He failed to understand that the military situation, as well as the political situation, was a revolutionary one; he could not come to grips with the conditions and concepts of this first modern war. It is true that few at that time fully comprehended its implications; Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William Sherman were probably the only ones who realized its necessities.

Davis’s long-standing quarrel with Joseph E. Johnston stemmed from the latter’s failure to be ranked highest of the five Confederate full generals. Late in the war, Davis removed Johnston from command in Georgia at a critical point: General John Bell Hood’s loss of Atlanta aided in Lincoln’s reelection and continued Northern support of the war. Public and congressional opinion did not influence Davis: He refused to remove General Braxton Bragg despite that officer’s ineffectiveness in battle, and when forced to remove Judah P. Benjamin as secretary of war, he “promoted” him to secretary of state. Davis spent too much time in battle areas; he neglected the West and refused to authorize the transfer of troops across the boundaries of military departments to areas where they were needed. Even after Antietam, he could not see that only a major offensive held any hope of victory and independence; instead, he insisted on scattering garrisons and attempting to hold every inch of territory. Robert E. Lee’s offensive into Pennsylvania came too late and could not thereafter be repeated.

Close control of military policy overshadowed all other considerations in Davis’s administration, although all policy in fact concerned the pursuit of the war. Davis’s commitment to a “southern nation” provoked opposition, from “fire-eaters” such as Robert Barnwell Rhett and William L. Yancey, states’ righters such as Governors Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina, and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens.

The influential Richmond Examiner and Charleston Mercury regularly opposed Davis’s policies; his imperious approach and inability to handle the political situation gave rise to vague but frightening rumors that he was a despot who at any moment might take over the entire government and even use the army to control the people. The tension between sovereign states and an embryo national government in wartime can be seen in most of the controversial issues: general conscription was denounced as unconstitutional, attempts to suspend the writ of habeas corpus were deemed tyrannical. The “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” continued with increasing military setbacks and declining supplies and morale.

During the last winter of the war, Davis remained strangely optimistic. He had always had strong faith; in May of 1862 he had joined St. Paul’s (Episcopal) Church. Although devastated by the death of Joseph, who fell from a balcony on April 30, 1864, he was consoled by the birth of Varina Anne (Winnie) on June 27, 1864. He urged a draft of forty thousand slaves (to be freed after victory); he sent an agent to offer Great Britain an emancipation program in return for recognition and military alliance. Peace movements, projects to remove the French-imposed Emperor Maximilian from Mexico, the Hampton Roads conference: Davis would consider no compromising of Southern independence (just as Lincoln was committed absolutely to the Union). He seemed to believe that at the last moment the South might yet be saved, perhaps by one great battle led by General Lee and by himself that would sweep the Union armies from the field.

Having evacuated his family, Davis, along with several associates, left Richmond on April 3, 1865, still committed to continuing the war. News of Appomattox persuaded the party to head southward; a cabinet meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina, agreed that General Johnston should ask for terms. At Charlotte, twelve days later, the group recognized Confederate defeat and dispersed, Davis moving south into Georgia to rejoin his family and attempt to leave the country. On May 10, the Fourth Michigan Cavalry came upon them at Irwinville, Georgia; Davis’s brief attempt to slip away in a hastily snatched-up rain cape belonging to his wife gave rise to the story that he had tried to disguise himself as a woman to evade capture.

Over the next two years, Davis remained a state prisoner in a damp casemate cell in Fortress Monroe. He was once put forcibly in irons for five days, with a lamp burning continually and the guard marching regularly outside, without adequate clothing or books, and suffering from erysipelas. His fortitude, faith, and kindliness impressed the doctors assigned to him, and finally he was placed in more comfortable quarters in the fortress, his family (which had been kept in Savannah) permitted to join him and friends permitted to visit him.

On May 4, 1867, Davis was arraigned on a charge of treason in the federal district court in Richmond and released on bail supplied by ten men, among them Horace Greeley and abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Thereafter, he and his family traveled at various times to Canada, Cuba, New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Davis Bend, as well as to Europe. He was never brought to trial, as the complex constitutional issues surrounding secession remained too controversial and politically incendiary (especially during the Reconstruction period) to be aired in connection with the former president of the defeated Confederacy. His case was dropped on December 5, 1868.

During the remaining years of his life, Davis experienced a series of business failures, several unprofitable European trips, and a gradual recovery of his health. Maggie became Mrs. J. Addison Hayes and settled in Memphis, but Billy died of diphtheria in 1872, and the remaining son, Jefferson, Jr., having failed at Virginia Military Institute, died of yellow fever in 1878. Davis was able to salvage only part of the value of his old plantation in 1878. A friend of Varina, the widowed Mrs. Sarah A. E. Dorsey, gave him a cottage in which to work, on her plantation “Beauvoir,” near Biloxi, on the Mississippi Gulf coast.

Varina was finally reconciled to this cooperation, and to Davis’s inheritance of the estate in 1879, and aided him in his writing of the two-volume Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), primarily a justification of the constitutionality of secession. In the South, Davis was largely “rehabilitated,” being often invited to make speeches and dedicate memorials (including one near his birthplace). His youngest, Winnie, the “Daughter of the Confederacy,” was assailed for wishing to marry a New York lawyer, grandson of an abolitionist, and died in 1898 at thirty-three, still single and grieving.

Despite financial problems, Davis, as he had done previously, continued to support both Howell and Davis relatives and several poor children and to entertain a variety of visitors. In 1889, he fell ill with bronchitis in New Orleans, Louisiana, and died there on December 6. He was buried there but, on May 31, 1893, his remains were reinterred in Richmond. Davis had steadfastly refused to ask for a federal pardon, even in order to be elected senator from Mississippi, averring that he had committed no legal offense. The year after Davis’s death, his widow wrote her two-volume Memoir (1890); living in New York, she kept his reputation alive, with the help of Joseph Pulitzer and the Confederate “expatriates” in the North. She died in New York on October 16, 1906, at the age of eighty, and was given a military funeral in Richmond.

Significance

Jefferson Davis was poorly suited for the task of political leadership of the Confederacy at its birth. He had a strong will and iron self-discipline, willing to drive himself relentlessly despite failing health and personal troubles, but he could neither deal effectively with political personalities nor catch the public imagination and gain popular support. In a revolutionary situation he was a conservative and a legalist. Satisfied as to the right of secession and the constitutional basis of state sovereignty, he regarded Northern opposition as motivated only by jealousy, greed, and aggression; yet committed to the ideal of the Southern nation, he could not tolerate independent action by state governments or opposition to policies (such as drafting slaves) that the Confederate government believed were necessary to the war effort.

Davis shared with many other southerners the delusion that cotton was king and that economic pressures would lead quickly to European aid and victory; he therefore agreed to policies that resulted in the Confederacy’s economic isolation. Free to act out his lifelong perception of himself as master strategist and commanding general, Davis kept tight control over all military aspects, never freeing even Lee from it completely, and refusing sound advice at crucial moments. Up to the end of the war, Davis never believed that defeat was possible; he thought that one more major campaign would turn the tide.

Davis’s policy was passive-defensive; he always expected European aid even though he was informed of the actual situation. Politically naive, he apportioned cabinet appointments evenly among the states, thereby making bad choices and alienating the powerful radical secessionists. He dominated his cabinet, so that its able members could not act effectively, yet did not urge his cautious treasury secretary, C. G. Memminger, to be as financially audacious as necessary for real accomplishment. He himself frequently functioned as secretary of war, a position he would have preferred to the presidency or to any other except that of commanding general. He understood neither the proper role of the executive nor the exigencies of strategy, and in attempting to be both president and general, he failed to fulfill either function well.

A nationalist facing sovereign states, a logical theoretician dealing with volatile personalities and political realities, an egotist who could see only the goal but who could not believe that his political opponents also strove for ideals, a leader in revolutionary times who could not rally popular support for great sacrifices: Davis was more of a debit than a credit entry in the Confederacy’s account. However, his dedication was total and his efforts unrelenting, and in the aftermath of defeat, Davis enjoyed more popular admiration than at any other time in his life. He had been a great senator and a great secretary of war. He had never sought public office, but accepted it as a duty.

Davis attracted intense loyalty and admiration as well as provoking bitter enmity, and with all his failings, it is difficult to imagine any other man in the Confederacy doing better in those circumstances. Surviving personal tragedies and the loss of an independent South, Davis died unshaken in his beliefs and conscious of his own rectitude and unswerving loyalties, in his own mind fully justified and fulfilled. On October 17, 1978, a unanimous joint resolution of Congress restored Davis’s citizenship.

Bibliography

Cooper, William J., Jr. Jefferson Davis: American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. A balanced, comprehensive biography. Despite Davis’s support of the secessionist Confederacy, Cooper argues that Davis continued to see himself as a patriotic and faithful American.

Davis, Jefferson. Jefferson Davis: Private Letters, 1823-1889. Edited by Hudson Strode. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. Very effectively edited, providing practically a condensed biography. As with the three-volume biography, strongly biased, placing even more emphasis than Strode’s work on personalities.

Davis, Varina. Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife. 2 vols. New York: Belford, 1890. A laudatory account, more than sixteen hundred pages; includes long quotations from Davis’s speeches and correspondence as well as biographical information dictated by Davis shortly before his death and valuable information from participants in events. Apart from Davis’s obvious bias, the book is detailed and usually reliable.

Davis, William C. An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2001. Recounts the fall of the Confederacy during the four months before the surrender of the South and the assassination of Lincoln. Focuses on the activities and personalities of Davis and Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Biography focusing on the public career of Davis. The author describes how Davis developed his lifelong values at West Point and during the Mexican War. President Davis is depicted as a poor administrator, who lacked managerial skill and was unable to admit mistakes or delegate authority.

Dodd, William Edward. Jefferson Davis. Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966. Written by a professor at Randolph-Macon College, the book reflects nineteenth century biases of time and place: contented slaves, good masters, Anglo-Saxon civilization. Dodd attempts to balance his own commitment to the United States with strong attachment to the rightness of Davis and the South on the constitutional issues and the “War Between the States.”

Hathaway, Herman, and Richard E. Beringer. Jefferson Davis: Confederate President. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002. An analysis of Davis’s presidency and the administration of the Confederate government, written by two Civil War historians. The authors analyze the Confederate government’s institutions, constitution, and administrators, and discuss Davis’s selection of generals and military strategy.

Strode, Hudson. Jefferson Davis: American Patriot, 1808-1861. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Jefferson Davis: Confederate President. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero—The Last Twenty-five Years, 1864-1889. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964. This detailed, three-volume biography by a professor of creative writing is the result of painstaking research, based on both secondary sources and primary documents including a thousand previously unavailable personal letters. Neither scholarly nor analytical; detailed narrative and quotations replace the historian’s generalizations. Pro-Davis with a pro-Southern, secessionist bias; often reads more as special pleading than as careful interpretation.

Tate, Allen. Jefferson Davis. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969. A very brief account by one of the Nashville “Agrarians.” Emotional and often contradictory defense of Davis as representative of the stable agrarian Southern society facing the aggression of the new industrial North; simultaneously blames Davis for the Confederate defeat.

Warren, Robert Penn. Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980. Very brief, almost a memoir of the author’s boyhood during the early twentieth century South, by a master writer. Effective evocation of the war and the man.