“He saw himself as a faithful American, even though he tried to destroy the Union that to him had become subverted. He always identified himself as a constitutional patriot and true son of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers” (p. 655).
I know, I know—I must be mentally sick to add—actually add—another book onto my already incomprehensibly long reading list. But this chance is literally too good to miss. Let’s set the record straight though: I do not class Jefferson Davis up there with the rest of the legitimate, whether we like them or not, Presidents of the United States, however a perverse sense of justice forces me to add his biography to all the others. Let’s just say that after reading all about Lincoln and the Civil War, I want to see the other side of the coin and judge accordingly. So here I am, pausing on the inevitable path to Andrew Johnson, to take in a little information on the brief history of the President of the Confederate States of America.
Now when I say “brief history” I am being facetious because the biography that I chose for Jefferson is over 600 pages long! Since I’m not merely interested in Davis’ CSA-years, I had to find a book that would give me a thorough account of the man who aided in breaking the Union so I read Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper Jr
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).
Jefferson Davis was born the last of ten children on June 3, 1808 in Kentucky. However, his father, on the eternal quest for means, soon moved the family to Louisiana and then onto Mississippi. As the baby of the family, Jefferson would be educated to the highest degree possible beginning at the age of 7, when he was sent into Kentucky to a catholic school. Two years later he was moved to a prep school closer to his family in Mississippi and finally, in 1823, he was sent back to Kentucky to Transylvania College. This small college was not good enough for his baby boy, so Mr Davis Sr worked it so Jefferson was invited to learn at West Point Academy. Even though Jefferson was not good at math or science he managed to scrape by at West Point, graduating four years later in the middle to his class.
He immediately was placed into the army’s infantry as an officer, but since there was nothing much to do, he seriously questioned this career path. “Quarrelsomeness, drinking, even violence became endemic in an officer corps that could anticipate no continuing military education, few chances for promotion, and limited social outlets. Resignations were common” (p. 42). At one point he was stationed at Fort Crawford in the Wisconsin Territory under Colonel Zachary Taylor, the future President of the United States. There he met and fell in love with Taylor’s daughter, Sarah Knox. Taylor disliked having his daughter marry a military man so he refused to countenance the match. Jefferson and Sarah continued to meet often in secret.
The biggest military event in these years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War was the Black Hawk War, which took place on the Mississippi River around Missouri and Illinois. Davis missed this opportunity to gain some military laurels for himself because he was on leave pretty much through the whole thing. However, he reported for duty at the end of the engagement and was actually put in charge of escorting Black Hawk to Jefferson Barracks in Missouri. During the trip, the two men grew to respect and admire each other.
Another military opportunity popped up around this time for Davis. Recently the US government had established a new military unit to patrol the burgeoning southwest around the Mississippi River, called the Dragoons and Taylor promptly promoted Davis into this group. As nice as this new promotion was, Jefferson found himself in the middle of nowhere and forced to work for inferior men. In December 1834, he was court-martialed due to his missing roll call in the middle of a rainstorm. He defended himself and was eventually acquitted but Jefferson had had enough. He sent in his resignation and immediately married Sarah Taylor (with Zachary’s eventual permission) in June 1835.
For their honeymoon, they headed south to New Orleans where, tragically, they both fell ill with malaria. Davis would eventually recover, even though he would experience intermittent malarial symptoms the rest of his life, while Sarah, after only 3 months of marriage, died. Her grieving, sick widower was sent to Cuba to recover and eventually he returned to Mississippi where his brother gave him a cotton plantation. Jefferson spent the next feverish years making this plantation, Brierfield, into a successful venture. He did what he set out to do, while also beginning to dabble in Mississippi politics as a Democrat. In 1843, he lost his very first election to the state Congress, but it was a start.
Even though he was, for the most part, a successful planter and budding politician, Jefferson’s private life merely encompassed his own immediate family members. Soon, while he was on a visit to his brother, Joseph, he met Varina Howells, who though only seventeen to Jefferson’s thirty, captured his fancy. They were married in February of 1845, which also marked Jefferson’s explosion onto the political scene when he was voted into the US House of Representatives.
In Washington, he was a fervent supporter of the Polk administration and voted for the Mexican War. He enjoyed politics but being a military man himself, he realized that the war would need his services. Besides, he had become quite close to Zachary Taylor, now a general, who could use his help. He was voted in as the colonel for the First Mississippi militia and in 1846 joined Taylor in Mexico. Davis acquitted himself very well in the war, earning high honors for himself and for the First Mississippi in the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. The war then turned its attention to General Scott’s invasion of Mexico City and so Davis went back to Mississippi on leave.
Once home again, he was no longer a Congressman. He had had to resign his position while in Mexico, but the people of Mississippi loved their war hero so much that they instantly appointed him to the vacant seat in the Senate. While there he was a strong antagonist of the Compromise of 1850, voting against every single piece of legislation that came through in regards to it. It passed anyways but he would forever be critical of that bill and its effect and treatment of the southern states.
In 1851, he quit the Senate to run for governor of Mississippi under the new States’ Rights party. He lost but remained a successful plantation owner and Mississippi politician over the next few years. He was soon called out of retirement however when Franklin Pierce, the New Hampshire Democratic President, asked him to fill the Secretary of War’s cabinet position. Davis accepted and the whole family moved back to Washington. “Davis started out and remained a hands-on secretary, seeking involvement in all aspects of his department’s operations. A man as dedicated and as ambitious as Davis, who also had a vision of what he wanted to accomplish, could master the small domain of the antebellum US Army” (p. 249). Under Davis’ time as secretary, he increased the regular army and its pay while also increasing military technology (he is the one that moved the army into using new rifles with minie ball bullets, which would be so devastating a few years later during the civil war).
When Pierce did not win re-nomination for president, Davis was voted right back into the Senate in 1857. There he was almost powerless to stop the slide toward secession, even though he did not approve of it, and was forced in January 1861 to resign because his own state had seceded. Immediately he was made a Brigadier General in the CSA army but his own election as President of the Confederate States of America superseded it.
In February of 1861 in Montgomery, AL he took the oath of office as President and went about making a government. Soon they had written their own constitution and Davis even had his own cabinet, almost a mirror image of Lincoln’s government. An early problem cropped up when the state governors wanted to keep most of their enlisted men to guard the state instead of the new nation. Davis would have to contend against this attitude the entire existence of the Confederate States. Not only that but there were many significant differences between the North and the South that would dictate policy for Davis and his cabinet. “In 1860 the total population off the Confederate States was just over 9 million, while the Union total exceeded 22 million. In the most crucial category, white males aged eighteen to forty-five, the North enjoyed an advantage of around three to one. As it began its struggle for independence, the Confederacy commanded but 10 percent of the industrial capacity of the Union. In 1860, the North had produced over 90 percent of the country’s firearms, pig iron, locomotives, cloth, boots, and shoes. The Union also had twice the density of railroads per square mile, as well as considerably more mileage of canals and macadamized roads” (p. 350-51).
In 1861, Davis saw the purpose of his new government to be garnering foreign aid, multiplying military successes, and abolishing the Union blockade. While the South began the war quite well with many battlefield wins, the CSA would be plagued with incompetent generals throughout. Also with Great Britain ruling that the North’s blockade of the South was legal, the South began to run out of many essentials vital for life and war. Finally foreign backing became virtually non-existent as the South began to lose more battles, culminating in Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and the Emancipation Proclamation really sealed the deal. “’We commenced this war without preparation,’ Davis concluded, ‘and we must do the best we can with what we have’” (p. 376).
In 1863, the rampant inflation of the Confederate dollar along with the blockade caused Richmond’s ladies to riot for food. The Richmond Bread Riot ended after a few hours but it showed that the war effected everyone, on or off the battlefield. Through 1864 and into 1865, the North slowly demolished the Southern armies. Sherman took Atlanta and moved on to the Atlantic ocean, cutting Georgia, then South and North Carolina in two. Grant persisted in moving south to Richmond and while losing thousands of men, he also inflicted irreparable damage on Lee’s army. With Davis and the government evacuated from Richmond, Lee surrendered to Grant in April 1865. Davis then went on the lam, intending to ride to Florida to then take a boat to Texas where he would continue the fight. He and his family was apprehended by Northern troops in northern Florida though and taken back north near Washington DC and placed in Fortress Monroe.
Jefferson Davis, the once proud President of a doomed people, was then imprisoned for two years. President Johnson had issued several amnesties for the confederates but in all of them Jefferson was not pardoned. However, on May 11, 1867, Davis was released on bail where he and his wife, Varina, headed to Canada to see their children and then on to live in England. They would remain overseas for several years while the charges against Jefferson were eventually dropped. The US government realized that if they prosecuted Davis in court for treason and he was acquitted, they would lose face over the whole matter and people would ask what the purpose of the war had been.
Davis now had to take a good long look at his current life. Unfortunately, he and his family had absolutely no money and no prospects. The Union troops, after Vicksburg, had found Davis’ home, Brierfield, and torched it. Also the entire South was hurting so much that Davis found himself just one of many with no money and no job. He would spend the rest of his life trying to provide for his family through various means. Initially he took the job as president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company out of Memphis but he resigned in 1873 when he disagreed with them over their policies in merging with another company. He then wrote two hefty volumes detailing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government and though popular, he never earned enough from their sale.
He remained a popular figure for the rest of his life and did speaking engagements every so often. Unfortunately he became increasingly prone to malarial attacks and with all the vagaries of his life, he felt unsettled and unhappy. Finally, a middle-aged lady, Sarah Dorsey, gave him her plantation house, Beauvoir, in which to retire and write his memoirs. He stayed there the rest of his life with Varina in a semi-happy retirement. On December 6, 1888, he died of acute bronchitis with malarial symptoms. He was 80 years old.
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