Jefferson Davis
American Soldier, Senator, Secretary of War, President
Born 3 June, 1808
A
West Point graduate, Davis distinguished himself in the
Mexican-American War as a colonel of the Mississippi Rifles volunteer
regiment, and was the United States Secretary of War under President
Franklin Pierce. Both before and after his time in the Pierce
Administration, he served as a United States Senator from Mississippi.
As senator he argued against secession but believed each State was
sovereign and had an unquestionable and constitutional right to secede
from the voluntary Union of the Founders, just as they had seceded from
England seeking political liberty. Davis resigned from the Senate in
January 1861 after receiving word that his State of Mississippi had
voted to leave the voluntary Union.
Davis
explained his actions stating: "[T]o me the sovereignty of the State
was paramount to the sovereignty of the Union. And I held my seat in the
Senate until Mississippi seceded and called upon me to follow and
defend her. Then I sorrowfully resigned the position in which my State
had placed me and in which I could no longer represent her, and
accepted the new work. I was on my way to Montgomery when I received,
much to my regret, the message that I had been elected provisional
President of the Confederate States of America."
Davis
was a great and patriotic American who tried to save the old
constitutional republic from revolutionaries, and who left the old union
with the old constitution intact to form a "more perfect Union" and
with the consent of the governed. He contended that he would rather be
out of the Union with the Constitution than to be in the Union
without the Constitution. Ironically, the Southern States seceded in
order to save the Constitution of the Founders. Davis remarked in July
1864: "I tried in all my power to avert this war. I saw it coming,
and for 12 years, I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could
not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves,
and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this
generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and
fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to
self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for
Independence, and that, or extermination, we will have....Slavery
never was an essential element. It was the only means of bringing
other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the
musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential
differences between the North and the South that will, however this war
may end, make them two nations."
Davis's "Brierfield" Plantation in Mississippi
Reminded
during the war of the destruction of his Mississippi plantations by
occupying Northern troops, we dismissed it as the cost of war, yet
confessed that he pitied his poor Negroes, who had been driven off by
those troops and abandoned to misery or ruin. He resisted arming the
slaves as they were not trained as soldiers, were needed to raise food
for the armies in the field, and he would not use them as mercenaries
and cannon-fodder as Lincoln was doing to avoid conscripting
unwilling white Northerners.
At
the end of the War, when a fellow traveler remarked that the cause of
the Confederates was lost. Davis replied: "It appears so. But the
principle for which we contended is bound to reassert itself, though
it may be at another time and in another form." In 1881, Davis was
critical of the Gilded Age corruption and political ignorance of the
United States Constitution and remarked: "Of what value then are paper
constitutions and oaths binding officers to their preservation, if
there is not intelligence enough in the people to discern the
violations; and virtue enough to resist the violators?"
Though
charged with treason, President Davis demanded a fair trial in order
to argue the constitutionality of the South's actions in 1860-1861. This
was denied by his revolutionary tormenters, and the reason was
revealed by Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, in
1867. Chase admitted that: "If you bring these leaders to trial, it
will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not a
rebellion. His [Jefferson Davis] capture was a mistake. His trial will
be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason."
President Davis died on December 6, 1889
