FIGURES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY JEFFERSON DAVIS BY ARMISTEAD C. GORDON FIGURES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY Each 12mo. $1.50 net Now Ready THOMAS JEFFERSON By David Seville Muzzey JEFFERSON DAVIS By Armistead C. Gordon Published Later ALEXANDER HAMILTON By Henry Ford Jones ROBERT E. LEE By Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman Further volumes will follow at short intervals, the list including WASHINGTON, LINCOLN, WEBSTER, GRANT, CLEVELAND, and others. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS FIGURES FROM AMERICAN HISTORY JEFFERSON DAVIS BY ARMISTEAD C. GORDON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1918 Copyright, 1918, bt CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September, 1918 St? 20 1918 I. Go ACKNOWLEDGMENT Grateful acknowledgment is made of assistance rendered in the preparation of this book by Dr. Walter L. Fleming, Professor of History in the Loui- siana State University; Dr. Lyon G. Tyler, Presi- dent of William and Mary College; Dr. Richard Heath Dabney, Professor of History in the Univer- sity of Virginia; Dr. Dunbar Rowland, Director of the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History; Mr. Fairfax Harrison, President of the Southern Railway Company; Mr. John D. Van Home, of Glyndon, Md.; Mr. John S. Patton, Li- brarian of the University of Virginia; Mr. Earl G. Swem, Assistant Librarian of the Virginia State Li- brary; Hon. D. Lawrence Groner, of Norfolk, Va.; Mr. Joseph P. Brady, Clerk of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Virginia; Dr. Thomas Walker Page, Professor of Economics in the University of Virginia; Colonel W. Gordon McCabe, President of the Virginia Historical Society; Mr. Alexander F. Robertson, of Staunton, Va. ; Dr. W. G. Stanard, Secretary of the Virginia Historical So- ciety; General Julian S. Carr, of Durham, N. C; Mr. Lucien Lamar Knight, of Atlanta, Ga. ; the late Dr. Charles W. Kent, Professor of Enghsh in the Uni- vi ACKNOWLEDGMENT versity of Virginia; Mr. H. F. Norris, of Staunton, Va.; Mr. Robert M. HugheS; Rector of William and Mary College; and the officials of the United States Military Academy, West Point, N. Y. Especial thanks are due to Dr. Tyler, who read the manuscript and made a number of valuable suggestions. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAQB I. Ancestry and Early Years 1 II. West Point and the Army 12 III. Marriage and Life at Briarfield ... 29 IV. Politics in State and Nation 40 V. In the House of Representatives ... 51 VI. Monterey and Buena Vista 58 VII. The "Great Controversies" 66 VIII. Four Years in the Cabinet 83 IX. Slavery in the Territories 91 X. The Gates of War 108 XL Fort Sumter 126 XII. War Measures 143 XIII. Confederate Diplomacy and the Cotton Famine . . . : 157 XIV. Sea-Power and the Cruisers 171 XV. Economic and Military Conditions . . . 182 XVI. The First Years of War 193 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XVII. Dark Days in War-Time 211 XVIII. The Sunset of the Confederacy .... 226 XIX. Departure from Richmond and Capture 238 XX. Imprisonment and Trial 257 XXI. Last Years 277 XXII. Personality and Character 290 Authorities 318 Index 325 JEFFERSON DAVIS JEFFERSON DAVIS CHAPTER I ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS The ancestry of Jefferson Davis, like that of his great democratic prototype and namesake, Thomas Jefferson, was Welsh. Of this ancestry he knew little, and for it he cared less. Not long before his last journey to his home at Davis Bend, he dictated to a friend a brief biography of himself, in which is indicated his lack of accurate knowledge in re- gard to his origin, but which contains enough of family tradition to vindicate what has since been discovered concerning it. "Three brothers,'^ he said, "came to America from Wales in the early part of the eighteenth cen- tury. They settled at Philadelphia. The youngest of the brothers, Evan Davis, removed to Georgia, then a colony of Great Britain. He was the grand- father of Jefferson Davis. He married a widow, whose family name was Emory. By her he had one son, Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis.'' 1 * Memoir, I, p. 3. 1 2 JEFFERSON DAVIS There are a number of traditions and stories of Davis's origin and ancestry; but the true story is probably that disclosed by the records of the Welsh Tract Baptist Meeting in Pencader Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware, which contain an ac- count of the origin, settlement, and development of a religious congregation of immigrants from Wales, of which one Shion Dafydd, as his name appears in Welsh upon their pages, was a member. Early in the eighteenth century WilHam Penn granted to David Evans and WilHam Davis thirty thousand acres of land, which, under the condi- tions of the grant, were to be divided and conveyed to immigrants from South Wales, some of whom were already settled in Radnor Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. This grant, still known as '^The Welsh Tract," hes partly in Pencader Hun- dred, in New Castle County, and partly in Cecil County, Maryland. Prominent among the settlers who came to take up Penn's grant were those who founded "the Baptist Church Meeting near the Iron Hill, in Pencader Hundred, in New Castle County." The meeting-house Records tell the quaint story of the emigration of the earliest members out of the counties of Pembroke and Caermarthen, in South Wales, to Pennsylvania. They were plain people, who worked with their hands, as tillers of the soil, carpenters, and artisans. John Davis, ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 3 who in Wales had been Shion Dafydd, the immi- grant progenitor of Jefferson Davis, and John^s brother, David, are both denominated "turners" in the deeds conveying the lands which they got from WiUiam Penn^s patentees in Pencader Hun- dred.^ The members of the Welsh Tract Meeting were non-conformistS; and were professed believers in "baptism, laying on of hands, election, and final perseverance in grace." They were earnest propa- gandists, and sent out their colonies in various di- rections, as Pennyslvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Pedee River section of South Carolina. During his life Jefferson Davis came under various denominational influences. His father^s family were Baptist, and he attended schools which were of Catholic, Presbyterian, and Unitarian direction; while in his later years he became an Episcopalian. But, though a devout and consistent member of the church of his final choice, he was a "religious cosmopolitan." Caring little for sectarian creed, he was as much at home in one place of religious assemblage as in another.^ Shion Dafydd^s name appears among the signers of " A large confession of faith put forth by upwards of a hundred congregations, holding believers, bap- * Ancestry, p. 27; Mississippi Valley Historical Review^ extra num- ber, April, 1917, p. 151. 2 Fleming, Religious Life, pp. 327, 342. 4 JEFFERSON DAVIS tism, election, and final perseverance/^ which, for the benefit of the Welsh Tract Meeting, "was trans- lated to Welsh by Abel Morgan, (minister of the gospel in Philadelphia), to which was added. An ar- ticle relative to Laying-on-of-hands; singing Psalms; and Church-covenants." This document was signed by the members of the quarterly meeting, February 4, 1716.1 There are a number of other Dafydds and Davids on the Welsh Tract roster; and the name "John'' is written there, with sturdy indifference, Shon, Shons, and Shion; while Davis appears in its Eng- lish form in the list as well as in the vernacular of the Welsh Dafydd. Penn's grantee, William Davis, who, with David Evans, had received the "Welsh Tract Grant," conveyed, on May 21, 1717, four hundred acres to John and David Davis. John Davis had a son named David, who was older than his brother, Evan Davis; but the John and the David of the deed were brothers. The latter married Martha Thomas, and they were the parents of the famous Presby- terian divine and president of Princeton College, Samuel Davies.^ A later deed for this tract of four hundred acres was executed May 16, 1743, by John Davis and Ann, his wife, to David Davies, who is described in it as the David Davis of the deed of 1717. * Records, part I, pp. 18, 21. * Records, part I, p. 26. ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 5 It is uncertain when Evan Davis, who was born in Philadelphia/ went South, whither a large colony had already gone out from "the Tract" in 1735. This colony settled at a place which they called "Welsh Neck" on the Pedee River, in South Caro- lina. The church at Welsh Neck was later eclipsed in religious fame by "Kioka Meeting House" in Georgia, near the Savannah River, which was at- tended by members from both South Carolina and Georgia; and thither Evan Davis moved. He had married, probably at Welsh Neck, "the widow Wil- liams," whose maiden name was Emory, and who is said to have "illustrated the power and the worth of woman." Of this marriage was born in 1756 Samuel Davis, the father of Jefferson Davis. He is supposed to have been named in honor of his kinsman, the great preacher, who had then become distinguished both in America and Europe. Evan Davis's wife survived him, and managed to give her son Samuel an education in "the three R's."2 When he was about twenty years old, his mother sent him with supplies to his two half- brothers, David and Isaac Williams, who were at that time in the Continental army. Samuel de- termined also to enHst, and joined them, remain- ing in the war until its close. "After several years * Genealogy f pp. 12, 50. ' Memoir, I, p. 4; Genealogy, pp. 50, 51. 6 JEFFERSON DAVIS of soldiering/' writes his son Jefferson, "he had gained sufficient experience and confidence to raise a company of infantry in Georgia. He went with them to join the Revolutionary patriots then be- sieged at Savannah." Captain Samuel Davis appears to have taken his company thence into South Carolina. That his services were recognized and highly esteemed by that State is evinced by its grant to him of a thousand acres of land. During the Revolutionary War Samuel Davis's mother died; and, upon his return home, he found the place where she had lived in an uninhabitable condition. He moved away and settled near Au- gusta, where he resided for several years. "His early education," says his son, "had qualified him for the position of county clerk, and the people who had known him from boyhood gave him that office." 1 In 1796 he went from Georgia to southwestern Kentucky, and engaged in tobacco-planting and in horse-raising in Christian County, in "what was known as the Green River country." Here, in a small farmhouse of one story, was born, on the 3d of June, 1808, Jefferson, the youngest of the children of Samuel Davis and his wife, Jane Cook. The part of Christian County where Samuel Davis resided is now in Todd County. Here he ^Memoir, I, pp. 3, 4; Dodd, Life, p. 16. ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 7 continued to live until about 1809, when he again moved to a place in Bayou Teche Parish, Louisiana. But the climate of his new home was not suited to the health of his household; and he departed from Bayou Teche, and finally established himself on a farm a mile east of Woodville, in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, where he died July 4, 1824. Samuel Davis is described by his son as "nat- urally a grave and stoical character, and of such sound judgment that his opinions were a law to his children, and quoted by them long after he had gone to his final rest, and when they were growing old." His "sound judgment," however, does not ap- pear to have helped Samuel Davis to accumulate the material things of life; or else his roving dis- position, acquired, perhaps, during the military service of his younger years, hindered him. In the year prior to his death he visited Philadelphia. While on this journey he wrote to his son Jefferson, then at Transylvania University, in Kentucky, a letter in which he expresses the fear that "all is lost here by lapse of time," and exhorts the boy to "remember the short lessons of instruction of- fered you before our parting. Use every possible means to acquire useful knowledge, as knowledge is power, the want of which has brought mischief and misery on your father in old age." ^ * Genealogy, pp. 13, 14. 8 JEFFERSON DAVIS Of his mother Jefferson Davis writes that Samuel Davis had first met her during his miHtary service in South CaroHna, and that "after the war they were married. Her maiden name was Jane Cook. She was of Scotch-Irish descent, and was noted for her beauty and sprightHness of mind.''^ Samuel and Jane Davis had ten children, five sons and five daughters, "and all of them arrived at maturity except one daughter.'' Three of the sons were soldiers in the War of 1812.2 jn Wilkinson County young Jefferson at- tended a country log-cabin school, in the vicinity ^ of his father's house, until he was seven years of age. The boy was then sent on horseback, with a party of his father's friends', through the Choctaw and Chickasaw country to Kentucky, and placed in a Dominican school known as St. Thomas. He remained at St. Thomas for two years. This rehgious association was wealthy, and owned "pro- ductive fields, slaves, flour-mills, flocks and herds." The individuals composing it possessed nothing, and were vowed to poverty and self-denial. A large majority of the boys in the school were Roman CathoHcs; and, after a time, Davis found himself "the only Protestant boy remaining, and also the smallest boy." The priests were very kind to him, and one of them, Father Wallace, who afterward ' Memoir, I, p. 4. * Memoir, I, p. 6. ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 9 became the bishop of Nashville, treated him "with the fondness of a near relative/' His kindly recollections of his stay at St. Thomas lasted through life, and this, together with some later friendships which he formed, caused him al- ways greatly to admire the Roman Catholics. In 1863 he was criticised by extreme Protestants in the South, and ridiculed by many people in the North, because he wrote to the Pope expressing his appreciation of the letter which the Romish potentate had written to the bishops of New York and New Orleans in relation to the war. The Pon- tiff's repl}^ was a courteous one; and later, when Davis was in prison at Fortress Monroe, Pius IX sent him a portrait of himself, with the inscription: "Come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Those who were critical saw in this exchange of letters in 1863 an effort on the part of the Con- federate President to gain CathoHc indorsement for his cause; but the Pope's later action showed a sympathy which was not of the world.^ After his return home from St. Thomas he was sent by his father to a school called "Jefferson Col- lege," in Adams County, Mississippi. His stay here was brief, and from his tenth to his thirteenth year he went to the academy of Wilkinson County, whose master was a scholarly Bostonian, John A. ^ Fleming, Religious Life, p. 333. 10 JEFFERSON DAVIS Shaw. Davis says that Shaw taught him more, in his time at the academy, than he ever learned from any one else anywhere. From the county academy, in 1821, he entered Transylvania University, at Lexington, Kentucky. His associations had been with boys older than himself, and he was disappointed to discover that the freshmen of Transylvania were much younger than he was, and was disturbed by being put in classes with the smaller boys. He procured private coaching at the hands of the professor in mathe- matics, so as to enable him to pass examinations for the sophomore class and thus to get rid of his juvenile associates. At Transylvania, he states, he "completed'^ his studies in '^ Greek, and Latin, and learned a little of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, surveying, pro- fane and sacred history, and natural philosophy." ^ In spite of his efforts at making up deficiencies, he did not become a senior until the end of his third session; and there are no records of the school left to show his class standing. The later testimony of members of his class is that he was a good student. One says of him, ^^He was considered by the faculty and by his fellow-students as the first scholar, ahead of all his classes, and the bravest and handsomest of all the college boys"; and another, that he was '^ always prepared with his lessons," and ''very 1 Memoir, I, pp. 20, 27. ANCESTRY AND EARLY YEARS 11 respectful and polite to the president and profes- sors/' ^ Samuel Davis died in the last year of his son's stay at Lexington. He had come home a disap- pointed man from the vain search for an illusive estate in Philadelphia, or at the "Welsh Tract." He was sixty-eight years old at the time of his death, and, though his youngest son had seen little of him, and that little had been marked by stern treatment of the boy by the man, Jefferson Davis's sense of filial respect compelled him to an ever-unfailing affection throughout life for his father's memory. 1 Memoir, I, pp. 27, 29; Dodd, Life, pp. 20, 21. CHAPTER II WEST POINT AND THE ARMY The boy had been sent away from home when very young; and to a place that was distant^ without his mother's knowledge or consent; and while his filial reverence for his father was undeviating, the recollection of his mother was a gentler and kindlier one. '^Neither then^ nor in the many years of my life; have I ceased to cherish a tender memory of the loving care of that mother, in whom there was so much for me to admire, and nothing to remem- ber save good/' is his tribute to her in his latest years.^ In the last year of his school life at Transylvania his brother Joseph Emory Davis, who was the oldest of Samuel Davis's ten children, and his youngest brother's senior by more than twenty-four years, obtained for him, through Congressman Chris- topher Rankin, of Natchez, then the sole repre- sentative from the undeveloped State of Mississippi, an appointment to a cadetship at West Point.^ * Memoir, I, p. 15. ^Biographical Congressional Directory, 1774-1911, pp. 105, 944; So. Hist. Soc. Papers, xxvi, pp. 14-85. 12 WEST POINT. AND THE ARMY 13 He was appointed by John C. Calhoun, secretary of war under Monroe. The appointment was dated March 11, 1824, but Davis did not learn of it until late the next summer, after he had completed the final examinations of the junior class at Transyl- vania University.^ The pupils of the academy, at the time of Davis^s appointment, nimibered between two and three hundred. The school was modelled on the Ecole Poly technique J and its superintendent was Sylvanus Thayer, who made its first reputation.^ In mathematics, in which he felt himself espe- cially deficient at Transylvania, his teachers were Charles Davies, D. H. Mahan, and E. C. Ross. Of these, he was especially fond of Mahan, who had graduated from the academy at the head of his class, and had later studied at the Military School of Application for Engineers and Artillerists at Metz. There was little difference in the ages of instructor and pupil, and a certain similarity of tastes drew them together. For quite a time after his graduation Davis kept up a correspondence with Mahan, who became distinguished, but less so than his son. Admiral A. T. Mahan, author of the books on sea power.^ The MiHtary Academy of to-day is in all its physical aspects different from what it was when 1 Davis at West Point, p. 248. » Ihid., p. 247. ' Ihid., pp. 252, 253, 14 JEFFERSON DAVIS Davis was a cadet there. The woods came down almost to the academy grounds, and ruins of old Revolutionary forts and soldiers^ huts and rehcs of graves of soldiers who had fallen in the time of the revolt of the colonies were still visible among the rocky hills. There were four barracks build- ings, a mess-hall, and the academy; and about the place were scattered the cottages of the instructors and officials. The cadets occupied the barracks by companies, and not by classes; and often members of different classes roomed together. Davis for two years roomed in No. 19 South Barracks, with two other cadets, in an apartment which was eleven feet square. Only two of his roommates can now be identified, A. G. W. Davis of Kentucky and Wal- ter B. Guion of Mississippi.^ "For furniture, there were one small table, three chairs, and shelves for books at the side of an open fire-place. All this furniture was supplied by the cadets themselves. Over the fire-place was a rack for three muskets and accoutrements. At night three narrow mat- tresses were spread upon the floor. Water, for drinking and bathing, the cadets brought from the spring, and there were no bath-tubs. The fire was fed by wood from huge wood-boxes kept in the halls. South Barracks was considered very cold in winter, and often the cadets in No. 19 sat at study wrapped 1 Davis at West Point, p. 250. WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 15 in their blankets, feet upon fender. Fire was kin- dled in the morning from a tinder-box, and it is a matter of record that this tinder-box was often not to be found when most needed."^ In French he did better than in mathematics. His teacher in this language was Claudius Berard, a Frenchman of Bordeaux, who was a scholar with no military tastes. The object of Berard's instruction was to impart to his pupils such a knowledge of his mother tongue as would enable them to possess a reading capacity for the French texts used in the several depart- ments. At the conclusion of the subject, in June, 1826, Davis stood fairly well in his class of forty- nine.^ He learned enough French from Berard to use the texts in that language. "He could understand the French dialect spoken in the Northwest, '' writes Doctor Fleming, "and when in prison, after the Civil War, he managed to converse in French with his fellow-prisoner Clay, much to the annoyance of Miles, who did not understand the language. But when he visited France, in the 'seventies, a French newspaper writer declared, 'he stumbles much in our language.' "^ Jared Mansfield was his teacher in natural phi- 1 Davis at West Point, pp. 250, 251. ^Ibid., p. 253; Appleton's Cyc, I, p. 243. 3 Davis at West Point, p. 254. 16 JEFFERSON DAVIS losophy, a subject which is no longer described by this generic term. It then embraced mechanics, physics, astronomy, electricity, and optics. His stand in "natural philosophy" was mediocre; yet some of the subjects greatly interested him. The third principal subject, following mathe- matics and natural philosophy, was engineering. David B. Douglas taught this course, assisted by Mahan and A. D. Bache. It embraced both the civil and miHtary branches. His standing in en- gineering was ordinary. The highest achievements by him in any course were in some of the varied subjects embraced in the category prescribed for instruction by the chap- lain, who happened to be at this time a versatile and scholarly man and an accomplished teacher. The regulations required the chaplain not only to preach in the chapel on Sundays but to conduct the cadets through a course of descriptive, physical, and statistical geography, history — which is de- scribed as "universal,'^ and "of the United States in particular '^ — ^moral philosophy, "the elements of natural and political law,'' and grammar. It was a heavy task which was imposed on the Rev- erend C. P. Mcllvaine, later Episcopal bishop of Ohio; but Davis studied under Mcllvaine, in his fourth year, grammar, rhetoric, ethics, and consti- tutional law, and stood fourteenth in a class of thirty-four, with a grade of 146 out of a 200 maxi- WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 17 mum.^ He always regarded his work in Mcllvaine's course as his best at West Point. The question whether secession was taught at the academy of those days is answered in the af- firmative by the story of a text-book. Kent^s Com- mentaries, then recently published, was used in the chaplain^s course of "constitutional law''; but with it was also used A View of the Constitution of the United States, by William Rawle, first published in 1825, at Philadelphia. Mcllvaine taught Davis's class from Rawle's book that "if a faction should \ attempt to subvert the Government of a State for ' the purpose of destroying its republican form, the national power of the Union could be called forth to subdue it. Yet it is not to be understood that its interposition would be justifiable if a State should determine to retire from the Union." ^ "It depends on the State itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be incon- sistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is that the people have in all cases the right to determine how they shall ^ be governed." '^The States may then wholly with- draw from the Union." " If a majority of the people of a State deliberately and peacefully resolve to relinquish the republican form of government, they cease to be members of the Union." "The seces- sion of a State from the Union depends on the will 1 Davis at West Point, p. 256. 2 Rawle, p. 289. 18 JEFFERSON DAVIS of the people of such State/' "This right must be considered an ingredient in the original compo- sition of the general government, and the doctrine heretofore presented in regard to the indefeasible nature of personal allegiance is so far qualified in respect to allegiance to the United States."^ From the beginning the question had assumed serious shape; and the "irrepressible conflict," a term for which Lincoln said that neither he nor Seward was responsible, but that it originated with Roger A. Pryor and the Richmond Enquirer j arose with the birth of the Constitution itself.^ The con- servative Madison said, in the convention, in pre- senting his objections to the principle of State equal- ity : " The perpetuity it would give to the Northern against the Southern scale was a serious considera- tion. It seemed now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interest lay, not between the large and small, but between the Northern and Southern States. The institution of slavery, and its consequences, formed the line of discrimina- tion. There were five States on the Southern, eight on the Northern side of this line. Should a propor- ^Rawle, pp. 289, 290, 292, 295; Cotton, p. 252; Davis at West Point, pp. 256, 257. Rawle's work, used by Cadet Benjamin S. Ewell, later president of William and Mary College, and chief of staff of General Joseph E. Johnston, is in the library of the college. It bears on the fly-leaf, ** Cadet Benjamin S. Ewell, West Point, 1832." 2 Debates of Lincoln and Douglas, p. 309 (speech at Cincinnati, September, 1859). WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 19 tional representation take place, it was true, the Northern would still outnumber the other; but not in the same degree, at this time; and every day would tend towards an equilibrium.'^^ It has been said that it was the intention of Davis's lawyers, when he was under indictment for treason, to make use of Rawle's essay when his trial should be had; and it is quite probable that the young cadet, who was especially interested in the subjects taught by Mcllvaine, which included constitutional law, gained, from his teaching, those views in regard to State sovereignty that character- ized his later political career. Though but a junior officer in the army, he seems four years after leav- ing West Point to have formed a very clear con- ception of the rights of the States as then recognized by the Strict Constructionists, and illustrated it in his attitude toward "Nullification" and Jackson's "Force Bill."^ The regulations of the United States Military Academy of Davis's time make no mention of an oath as required from a cadet upon his admission. The later academic regulations of 1839 provide that the cadet shall subscribe a promise to serve in the army for eight years, and to pledge his honor as a gentleman that "he will faithfully observe the rules and articles of war," and the regulations of ^ The Lost Principle, pp. 49, 50. 2 See post, pp. 27, 28. 20 JEFFERSON DAVIS the academy. 1 No ^^oath of allegiance" to the United States was required. Classmates of Davis said of him that in military matters he was looked on as a leader by the cadet corpS; and General Crafts J. Wright described him as '^distinguished in the corps for his manly bearing and his high-toned and lofty character. His figure was very soldier-like and rather robust, his springy step resembling the tread of an Indian brave on the war-path." 2 " Spending-money was scarce with most of the cadets. Davis received $16 per month pay, and two rations, equivalent to $28 per month. Out of this he had to pay all expenses. But he was eco- nomical, and sent part of his money to his mother each month. There were rules against receiving spending-money from home, but many cadets man- aged to get it, — 'patches for old clothes,' it was called. Nearly all were in debt to stores at the Point."^ His friends and schoolmates included many who afterward were distinguished in the Union and Con- 1 Letters to the writer, 1917, from Headquarters, U. S. Military Academy, West Point. Prior to 1861 no oath of "allegiance" was required at any time of any one. The only oath taken by United States officials was one "to support the Constitution of the United States," which in the opinion of Southern statesmen satisfied the requirements of the Constitution, whose Tenth Amendment re- served all undelegated powers, including that of secession. ^Blackwood's Magazine, September, 1862; Memoir, I, p. 51. ' Davis at West Point, pp. 264, 265; Memoir, I, p. 54. WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 21 federate armies. His most intimate companions were Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk. It is said that Polk was the first cadet to kneel in chapel, and Davis, Johnston, and others soon fol- lowed his example.^ Davis, although in later years a devout and con- sistent Episcopalian, did not connect himself with any religious body until 1863. His second wife was an Episcopalian, and it was due to her influence that, with a cosmopolitan indifference to doctrine and dogma, he allied himself with the denomination of her choice. Johnston, who like Davis had attended Transyl- vania University before going to West Point, was two classes ahead of him. But class feeling and association were not as strong then as they after- ward became, and Davis's friends were chosen by him without regard to class affiliation. Johnston's son, in his biography of his father, says of their re- lations: "Jefferson Davis, who was two classes below Johnston in the Academy, formed with him a fast friendship, that grew and strengthened, and knew neither decay nor end."^ His years at the academy were fruitful if not studious ones, and were strongly formative of his character. The mental and social training which he received here did much toward developing the ^ Religious Life of Davis, p. 328; Metropolitan Magazine, June, 1908. "Johnston, Life of A. S. Johnston, p. 14. J 22 JEFFERSON DAVIS unyielding disposition that illustrated his career as President of the Confederacy. Here he laid the foundations of a broad and catholic education, and acquired those tastes for mathematical; philosoph- ical, and engineering problems which lasted into his maturer life. He gained here, too, a habit of wide and extensive reading, which resulted in causing those who knew him well in later years to regard him as one of the best-educated men of his day in America.^ His interest in the place was strong and abiding, and one of his last acts as a United States senator was to aid in revising its course of studies. Kindly memories of his years at West Point stayed with him always, and in his last days, when the hand of death lay on him, he dictated some desultory recol- lections of the school. "I have not told," he said, "what I wish to say of my (friends) Sidney Johnston and Polk. I have much more to say of them. I shall tell a great deal of West Point, and I seem to remember more every day."2 Davis graduated from the MiHtaiy Academy in July, 1828, with the usual brevet of second Heu- tenant of infantry. From West Point he went, on his first furlough, to the home of his brother Joseph in Mississippi. In the late autumn of the year he ^ Davis at West Point, p. 267. 2 Ibid., p. 267. WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 23 reported for duty at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, taking with him from Hurricane, his brother^s place at Davis Bend, a young negro slave named James Pemberton, who had accompanied liis father on his visit to Philadelphia in 1823, as far as Harford in Maryland, and of whom Samuel Davis had written his son : "I have notify ed you where I have left your boy James; he is in the care of a David Malsby in the village aforenamed.'^ ^ Until he was twenty-eight years old, when he left the army, Davis had spent only eleven years of his life in the South and Southwest, and they were years of his earliest youth. His acquaintance and association with the negroes of a typical Black Belt section were only casual. James Pemberton, who had been given to him by his mother when they were both boys, and who now accompanied him as a "body-servant" to the armiy-post in Missouri, was the first negro slave with whom he came into personal relations. Pemberton remained with him during his military service on the frontier, from 1829 to 1835. Much of this time he was stationed in free States and in free Territories, but such resi- dence occasioned the negro, who was very intel- ligent, no discontent with his peculiar situation, nor did it ever occur to him to think of changing it. His devotion to his master was characteristic of the best of the slaves of the period. * Genealogy, p. 14. 24 JEFFERSON DAVIS Davis remained at Jefferson Barracks for a short time, and then was ordered to Fort Crawford on the site now occupied by the city of Prairie du Chien, near the junction of the Wisconsin River with the Mississippi. From the autumn of 1829 until 1831 he was stationed at Fort Winnebago, about two miles from the junction of the Fox and Winnebago Rivers, with an intervening region between it and the fort at Chicago which was for the most part imexplored by white men, though the Indians occupying it were generally friendly. In 1831 he was sent to the upper waters of the Yellow River on a lum- bering expedition for the works at Fort Crawford. Here he established a sawmill and constructed a small rough fort; and here also he succeeded in winning the confidence and friendship of the local Indians.ji At this time he had little or no beard, and "his smooth face, fresh color, and gay laugh gave the impression of a boy of nineteen.'^ But the Indians recognized his soldierly qualities, and one of the chiefs adopted him as a "brother." He was thenceforth known among them as "Little Chief." In this year fell what was known for a long time thereafter in the Northwest as "the deep snow." Through overexertion and exposure to the rigors of the winter he became ill with pneumonia. For many months he lay prostrated in an isolated coun- WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 25 try; but with indomitable will and energy, he con- tinued to direct from his sick-bed the operations of his men. He became very feeble and emaciated, and the faithful James Pemberton, who was his nurse, used to lift him in his arms like a child and carry him from his bed to his seat by the window.^ His illness left a permanent impression on Davis's vitaHty, and was the beginning of the acute attacks of facial neuralgia which pursued him through life, often making him almost blind for days at a time and causing him intense suffering. In 1831 he was again at Fort Crawford, where ^ Colonel Zachary Taylor had succeeded to the com- mand of his regiment, the 1st Infantry. Taylor sent him to the lead-mines of Galena, Illinois, to deal with the troubles which had developed into a local war between the Indians of the vicinity and the white adventurers who had swarmed in with the hope of taking possession of lands which were believed to be rich in mineral treasure. An earlier emissary had been detailed on a similar mission, which had failed. Davis brought about temporary peace between the contending parties by a diplo- matic arrangement under which the miners were to file records of their claims with him, and sur- render possession of the lands to the Indians until the government should determine the respective rights of the contending parties. 1 Memoir, I, p. 81. 26 JEFFERSON DAVIS The subsequent ratification of a treaty concern- ing the lands temporarily appeased the local In- dians; but it did not satisfy Black Hawk, the chief of the Sac and Fox tribes, who resented the intrusion of the white men. One of its provisions, which had been agreed to by a number of minor chieftains, made the lead-mines the property of the whites. The Indians were evicted, and Black Hawk, re- turning in the following spring, crossed the Missis- sippi River and engaged in indiscriminate warfare on the white settlers. During the summer the In- dians were driven back to the Wisconsin, and later were routed at the battle of Bad Axe. Black Hawk and two of his sons were captured, with sixty or more other prisoners, and sent down the river to Jefferson Barracks under Davis's charge. In his au- tobiography the Indian chieftain records his treat- ment by the young lieutenant: We started to Jefferson Barracks in a steamboat, under the charge of a young war-chief [Lieutenant Davis], who treated us all with much kindness. He is a good and brave young chief, with whose conduct I was much pleased. On our way down we called at Galena, and remained a short time. The people crowded to the boat to see us, but the war-chief would not permit them to enter the apartment where we were, knowing from what his own feelings would have been, if he had been placed in a similar situation, that we did not wish to have a gaping crowd around us.^ 1 Life of Black Hawk, edited by J. B. Patterson (1834), quoted, Memoir, I, p. 143; Life of Cass (S. S.), p. 141. WEST POINT AND THE ARMY 27 After the close of the Black Hawk War Davis was again sent on a tour of inspection to the Galena lead-mines; and in the autumn of 1832 he was or- dered to Louisville and Lexington on recruiting service. During his stay in Lexington a violent epidemic of cholera broke out, but he continued at his post until the plague was under control. It was at the time of the Black Hawk War that the young soldier was first confronted with what promised to test his views, then already formed, of constitutional State sovereignty. He alluded in his speech on the compromise measures of 1850 to the rumor, when the NulHfication Ordinance was adopted by South Carolina, that his regiment would probably be sent to Charleston to enforce the federal tariff law. "Then," said he, "much as I valued my commission, much as I desired to remain in the army, and disapproving as much as I did the remedy resorted to, that commission would have been torn to tatters before it would have been used in civil war with the State of South Caro- lina." i He never had, then or thereafter, any sympathy with the political reasoning of the nullifiers who proposed to remain in the Union and yet to invali- date a law of the Union. Infringement upon the rights of a State which was unbearable was ac- ^ Dodd, Life, p. 38; Cong. Globe, 31st Cong., 1st session, July 13, 1850; Memoir, I, pp. 89, 90. v" 28 JEFFERSON DAVIS cording to his theory of the Constitution to be met in the last extremity by the Staters withdrawal from the Union. Returning from Kentucky to Fort Crawford with his recruitS; Davis remained there until 1834, when he was ordered to Fort Gibson on the extreme fron- tier. Prior to his recruiting detail to Lexington and Louisville, he had been selected by Colonel Taylor from the 1st Infantry for promotion as adjutant to the newly created regiment of Dra- goons.^ * Memoir, I, p. 149. CHAPTER III MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT BRIARFIELD When Colonel Zachary Taylor succeeded Colonel Willoughby Morgan in command of the 1st In- fantry at Fort Crawford, in 1832, he brought with him to the post his wife and children; and their home was the centre of social life. Mrs. Taylor was a kindly lady of a domestic disposition, and her daughters were interesting and attractive. Anne, the eldest, became the wife of Doctor Robert Wood, later surgeon-general of the United States army, and their son was John Taylor Wood, who was a graduate of the Naval Academy, commander of the cruiser Tallahassee, and one of the last men to leave the Confederate President before his capture in 1865. Sarah Knox Taylor, the second daughter, was eighteen years old when Davis first met her, and was her father^s favorite. Elizabeth, the youngest, was then a child; and the son, Richard, who thirty years afterward became a distinguished Confederate general, is described as being at the time ^'a lubberly sort of a boy." Sarah Knox, named in honor of Washington's secretary of war, became Davis^s first wife. Of their 29 30 JEFFERSON DAVIS courtship and marriage legend and gossip have furnished many contradictory accounts. The pub- Hcation of some of these stories, notably that con- tained in a biographical sketch of Davis in a prominent cyclopaedia of 1888, caused him pain and displeasure. In it their marriage was spoken of as a "romantic elopement," and he denounced the statement as a "baseless scandal." Davis fell in love with Sarah Knox Taylor, and though most of his leisure time at the fort was spent in reading law, he found opportunity to press his suit. An engagement of marriage soon ensued, subject to Colonel Taylor's approval. But "Old Rough and Ready" did not regard the match with favor, and refused his consent. When Captain Kearney, one of the senior officers of the post, and a friend of Davis's, endeavored to persuade Taylor to withdraw his opposition, the stern parent an- swered : I will be damned if another daughter of mine shall marry into the army. I know enough of the family life of officers. I scarcely know my own children or they me. I have no personal objections to Lieutenant Davis.^ Taylor never afterward permitted any prejudice against Davis to cause him to discriminate against him as an officer. He often chose him for important service, as when he sent him to settle the troubles ^Davis^s First Marriage, pp. 23, 25, 29, 30. MARRIAGE 31 at the Galena lead-mineS; and when he put him in charge of the detail which accompanied Black Hawk to St. Louis; and Davis was selected by him in 1835 for promotion to the newly organized 2d Regiment of Dragoons. Before time had healed the wounded feelings to which the courtship of the lovers had first given rise, and before the marriage took place, Taylor ceased his active opposition and yielded an un- willing acquiescence. He wrote to his sister, Mrs. John Gibson Taylor, during his daughter's visit to her aimt in Kentucky a short time prior to the wed- ding, that "if Kjiox was still determined to marry Lieutenant Davis, he would no longer withhold his consent, but wished her to marry at her aunt's house.'' ^ The wedding took place at Beechland, the resi- dence of John Gibson Taylor, near Louisville. Davis says of it : In 1835 I resigned from the army, and Miss Taylor being then in Kentucky with her aunt, — the oldest sister of General Taylor, — I went thither, and we were married in the presence of General Taylor's two sisters, of his oldest brother, his son-in-law, and many other members of his family.^ After their wedding they visited Joseph Emory Davis, at Hurricane, on Davis Bend; and, to start 1 Davis^s First Marriage, pp. 26, 31. ^ Memoir, I, p. 162, 32 JEFFERSON DAVIS the young people in life, his brother gave Jefferson an adjoining tract of land known as Briarfield; and sold him fourteen slaves on credit. Here he worked at clearing up the place and getting it into shape for cultivation until the "fever season'^ of the year came round, when he took his young wife, who was unacclimated, on a visit to his sister, Mrs. Luther Smith, at Locust Grove Plantation, in West Feli- ciana Parish, Louisiana. Her stay in the miasmatic region of Briarfield, however, had been fatal. They both fell ill with malarial fever on arriving at Locust Grove, and Mrs. Davis died. Her early and tragic death, after a few happy months of wedded life, produced a permanent im- pression upon the bereaved husband; and for eight years afterward he lived in seclusion at Briarfield, occupying himself with the cultivation of his fields and in the pursuits of reading and study. After his wife^s death, weak and prostrated from his own illness, he sailed in the autumn of 1835 to Havana i*n search of health. In the following spring, with his health partially restored, he returned to Briarfield, and took up the life of a planter and student. For the ensuing eight years he came strongly under the influence of his brother Joseph, who lived with his family on the adjacent plantation. Joseph Davis had prevailed on him to enter the army, instead of becoming a lawyer, and had obtained an appointment for him MARRIAGE 33 to West Point. He had persuaded him to relinquish the iniHtary Hfe and become a planter in 1835; and he had given him the Briarfield plantation when he was married. Though they had been little thrown together, his brother had been Jefferson's monitor and best friend. Their life, after the younger man went to Davis Bend to live, was one of intimate asso- ciation and of daily contact; and the impression of the older on the younger was profound and lasting. They spent the hours which were not devoted to the management of their plantations in the dis- cussion of pontics, of government, and of literature. Joseph Davis received in his library the best Eng- lish and American periodicals of the day; and he and his brother Jefferson read the Congressional Globe, the National Intelligencer , the Charleston Mercury, and the Richmond Enquirer, together with the local Mississippi papers. On the shelves of the library at Hurricane, where the younger brother spent many hours each day, were the classic authors of Great Britain; and he founded upon the models of the best orators and essayists and his- torians of the English language the unusual power of expression which characterized his subsequent speeches and writings. He was deeply interested in his occupation as a planter, and pursued it, in all its details, with an intelligence and an energy that achieved significant results. He got the best work from his slaves by 34 JEFFERSON DAVIS his interest in them and by his kindly treatment of them. He investigated and appHed the most desirable methods of agriculture, and his labors were crowned with abundant success. Davis Bend was a peninsula on the Mississippi, which included lands of great fertility. In the management and control of their plantations the Davis brothers were daily many hours in the saddle; and in their fields were produced most of the aiticles primarily necessary for the support and maintenance of the local population. The di- rection of his plantation tended strongly to develop administrative ability of high order, and " as master of such an estate, and associate with his brother on a much larger one, Jefferson Davis emerged from this period of retirement a tried executive, which, added to his scholarly attainments and military training, made him an unusual character, one to whom people would readily turn for leadership."^ Until 1835, when at the age of twenty-six he married and went to live at Briarfield, he had had no practical knowledge of the conditions of plan- tation negro slavery. His childhood had been spent in a new country, in which society was crude and in a formative state and where slavery was merely an incident. James Pemberton was the only slave he had owned or whose service he had directed, prior to his purchase from his brother Joseph of 1 Dodd, Life, pp. 52, 53. MARRIAGE 35 those with whom he cleared and planted Briarfield. In the eight years at Davis Bend, in which he was thrown into intimate daily contact with the slave population, and in the less intimate because less frequent association of his subsequent career, he formed his views of the negroes as a race and de- veloped his ideas of slavery as a social and economic institution. In his opinion, slavery was not only a temporary solu- tion of the labor-problem in the newly settled South, but it was also a partial solution of what we now call the race problem, — the problem of how to make tw^o distinct races live together without friction. That the negro race was fundamentally inferior to the white was his firm conviction. That there was any moral wrong in holding slaves, he in company with most of the slave-holders, would never admit. By him, as by most men of his class, then as now, slavery was considered a benefit to the negro and a recognition of that law of nature which subjected the weaker to the stronger for the good of both. Slavery took idle, unmoral, barbarous blacks and gradually rooted out their savage traits, giving to them instead the white man's superior civilization, his religion, his language, his customs, his industry. The negro was a child-race, and slavery was its training school. These convictions shaped his attitude toward the individuals of the race. And never were there more intimate friendships between whites and blacks than between Davis and his servants, as he always called his slaves.^ 1 Davis, the Negroes and the Negro Problem, p. 3. Speech of Davis on "Slavery in the Territories," in the Senate, February 13 and 14, 1850. Appendix to Congressional Globe, 1st session, 31st Cong., pp. 149 etseq. I'i J 36 JEFFERSON DAVIS He and his brother thought alike on most ques- tions, and a pohtical maxim of the older brother, which Jefferson adopted, was the famihar one of laissez-faire. "The less people are governed, the more submissive they will be to control," and con- sequently the better governed they will be, was a theory which Joseph Davis put into successful prac- tical execution with the negroes on Davis Bend in the early thirties of the nineteenth century, and he and Jefferson Davis continued his system of slave management uninterruptedly as long as slavery existed. This system was one in which the master exercised the least possible control of the individual slave consistent with the latter^s good behavior and the proper discharge of his duties, and gave to the slave commimity a large measure of authority over the individual. It provided the judicial means of de- termination, by a regularly constituted court com- posed of judge, jury, and sheriff, all of whom were blacks on the plantation, of all matters involving a breach of discipline or of morals. No negro at Davis Bend was ever convicted in this court save by a jury of his peers, made up of the "settled'' men. An elderly negro judge presided; a black sheriff compelled attendance; and black witnesses were examined and testified, as in legally constituted tribunals. The verdicts of the negro juries were usually fair and impartial and gave satisfaction. MARRIAGE 37 Davis always reserved the right to modify or to alter the judgment of the court, to suspend sen- tence, or to grant pardon; but he was seldom re- quired to interfere with the punishment meted out to offenders. The negroes, who were strongly amen- able to formalities and ceremonies, took great pride in the administration of their court; and if there was any defect in the operation of the system it lay in the occasional inclination of the juries to deal severely with crime.^ As long as he lived James Pemberton, in whose judgment and fideHty Davis reposed lasting con- fidence, was "head man" over the negroes at Briar- field, and exercised his sway with ability and dis- cretion in co-operation with the estabHshed negro tribunal. After his death, in 1852, Davis felt it necessary to employ white overseers, on account of his continued absence from home; but they were not allowed, as elsewhere, to inflict corporal punish- ment. Their prerogative of compelling obedience and order did not go beyond reporting derelictions and offenses on the part of the slaves to the plan- tation court; and this method of managing the negroes proved so objectionable to the white over- seers that at least one of them left on account of it. "The Davis system, which was practised imtil 1862, had vitality enough to survive for a while 1 Davis, the Negroes and the Negro Problem, pp. 6, 7; Memoir, I, p. 174. 38 JEFFERSON DAVIS after the Federals had occupied the plantations, and a year later a Northern officer, who saw what remained of the self-governing community, and knowing nothing of its origin, took it for a new de- velopment and an evidence of how one year of free- dom would elevate the blacks."^ The efforts of the brothers to inculcate in the negroes at Hurricane and Briarfield habits of thrift, self-reliance, and self-government, proceeded in yet other directions. Any negro who by skilled labor and dihgence as a carpenter or blacksmith, or by other manual art, was able to make money for him- self, was permitted to do so, paying to his master the ordinary wages of an unskilled laborer; and some of the slaves set up business for themselves. Religious training was afforded them, and the brothers paid the salary of a white Methodist itinerant preacher, who was sent out by his church to do missionary work among the slaves on the plantations. Doctor Fleming, in his account of the life of the negroes at Hurricane and Briarfield, quotes the statement by Davis of his conviction that in religious work for the negroes the South had "been a greater practical missionary than all the society missionaries in the world.' ^^ When he left Briarfield in 1861, upon notification ^ Davis, the Negroes and the Negro Prohlem, p. 7, citing John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen, p. 165. 2 Jbid,^ pp. 8, 9. . • , MARRIAGE 39 of his election to the presidency of the Confederate States, he assembled his "servants'' and made them a farewell talk. He saw little of them again, save of the few who greeted him on the occasion of his visit to New Orleans after his release from prison, and again when he went to Davis Bend imme- diately preceding his death; though many of them clung to the place after the siege of Vicksburg. Others, who had gone away, returned, and for a time it was made a "Freedman's Home" for them and for many others who were brought there, and they were put in possession of the land by the fed- eral authorities. When he died in New Orleans, in 1889, those of his former slaves and their children who were still living on Davis Bend sent to his widow a message of sympathy and affection: We, the old servants and tenants of our beloved master. Honorable Jefferson Davis, have cause to mingle our tears over his death, who was always so kind and thought- ful of our peace and happiness. We extend to you our humble sympathy. Respectfully, Your old Tenants and Servants.* * Davis, the Negroes and the Negro Problem, p. 23. CHAPTER IV POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION Between the years 1830 and 1840 the population of Mississippi had increased by three hundred thou- sand, and the southward movement of slavery, which had begun in the previous century from New England, now proceeded from Virginia in the di- rection of the new and rich territory lying along the Mississippi Eiver and the Gulf of Mexico.^ An active immigration of whites from many sections of the country swarmed in; and Davis states, in his sketch of his own life, that in his boyhood Missis- sippi was composed of about equal parts of im- migrants from the States lying along the seaboard and from the more recently settled communities of the West. With the development of the Mississippi coun- try, the influx of slave owners bringing with them their slaves, the increase in the values both of slaves and of lands, and the busy movement of united energy and opportunity, it was inevitable that the spirit of speculation should take possession of the people. There was an inflation of values, a 1 Cotton, pp. 149 ff- 40 POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION 41 reckless issue of obligations public and private; and a consequent climax of debt and repudiation. Two issues of bonds, known respectively as "Union Bank bonds" and "Planters' Bank bonds/' behind which were the faith and credit of the State, were repudiated by the legislature of Mississippi. In 1830 the State had chartered the Planters' Bank, and had become its principal stockholder; and in 1833 the legislature authorized the sale of a million and a half of its bonds, which were sold in New York at a premium of thirteen per cent. The sale indi- cated an unreal prosperity and was based on a dangerous expansion of credit. In 1837 the tide of speculation had run so high that the general de- mand for more money was met by the establish- ment of other banks, with capital derived from the sale of bonds.^ The movement against the Union Bank bonds took form in 1841, when the governor of the State advocated their repudiation in a message to the legislature. The legislature of that session refused to concur in the governor's recommendation; but that of 1842 was more pliable, and the Repudiation Act was passed. Eleven years later the Planters' Bank bonds were repudiated.^ For a period of twenty years after 1840, the payment or repudiation of the public debt was an important polit- » State Finances of Miss., S. B. AT., V, p. 524. ' Van Home, Davis and Repudiation in Miss., p. 8. 42 JEFFERSON DAVIS ical issue. The management of the State banks had been corrupt, and politicians inflamed the minds of the people against banks and bondholders for selfish purposes. As the result of such agitation, the State repudiated seven million dollars of just debts.^ The Democratic party of Mississippi, to which Davis belonged, had made itself responsible for the policy of repudiation in the year preceding that in which he first entered the political arena as a candidate for the legislature. It had been in con- trol of the machinery of government which had enacted the statute of 1842, repudiating the Union Bank bonds. The Whig party believed the time to be a favorable one for electing a legislature, and for reversing the policy of the repudiationists. There were two Whig candidates for the State house of representatives in the Whig county of Warren. Davis was opposed to the repudiation policy of his^own party, and the local Democrats thought that his nomination would draw votes from their divided opponents and secure the election of a Democrat. The champion of the Whigs in the State was Sergeant S. Prentiss, who was earnestly op- posed to the Democratic policies. Davis's attitude on the question of the bonds was that of his Whig neighbors. He held that the Union Bank bonds, which were the subject of dispute, were obligations issued by the State, whose validity ought to be ^S. B. N., V, pp. 524, 525. POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION 43 determined by the adjudication of the courts, and that there was no power in the legislature to re- pudiate them. In view of the then-existing con- stitution of the State judiciary, which was of a mind to uphold their validity, this was equivalent to insisting that they should be paid. He met Prentiss in a joint debate, from which they agreed to elim- inate the bond question as one on which they were in essential accord, and to confine their dis- cussion to other matters of State and national polit- ical difference. "The result of the election,'^ he said at a later time, "as anticipated, was my defeat. As this was the only occasion on which I was ever a candidate for the legislature in Mississippi, it may be seen how utterly unfounded was the allegation that at- tributed to me any part in the legislative enactment known as the 'Act of Repudiation.' " ^ In subsequent years attacks were made on him by personal and pohtical enemies as having been an advocate of the repudiation measures of this period. He felt, and at times expressed especial indignation that General Winfield Scott should have published in his autobiography the assertion that the Mississippi bonds had been "repudiated mainly by Mr. Jefferson Davis,'' ^ and spoke in 1 Walthall, Davis, pp. 10, 11. * Ibid., p. 12; Van Home, Davis and Repudiation in Miss., p. 9, note 7. 44 JEFFERSON DAVIS terms of even stronger condemnation of the efforts of Robert J. Walker, while the financial agent of the United States Government in England during the war, to fasten upon him the stigma of having been a repudiator. Walker^s attack took shape in a volume published in London in 1863, which public men in the Confederacy regarded as intended to discredit Davis in connection with Walker^s efforts to prevent a foreign loan to the Confederate States. ''By reason of intimate connection in the past with politics in Mississippi," writes Mr. Van Home, "Mr. Walker should have been familiar with the movement which culminated in the legislature's resolution of 1842, but his letters pubHshed in Lon- don failed to show any participation by Mr. Davis in that movement.^' ^ He never at any time, either before or after the legislative canvass of 1843, held any civil office, legislative, executive, or judicial, under the State government; and the repudiators in his own party urged actively but ineffectually his well-known sympathy with the payment of the debt against his subsequent election to Congress in 1845. Prior to 1843 he had evinced no disposition to engage in active politics, but he had attracted at- tention by his dignified and courageous course in ^Van Home, Davis and Repudiation in Miss., pp. 11, 12; Walt- hall, Davis, p. 12; Dodd, Life, p. 64; Trent, Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime, p. 275; Pollard, Life, p. 22; Memoir, I, p. 185, and note. POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION 45 the brief canvass which he made for the legislature; and in the following year he was nominated as an elector on the Polk and Dallas presidential ticket, and made an aggressive campaign in its behalf throughout the State. His electoral ticket was chosen in the State, and Democracy was successful in the Union; and recognition and popularity fol- lowed his first State-wide campaigning. His repu- tation as a public speaker gave him position in his party, and in 1845 he was nominated by the Democ- racy of Mississippi for representative-at-large in the United States Congress. On the day following his nomination he published a pamphlet announcing his continued and unalterable opposition to the Democratic attitude toward the repudiation of the State debt, which was the one live local issue in the campaign. His daughter, Mrs. Hayes, states that her father was moved to this speedy and emphatic announcement of his position on the debt question, ''because the chairman of the nominating body was a repudiator.'^ ^ The Democratic organization, however, gave him \oj3i\ support; and he was elected and took his seat in the House of Representatives the following De- cember. The time of his entrance into national politics was one of great restlessness and party passion. 1 Letter in N. Y. World, Jan. 3, 1905; Memoir, I, pp. 205, 206; Dodd, Life, pp. 67, 68. 46 JEFFERSON DAVIS The tide of agitation over the question of slavery, though not yet at its flood, was already flowing free; and the annexation of Texas was the subject of strenuous controversy, while the '^Oregon ques- tion'^ was part and parcel of the same agitation. The Democratic party in the campaign of 1845 was committed to the tariff of 1842, to the annexa- tion of Texas, and to the measure of "the whole of Oregon, or none, with or without war with Eng- land/' The origins of the political controversies which culminated in a conflict of arms between the sec- tions in 1861 were in existence even in the colonial era. They appeared in the debates of the State assemblies over the adoption of the Federal Con- stitution. But slavery, which later emerged from the background of its constitutional recognition, and became both centre and circumference of the "great controversies,'' was not one of the earlier and more serious subjects of difference which arose out of constitutional construction and interpreta- tion. From the beginning of the government the basic causes of contention lay in matters of economic development and of sectional political power. These were illustrated in the questions of the control by Spain of the Mississippi River, the location of the federal capital, the assumption of the State debts, the negotiations with France and England regard- ing trade, the alien and sedition laws, the United POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION 47 States Bank; and by the embargo and non-inter- course laws favored by Southern administrations to countervail the restrictions of England and her violation of our rights on the high seas. Later eco- nomic division was emphasized by the tariff and by nullification in South Carolina, and by the con- tinued debate thenceforward between North and South over the tariff. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which Jefferson declared alarmed him "like a fire-bell in the night/' as indicating a permanent dissociation of sections, was in reality a truce-treaty between antagonistic political and economic sys- tems. Slavery was at first a mere incident in these dif- ferences. For years after the Missouri Compromise negro slaves as domestic servants were taken by their owners into the Territories without let or hin- drance; and even in the Northwest Territory, w'hich had been given to the Union by Virginia, and where slavery had been prohibited by the Ordinance of 1787 in the original language of the Thirteenth Amendment, the " institution '^ was regarded in no unkindly way.^ The responsibilities of the govern- ment in regard to slavery were recognized both in the treaty of peace in 1783 and the treaty of peace in 1814. Each contained clauses obligating Great Britain to return negro property carried off during the two wars. 1 Munford, Virginia's Attitude, pp. 26, 27, 28, 48 JEFFERSON DAVIS The abolition of slavery, originating in the hu- manitarianism of the Pennsylvania Quakers, was agitated for many years by a small following before it attracted any considerable attention; and in 1832, when South Carolina undertook to "nullify" the tariff bill of that year and Jackson met the nullification movement with his proclamation of December 16 and sent a naval force to Charleston harbor, each of the twenty-seven States and Terri- tories was nominally slaveholding except Vermont; though the number of slaves in the New England States and in those of the North, especially Ohio and Indiana, which when yet a Territory, in 1803, had memorialized Congress to suspend the provision of the Ordinance of 1787 prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory, was negligible.^ In 1790 New York and Georgia had stood not far apart in the number of slaves possessed by each; but by 1800 the slave population of the South had increased thirty-three per cent, and the next dec- ade showed a much greater divergence. Whitney's cotton-gin had largely revolutionized the economic relation of the sections. The farmers of the Northern States were enabled to sell their slaves, who had become an expensive burden to them, to the cotton- planters of the South, who in the year 1793, the date of Whitney's invention, had produced ten thousand four hundred and sixty bales of cotton, * Force, National Calendar, 1832, p. 159. POLITICS IN STATE AND NATION 49 and who produced in 1810 one hundred and seventy- seven thousand eight hundred and twenty-four bales, of which they exported about three-fourths at fifteen and one-half cents a pound.^ Yet even with the progressive economic cleavage between the manufacturing and commercial North and the agricultural South, the aboHtion movement con- tinued to develop slowly, and its propagandists were the humanitarians alone. But the humanitarians were imbued with pro- found convictions, and were strenuous and militant in their propagandism. The abolitionists were among the earhest secessionists. Their reprobation of the legalized holding of human beings in bondage was such that they wished to destroy the Union rather than remain in it with slaveholders. They sent into Congress as early as 1827 petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; and these petitions continued to come in imtil on the 25th of February, 1850, Giddings of Ohio pre- sented to the House the resolutions of citizens of Pennsylvania and Delaware praying for the "im- mediate and peaceful dissolution of the American Union.^' In January, 1843, the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society resolved : " That the compact which exists between the North and the South is a cove- nant with Death and an agreement with Hell, in- * Cotton, p. 149, and note 1. ^50 JEFFERSON DAVIS volving both parties in atrocious criminality; and should be immediately annulled." ^ The American Anti-Slavery Society affirmed the sentiment at its tenth anniversary meeting in New York City, in May, 1844, resolving that ^^ secession from the present United States government is the duty of every abolitionist," and Garrison declared in 1854: ^' There is but one honest, straightforward course to pursue, if we would see the slave-power overthrown, — the Union must be dissolved"; while Wendell Phillips said that disunion was "written in the counsel of God." Schouler, referring to this declaration of Garrison's and the occasion of its utterance, says: ^^Such was the tenor of anniver- sary speeches and resolutions through the next six years whenever and wherever meetings were held of our Anti-Slavery societies." ^ But these expressions of passionate feeling on the part of a small band of enthusiasts, though in- dicating a tendency, did not represent the thought of the non-slave-possessing States of the period, who had no conscious wish to see on their Southern border a republic with an anti-tariff policy, neces- sitated by its social and economic conditions, which would be the direct opposite of that of a commer- cial and manufacturing North. 1 Virginians Attitude, p. 217, citing William Lloyd Garrison, by his children, vol. Ill, p. 88. 2 IHd., pp. 100, 218, 414; Schouler, Hist. U. S., V, p. 319; Niles's Register, vol. 66, p. 192; Martyn, Wendell Phillips, p. 207. CHAPTER V IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES On February 26, 1845, Davis, then in his thirty- seventh year, contracted a second marriage. His bride was Varina Howell, a daughter of William B. Howell of Natchez, Mississippi. Her grand- father was Governor Richard Howell of New Jersey, who was a native of Newark, Delaware, and whose family name occurs frequently on the roster of the early members of the Welsh Tract Baptist Meeting House "at the foot of the Iron Hill,'^ of whose con- gregation Shion Dafydd, Jefferson Davis's great- grandfather, had been a member. The second Mrs. Davis was the companion and survivor of her hus- band's subsequent fortunes through a long life, and his devoted and self-sacrificing helpmeet. She was his amanuensis when he wrote his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, and was herself the author of Jefferson Davis : A Memoir, a work in two large volumes which presents a vivid narra- tive of the career of its subject. The humanitarian view of slavery had made in- significant progress prior to 1844, the year preced- ing Davis's election to Congress; but when the territorial extension of the ^' institution " began to 51 52 JEFFERSON DAVIS involve the question of sectional power and equilib- rium the processes of federal disintegration began also. The Whigs of the South were drifting toward State-rights, and the Northern Whigs, the suc- cessors of the National Repubhcans of the earlier decades of the century, were moving in the direc- tion of affiliations which took final shape in the Republican party of 1856. The Jacksonian Van Buren Democracy of the North, which had been Hamiltonian in its conduct, if not in its professed creed, since Jackson's time, was closely sympathetic with the movement; and Northern Whiggery and Northern Democracy drew together, imperceptibly but inevitably, in their respective attitudes toward the sectional differentiation of political power. The economic differences between North and South, as always theretofore, lay within the very core of the approaching physical struggle over slavery.^ Davis took a conspicuous part in the debate of Congress on the two questions of foreign policy involved in the Oregon boundary and the Mexican issues. He illustrated his independence of thought and action in differing with his party associates on the Oregon question, although he did not wholly concur with the opposition. He advocated the continued joint occupancy of the disputed terri- tory, and opposed the proposition to give notice » Tyler, The Whig Party in the South; W. & M. College Quarterly, xxiii, pp. Iff. ; Cotton, chapters 34 and 35. IN HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 53 to Great Britain of a termination of the treaty au- thorizing it. In the course of the debate he gave utterance to his feelings of devotion to the con- stitutional Union, as he conceived it to have been formed by the fathers of the Republic, as he did on many other occasions. "As we have shared in the toils," he said, "so we have gloried in the triumphs of our country. In our hearts as in our history are mingled the names of Concord and Camden and Saratoga and Lexington and Plattsburg and Chippewa and Erie and Moultrie and New Orleans and Yorktown and Bunker Hill. Grouped all together they form a record of the triumph of our cause, a monument of the common glory of our Union. What South- ern man would wish it less by one of the Northern names of which it is composed? Or where is he who gazing on the obelisk that rises from the ground made sacred by the blood of Warren, would feel his patriot^s pride suppressed by local jeal- ousy?" ^ In the presidential campaign of 1844 he had ad- vocated the admission of Texas into the Union by simple enactment of Congress, instead of by treaty. As a member of Congress, he voted in accordance with this view, which was that of Tyler's admin- istration; and he supported with his vote the presidential declaration, after the battles of the ^Walthall, Davis, p. 13; Memoir, I, p. 234. 54 JEFFERSON DAVIS Rio Grande^ that hostilities existed by the act of Mexico. He also voted for organizing a volun- teer force for the war, and for appropriations neces- sary to its vigorous prosecution; but with the mili- tary directness with which his West Point education seems to have influenced his character more deeply than any other factor in its formation, he antag- onized as unconstitutional the authority conferred by Congress on the President of appointing the general officers of the volunteer army. On the question of the tariff he pursued the course of the strict-construction party. That the tariff, like slavery, though even earher, had become a sectional issue, owing to its operation upon the one hand on a manufacturing and commercial sec- tion of the country constantly increasing in popu- lation through foreign immigration, and upon the other on an agricultural one into which European immigrants had ceased to come on account of the presence of the negro, is indicated in the historical fact that in Jackson's administration all the Northern Democrats in the House of Representatives but two voted for the protective bill of 1832. As early as 1820 a protective tariff act had been passed by the House and rejected by the Senate; and the tariff issue continued to hold the larger place in the con- test of the sections and in the discussions of con- stitutional interpretation until it was dwarfed by the growing anti-slavery movement after 1844. IN HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 55 Davis's first resolution, offered three weeks after he had taken his seat as a member, foreshadowed his undeviating advocacy, as long as he was in the public service, of what is now known as "prepared- ness." It was as follows: That the Committee on Military Affairs be instructed to inquire into the expediency of converting a portion of tlie forts of the United States into schools for military instruction, on the basis of substituting their present gar- risons of enlisted men by detachments furnished from each State of our Union in ratio of their several repre- sentatives in the Congress of the United States.^ The resolution appears to have been without result; and beyond his committee work in con- nection with the tariff bill, and his speech on the Oregon question, and one against the rivers and harbors appropriation bill, he took only a quiet and undemonstrative part in the business of the House. In the latter speech he antagonized extravagant expenditures and attacked the sectional character of the proposed appropriations.^ He was deeply interested at this time in the operations of the army of occupation on the Rio Grande under General Taylor; and when, on May 28, 1846, the House, in committee of the whole, had under consideration the resolution tendering the thanks of Congress to Taylor for his services, 1 Mem