Jefferson Davis, his life and personality

Front matter

JEFFERSONl

HIS LlFt:X<J PERSGTOty

•S?/ MOKRIS SGHAFF'!'S'

Chapter I

There are two reasons for undertaking to write this book. The first and main one is this: a longing to see justice done, so far as my pen may prevail, to Jefferson Davis, President of the ill-starred Southern Confederacy, who, I feel and believe, has had unfair treatment by the historians of the great war between the States, known as the Southern Rebellion, and against whose armies I fought on many fields, including the bloody ones of Chancellorsville, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. So then, it is not through sympathy with the cause he was at the head of that I take up my pen; no, no, but at the entreaty of two mighty advocates. Truth and Fair Play. I am cheered on, furthermore, in my undertaking by one of the handsomest, the noblest of our country's virtues. Magnanimity, proclaiming that, out of hatred and revenge to perpetuate a false and unjust portrait of the leader of the Confederacy, the sons and grandsons of whose gallant defenders helped so bravely to carry their united country's flag to victory on the fields of France, is unworthy and out of keeping with a great-hearted people.

Moreover, Jefferson Davis, beside being leader in the most unparalleled struggle of modern times — a struggle commemorated by monuments, ceremonial, and poetry that deck the green slopes of that height called History — was in manner and reality, in private and public life, the finest product of a democracy; namely, a gentleman. The world has had many types of the hero, statesman and philosopher, but only one in its conception of the gentleman. Again, his mind was not only stored with political, scientific, and historic knowledge but ornamented also with the ripened fruits and beauties of Hterature; and his heart, the mind's working companion, was naturally bold and had not onl}'- stood the dangers of the battlefield but was strung also with the finest chords of sweet tenderness.

The second reason is the silent, personal pleasure that will attend the use of my pen in such a cause; not arguing or contending, but talking as it were to an open-minded reader who, I hope, on taking up this book, is blessed with a fight heart; but should he be so unfortunate as to be harassed by cares and sorrows will, while reading it, forget them all and find his pillow sweet.

We learn, from a mere fragment of an autobiography dictated a few years before Jefferson Davis' death, that he was born on June 3, 1808, at Fairview, Todd County, Kentucky, and that his ancestors, on his father's side, were "^Ish Baptists who one May morning, 1701, in a company of twenty of like faith "after bidding farewell to their home and brethren" — so says an old Delaware church record — sailed from Milf ord Haven, South Wales, on the ship James and Mary and landed in Philadelphia on the eighth of the following September.

Once at the end of their long voyage they made their way — and no doubt with glad hearts — to a settlement of fellow churchmen in Delaware, and cast their lot with them. In 1735, the Delaware Colony swarmed and settled on the Peedee River, South Carolina, at a place afterward known as the Welsh Neck Baptist Church. About 1754 or 1755, Evan Davis, an old bachelor, the son of John, one of the three brothers of the original company from Wales, drifted down to the Peedee and there married a widow Williams, whose maiden name was Emory, with two children, boys; and in 1756, Samuel, Jefferson Davis' father, was born.

Before the Revolutionary War broke out the family had moved to near Augusta, Georgia, and the head of it, Evan Davis, had died. While the war was going on his widow sent Samuel with supplies to his two half brothers who were in the field, and, boy like, yielding to the spirit of adventure, fondness and pride in their gallantry, he stayed with them. Later and notwithstanding his youth.

he was made captain of a company and led it to the defense of Savannah when attacked by the British.

After the war was over, the young Captain was elected Clerk of the Courts and then fell in love with and married Jane Cook, the mother of Jefferson Davis. She was the daughter of a famously eloquent Scotch-Irish Baptist preacher, and Mr. Davis in his fragmentary autobiography says in loving terms that she had a poetic nature, the source perchance of many a charm which graces the speeches and addresses of her distinguished son.

Here then in Jefferson Davis' veins we have a mingling of Welsh and Scotch blood carrying the roots and seeds of their racial virtues and characteristics, chief of which has ever been a grim tenacity of convictions and a prompt readiness to risk all, and if need be to lose all in their defense. Davis' blood fairly teemed with this ancestral characteristic and we are quite sure he would have been spared many a trial, many a poignant hour if, when his wounds were bleeding on the field of Buena Vista in the Mexican War, the veins that carried a possible excess of this too defiant blood had been somewhat more completely emptied.

But let all this be as it may, the voice of Kentucky, with its ever wild fascination for the frontiersman, was heard in Georgia by the young Captain and his wife Jane, and about 1790, with their rapidly increasing family, they started through the wilderness for Tennessee, for the famous Blue Grass region; and there Jefferson, the last of the ten boys and girls, was born on June 3, 1808.

In a cabin within forty miles of his birthplace, eight months and nine days later, February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born; and we think even the stars must have wondered over the contrasting fate of these two children asleep in their cradles: one of them named in honor of the living President, Thomas Jefferson, whose views on the rights of the States determined his namesake's career; the other in honor of the patriarch Abraham, revered by Jews, Christians and Mohammedans the world over and whose namesake is likewise revered throughout the civilized world and more and more tenderly loved from generation to generation by his fellow countrymen. Was there a farseeing genius that presided over the naming of these children?

A Baptist church stands now on the spot where Jefferson Davis was born, and when it was dedicated, long after the war and old age had whitened his hair, its builders begged him to come back and join in the services, and, with a pensive gladness, he complied with their request.

When he was four or five years old his father sold his tobacco raising and thorough-bred horse breeding plantation and struck off again into the wilderness, this time for the Bayou Teche country in Louisiana. But the swampy cUmate proved so bad that he soon sold out and bought a large tract in Wilkenson County, Mississippi, building his house on a knoll where the health-giving breezes from the neighboring yellow pine forests blew softly over it.

When the future President of the Southern Confederacy was seven years old, one of his father's friends. Major Hinds, who had fought in the battle of New Orleans under Jackson, made a trip back to his old home in Kentucky and Mr. Davis asked him to take Jefferson with him to a school for boys known as St. Thomas College, kept by Dominican Fathers in Washington County, Kentucky. Mr. Davis took this step without his wife's consent or knowledge, because, perchance, he well knew she would be unwilling to part with the baby, as it were, of her large family.

The Major's party, with negro servants and suitable camp outfit, consisted of his wife, his sister and his son Howell, about Jefferson's age. All were mounted — the boys on ponies. Here let me say — and with a feeling of pensiveness, that in view of the happiness with which these boys enjoyed their ponies and the camp fires, I cannot for the moment throw off — that Jefferson's Uttle companion on this ride became a soldier in the Confederate army and was killed soon after the war was over while trying to separate two of his friends engaged in a pistol duel in Greenville, Mississippi.

The trail the Major followed wound through the wide, shadow-flecked wilderness of the Choctah and Cherokee Nations, and when at last he reached Nashville, Tennessee, he at once led his party to the door of his old commander, Jackson, who welcomed him and his charge with such heartiness that they stayed there for several weeks.

Jefferson Davis never forgot that visit to the Hermitage with its grove of towering primeval trees and vast estate of grain and pastm-e fields, and to his old age cherished the remembrance of Mrs. Jackson's charms and the mingled dignity and simplicity of her heroic and famous husband.

The lad's journey ended at the gateway of the monks who, besides the school, had a large landed property, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, flour mills and slaves; a very consistent and workable combination of the spiritual and the worldly.

As might be assumed, nearly all of the pupils were Catholics, but to the monks' credit, they did not tiy to make a proselyte of their new pupil and in later days, not alone when fame rested on him but at the time of his great trials, spoke well of him and were his warm friends to the end.

He was the youngest in the school and slept on a cot in a room with one of the priests. One night, as soon as the candle was blown out, the older boys who had a grudge against the priest, bombarded the room with cabbages, tmriips and other Uke vegetables. On the immediate investigation of the riot, the indignant authorities asked Uttle Jeff if he knew who were the leaders and actors in the affront; he said he did, but refused to tell on them. Whereupon one of the tonsured Fathers strapped him down to receive the usual punishment, but before delivering a blow asked him if he was ready to give the names of the culprits. He replied, ''No," but he was willing, however, to disclose one fact; he knew who blew out the candle, the signal for the vegetable-equipped firing party. On being asked who it was, he responded that he had done it. His answer was so unexpectedly frank and he was so little that the monk unstrapped him, and let him off with a serious lecture.

At the end of the second year, and President Davis intimates at the insistence of his mother, he was sent home, escorted thither on a steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi by a young law student at Transylvania. His brother Isaac met him at the landing, and, to surprise their mother, it was mischievously planned between them that little Jeff should go ahead and ask her if she had seen any stray horses about the place. He found her sitting at the door and boldly putting the question, she turned and clasped him in her arms saying, *'No, but I have got my stray boy." He then ran

HIS LIFE AND PERSOiN..

out to his father in the fields who to his wonder, . his father was habitually undemonstrative in his affection, embraced and kissed him.

He attended neighborhood and select schools till he was sixteen and then entered the sophomore class of Transylvania University at Lexington, Kentucky. That mysterious spirit, which in old age we call fate but in boyhood our good angel, must have directed his footsteps back to those college grounds of his native State, for surely he could not have been thrown in with a student body endowed with more natural ability or animated, as time proved, with more latent ambition; for six of his fellow collegians, some from the North and some from the South, were members of the United States Senate at the same time with him. Now, in the eye of every instinctively high-minded youth on entering a student body. Nature in her friendly and wise provisions, plants an ideal of what constitutes manliness and honor adorned by intellectual strength. In some of the classes above him he soon discovers the embodiment of that ideal and considers it one of the happiest days of his life when he can call him a friend. Hail, all hail! ''Nick" Bowen, Jones, W. G., who fell at Chickamauga and Ramseur at Cedar Creek in the valley, you filled my West Point boyhood's ideals, and your manly faces are still blooming as in your youth for me. The one in that brilHant group at Transylvania who filled this r-

-acal when Davis matriculated was Albert Sidney Johnston, large in frame, erect, of open countenance and clothed in natural dignity.

Johnston preceded Davis to West Point, maintaining among the cadets drawn from the high life of all sections of the country the same preeminence for character and ability as at Transylvania . It is well known, it is a matter of history, that Davis appointed Johnston second on the list of general officers for the Confederate armies, and that he fell at Shiloh just on the verge of gaining what promised to be an overwhelming victory. His untimely death was the heaviest blow in the mind of Mr. Davis and that of others which the Confederacy ever met, and Davis never spoke of him and that battle in his old age without eyes filled with the dew of tenderness.

Just after passing his examination for the senior class, and with honors, Davis' father died on July 4, two years to a day before the death of ex-President Jefferson, in honor of whom he had named his boy. Shortly afterward, Davis' oldest brother, Joseph Emory, who from that time on was like a second father, secured for him from President Monroe an appointment as Cadet to West Point; and in September, 1824, he entered that famous institV tion which through its incarnated traditions and mighty over-arching spirit had much to do, as we believe, indeed we know, in developing certain inherent qualities, some playing a conspicuously favorable and some an equally conspicuously unfavorable part in his eventful life.

In the class two years ahead of him was his friend, Albert Sidney Johnston; in the next class above, Leonidas Polk, afterwards Bishop of Louisiana, who, on the breaking out of the war, laid off his vestments and was commissioned by President Davis a general officer in the Confederate Army and, like Johnston, met death on the field of battle. He and Sidney Johnston were Jefferson Davis' closest friends at West Point, a relation of joy and tenderness, confidences and affection which every graduate will duly remember, for it blossoms on to old age in the memory of every one of them.

From Virginia, in the Corps above Davis were Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston, little dreaming what the future had in store for them in connection with the tallish, spare, dignified but ever graciously polite Cadet in the second class below them. Yet, yet, the web was in the loom, the threads with their varying hues were on the spools, and the shuttle ready waiting till the guns would open on Sumter to weave the involved and many-hued designs of their fate.

A. E. Church, son of the Chief Justice of Connecticut, graduated at the head of Davis' class and in my day at West Point, 1858, was professor of mathematics, and the only time I ever saw Jefferson

Davis, he was walking at the close of a golden September day between him and Professor Bartletl under the bending elms that line the plain. We hac just passed them when my companion, a Southerr Cadet, observed, 'Hhat is Jeff Davis." I turned anc recall with distinctness his graceful figure and distinguished bearing. He was arrayed in a dark blue serge and wore a soft, light-colored, low-crowned gracefully brimmed hat. I have always been sorry my Southern classmate did not tell me who he was before we had met and passed them, for my memory, I am sure, would have carried away the look ir his face.

He graduated July 12, 1828, standing twenty-third in a class of thirty-three members. And now let me dwell for a moment on his four years of edu cation at West Point, and make clear if I can mj convictions as to how advantageous and disadvan tageous it proved to be as that beaming caree: mounted and unfolded.

In his day and for many years afterwards, ai soon as a Cadet entered West Point, its spiri began to prepare the ground of his nature, not ai for an athlete or football player, but to bear th( fruits of the educated soldier and gentleman. T( this end and in keeping with its traditions inheritee from its Revolutionary founders, it held before hin day in and day out, good manners, honor, simplicity courage and love of truth as the virtues that, ii connection with the ornaments of a cultivated mind, should adorn his life.

To consummate this high purpose the Academy as a seat of learning was especially fortunate in its student body; for in those days, as from the very beginning, only the sons of famihes of social distinction, as a rule, received appointments. The inevitable result was that the air of an aristocracy more or less pervaded West Point, infusing the bearing of every graduate, albeit unconsciously to him, with some of its innate cast of exclusiveness.

While this combination of family distinction, culture and a life position as an officer of the Army with its attendant, possibiUties of mihtary glory gave the graduate a ready entrance to the best society, yet it had one very weighty drawback, it cut him off from the great body of the people who, conscious of equal abilities but less fortunate and more or less doomed to toil, very naturally, for such is our nature, withheld its friendliness, meeting his assured advances with a cold eye. This was especially true of the demeanor of the descendants of the Puritans; who, very proud at heart and blessed with many, many fine qualities, yet sparingly so of the spirit of good fellowship, to this very day are keenly resentful to any asserted social and political preeminence.

Now such was the inborn nature of JefTerson Davis that while all the virtues of West Point education, honor, frankness, truthfulness and good manners found a native soil to grow in, still in it too were already germinated seeds of a certain reserve and dignity that found the air congenial and had flourished by the time he graduated into a distinctively aristocratic bearing that clung to him to the end; and much, very much, as all the world knows to his serious disadvantage in his presidential life.

So then, the result of his four years at West Point, instead of inculcating the pliancy and assumed cordiality of the politician, was to develop a personality of the reverse order. But, heavy as was this handicap, the powers and duties attending the Presidency of the Confederacy imposed a far heavier one upon him; in this that from the earliest days of the Academy there has been in the minds of the militia and volunteers, South and North, an unfavorable prepossession of its graduates; that they not only held themselves above and aloof from them, but, what was more galUng, gave their fellow graduates in time of war the precedence over them no matter how well or bravely they had met their duties.

And as to this umbrage and unjust accusation I do protest. For this is a fact, let it weigh what it will; in my long life many a fellow West Point graduate has opened his heart to me around campfires in the field and before blazing hearths with their evoking unreserve, and not a word or even a hint ever fell from the lips of one of them to justify such a charge.

But let this be as it may, no sooner had the war begun and Jefferson Davis had to make appointments for its armies than many of the officers of volunteers and militia, but chiefly ambitious politicians hungering for military honors, whom he had refused to appoint to high places as leaders of troops, at once became his bitter, malicious enemies, declaiming that, as usual, like all West Pointers, he had favored his fellow graduates. And thus was bred a virulent faction; a faction whose poison soon mingled in the editorial pages of leading newspapers, undermining the President's influence and, as it persisted throughout the war, weakening like a deep-seated carbuncle the body of the Confederacy itself.

But, however intense and personal was this hostility, not even his most relentless enemy ever alleged that in deed or act, in sunshine or shadow, Jefferson Davis violated a single one of the great virtues which West Point had helped to develop in his character; namely, honor, courage, fidelity to public and private trusts, purity of life, and the bearing and speech of a gentleman. And it can be said with all truth that his stern old Alma Mater had no son who walked her velvety green plain, who loved her more deeply or cherished more her ideals. When his voice was almost gone, and death waiting at the doorstep, from his pillow he whispered of her and his West Point bygone friends in loving terms, and we think the Spirit of Old West Point heard his whispering love and would have smoothed his brow if she could.

We have dwelt, and perhaps too long, on some of the advantages and disadvantages of his West Point education; but not, we hope, without lighting a candle here and there in the mind of the reader, helping him to find his way, not necessarily to a favorable, but a fair judgment of Jefferson Davis as we go along with the narrative.

Chapter II

Upon graduation he was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the First Regular Infantry, and in September, 1828, at the expiration of the usual graduation leave, reported at Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis.

Shortly afterward he was ordered to join his company at Fort Crawford, the present site of Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, journeying thither on one of the triple-decked, stern-wheel steamboats, an imperial princess of navigation in those days, saluting grandly as they approached and departed from cities and towns with prolonged, reverberating, hoarse blasts, arousing in the breast of every passenger, however obscure, the momentarily pleasing sense of a vague importance.

Fort Crawford at that time was one of the Army's extreme outposts on the frontier; but for a hundred years or more before its day on the same site had been a trading post of the fur gathering companies of Quebec. For at that point, near the mouth of the Wisconsin, one of their long, winding trails through the wilderness of lakes, forests, and beaver-homing streams crossed the Mississippi, thence bearing on over the wide ranges of buffalo and under soaring eagles to the faraway upper Missouri. As I write these Hues, the native wildness of that historic trail steals back into this room and I wish, reader, that we could have travelled and camped with its carefree hunters and trappers.

Around the fort and up and down the river were many Indians; Sacs and Foxes, Wyandots, Menominees, Winnebagos and Pottawatomies, who, crowded back day in and day out from their hunting grounds and the graves of their people by equally fierce and unmerciful frontiersmen, were not in a friendly mood, and on several occasions when Davis was out with detachments to get timber for the completion of the fort, he and his men barely escaped massacre from bands on the warpath.

But that first winter he had another and more pleasing experience, one that he enjoyed recalHng in his old age. With a sergeant, he was out on a reconnaissance and some forty miles from the fort when night overtook them. After wandering through the darkness hour after hour, to their joy they came across a cabin. On haihng, its occupant came to the door and asked, ''Who is there?"

Davis recognized the voice and answered, ''Were you ever at Transylvania?"

"Yes," responded the pioneer, "I was there from 1821 to 1825."

"Do you remember a college boy named Jeff Davis?"

''Of course I do."

"Well, I am Jeff."

"That was enough for me; I pulled him off his horse and into my cabin and it was hours before either of us would think of sleep," said George W. Jones, later United States Senator from Iowa, in a statement after Mr. Davis' death.

The next spring with a small detachment he was sent up the Wisconsin to Yellow Creek, somewhat over a hundred miles from Crawford, to establish a sawmill for additional lumber. There he met the Indians again, but gaining their affection, he was formally made a chief of the tribe, and an old squaw a few years afterward, out of friendship and in remembrance of him, notified an adjacent post of a contemplated attack. While on this lonely duty he was seized with such a debilitating illness that he had to be carried about and nursed like a child ; but, fortunately, he had with him James Pemberton, colored, a slave in law but on the footing with his master, whom he had played with as a boy, of a friend and glad companion — if ever there were two friends in this world that knew each other and loved each other, they were Jefferson Davis and James Pemberton.

Just before the breaking out of the Black Hawk War, Davis rejoined his regiment at Fort Crawford, then commanded by Zachary Taylor, later President Taylor. Colonel Taylor had his family with him — three girls and a boy — and Jefferson Davis for his first wife, married the eldest, Sarah Knox Taylor, as will be told later.

April, 1831, Davis accompanied the troops in the campaign against the Indians; their hne of march, made in early May, was up the pebbly-shored Rock River; the wild plums, honeysuckles and pawpaws in the thickets here and there along its sycamoreshadowed banks, and the flowers of the prairies that stretched away from them were in full bloom.

Besides the Regulars under Taylor, there were militia organizations called out by the Governor of Illinois, a thousand or more men, and among them first as a private and later as a captain of one of these companies was Abraham Lincoln, who brought back from that campaign something that Davis' nature could not give lodgment or whose value as a foil he could not appreciate, namely, several additions to that famous granary of funny stories by which Lincoln avoided many a conflict with the politicians of his own party, who, no matter how angry on entering the White House, always went away amused and more highly attached to him than ever because of the clever way he had dodged their issue behind a funny story.

The Indians were overwhelmingly defeated in August at the Battle of Bad Axe some twenty odd miles above Fort Crawford, and a few days later, their leader, Black Hawk, then an old man, his son and the Prophet, a tall, straight chief with a broad face, large, full eyes, abundant coarse black hair ornamented with an eagle feather and dressed in a suit of white deerskin, were taken prisoners by a treacherous band of Winnebagos and delivered up to the authorities at Fort Crawford.

A moving account of the sufferings of the Indians in that last great battle of their race east of the Mississippi may be found in a letter from Mrs. Albert Sidney Johnston, whose husband was in the engagement, to a member of her family. In years gone by, more than once I lounged on what is known as Black Hawk's Tower at the junction of the Rock River with the Mississippi and pondered over their fate. That spot with its conmianding outlook had been the home of his tribe for generation after generation; his forefathers and favorite daughter were buried there, and in my day the rows of their cornfields were still traceable. The view is wide and you see the distant skyUne asleep in the bosom of the prairie.

It was decided that Black Hawk, his son, and a number of others should be sent as prisoners of war to St. Louis and Davis was detailed by Colonel Taylor to conduct them thither. Black Hawk says in his autobiography dictated the following year: "Then started to Jefferson Barracks (St. Louis) in a steamboat (the Winnebago) under the charge of a young war chief, 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 want a gaping crowd around us." Verily, Davis' consideration for the feelings of his captives speaks well for him.

On their arrival at St. Louis a ball and chain were fastened on Black Hawk, and while there Washington Irvdng went to see him and wrote, " He is upwards of seventy years old, has a fine head, a Roman style of nose and prepossessing countenance." Later he was sent to Fort Monroe for confinement, little dreaming that Jefferson Davis would follow in his steps to the same place and there also wear manacles, people craving to gape at him as at Black Hawk. But Black Hawk had almost the freedom of the Post with its widely encircling green ramparts, while Davis was closely guarded by double lines of sentinels in a semi-dark casemate, no one allowed to approach it, sentinels and blazing lights in the room throughout the night.