Posted on 11/19/2007 10:09:26 AM PST by BnBlFlag
Should read “like all of us”
I have actually visited Fort Monroe where he was held after the armistice. The story told there is that he was a decent, restrained man, and the guards felt somewhat sheepish about confining him.
Maybe, maybe not. What history does show us is he wasn’t very good at the job, as it was detailed in the CSA constitution. He micromanaged way too much, gave in to political appointments for combat units with disasterous results (Polk, Bragg come to mind) and in the end was moving units that didn’t actually exist, as if they did, eerily reminiscent of Hitler in the last days of The Reich.
(disclaimer for you ‘Lost Cause’ types, I’m not comparing Jefferson Davis to Adolph Hitler, so don’t bother flaming me on that score).
Somebody once noted that ‘The Confederacy needed either a great stateman, or a great military leader. IN Jefferson Davis, they got neither.’
I think that about sums it up.
Good and decent yes, but his view of the Constitution was fatally flawed - as his heroic attempts to govern the South using his newfangled constitution proved to be doomed to failure.
"Died of a theory" was his own epitaph for the Confederacy.
Unfortunately, the history books tell us more of Pres. Lincoln, Gen. Grant and Gen. Lee and very little of Pres. Jefferson Davis.
‘I have actually visited Fort Monroe where he was held after the armistice. The story told there is that he was a decent, restrained man, and the guards felt somewhat sheepish about confining him.’
How the Union treated him while he was there for two years is one of the uglier post Civil War incidents you’ll never read about in any highschool history book.
I thought in the PPS special Civil War said while imprisoned at Fort monroe he was basically an outcast and died later after being released without many friends...
Perhaps I remember wrong..what is the proper histroy??? ...or has he become a hero after death???
Dixie Ping!
Wow, I got in before someone called him a “traitor”!
‘I thought in the PPS special Civil War said while imprisoned at Fort monroe he was basically an outcast and died later after being released without many friends...
Perhaps I remember wrong..what is the proper histroy??? ...or has he become a hero after death???’
He was always viewed as a ‘hero’ by the South after the war, and had thousands of friends, and hundreds of thousands that would have been glad to have made his acquaitance.
They jump when they’re told to,,only response is “How High”,,
I visited his home in Pass Christian (I think), Mississippi 20 years ago. It overlooked the Gulf of Mexico. I believe it was destroyed by Katrina.
Hmmmm. Traitor is a strong word, and I don’t think it applies to Jefferson Davis.
He, and many many others believed the South had a right to ‘succeed’ from the Union, based on their interpretation of the Constitution.
He was a traitor to the union.
The reality is that he was a pretty retiring, chastened individual after the war and there was little mileage to be made politically out of publicly befriending him or associating with him.
But he had plenty of friends and admirers, and it was much easier to celebrate him after he died than to champion him while he was alive.
The national climate was much different in 1889 than it was in 1866.
I will also point out that many former Confederates who despised him while he was alive became his biggest boosters when he died.
Where does it say in the Constitution as it existed in 1861 that individual states don’t have a right to succeed from the Union?
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