Posted on 6/11/2003, 4:10:33 PM by Aurelius
June 3 was the birthday of one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. He was a graduate of West Point, a hero of the Mexican War, a U.S. senator, a secretary of war and the president of the Confederate States of America.
I'm speaking, of course, of Jefferson Davis. It's unfortunate that we live in an age of ideologues and propaganda. No matter how intelligent, how accomplished, how compassionate, how noble in character, how admired by his contemporaries a man is, if he is on the wrong side of the current politically correct fence, then he's condemned. Even as I write this, some yahoos in Kentucky are trying to persuade the state to remove a statue of Davis, one of its most illustrious native sons. I will think poorly of Kentuckians if they allow this ignorant campaign to succeed.
Had he not ended up on the politically incorrect side of the War of Northern Aggression, his story would be the stuff of novels and motion pictures. American history has provided us with some great love stories — John and Abigail Adams and Andrew and Rachel Jackson, to name just two. The story of Jeff Davis and his beloved wife Varina is another.
Davis had never aspired to be anything but a soldier. After graduating from West Point, he served seven years on the frontier. He fell in love with a daughter of Gen. Zachary Taylor. The old general, who had spent most of his life in dilapidated forts, told Davis that in order to marry his daughter, he would have to resign his commission and find a better way to provide for her. Davis did. He became a planter and married the general's daughter.
Three months later, she died of malaria, and the grief-stricken Davis became a virtual recluse for seven years. It was the vivacity and intelligence of Varina Howell that drew him out of his shell, and though they were as different as two people could be, their great love and marriage lasted until death.
The best way to get acquainted with Davis is with the book "Jefferson Davis: Private Letters, 1823-1889," edited by his biographer, Hudson Strode. These letters, which are as interesting as any novel, give you an intimate portrait of Davis and his wife and the many famous Americans their lives were intertwined with. Reading them is like taking a time machine back to the 19th century.
Davis was a Jeffersonian Democrat who believed in a strict construction of the Constitution. Those were the principles he learned from his father, who had fought in the Revolution, and he never abandoned them. After the war and after he was freed from prison, Davis refused amnesty, saying it would be an admission of wrongdoing, and he believed he and his Southern compatriots had done nothing wrong.
According to Strode, Davis had a remarkable ability to inspire friendship. His friends, writes Strode, loved him with an ardor uncommon among men. "Several bishops who knew him long and well unabashedly wrote to him not only of their love but of their veneration," he writes.
One such friend was Robert Brown, a slave who simply ignored emancipation and stayed with the Davises as a friend and servant for the rest of their lives. Brown was entrusted with the Davises' children when Varina sent them to Canada for safety's sake immediately after the war. Davis was in prison. She was not allowed to leave Savannah, Ga., and there was lawlessness everywhere.
On the ship, Brown overheard a white abolitionist making insulting remarks about Davis within the hearing of the children. Brown walked over and said, "Do you believe I am your equal?" Of course, the abolitionist said. "Then take this from an equal," Brown said, and knocked him flat with one powerful punch.
I think you will enjoy this book, and if you are ever in Biloxi, Miss., be sure to visit Beauvoir, Davis' last residence and now a museum. Jeff Davis was a truly remarkable and admirable man.
Not to the neo-confed clowns who inhabit threads like this one.
That is no reason not to strive for accuracy.
I expect that moral indignation at the South's dogged determination to retain slavery will remain "current" for a long time to come. So will pride in the Union's eventual elimination of this evil blight. Slavery was not the only issue involved in the Civil War, but the Civil War would have been inconceivable without it. Slavery was a necessary, if not sufficient condition for that war. And the fact remains that it was the United, not the Confederate, States which eventually outlawed slavery. Jeff Davis chose his side and lost--and the blessings of individual liberty were thereafter extended to Americans to which those blessings had been denied.
That was an unintended consequence of Union actions, and would have happened even had the North not been victorious, and probably with less evil side effects.
It wasn't they who chose to fight, the fight was forced upon them by the Union, or Lincoln, more specifically.
The Confederate States of America, of course. Oh, wait a moment...
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