He was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, grew up to be president and led his nation through a bitter Civil War.
No, not Abraham Lincoln.
The other guy: Jefferson Davis.
The 200th birthday of the only president of the Confederate States of America is Tuesday, and it will pass with little notice.
A few modest ceremonies and a historians’ symposium are planned this month, and there will be a festival next weekend at Davis’ hometown of Fairview in Todd County. That’s where a 351-foot concrete obelisk was built to his memory in the early 1900s by old men of the Lost Cause.
The commemorations are in stark contrast to the two-year national celebration that began in February to mark the bicentennial of Lincoln, who was born eight months later and 125 miles away, near Hodgenville in LaRue County.
Lincoln achieved mythic status after he died a martyr as the Civil War was ending. In the pantheon of American heroes, he’s right up there with George Washington.
Davis, on the other hand, is a man few now want to acknowledge, much less celebrate.
Before the Civil War, few would have predicted their fates.
Lincoln was homely and awkward. He educated himself while working as a frontier store clerk. His military career was modest. He married well by Lexington standards, but the Todds had little influence outside the Bluegrass.
After holding small political jobs, practicing law and serving in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln was elected to a single two-year term in Congress. He won the presidency in 1860 with not quite 40 percent of the vote in a four-way race that included John C. Breckinridge of Lexington. Lincoln was openly mocked, even by some in his own government. His emancipation of slaves was not a popular move.
Davis, on the other hand, was the handsome ideal of Southern manhood. He left Kentucky at an early age, as Lincoln did, but returned as the only Protestant pupil at a good Catholic school in Springfield. He studied at Transylvania, then one of the nation’s best colleges, before leaving Lexington to attend West Point.
He served twice in the military with distinction and married the daughter of his commander, the future President Zachary Taylor. She died of malaria three months after the wedding. He married well a second time, too, securing a comfortable place in Mississippi’s plantation aristocracy. He represented Mississippi in the U.S. House, served as secretary of war and was elected to the U.S. Senate.
Davis opposed secession, but when Mississippi left the union, he resigned his Senate seat and a month later was elected president of the Confederacy.
“In some ways, the elevation of Lincoln over Davis isn’t quite fair,” said Brian Dirck, a history professor at Anderson University in Indiana and author of Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1809-1865.
“Jefferson Davis was a talented man; before 1860, most people would have said he was more talented than Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “There are many people who felt (Davis) would have made a good president of the United States before the war.”
Davis did a remarkable job of holding together a confederacy founded on the principle that states’ rights supersede those of a central government. Throughout the war, he was constantly sparring with state courts and legislatures.
“I doubt anyone else could have done a better job, given the circumstances,” Dirck said.
“But here’s the thing: He lost. And by that I mean not only did he lose the war, he lost the battle for the Confederacy’s legacy, as well. After the war, he told anybody who would listen that the Confederacy was not about defending slavery, but rather the Constitution and states’ rights. He wrote a book to that effect - a really long, tedious book, I might add - and for a while people believed him.”
The Confederacy, of course, was all about slavery; the South’s wealth depended on it. Jefferson Davis led the fight for slavery and ended up as the poster boy for the most evil social institution in American history.
Davis’ view that slavery “was established by decree of Almighty God … it is sanctioned in the Bible” was conventional wisdom in the South of his day, where slavery had existed for 250 years. People used Scripture then to defend slavery the way others would use it later to deny equal rights to women and gay people.
The United States is great because it is a nation of values, and high on that list of values is equal rights. We really believe that stuff about all people being created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, our entire history has involved struggles to make those words reality. In many ways, we’re still working on it.
I’ve always been fascinated by historic figures such as Jefferson Davis, the man who stood for all of the popular things and is now pitied for it.
And it makes me wonder: When people look back on us a generation or a century or two from now, who will be our Jefferson Davises? Whom will people revere, and whom will they pity?
June 1, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Hi Tom: Great article. I love hearing and sharing the ‘forgotten’ or ‘little known facts’ about history. This is a great viewpoint not known by many. Thanks for the insight.
Barry Cauchon of AwesomeTalks.
June 2, 2008 at 12:10 pm
[...] http://tomeblen.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/jefferson-davis-life-still-holds-lessons/ [...]
June 11, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I received this response from Don Shelton of Nicholasville, who has been active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans:
Tom Eblen’s opinion column on Jefferson Davis concluded by asking “a generation or a century from now, who will be our Jefferson Davises?”, a question that taken by itself and considered by an honest mind would be asking specifically this: who today is willing overcome personal loss, is willing to ignore societal taboos to do the right thing, and is willing to suffer physically for his people? This would be a call for assessment of personal heroism, for these were the actions which exemplified Jefferson Davis’ life. From overcoming the loss of his young bride, Kentuckian Sarah Taylor to malaria, to adopting a slave child – Jim Limber – while he was President, to enduring two years of imprisonment which ended in his captors admitting that they could not try him for treason (in fact becoming convinced that Davis would instead prove the legality of secession), it would be difficult to find aspects of his life that do not serve as positive examples very seldom achieved by today’s politicians.
Of course, the intent of Eblen’s question was to convey just the opposite, instead intimating what popular leader today will be vilified in some form of infamy in the future. He bases this on the simplistic crux of his piece: “The Confederacy, of course, was all about slavery” - a statement brimming with nescient error equivalent to that of saying the American Revolution was all about tea taxes. The Confederacy, and its Second American Revolution, was about many things – including which states would bear the brunt of filling Federal tax coffers and whether the Constitution meant what it said (or didn’t say). But it was about other things as well, like defending one’s home from invasion and about President Lincoln choosing war over diplomacy through acts such as demanding Southern states provide troops to invade South Carolina; predictably steering those states away from their own initial desires to remain in the union. It was also about the cultural and economic frictions of one section moving rapidly into industrialism (and forms of labor arguably cheaper and as morally evil as slavery) while another continuing in agricultural pursuits. Most certainly it was also about slavery; the economic institution of slavery, the political institution of slavery, and the moral institution of slavery.
The economic aspect of slavery was not, contrary to Eblen’s impression, providing merely the South with its “wealth”. The tariffs on Southern products were what paid for the federal government – Lincoln admitted as much regularly – and the South provided many of the raw materials that Northern industrialism needed to create its own wealth. It is beyond simplistic to think that only the South depended on the economics of slavery.
The South already controlled the political battle over slavery long before the first serious consideration of secession. Put simply, slave states had enough votes in the Senate to block any constitutional amendment eradicating it. While Lincoln’s election was seen by many as a threat to slavery, he had little ability or inclination to do so. If the South merely wanted to preserve slavery, the easiest and most likely path to success lay in the status quo.
The morality of slavery was an undeniable factor of the times, certainly, but was not the raison d’être for secession or the Confederacy. There were many in the South who considered slavery a moral evil, Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson among them, and who sought solutions; equally, there were many in the North who considered slavery morally acceptable. However, any real solutions had to face the realities of how to bring an end to slavery without economic and societal upheaval. Simple abolition would present society with millions of former slaves in need of housing, education, and food with no means to pay for them, and with former slave owners no longer possessing a means to keep the engines of economy going, which might at least provide some way to generate the tax revenue needed to attempt solutions for the former slaves. This catch-22 caused Southern emancipation movements to call for the gradual emancipation of slaves as the solution, and this was practiced by a number of slave owners. Northern states, though, feared the emancipation of slaves, gradual or not, and passed laws preventing free Blacks from even living there. If Northern states had instead been willing to pay for the emancipation of slaves, this solution, found by England and many other countries, was likely to succeed, and surely was more desirable than the path taken.
The primary arguments for the War for Southern Independence not being “all about slavery”, though, come from none other than the man executing the war; President Lincoln. Almost to ad naseum did he repeat his insistence that the war was not about the moral or political issue of slavery. Eblen could argue that Lincoln was lying, I suppose, but that would damage Eblen’s claim of Lincoln being “right up there with George Washington” in the “pantheon of American heroes”. After all, Washington never told a lie, or at least a whopper like this that cost over 600,000 American lives. Even in the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln chose not to attempt to free any slaves in the United States, and of course there were still many, and they remained slaves until well after the war. What Lincoln hoped for was a slave uprising in the Confederacy, but it didn’t happen. If he had tried to free slaves in the United States, he likely would have faced a political uprising which would have ended his Presidency.
The simple historical truth is there were a large number of reasons for secession and war, far more than this space allows. For the soldiers actually fighting the war, very few of them on either side would have considered the morality of slavery as a primary reason to endure years of extreme hardship. The undeniable evidence is in their war-time letters and diaries, as well as post-war writings.
If President Davis is now held by some as infamous – and I would argue that millions still respect and revere him – it can only be due to their own lack of historical education and knowledge of the unparalleled achievements of Davis in his life. Of course efforts to diminish the life of Davis are also due to efforts by those with modern political agendas (the media elite and politically correct do come to mind) in moving us towards Orwellian revisionism. It could even be that the tragedy of that war - a needless and incredibly bloody American disaster - causes us to prefer simplistic revisionism in order to feel good about ourselves while avoiding honest and painful reflection on our nation and its history. Ignoring that there were myriad ways of finding solutions that didn’t include killing a large percentage of the population, and pretending that the South was invaded and destroyed singularly because of morality rather than more typical causes of war like serving industrial interests or political ambition, and even pretending that slavery and bigotry were and are uniquely Southern maladies, may make us feel better - but the feeling is false. We won’t really be better until our self-appraisals include a more realistic perspective.
My hope, though, is that the answer to Eblen’s question would be in the future we revile the revisionists who seek to create scapegoats from history for their own ends, and that we praise those who find a desire to quit pretending history fits our contemporary views of ourselves.
Don Shelton
Nicholasville, KY