Jefferson Davis’ life still holds lessons

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?

KY Notebook: The problem is Obama, not Appalachia

Bill Bishop of The Daily Yonder has an excellent piece on the discussion about Barrack Obama’s “Appalachian problem.” It offers statistics showing that race is no more an issue in Appalachia than many other parts of the country, including New York. Bishop argues that Obama would get a lot more support in the mountains if he would simply show up and try. It worked for Jesse Jackson two decades ago.

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In the last Kentucky Notebook, I mentioned “retiree” blogs. Another interesting idea comes from Marty Solomon, a retired University of Kentucky education professor. Like many people, Solomon says he is frustrated that some stories he thinks are important don’t get much coverage by major new organizations. So he has created The Watchdog Post blog to draw attention to them.

Kentucky Notebook: Retirees and The New Yorker

Blogging software is one of my favorite new inventions. It allows anyone with a computer and Internet connection to easily express himself to a worldwide audience. One interesting genre is blogs written by retirees who use their expertise to report and comment on news and issues in their fields.

One of my favorites is Kentucky School News and Commentary, written by Richard Day, the retired principal of Cassidy Elementary School in Lexington. Day writes frequently on a variety of education topics, and flags relevant articles published elsewhere. What makes his blog especially interesting is that he does some original reporting, and not just commentary.

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A reader alerted me to an interesting article in last week’s New Yorker magazine that ends with a scene from John McCain’s recent campaign trip to Inez in Martin County. George Packer’s piece is called The Fall of Conservatism, and it traces America’s conservative movement from Barry Goldwater to George Bush. “It was interesting to hear big names like Buckley, Reagan, Nixon – characters in the great, big game of America – and end up unexpectedly in your own backyard,” said Matthew Clarke, a Kentuckian who now works in Manhattan.

NRA’s slippery slope full of holes

As expected, I heard an earful about my column last week on a new gun group that opposes the National Rifle Association’s hard-line views and allegiance to the Republican Party.

NRA loyalists from around the country sent me e-mails echoing the organization’s claim that a small rival, the American Hunters & Shooters Association, is just a “front” for gun-control activists. They said that anything that weakens absolute Second Amendment freedom is a slippery slope that will lead to the nation being disarmed.

I believe just the opposite is true — and I think many gun owners realize it.

There’s a lot of money and power to be had by representing gun enthusiasts. Nobody knows that better than the NRA and its many competitors. With guns in nearly half of all American households, these organizations know that fear — “sneaky liberals want to take away your guns!” — is a powerful recruiting tool.

Both Democrats and Republicans love to exploit wedge issues that will energize their base. Republicans have become masters of the technique, courting factions that feel so passionately about hot-button topics — guns, gay rights, abortion, prayer in schools — that it has become difficult to find common ground on many important issues in American life.

I don’t know whether the American Hunters & Shooters Association is a good organization or a bad one. What I found interesting was its willingness to say what many “pro-gun” Kentuckians like me think about this endless debate: that we need some intelligent compromises to protect responsible gun ownership and make communities safer.

Many law-abiding Kentuckians want guns for self-defense or farm use, or because they enjoy shooting, hunting or collecting. Or they believe that America would be less safe if responsible, law-abiding citizens were disarmed. Members of the NRA and similar groups are generally the most responsible gun owners and shooters out there.

Guns were an important part of the frontier heritage that helped make America great. And Kentucky, after all, was the nation’s first frontier.

But gun violence and crime are serious problems. The no-compromise crowd has kept law enforcement agencies from having some tools they need to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and crazy people. And that has led to some over-reaching, such as when police in New Orleans illegally seized hundreds of guns after Hurricane Katrina.

Without some intelligent compromises, each new tragedy, like the Virginia Tech or Columbine massacres, will prompt more emotional calls for banning guns. All guns. There are zealots on both sides.

The NRA and other gun groups could learn something from the horse industry.

High-profile deaths of horses in Thoroughbred racing and eventing have created some public backlash against those sports. Rather than stonewall, though, horse industry leaders are aggressively working to make their sports safer. They love horses, sure, but they also realize that their sports could live or die with public opinion.

As society becomes more diverse, we must regain the lost art of compromise. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to deal with complex problems in ways that protect everyone’s rights. Polarization may be good for special-interest groups and political parties, but it’s bad for America.

If Second Amendment absolutists keep standing up and daring others to pry their guns from their “cold, dead fingers,” eventually somebody’s going to do it.

Kentucky Notebook: What’s worth reading online

The World Wide Web is a gold mine for news and information junkies. The more I look, the more I find fascinating “content” that helps me understand the world and our little corner of it.

Today I’m beginning an occasional series of blog posts called Kentucky Notebook. I call it occasional, because I’ll do it whenever I find time and material worth calling to your attention. I call it Kentucky Notebook, because it will highlight online content relating to our state, people and culture. If you see articles worth highlighting, post a comment or send me an email.

Ron Eller, a University of Kentucky history professor who specializes in Appalachia, has a perceptive essay about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Appalachian voters. It was written before Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory over Obama in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary, but it helps explain why Obama received minuscule support in some Eastern Kentucky counties. The essay is accompanied by photos of Letcher County taken by photographer Andrew Stern this year and a half-century ago.

Eller’s essay also is a good excuse to highlight the online publication in which it appears. The Daily Yonder focuses on news and commentary about rural America. It is edited by two Kentuckians: Bill Bishop, a former Herald-Leader editorial columnist, and his wife, Julie Ardery. They now live in Austin, Texas. Bishop is also the author of a new book, The Big Sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart. It was reviewed Sunday in The New York Times.

Signs of spring: Cast your vote May 20

Campaign signs are popping up like dandelions as Kentucky’s May 20 primary election nears. This crop is at a crossroads on Ky. 1269 near Salt Lick in Bath County. Photo/Tom Eblen

Who is your favorite candidate, and why? Leave a comment below

Historian’s memo as current as today’s headlines

I always think of Thomas D. Clark in the spring.

Perhaps it’s because, soon after I returned to Lexington in the spring of 1998, I asked Kentucky’s historian laureate to speak to the Herald-Leader staff. He stood and lectured for nearly an hour without notes, putting Kentucky’s array of issues, controversies and quirks into the context of history’s great sweep.

It was an impressive performance, especially for a man about to turn 95.

While cleaning out files recently, I found a 15-page autobiographical memo Clark sent so I could introduce him properly that day. Hammered out on his manual typewriter, it was filled with typos and seemed to be missing a page or two. Mostly it was his exposition of Kentucky problems that need to be fixed.

It was classic Clark. He didn’t study history to bask in the glow of a romanticized past. Rather, he saw history as the recipe for who we are and as a guide to the future that could help us learn from the mistakes of the past.

After Clark retired from a long and distinguished teaching career, he became even more active and outspoken. He drove himself around the state, speaking to legislative committees and garden clubs alike — anyone who was willing to listen. And he never pulled punches. Herald-Leader reporter Andy Mead wrote my favorite description of Clark, calling him “a sort of unofficial state grandfather - but not the kind who spoils you.”

Clark didn’t let up until his death on June 28, 2005 — 16 days short of his 102nd birthday.

Perhaps I also think of Clark this time of year because spring is a time of renewal, a time to sort through old things and get serious about the future.

This is an especially good day to read Clark’s observations, as the General Assembly heads home from Frankfort, having left so many of Kentucky’s needs unmet.

Here are some excerpts:

“I thoroughly abhor the political corruption which has so often stained the democratic process in Kentucky’s history. Every vote “bought”, every private driveway paved at public expense, every mean and selfish act of a public school board, failure of the courts and criminal act by a public official has soiled Kentucky’s image and diluted its integrity. One has only to examine the electoral statistics of past elections to see how much Kentuckians lack faith in their governing process.

“There has ever run through Kentucky history the not-so-subtle impact of provincialism. Often this has been a costly thing. Communities have been set against communities, there have been failures in the creation and operation of regional institutions …

“On the broader statewide scale, sectionalism has often generated a shortsightedness which has kept many Kentucky public institutions in a state of mediocrity, or has involved a wasteful use of limited financial and other resources. …

“It is highly frustrating to see Kentuckians fail to live up to the potentials of their land and place. They have at once a passion for the past and too often have revealed a shortsighted indifference to their potentials. Too often they have been slow if not actually resistant to changes, changes which are exerted largely by local native inertia, and, paradoxically, by outside forces which may too often have been of an exploitative nature.

“Never at any moment have Kentuckians been fully alerted to the fact its human population is as much a resource as are the land and its forests and mineral resources, all demanding effective processing. …

“It is painful to see the very bosom of the state desecrated with trash in myriad forms, to see sloven domestic premises, pollution of streams, erosion of the hills and ravenous log and lumber exploiters rob that forest twenty years ahead of profitable harvest time. …

“ … democracy in Kentucky is stained often by weak-kneed political opportunists who failed to discuss intelligently and openly the major issues of the moment, often preferring to make personal and scurrilous attacks on opponents rather than tackling devitalizing problems. Too often the Kentucky gubernatorial administrations and legislators have failed their constituents by not exerting forthright and honest political leadership.

“Every time the General Assembly adjourns without having resolved basic and nagging problems, it leaves behind a body politic suffering a chronic condition of public cynicism.”

To download a PDF copy of Clark’s whole memo — wisdom, typos and all — click here.

Thomas D. Clark at his typewriter, 1998. Above, in front of the governor’s mansion in Frankfort, 2002. Photos/Charles Bertram

What do you think of Mayor Newberry’s budget?

Mayor Jim Newberry today unveiled a “very tight” budget for Lexington Fayette Urban County Government that includes no new taxes and only a few new initiatives. Among other things, the budget calls for cutting 180 city jobs through attrition and retirements by the end of the year.

Read Michelle Ku’s report here, where you also can download a copy of the mayor’s budget address and the budget document itself.

What do you think of the proposed budget? What do you like or not like about it? What other suggestions would you offer Mayor Newberry and the Urban County Council? Comment below.

Preserve Lexington: Let’s look for common ground

Tom,
I enjoy your blog very much. I feel like I am strolling through a virtual Forum listening to engaged citizens debate the future of their city.

After reading through the many interesting comments on your site, I had a few thoughts that I wanted to share.

We can spend a great deal of time debating what happened in the past, or what didn’t happen in the past, or what should have happened in the past. And perhaps that is a debate that should happen, and could be useful, down the road. But now, all that is likely to result is the sort of finger-pointing unlikely to move us forward.

I expect that within a week a number of parties to this debate will have a chance to sit down and discuss the possibilities for compromise. Preserve Lexington has committed to a good faith conversation with Mr. Webb. And I believe that Mr. Webb will approach these discussions with the same good faith.

So, for the next week, it might be best to focus on what we have in common, rather than what separates us. We all respect and applaud the considerable accomplishments of Mr. Webb and of the Webb Companies, we all want what is best for our city, we all welcome a significant development on this block. I think that we can even agree in principle that significant new development can co-exist with, and more important, can complement existing historic architecture. To illustrate this, Preserve Lexington has compiled a considerable portfolio of major developments across the U.S. that successfully marry the historic with the new.

Let us all take a deep breath.

Let us reflect upon these commonalities.

Let us see if conversation can lead to compromise.

Sincerely,

Hayward Wilkirson
President of the Board of Directors
Preserve Lexington

Beshear: Politics getting in the way

Not to be outdone by Keeneland President Nick Nicholson, Gov. Steve Beshear had his own pithy introduction as the featured speaker at Lexington Forum’s meeting Thursday morning at Keeneland.

Beshear remarked on looking out over the beautiful Keeneland track, with horses going through their morning exercise. “It tells you two great, positive things,” he said. “One, is that spring is almost here. Two, the legislature’s almost ready to go home.”

Only about eight hours earlier, the General Assembly had approved a $19 billion state budget that makes almost nobody happy. In his remarks and in comments to reporters afterward, Beshear talked bout the budget, the legislature and the partisan bickering in Frankfort. Read Ryan Alessi’s report here on PolWatchers.

Then Beshear reflected on his view of Kentucky’s challenges and problems, partisan politics and his own political motivations and ambitions. Listen to a brief excerpt of his remarks by clicking the arrow below.