The Davis Legacy

In 1832 a gallant young army lieutenant fell in love with the 18-year-old daughter of his commander. They decided to get married, despite the opposition of her father, who frowned on her marrying an army officer. He refused to attend the wedding, in 1835; within three months the bride died of malaria.

Both men still had a future. The lieutenant would become a colonel and distinguish himself in the Mexican War; the colonel would, as a general, become the great American hero of that war. General Zachary Taylor would be elected president of the United States, while his former son-in-law, Jefferson Davis, would be the only president of the Confederate States of America.

Davis also served as a U.S. senator from Mississippi and as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. His knowledge of military matters taught him that the South would be no match for the North if regional differences should erupt into civil war. The North was nearly three times as populous as the South, and its advantages over the rural South in wealth and manufacturing were even more disproportionate.

When he returned to the Senate in 1857, Davis was one of the most respected of Southern spokesmen. But he opposed secession. He believed, absolutely, in the right of any state to leave the Union, but at the moment he thought it would be unwise for the South to exercise that right. Still, when Mississippi seceded in late 1860, he loyally went along with his state. He gave a moving farewell speech in the Senate; it drew thunderous applause, during which he sat down and sobbed.

As president of the Confederacy Davis was a failure; but given the North’s material advantages, the South was doomed anyway. Davis was a man of unquestioned integrity, but he was starchy and quarrelsome and lacked Lincoln’s great tact and forbearance, not to mention his eloquence.

At the end of the Civil War Davis was captured and charged with treason and with conspiring in Lincoln’s assassination. The second charge was so obviously silly that it was soon dropped, but Davis spent two years in painful confinement awaiting trial for treason.

Davis looked forward to his trial. In making his defense he would get the chance to vindicate the South by arguing the constitutional case for the right to secede. As the historian Charles Adams says, it would have been “the trial of the century.” All eyes in America and Europe would have been riveted to it. And if Davis won acquittal, it would have been a heavy blow to Northern war propaganda. Even if he was convicted, the world would have heard his side of the story, perhaps with the same result.

The government couldn’t risk that. So Davis was finally released and the trial was canceled. He was disappointed, but it meant the government was none too sure that its own claim that secession was “treason” could stand up in court. The Union’s real “sovereignty” lay not in the law or the Constitution, but in raw Northern power. It was wiser not to put it to a legal test, especially with some of the best lawyers in the country offering to represent Davis for no fee.

Davis eventually made his case in his own memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government — a two-volume work that seemed calculated to exhaust the patience of the hardiest reader. It was dry, legalistic, humorless, and lacking in the stylistic felicity of a Lincoln or a U.S. Grant. Today it is read more for research than for pleasure.

But Davis’s history does have one great merit: cogency. The hundred pages he devotes to explaining secession can’t be called light reading, but they show why the government didn’t want to let Davis have his day in court. These 15 chapters display a profound grasp not only of the Constitution, but of the writings of the real “greatest generation” — of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. These are works of political philosophy that the Northern leaders, particularly Lincoln, were only dimly aware of. If more Americans had read them, we might have been spared the Civil War.

Perhaps some enterprising publisher will extract Davis’s 15 chapters on secession from the forbidding work and issue them separately. They deserve to stand beside The Federalist Papers in any patriot’s library.

Joseph Sobran