The Life of Jefferson Davis

Mr. Horace Greeley frequently and emphatically, previous to the war, affirmed the right of changing its political association asserted by the South. Three days after the election of Mr. Lincoln, in November, 1860, his paper, the New York Tribune, said: “If the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace… We must ever resist the right of any State to remain in the Union, and nullify or defy the laws thereof. To withdraw from the Union is quite another matter; and whenever any considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to another by bayonets.” On the 17th of December, 1860, the Tribune said: “If it [the Declaration of Independence] justifies the secession of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861.”

Such are a few illustrations, to which might be added innumerable quotations, of the same import, from the most prominent sources of Northern opinion. Never has there been a question so capable of positive solution and easy comprehension, when subjected to the test of candid investigation, and never so successful a purpose to exclude the illumination of facts by persistent and ingenious misrepresentation. The North has reason for its extravagant exultation at the skill and audacity with which the brazen front of hypocrisy, for a time, at least, has successfully sustained, in the name of humanity and liberty, the most monstrous imposition and transparent counterfeit of virtue ever designed upon an intelligent age.

To the triumphant historical vindication of the South, there remains only the essential condition of a clear and truthful statement of the provocations which impelled her to adopt that long-deferred remedy, which is the last refuge of a people whose liberties are imperiled. Secession, however strong in its prescriptive or implied justification as a principle, was not to be undertaken from caprice, or trivial causes of dissatisfaction.

Abuses, numerous, serious, and consecutive, were required before disunion became either desirable or acceptable to the South. The native conservatism of the Southern character renders it peculiarly averse to agitation; to this were added social features, the safety of which would be greatly imperiled by civil war, and thus a train of influences tended to make Southern soil, of all others, the least favorable to the growth of revolutionary principles.

In the development of this volume, we have glanced at the progress of those sectional differences, at various periods precipitated by the insolent aggressions of Abolitionism, which steadily depreciated the value of the Union in Southern estimation. Continued aggressions by her enemies; their Punic faith, illustrated in a series of violated pledges, and habitual disregard of the conditions of the covenant which bound South and North together; petty outrages, taunts and insults, emanating from every possible source of public expression at the North, for many years had banished fraternal feeling and precluded those interchanges of comity between the sections which were the indispensable requisites to national harmony. It is undeniable, that for years previous to secession, the sentimental attachment to the Union, which was the distinctive characteristic of Southern patriotism – unlike the coarse, utilitarian estimate of the Union as a source of pecuniary profit, which constituted its value to the North – had been greatly impaired. Since 1850, and to a considerable extent during the preceding decade, the most sagacious statesmen of the South contemplated disunion as an event almost inevitable, unless averted by a contingency of very improbable occurrence. There must be an awakening by the North to a more just appreciation of its constitutional and patriotic obligations, or an unmanly submission by the South, to a condition of degrading inferiority, in a government to whose construction, prosperity, and distinction, she had contributed more than a proportionate share of influence.

Chief among the considerations which admonished the South of the perils which environed her situation in the Union, was the total destruction of that sectional balance, which had been wisely adjusted by its founders, as the safeguard of the weaker against the stronger influence. Having in mind the wise saying of Aristotle, that “the weak always desire what is equal and just, but the powerful pay no regard to it,” the statesmen of 1787 designedly shaped the chart of government with a view to the preservation of equality. The struggle between the weaker element, naturally contending in behalf of the equilibrium, and the stronger striving for its overthrow, was, at an early period, distinctly foreshadowed. With characteristic prevision, Alexander Hamilton, probably the foremost statesman of his day, foretold the nature of this contest over the principle of equality. Said that sagacious publicist: “The truth is, it is a contest for power, not for liberty.”

This contest, indeed, so long waged, was, many years since, decided overwhelmingly against the South. In 1850, the Northern majority in the House of Representatives, the popular branch of the government, had increased from a majority, in 1790, of five votes, to fifty-four. Years before, the legislation of Congress assumed that sectional bias, which was undeviatingly adhered to for the purpose, and with ample success, of the material depression of the South. Under the baleful influences of hostile legislation, of tariffs aimed directly at her commercial prosperity, of bounties for fostering multifarious Northern interests, her position in the Union was helpless and deplorable in the extreme. Yet, like a rock-bound Prometheus, with the insidious elements of destruction gnawing at her vitals, the South suffered herself to be chained by an influence of sentiment, of association, and reminiscence to the Union, fully conscious of the growing rapacity of her despoiler and of her own hopeless decline. Her infatuation was indeed marvelous, in trusting to the dawning of justice and generosity in a fierce, vindictive, and remorseless sectional majority.

The alarming portents of ultimately complete material prostration, to be consummated by these perversions of the purposes of the Union, were terribly significant, in view of the venom which actuated the enemies of the South. The sectional balance was hopelessly gone; Southern material prosperity destroyed by sectional legislation; not a check, originally provided by the Constitution for the protection of the weaker section, but had been virtually obliterated; Northern perfidy illustrated in the violation of every compact which, in operation, proved favorable to the South, while the latter was held to a rigid fidelity in all agreements favorable to her enemies; the nullification, by the legislatures of half the Northern States, of Federal laws for the protection of Southern property, are a few of those grievances which presented to the South the hard and inexorable alternative of resistance, or abject submission to endless insult and outrage.

A Southern Senator,15 announcing the secession of his State, and his own consequent withdrawal from the Senate, stated the question in a form, which even then had the authority of history.

“Not a decade, nor scarce a lustrum, has elapsed (since Alabama became a State) that has not been strongly marked by proofs of the growth and power of that antislavery spirit of the Northern people, which seeks the overthrow of that domestic institution of the South, which is not only the chief source of her prosperity, but the very basis of her social order and State polity. It is to-day the master-spirit of the Northern States, and had before the secession of Alabama, of Mississippi, of Florida, or of South Carolina, severed most of the bonds of the Union. It denied us Christian communion, because it could not endure what it calls the moral leprosy of slave-holding; it refused us permission to sojourn, or even to pass through the North with our property; it claimed freedom for the slave, if brought by his master into a Northern State; it violated the Constitution, and treaties, and laws of Congress, because designed to protect that property; it refused us any share of lands acquired mainly by our diplomacy, and blood, and treasure; it refused our property any shelter or security beneath the flag of a common government; it robbed us of our property, and refused to restore it; it refused to deliver criminals against our laws, who fled to the North with our property or our blood upon their hands; it threatened us by solemn legislative acts, with ignominious punishment, if we pursued our property into a Northern State; it murdered Southern men when seeking the recovery of their property on Northern soil; it invaded the borders of Southern States, poisoned their wells, burnt their dwellings, and murdered their people; it denounced us by deliberate resolves of popular meetings, of party conventions, and of religious, and even legislative assemblies, as habitual violators of the laws of God and the rights of humanity; it exerted all the moral and physical agencies that human ingenuity can devise, or diabolical malice can employ, to heap odium and infamy upon us, and to make us a by-word of hissing and of scorn throughout the civilized world.”

There was no room for uncertainty as to the significance of the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency, in 1860, by a party exclusively sectional in organization, and upon a platform, which virtually declared the Union, as then constituted, in opposition to justice, humanity, and civilization.

The real danger to the South, involved in this election, was that it was a sectional triumph – a victory of North over South, in a contest where the South risked every thing, the North nothing. From time immemorial sincere patriots of both sections had deprecated the formation of sectional parties, organized upon geographical interests, or upon ideas confined to limited portions of the Union. Washington, in his farewell injunction, admonished his countrymen of the deplorable results which must follow the presentation of such issues.

The Chicago platform was more than a menace to the South; it was a defiance of law, a declaration of war upon the Constitution. The election of Lincoln was both a legal and moral severance of the bonds of Union. While he received the united vote of the North, save New Jersey, he did not receive one electoral vote from the South. His shaping of his administration was consistent with the character of the party which elected him. All his constitutional advisers were Northern men or Southern Abolitionists; social outlaws in their own section, in consequence of their notorious personal depravity, and infidelity to their immediate fellow-citizens. Of like character were the subordinate appointments of the Federal Government in Southern communities.

Nor was there reason to doubt the policy of the Government under its new management. Mr. Lincoln had been sufficiently communicative of his own bitter hostility to Southern institutions. In fact, with much show of justice, his admirers claimed for him the original suggestion of the idea of an “irrepressible conflict,” afterwards so elaborately pronounced by William H. Seward. Public announcements, from prominent speakers of the successful party, amply revealed the feast to which the South was invited. Wendell Phillips, the most able, eloquent, and sagacious of the original Abolitionists, thus pointedly defined the situation: “No man has a right to be surprised at this state of things. It is just what we have attempted to bring about. It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face, and calls itself national; but it is not national – it is sectional. The Republican party is a party of the North pledged against the South.”

Such was the complexion to which political affairs were brought by the election of Abraham Lincoln. There remained hardly a hope, even for future security or domestic tranquillity to the South, except in withdrawal from an association, in which she had become an inferior and an outcast – an object of oppression, outrage, and contumely. From a relentless Abolition majority she could expect no favors; and the Northern Democracy, so long her ally, for common purposes of party, had cowered before the storm of fanaticism, and repudiated the first demand made upon its fidelity to principle.

Congress assembled on the first Monday of December, 1860, a few weeks subsequent to the Presidential election. Never had that body met under circumstances of such gravity. Universal foreboding of peril to the nation was mingled with hope of such action, as would avert the impending calamities of disunion and civil war. There were few indications, at the opening of the session, of conciliatory sentiments; from the representatives of both sections came open defiance, and Northern members of both houses were more than ever bold in the utterance of insult and menace. Before the opening of the session, President Buchanan received from Mr. Davis the most satisfactory assurances of his coöperation with the administration in a pacific policy, having for its object the settlement of the national difficulties upon terms promotive of the peace of the country, and assuring the security of the South.16 To such a settlement the efforts of Mr. Davis were addressed so long as there was the slightest ground for the indulgence of hope.

This session of Congress, the last which was held previous to the commencement of civil war, is chiefly interesting as the historical record of those patriotic efforts which were made to save the Union, and as furnishing incontestible proof of the guilt of those who, by their persistent refusal of all conciliatory propositions, are justly responsible for the calamities which were to befall the country. Happily for the reputation of Mr. Davis, the proof is authentic and conclusive in his favor upon these important questions. There is no portion of his career in which statesmanship, patriotism, and a noble appreciation of the claims of humanity shine forth more conspicuously. So overwhelming is the evidence that, in these last days of the Union, he was false to none of these high considerations, that the most mendacious assailants of himself and the cause he lately represented have not yet ventured to call it in question.

A disposition is frequently evinced to plead for him immunity from the responsibility of his position, as the leader of the Confederate movement, upon the score of his consistent Unionism, manifested in the prevailing conservatism of his course as a politician. He needs no such palliation. His devotion to the Union of the American fathers was as unquestionable as was that of Washington. His patriotism was illustrated by every mode of exemplification in the service of country. To substantiate his attachment to that association of States, designed by the fathers, sublime in its objects of mutual fidelity, generous sympathies, justice, and equality, no elaborate statement is required, nor could formal vindication strengthen its defenses.17 He never arrayed himself against such a Union, but, abhorring that perverted instrument of sectional aggression, which the Government had become, he did accompany and lead his fellow-citizens in their exercise of the highest privilege of freemen.

He was always prepared to follow the principles of States’ Rights to their logical consequences, and was yet consistent in his attachment to the Union. Thus he was a firm believer in the absolute sovereignty of the States, and of the enjoyment, by the States, of all the attributes of sovereignty, including, necessarily, the right of secession. He had never urged the expediency of secession, though, upon repeated occasions, he had foreshadowed its probable necessity in the future, as the only remedy remaining to the South in certain contingencies. In the Senate, in 1850, he thus alluded to the possibility of a successful organization of a sectional party: “The danger is one of our own times, and it is that sectional division of the people which has created the necessity of looking to the question of the balance of power, and which carries with it, when disturbed, the danger of disunion.”

In 1859, again, he proclaimed, in unequivocal terms, his course in the event of the success of a party indorsing the Rochester pronunciamento of Mr. Seward. Yet his course, subsequent to the election of Mr. Lincoln, was directed entirely in the interest of moderation. Having little hope of concession from the enemies of the South, in the moment of their overwhelming victory, he yet anxiously, earnestly entered that last struggle for the Constitution, before it passed into the keeping of iconoclasts, who were pledged to its destruction.

His zeal in behalf of pacification was actuated by considerations of humanity, no less ennobling than his impulse of disinterested patriotism. Regarding a long and bloody war as the certain result of dissolution, he anxiously sought to avert that calamitous result, and stood pledged to the acceptance of any basis of settlement which should guarantee the safety and honor of the South. At no time, however, did he advocate submission. His language in the Senate is explicit. Speaking of the secession of Mississippi, he said: “I, however, may be permitted to say, that I do think she has justifiable cause, and I approve of her act. I conferred with her people before that act was taken, counseled them then that, if the state of things which they apprehended should exist when the convention met, they should take the action which they have now adopted.”

During the session, numerous efforts at compromise were made, in every instance emanating from Southern Representatives or Northern Democrats, the dominant party of the North declining all tenders of pacification, and offering no terms of conciliation in return. It is unnecessary to trace the progress of these abortive efforts, which, in the main, received the support of feeble minorities, and had, from their inception, no prospect of adoption.

There was one proposition, and probably only one, which embodied a competent basis of settlement, and was entitled to favor. This was called the “Crittenden Compromise,” and originated with the venerable Kentucky Senator, by whose name it is designated. For a time it seemed that the demonstrations of popular sentiment in its favor, especially the well-ascertained readiness of a large majority of the Southern people to accept it, and its exceedingly practical nature, as a final settlement of the slavery question, would eventually secure its adoption by Congress. The result was a disappointment of this patriotic expectation, and a conclusive demonstration of the purpose of the Republican party to consent to no settlement which the South could accept.

An examination of the Crittenden proposition will reveal a most striking illustration of the ever-present spirit of accommodation, in matters affecting the safety of the Union, which, even in its last hours, was characteristic of the leaders and people of the South, and of the narrow, selfish, and exacting sectionalism of the North. In reality, it was little short of a surrender, in its ample concessions, to the encroachments of Abolitionism.

The resolutions introduced by Mr. Crittenden, in the Senate, on the 18th of December, 1860, contemplated amendments to the Constitution having the following objects: The prohibition of slavery in all Territories north of the old Missouri Compromise line, and providing protection for it south of that line; a denial of the power of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, or in ports, arsenels, dock-yards, or wherever else the Federal Government exercised jurisdiction; remuneration to owners of escaped slaves by communities in which the Federal laws, providing rendition of slaves, might be violently obstructed. Such were the material features of the “Crittenden Compromise.”

It will be seen at a glance how absurd was the misnomer of “compromise” applied to so one-sided a settlement. The South was required, by its provisions, to abandon the sacred right of protection to her property, guaranteed by the Constitution and unequivocally re-affirmed by the highest judicial tribunal in the land. The Supreme Court, in the Dred Scott case, had already decided the right to take slaves into all the Territories, while the Crittenden proposition prohibited it entirely in the major portion of the common Territory, and merely tolerated it in the residue. The Constitution, as expounded by the Supreme Court, guaranteed the right of introduction and protection of slavery in all the Territories, in whatever latitude, as the common property of the States. The Crittenden amendment proposed to confine this right to Territory south of 36° 30', prohibiting, in the meanwhile, slavery forever north of that line, and in regions where its legal existence had been emphatically affirmed by that august tribunal, the Supreme Court. If adopted, it would have yielded every thing to Abolition rapacity, save a mere abstraction. Of all the vast territory yet remaining to be hereafter divided into States, only in New Mexico did it propose even to tolerate slavery, and in that locality the laws of nature precluded its permanent establishment.

A few days after its introduction in the Senate, the Crittenden amendment was proposed by its author to a special committee of thirteen, created on motion of Senator Powell, of Kentucky, for the consideration of all questions pertaining to the pending national difficulties. This committee was composed of the most eminent and influential Senators, embracing five leading Republicans, five Southern Senators, and Messrs. Bright, Bigler, and Douglas, on behalf of the Northern Democracy. Mr. Davis, originally appointed, at first declined to serve, but finally consented, in compliance with the urgent requests of other Senators. At the first meeting of the committee, 21st December, it was “resolved that no proposition shall be reported as adopted, unless sustained by a majority of each of the classes of the committee; Senators of the Republican party to constitute one class, and Senators of the other parties to constitute the other class.”

This resolution was necessary, in consequence of the obvious futility of any settlement which did not meet the approval of a majority of the Republican Senators. In this Committee the Crittenden proposition was defeated. Not one of the Republican Senators voted for it, and Messrs. Davis and Toombs likewise voted against it when it was ascertained that it would not receive the sanction of a majority of the Republican Senators.

Despite its unfairness as a measure of settlement, and its great injustice to the South, Mr. Davis would have accepted it, as would a large majority of Southern Senators, as a finality, if the Republican Senators had tendered it. This, however, the latter were determined not to do, nor did a single Republican Senator, at any time during the session, express even a desire that any action, conciliatory to the South, should be adopted.18 Insolent, dictatorial, and defiant, they proclaimed their purpose, at all hazards, to assert the authority of the Government, and their acts clearly indicated their stern purpose to refuse every proposition contemplating concession or compromise. In substitution of the Crittenden adjustment, they voted solidly for the amendment of Senator Clarke, of New Hampshire, which denied the necessity of amendments to the Constitution, which ought to be obeyed rather than amended, and declared that the remedy for present difficulties was to be sought in a stern enforcement of the laws, rather than in assurances to peculiar ideas and guarantees to peculiar interests. This palpable defiance, and emphatic avowal of a purpose to concede nothing to Southern demands, was indorsed by the action of Republican caucusses of both houses of Congress, by resolutions of State Legislatures, and by tenders of men and means to compel the submission of the South. The entire Republican party were clearly committed to the purpose, avowed by Mr. Salmon P. Chase, in a letter from the Peace Congress, to Portsmouth, Ohio, to “use the power while they had it, and prevent a settlement.”19

On the 31st December, 1860, the Committee of Thirteen reported to the Senate their inability to “agree upon any general plan of adjustment,” and thus, with the arrival of the new year, had vanished the last hope of preserving the peace of the country. The failure of the Crittenden proposition was decisive of the question of pacification; no other plan of adjustment, that was presented, having either its merits or its practical features.