The Life of Jefferson Davis

A peculiar feature in the public career of Mr. Davis was its steady and consecutive development. He has accepted service, always and only, in obedience to the concurrent confidence of his fellow-citizens in his peculiar qualifications for the emergency. From the beginning he gave the promise of those high capacities which the fervid eulogy of Grattan accorded to Chatham – to “strike a blow in the world that should resound through its history.” His first election to Congress was the spontaneous acknowledgment of the profound impression produced by his earliest intellectual efforts. The consummate triumph of his genius and valor at Buena Vista did not exceed the anticipations of his friends, who knew the ardor and assiduity of his devotion to his cherished science, and now in the noble arena of the American Senate his star was still to be in the ascendant.

At the first session of the Thirtieth Congress, Jefferson Davis took his seat as a Senator of the United States from the State of Mississippi. The entire period of his connection with the Senate, from 1847 to 1851, and from 1857 to 1861, scarcely comprises eight years; but those were years pregnant with the fate of a nation, and in their brief progress he stood in that august body the equal of giant intellects, and grappled, with the power and skill of a master, the great ideas and events of those momentous days. Mr. Davis could safely trust, whatever of ambition he may cherish for the distinguished consideration of posterity, to a faithful record of his service in the Senate. His senatorial fame is a beautiful harmony of the most pronounced and attractive features of the best parliamentary models. He was as intrepid and defiant as Chatham, but as scholarly as Brougham; as elegant and perspicuous in diction as Canning, and often as profound and philosophical in his comprehension of general principles as Burke; when roused by a sense of injury, or by the force of his earnest conviction, as much the incarnation of fervor and zeal as Grattan, but, like Fox, subtle, ready, and always armed cap a pie for the quick encounters of debate.

Among all the eminent associates of Mr. Davis in that body, there were very few who possessed his peculiar qualifications for its most distinguished honors. His character, no less than his demeanor, may be aptly termed senatorial, and his bearing was always attuned to his noble conception of the Senate as an august assemblage of the embassadors of sovereign States. He carried to the Senate the loftiest sense of the dignity and responsibility of his trust, and convictions upon political questions, which were the result of the most thorough and elaborate investigation. Never for one instant varying from the principles of his creed, he never doubted as to the course of duty; profound, accurate in information, there was no question pertaining to the science of government or its administration that he did not illuminate with a light, clear, powerful, and original.

It has been remarked of Mr. Davis’ style as a speaker, that it is “orderly rather than ornate,” and the remark is correct so far as it relates to the mere statement of the conditions of the discussion. For mere rhetorical glitter, Mr. Davis’ speeches afford but poor models, but for clear logic and convincing argument, apt illustration, bold and original imagery, and genuine pathos, they are unsurpassed by any ever delivered in the American Senate. Though the Senate was, undoubtedly, his appropriate arena as an orator, and though it may well be doubted whether he was rivaled in senatorial eloquence by any contemporary, Mr. Davis is hardly less gifted in the attributes of popular eloquence. Upon great occasions he will move a large crowd with an irresistible power. As a popular orator, he does not seek to sway and toss the will with violent and passionate emotion, but his eloquence is more a triumph of argument aided by an enlistment of passion and persuasion to reason and conviction. He has less of the characteristics of Mirabeau, than of that higher type of eloquence, of which Cicero, Burke, and George Canning were representatives, and which is pervaded by passion, subordinated to the severer tribunal of intellect. It was the privilege of the writer, on repeated occasions, during the late war, to witness the triumph of Mr. Davis’ eloquence over a popular assemblage. Usually the theme and the occasion were worthy of the orator, and difficult indeed would it be to realize a nobler vision of the majesty of intellect. To a current of thought, perennial and inexhaustible, compact, logical and irresistible, was added a fire that threw its warmth into the coldest bosom, and infused a glow of light into the very core of the subject. His voice, flexible and articulate, reaching any compass that was requisite, attitude and gestures, all conspired to give power and expression to his language, and the hearer was impressed as though in the presence of the very transfiguration of eloquence. The printed efforts of Mr. Davis will not only live as memorials of parliamentary and popular eloquence, but as invaluable stores of information to the political and historical student. They epitomize some of the most important periods of American history, and embrace the amplest discussion of an extended range of subjects pertaining to almost every science.

The development in Mr. Davis of the high and rare qualities, requisite to parliamentary leadership, was rapid and decisive. His nature instinctively aspires to influence and power, and under no circumstances could it rest contented in an attitude of inferiority. Independence, originality, and intrepidity, added to earnest and intelligent conviction; unwavering devotion to principle and purpose; a will stern and inexorable, and a disposition frank, courteous, and generous, are features of character which rarely fail to make a representative man. After the death of Mr. Calhoun, he was incomparably the ablest exponent of States’ Rights principles, and even during the life of that great publicist, Mr. Davis, almost equally with him, shared the labors and responsibilities of leadership. His personal courage is of that knightly order, which in an age of chivalry would have sought the trophies of the tourney, and his moral heroism fixed him immovably upon the solid rock of principle, indifferent to the inconvenience of being in a minority and in no dread of the storms of popular passion. His faith in his principles was no less earnest than his confidence in his ability to triumphantly defend them. In the midst of the agitation and excitement of 1850, Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, whose brilliant but erring genius so long and fatally led estray, from the correct understanding of the vital issue at stake between the North and the South, a numerous party of noble and true-hearted Southern gentlemen, furnished the occasion of an impressive illustration of this quality. Turning, in debate, to the Mississippi Senator, he notified the latter of his purpose, at some future day, to debate with him elaborately, an important question of principle. “Now is the moment,” was the reply of the intrepid Davis, ever eager to champion his beloved and imperiled South, equally against her avowed enemies, and the not less fatal policy of those who were but too willing to compromise upon an issue vital to her rights and dignity. And what a shock of arms might then have been witnessed, could Clay have dispelled thirty years of his ripe three-score and ten! Each would have found a foeman worthy of his steel. In answer to this bold defiance, Clay, like Hotspur, would have rushed to the charge, with visor up and lance couchant; and Davis, another Saladin, no less frank than his adversary, but far more dexterous, would have met him with a flash of that Damascus scymetar, whose first blow severed the neck of the foeman.

That would have been a bold ambition that could demand a formal tender of leadership from the brilliant array of gallant gentlemen, ripe scholars, distinguished orators and statesmen, who, for twenty years before the war, were the valiant champions in Congress of the principles and aspirations of the South. Yet few will deny the preëminence of Mr. Davis, in the eye of the country and the world, among States’ Rights leaders. Equally with Mr. Calhoun, as the leader of a great intellectual movement, he stamped his impress upon the enduring tablets of time.

Like Mr. Calhoun, too, Mr. Davis gave little evidence of capacity or taste for mere party tactics. Neither would have performed the duties of drill-sergeant, in local organizations, for the purposes of a political canvass, so well as hundreds of men of far lighter calibre and less stability. Happily, both sought and found a more congenial field of action.

The unexpired term, for which Mr. Davis had been elected in 1847, ended in 1851, and, though he was immediately reëlected, in consequence of his subsequent resignation his first service in the Senate ended with the term for which he had first been elected. A recurrence to the records of Congress will exhibit the eventful nature of this period, especially in its conclusion. In the earlier portion of his senatorial service, Mr. Davis participated conspicuously in debate and in the general business of legislation. Here, as in the House of Representatives, his views upon military affairs were always received with marked respect, and no measure looking to the improvement of the army failed to receive his cordial coöperation.

The extensive conquests of the army in Mexico, and the necessity of maintaining the authority of the Federal Government in the conquered country until the objects of the war could be consummated, created considerable embarrassment. Upon this subject Mr. Davis spoke frequently and intelligently. His sagacity indicated a policy equally protective of the advantages which the valor of the army had achieved, and humane to the conquered. In a debate with Mr. John Bell, in February, 1848, he defined himself as favoring such a military occupation as would “prevent the General Government of Mexico, against which this war had been directed, from reëstablishing its power and again concentrating the scattered fragments of its army to renew active hostilities against us.” He disclaimed the motive, in this policy, of territorial acquisition, and earnestly deprecated interference with the political institutions of the Mexicans. The estimate entertained by the Senate, of his judgment and information upon military subjects, was indicated by his almost unanimous election, (thirty-two for Mr. Davis, and five for all others,) during the session of the Thirty-first Congress, as Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs. His speeches on the subject of offering congratulations to the French people upon their recent successful political revolution, resulting in the establishment of a republican form of government, the proposed organization of the territorial government of Oregon, upon various subjects of practical and scientific interest, and his incidental discussions of the subject of slavery, were able, eloquent, and characteristic.

The session of Congress in 1849 and 1850 brought with it a most angry and menacing renewal of sectional agitation. Previous events and innumerable indications of popular sentiment had clearly revealed to candid minds, every-where, that the increasing sectional preponderance of the North, and its growing hostility to slavery, portended results utterly ruinous to the rights and institutions of the South. To the South it was literally a question of vitality, to secure some competent check upon the aggressive strength of the North. To maintain any thing like a sectional balance, the South must necessarily secure to her institutions, at least, a fair share of the common domain to be hereafter created into States. The immense territorial acquisitions resulting from the Mexican war were now the subjects of controversy. After a contest, protracted through several months, and eliciting the most violent exhibitions of sectional feeling, a plan of adjustment, under the auspices chiefly of Henry Clay, whose fatal gift was to preserve, for a time, the peace of the country by the concession of the most precious and vital rights of his section to an insolent and insatiate fanaticism, was finally reached. This settlement, known, by way of distinction, as the “Compromise of 1850,” averting for the time the dangers of disunion and civil war, met the approval of the advocates of expediency, but was opposed, with heroic pertinacity, by Mr. Davis and his associates of the States’ Rights party. They saw the hollowness of its pretended justice, its utter worthlessness as a guarantee to the South, and sought to defeat it – first in Congress, and afterwards by the popular voice. But the sentiment of attachment to the Union triumphed over every consideration of interest, principle, even security, and the snare succeeded. Again the South receded, again received the stone instead of the asked-for loaf, and again did she compromise her most sacred rights and dearest interests, receiving, in return, the reluctant and insincere guarantee of the recovery of her stolen slaves.

The folly of the South in assenting to this adjustment is now obvious to the dullest understanding, and subsequent events were swift to vindicate the wisdom, patriotism, and foresight of Mr. Davis and those who sustained him in opposition to the much-vaunted Union-saving compromise. Yet, they were no more disunionists in 1850 than rebels and traitors in 1861. The charge of disunionism was freely iterated against them, and not without effect, even in their own section, where the sentimental attachment to the Union was stronger, just as its sacrifices in behalf of the Union were greater, than those of the North. Jefferson Davis never was a disunionist, not even in his subsequent approval of secession, in the sense of a wanton and treasonable disposition to sever the bonds of that association of co-equal sovereignties which the founders of the Federal Government bequeathed to their posterity.

His action, at all times, has been thoroughly consistent with his declared opinions, and with the earnest attachment to the Union, avowed in his congressional speeches and in his public addresses every-where. In 1850 and in 1861 his course was the logical sequence of his opinions, maintained and asserted from his introduction to public life. To save the Union, upon the only basis upon which it could rest as a guarantee of liberty, – the basis of absolute equality among the States; to blend Federal power and States’ Rights, was the grand, paramount object to which all his aspirations and all his investigations of political science were directed. Repudiating the power of a State to nullify an act of Congress, and yet not surrender its normal relations as a member of the Union, he always asserted the right of secession, in the last resort, as an original, inherent, and vital attribute of State Sovereignty. The Federal Government, to his mind, was a mere agent of the States, created by them for a few general and intestate purposes, but having in it no principle subversive of the paramount sovereignty of the States. Rapidly extending its power by enactments of Congress and judicial constructions, he foresaw, and sought to counteract, its tendency to obliterate all State individuality, and ultimately absorb into its own keeping the liberties of the people. With dread and indignation, he contemplated its progress towards that monstrum horrendum, a consolidated democracy – the Union of to-day, in which we see that the will of the majority is the sole measure of its powers.

Such was his consistency, and such his sagacity, as vindicated in the light of subsequent events, and patent to the eyes of the world to-day. Who can now doubt which was the better and more logical theory? Clay said: “I owe allegiance to two sovereignties, and only two: one is to the sovereignty of this Union, and the other is to the sovereignty of the State of Kentucky.” Thus he held to the paradox of an imperium in imperio, that obvious absurdity in our system of government, a divided sovereignty. In his ardent Unionism, the great exponent of expediency disavowed allegiance to the South, though still holding to his allegiance to Kentucky. But suppose Kentucky asserts her sovereignty, and chooses to unite with the South, what, then, becomes of State Sovereignty and State allegiance? Just here was the hiatus in Clay’s logic, and, closely pressed by Davis, he emphatically declared his first allegiance to the Union as the supreme authority; and the State Sovereignty of Clay’s conception was seen to be as intangible and unreal as the “baseless fabric of a vision.”

Far more fair in its semblance, noble in its proportions, and beautiful in its harmonies, was the ideal of Davis. In his speech on the compromise measures, July 31, 1850, he said:

“Give to each section of the Union justice; give to every citizen of the United States his rights as guaranteed by the Constitution; leave this Confederacy to rest upon that basis from which it arose – the fraternal feelings of the people – and I, for one, have no fear of its perpetuity; none that it will not survive beyond the limits of human speculation, expanding and hardening with the lapse of time, to extend its blessings to ages unnumbered, and a people innumerable; to include within its empire all the useful products of the earth, and exemplify the capacity of a confederacy, with general, well-defined powers, to extend illimitably without impairing its harmony or its strength.”

The grounds of Mr. Davis’ opposition to the so-called “Compromise” programme of Mr. Clay were far otherwise than a factious and impracticable hostility to an amicable adjustment of sectional differences. He conscientiously doubted the disposition of the North to abstain from all future interference with Southern institutions, and he detected and exposed the utter want of efficacy of the compromise measures as an assurance of protection against future aggression. He abhorred the substitution of expediency for principle; could see no compromise where one side simply surrendered what the other had no right to demand, and correctly estimated this settlement, like those which had preceded it, as but an invitation to still more intolerable exactions by an implacable sectional majority. While discussing, in private conversation with Mr. Clay, the merits of Mr. Webster’s memorable speech of the 7th of March, 1850, a few days after its delivery, he briefly, but sufficiently defined his position. “Come,” said Mr. Clay, “my young friend; join us in these measures of pacification. Let us rally Congress and the people to their support, and they will assure to the country thirty years of peace. By that time” (turning to John M. Berrien, who was a party to the conversation) “you and I will be under the sod, and my young friend may then have trouble again.” “No,” said Davis, “I can not consent to transfer to posterity a question which is as much ours as theirs, when it is evident that the sectional inequality, as it will be greater then than now, will render hopeless the attainment of justice.”

His clear, penetrating glance discovered, under the guise of a friendly and pacific purpose, the insidious presence so mischievous to Southern interests, just as George Mason, more than fifty years before, had seen the “poison under the wing of the Federal Constitution.” While the bill for the organization of the Territory of New Mexico was pending, the vigilance and sagacity of Mr. Davis elicited the most flattering commendation from his Southern associates. In this bill there was a general grant, in loose and ambiguous phraseology, of legislative power, with a reservation that no law should be passed “in respect to African slavery.” Strangely enough, this provision, though obviously involving an inhibition against the enactment of laws for the protection of Southern property, escaped general detection. Mr. Davis promptly exposed its purpose, and offered an amendment, striking out the restraint against legislation “in respect to African slavery,” and prohibiting the enactment of any law interfering “with those rights of property growing out of the institution of African slavery as it exists in any of the States of this Union.” To meet the concurrence of other Senators, the amendment was variously modified, until, as explained by Mr. Davis, it embodied “the general proposition that the Territorial Legislature should not be prevented from passing the laws necessary for the protection of the rights of property of every kind which might be legally and constitutionally held in that territory.” It is needless to say that so just a proposition, affording equal protection to Southern with Northern institutions, was defeated.

While there was little in Mr. Clay’s plan of pacification to recommend it to Southern support, beyond the merely temporary staving off of a dissolution of the Union and civil war, it embodied propositions utterly incompatible with the security of the South. Mr. Davis especially and persistently combated its provision for the abolition of the slave-trade in the District of Columbia, and the concession that slavery did not legally exist in the newly-acquired territory. His position upon the general issues involved can not be more clearly and forcibly stated than in his own language:

“But, sir, we are called upon to receive this as a measure of compromise! – as a measure in which we of the minority are to receive something. A measure of compromise! I look upon it as a modest mode of taking that, the claim to which has been more boldly asserted by others; and that I may be understood upon this question, and that my position may go forth to the country in the same columns that convey the sentiments of the Senator from Kentucky, I here assert that never will I take less than the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, with specific right to hold slaves in the territory below that line; and that before such territories are admitted into the Union as States, slaves may be taken there from any of the United States, at the option of the owners. I can never consent to give additional power to a majority to commit further aggression upon the minority in this Union; and I will never consent to any proposition which will have such a tendency without a full guarantee or counteracting measure is connected with it.”

The parliamentary annals of the Union embrace no period more prolific of grand intellectual efforts than the debates incident to this gigantic struggle. The prominence of Mr. Davis, with his extreme ardor in behalf of the rights and interests of his section, brought him constantly into conflict with the most eminent leaders of both the great political parties, who had cordially agreed to ignore all minor issues and unite in the paramount purpose of saving the Union. Cass, Douglas, Bright, Dickinson, and King, earnestly coöperated with Clay, Webster, and other Whig champions, in the advocacy of the measures of compromise. That Davis, younger in years and experience than most of these distinguished men, amply sustained his honorable and responsible role as the foremost champion of the South, contemporary public opinion and the Congressional records give abundant testimony. The great compromise chieftain, between whom and Davis occurred such obstinate and protracted encounters in debate, delighted to testify his respect for the talents and intrepidity of his “young friend,” which was his habitual salutation to Davis. Despite the pronounced antagonism between them, on all measures of public policy, and their comparatively brief acquaintance, Mr. Clay repeatedly evinced, in a most touching manner, his warm regard for one who had been the companion-in-arms and cherished friend of a noble son,10 who lost his life on the same field, upon which Davis won such deathless distinction. “My poor boy,” were his words to the latter, upon his return from Mexico, “usually occupied about one-half of his letters home in praising you.” A still more touching incident, illustrative of his friendly regard, at the moment not understood by those present, occurred, in the heat of discussion during the exciting period, which we have had under consideration. Replying to Davis, said Mr. Clay: “My friend from Mississippi – and I trust that he will permit me to call him my friend, for between us there is a tie, the nature of which we both well understand.” At this moment the utterance of the aged statesman became tremulous with emotion, and, bowing his head, his eyes were seen to fill with tears. This friendship was warmly reciprocated by Mr. Davis, and its recollections are among those the most highly-cherished of his public life.