Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper Jr., Knopf, November 1st, 2001
Though I’ve long had an interest in the American Civil War, I’ve never written a dedicated post about it on the blog. On my one and only trip to the United States almost twenty years ago, I remember going out of my way to seeing some famous sites. I was on a university student exchange at the time and the college I studied at was located in the Shenandoah Valley in the state of Virginia where Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s brilliant military exploits took place. At that time, I was also able to have a visit to Richmond, Virginia where I could see the monuments to Confederate war heroes and after some further searching, to see the Confederate ‘White House’. These statues were all taken down and destroyed five years ago in one of the most disgraceful acts of cultural iconoclasm in the nation’s history; following orchestrated rioting across the country after the death of violent criminal, George Floyd. This death, although entirely by Floyd’s own actions, was used to justify a range of attacks on the American people which as I write has merely abated. It was fortunate then that I was able to see these statues and something of what was still a proud South before yet another attack on these people was perpetuated from the malignant powers above.
Although, I’m generally well-read on the Civil War (at least for an Australian), I had not read much about Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. I knew him mostly by name but the history books do tend to focus a lot more on the battles. A few years ago, I sought out a biography and found this lengthy and comprehensive one by William J. Cooper Jr. which I finally got around to read this year. I thoroughly enjoyed it but naturally, I have further thoughts to share.
The first thing to get out of the way is what Cooper was at pains to make clear in his Preface:
…my goal is to understand Jefferson Davis as a man of his time, not condemn him for not being a man of my time. In his age his views were not at all unusual, much less radical. In Davis’s lifetime almost every white American and Western European believed that whites were superior to blacks. In addition, millions of Americans, northerners as well as southerners, accepted slavery as a constitutionally sanctioned and legal institution. I will not keep pointing out that his outlook is different from my and from that of our own era. I should not need to.
Though understandably careful to separate himself from his subject, you get the impression throughout that he admired Davis despite his strong differences of opinion with regards to race and slavery. The title of the biography really indicates this more than anything within which would be more than enough to put off any one with a prejudice against Davis from ever reading it.
Yet, as the book shows early on, Jefferson Davis was as American as it is possible to be and far more so than tens of millions of foreigners that claim to be today. Davis’s father was a veteran of the War for Independence who named him after Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. As a boy Davis even had a memorable meeting with the seventh president, Andrew Jackson; a meeting he treasured for the rest of his life. He graduated from West Point, became a respected and popular politician and even served in the Mexican War — resigning from political office to do so. To dismiss him simply as a traitor, is absurd based on this information alone. We live in absurd times though and much like a famous Austrian veteran of the First World War and aspiring painter, Jefferson Davis is now something of a cartoon villain with any nuance surrounding his actual beliefs and life ignored or dismissed.
Only around a third of the way through the book, I was quite convinced that Jefferson Davis puts all of our modern politicians to shame; living and dead. Unlike what we have today, he was genuinely well-educated, spoke multiple languages, had actual principles and purpose in his political pursuits outside of self-enrichment. He was also prepared to forsake the comforts of political office when it mattered and had lost virtually all his pre-war wealth by 1865. Compare that to the average Congressman or Senator today which includes many who cling to office until carried out in a coffin while doing nothing of any value. Nancy Pelosi for example, just announced her retirement this month at the age of eighty-five and will leave office a multimillionaire! Davis in contrast, had lived a much more colourful and interesting life before he was forty than most of these creatures will have when their hearts give out and it was in his later years, when most of the historical events he is remembered for took place. Whatever you think of his views, he was a much more virtuous and worthy man than any living politician I can think of.
As to his views, to say they were politically incorrect today is to understate things but as Cooper points out, they were hardly unusual in the time he lived even among northerners. Abraham Lincoln, the “official” hero of this period had views on blacks that (outside of the institution of slavery), were indistinguishable from Davis’s own. While Davis would have kept the blacks on plantations, Abe, had he lived, had plans to repatriate them all to Africa. There are plenty of Americans today who would now wish Abe had avoided the assassin’s bullet long enough to have carried this out too.
I have to say that I do not find Davis’s (or Lincoln’s for that matter), views on race to be all that controversial anymore. I once did but as the aforementioned riots of 2020, a number of events over the last twenty years as well as some personal experiences, have made Davis and people like him, a whole lot more sympathetic. Consider two of Cooper’s summaries of his stated views after the war had ended:
Calling blacks “poor creatures,” [Jefferson] Davis feared that Republicans’ pushing political rights on blacks would make them “more idle and ungovernable than heretofore.” He had “little faith” in “the fidelity of the free Negro.” What he termed “the obtrusive insolence of the Negroes” greatly troubled him. From that perspective he justified strong actions by southern whites, including violence, to restore what he saw as the appropriate social order in the South. Although Davis recognized that slavery had been destroyed, his vision of the proper southern social order remained steadfastly Jacksonian—a democratic white polity based firmly on dominance of a controlled and excluded black caste.
Page 649
Although slavery had been abolished for a decade and a half when Davis began anew as a planter, his view of the basic relationship between whites and blacks had not altered. He still believed that blacks were inferior to whites, and he did not envision any foreseeable change in the racial order. To his mind, white tutelage had always been central in any advance the subordinate race made. Thus, he had always expressed serious doubts that even the able Montgomerys [former slaves working his former plantation] could succeed on their own. His experience with free black labor at Brierfield confirmed his opinion that blacks lacked crucially important traits. He told Thomas Drayton, “The habit of drinking & gambling is so common among our negroes that for the sake of such indulgence, a large proportion of them prefer to work as day laborers instead of waiting for the larger sum they would get by making a crop & that class are always ready to drift away just at the time they are most needed.”
Page 689
The “obtrusive insolence” really jumped out as it remains a significant characteristic of American blacks from my observations and some direct experience. Nonetheless, I don’t and Jefferson Davis didn’t hate black people. Davis worked directly with and had at least one close friendship with many blacks throughout his life and I’m not referring to Labradors. While the above will be offensive to modern sensibilities, I can’t see anything he got wrong about the general characteristics of American blacks then or now. A century and a half later, there is not one nation on earth with a majority black population that has anywhere close to the level of stability of a majority European nation. The much smaller demographic in the United States makes up for a shockingly disproportionate amount of crime and other social maladies. Australia until very recently had almost no Africans but the more significant numbers that have arrived in the last twenty have already made a negative impression despite the best efforts of the media and political class to supress the mention of this. The same is true anywhere where they’ve been allowed to arrive in significant numbers. Rhodesia and South Africa speak for themselves. I would go so far as to argue that if anything, the American blacks in particular, are even worse now than they were in Davis’s time.
While I initially began reading with interest in his experiences during the Civil War, I actually found his life prior and after the war more engaging reading. Though certainly born into the upper rungs of society, he did encounter a lot of hardship. This was mainly through serious health problems he developed in his early days in the military which reoccurred throughout his life. He lost his first wife Sarah (daughter of President Zachary Taylor), to disease very soon after they were married. He had six children with his second wife Varina but he outlived all four of his sons with only one living to his early twenties before succumbing to disease. Of his two remaining daughters, only one got married and had children.
Through all this tragedy, what held him firm was religion. Though not growing up religious, he did later become so and there was a both interesting and disappointing anecdote early in the book of an experience at a Catholic school:
Sectarianism did not characterize St. Thomas. Admissions policy was not tied to religious affiliation. From the outset, both Catholics and non-Catholics were welcome, and a substantial number of non-Catholics were always enrolled. Although all students had to attend religious exercises, proselytism did not form a central part of the program. In fact, when Jefferson Davis told Father Wilson that he wanted to become a Catholic, the old priest kindly put him off. As Davis recollected, Father Wilson “handed me a biscuit and a bit of cheese and told me that for the present I had better take some Catholic food.”
19
One can see a hint here of why there was later a need for Pope Leo XIII to address the heresy of “Americanism”. Perhaps this Father Wilson didn’t believe Davis sincere and perhaps he was right; it still doesn’t sound like the way he should have responded to an expressed desire to join the Faith. In any case, Davis did later join the Episcopal Church and remained an active member for the remainder of his life.
His life after the war was one of sadness with him being the main scapegoat for the war. He interestingly eventually escaped being tried for treason because Federal authorities didn’t believe they would successfully prosecute and were understandably worried how this would look. He still came out of the war very much diminished and never recovered the wealth he had before the war. Yet through all this, he remained strong and was largely beloved among the people he had led to war.
In the latter part of his life, there was one more interesting anecdote I wanted to include:
A most unusual caller was the young Irish poet-lecturer Oscar Wilde. On a lecture tour in the United States in 1882, Wilde pronounced Davis the American he most wanted to see. When he appeared at Beauvoir, he captivated Varina and Winnie, though Davis found his demeanor and dandyish dress off-putting. Wilde left him an unrequested, signed photograph.
682
This is amusing on a number of levels whatever your opinion on Davis or Wilde.
Jefferson Davis may have been on the losing side but I hope as the American Empire Abraham Lincoln essentially founded in his conquest of the South continues its slow collapse, that he will be better appreciated by future generations. I know I certainly have new respect for someone usually rarely described in warm terms today.