Jefferson Davis: Our Greatest Hero

Via Billy

 

 When Jefferson Davis saw the U.S. flag as he was leaving the prison dungeon in which he was kept for two years, he stated: "There is the gridiron under which we were grilled."

President Jefferson Davis: "If this action is once tolerated, where will it end? Where is constitutional liberty? What strength is there in bills of rights-in limitation of power? What new hope for mankind is to be found in written constitutions, what remedy which did not exist under kings of emperors? If the doctrines thus announced by the government of the United States are conceded, then look through either end of the political telescope, and one sees only an empire, and the once famous Declaration of Independence trodden in the dust of as a "glittering generality," and the compact of the union denounced as a "flaunting lie". I love the Union and the Constitution, but I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than remain in the Union without it. Those who submit to such consequence without resistance are not worthy the liberties and rights to which they were born, and deserve to be made slaves. Such must be the verdict of mankind."

"Although the Confederacy as an organization may have ceased to exist, the fundamental principles, the eternal truths, uttered when our colonies in 1776 declared their independence, on which the Confederation of 1781 and the Union of 1788 were formed, and which animated and guided the Confederacy of 1861, yet live, and in God's appointed place and time, will prevail." 

--Jefferson Davis

***************************************** 

During and after the War for Southern Independence, Jefferson Davis was accused of a wide variety of villainies. Not all of his accusers were Yankees, but Northerners made the most extensive and lasting attacks upon Davis. In one of these insults -- a letter embossed with an American eagle crushing "Secession" and holding proudly in its beak a U.S. banner announcing "Death to Traitors" -- a New Yorker wrote: "Jeff Davis you rebel traitor here is the beauty of America one of the greatest treasures that ever waved over your sinful head. Now I want you to look at this motto and think of me for -- say death to cession [sic] and death to all traitors to their country and these are my sentiments exactly. Yours not with respect for I can never respect a traitor to his Country a cursed traitor." The same view of Davis as being "among the archtraitors in our annals" was expressed just as emphatically years later by Theodore Roosevelt and Harvard University Professor Albert T. Perkins.

Davis became, and remained to Northerners, the quintessential wrongdoer. Later generations of liberal progressives would consider him an American Hitler. Immediately after the War for Southern Independence Yankee authorities put Davis in jail and left him there for two years without a trial, while they tried to implicate him in the assassination of Lincoln, alleged cruelty to Federal prisoners, and treason itself. Though never brought to trial or convicted of any crime, Davis received abundant abuse in the Yankee press and on the podium. During and after the war the New York Times depicted him as a murderer, a cruel slaveowner whose servants ran away, a liar, a boaster, a fanatic, a confessed failure, a hater, a political adventurer, a supporter of outcasts and outlaws, a drunkard, an atrocious misrepresenter, an assassin, an incendiary, a criminal who was gratified by the assassination of Lincoln, a henpecked husband, a man so shameless that he would try to escape capture by disguising himself as a woman, a supporter of murder plots, an insubordinate soldier, an unwholesome sleeper, and a mean-spirited malingerer. 

More @ Southern Heritage 411