Jefferson Davis
being sworn in as President of the Confederate States of America on
February 18, 1861 on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.
Jefferson
Davis was a Unionist and struggled to his last days as a Mississippi
Senator to push Congress toward a peaceful solution to the sectional
crisis. He belonged to the Calhoun school which saw preserving the
rights of the South in the federal Union as paramount; he viewed
secession as a last resort of the States in order to preserve their
sovereignty and liberties, should the Constitution ratified voluntarily
in 1787, and its federal agent, became destructive of those rights.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Jefferson Davis, Last of the Senate Giants
“The
theory of State Rights and the belief in secession had been understood
in both sections equally, when advantage dictated understanding: as late
as 1846 the State government of Massachusetts had been willing to
secede, had passed resolutions to that end, in opposition to the Mexican
War.
The
North alone now repudiated State sovereignty because it had no interest
to serve with its support. After the Republican senators had rejected
the Crittenden Compromise, which gave to them every eventual advantage
and to the South nothing in the end, they would not listen to a proposal
of a convention of the States; they were then challenged for a
compromise proposal of their own, but not a Republican replied.
At
this distance it is certain that the deadlock exactly suited the North,
for its purpose was to subdue the South at all costs; in a policy that
conceded nothing and demanded everything, the North meant to “ride over
the South rough-shod.”
The
South was willing at this time to accept any measure that guaranteed it
even less than its Constitutional rights in the territories; but the
North no longer desired equality of sectional power; the North was bent
on domination. By refusing to budge from this position, the North forced
the South to act for its preservation, and by means of the slavery
issue the shrewdness of the Yankee succeeded, as always, of putting his
enemy in the wrong.
There
was probably not a single phase of the conflict that Mr. Davis failed,
in a sense, to understand; and yet, in the end, he could not see why men
would not follow the law, or why the inflamed sections would not abide
by compromises. Men sometimes act reasonably, but never logically; this
was a distinction that Mr. Davis, being logical, could not grasp.
[After
his final speech and resignation from the United States Senate after
Mississippi had seceded, Davis] painfully moved through the crowded
Senate chamber out into the street, [and for him] the old Constitutional
republic came . . . to a dramatic end. There would no longer be a Union
in the exact sense of that word; there would be a uniformity; for one
of the two types of American civilization must absolutely prevail.
Davis left the Senate smaller; it would never be so large again; he was
the last of the Senate giants.
All the night of January 21
he suffered, sleepless; the nervous strain of the last six months had
broken him down. His neuralgia had spread film over one iris; he was
almost blind in that eye. Mrs. Davis, anxious in the next room, heard
him say, again and again, in a tone of agony:
“May God have us in His Holy keeping, and grant that before it is too late peaceful councils may prevail.”
(Jefferson Davis, His Rise and Fall, Allen Tate, Minton, Balch & Company, 1929, pp. 12-13)
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