President Jefferson Davis, Died 6 December 1889

Jefferson Davis Funeral Richmond, Virginia - May 31, 1893
Richmonders lined the streets to watch the procession and over twenty thousand gathered at Hollywood Cemetery to witness the burial
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“The lamp of life waned low as the hour of midnight arrived; nor did it flicker into the brightness of consciousness at any time. Eagerly, yet tenderly, the watchers gazed at the face of the dying chieftain. His face, always calm and pale, gained additional pallor, and at a quarter to 1 o’clock of the morning of the 6^th day of December death came to the venerable leader.

There was nothing remarkable about the death-bed scene. The departure of the spirit was gentle and utterly painless. There were no dry eyes in the little assembly about the bed, and every heart bled with the anguish which found vent in Mrs. Davis’s sobs and cries.”

The Times-Democrat gave the following account of the closing scene: At 12:45 o’clock this morning Hon. Jefferson Davis, ex-President of the Confederate States, passed away at the residence of Associate Justice Charles E. Fenner. Only once did he waver in his belief that his case showed no improvement, and that was at an early hour yesterday morning, when he playfully remarked to Mr. Payne: “I am afraid that I shall be compelled to agree with the doctors for once, and admit that I am a little better.” At 7 o’clock Mrs. Davis administered some medicine, but the ex-President declined to receive the whole dose. She urged upon his the necessity of taking the remainder, but putting it aside, with the gentlest of gestures whispered,

“Pray, excuse me.” These were his last words.”

The Daily States said in its editorial:

“Throughout all the South there are lamentations and tears; in every country on the globe where there are lovers of liberty there is mourning; wherever there are men who admire heroic patriotism, dauntless resolution, fortitude, or intellectual power and supremacy, there is sincere sorrowing. The beloved of our land, the unfaltering upholder of constitutional liberty…is no more…” “Jefferson Davis is dead; but the principles for which he struggled, for the vindication of which he devoted his life, for which he suffered defeat, and unto which he clung unto death, still live. The fanatical howlings of the abolitionists, the tumult and thunders of civil war, the fierce mouthings of the organizers of reconstruction, and reconstruction itself, that black and foul disgrace of humanity, are all departed, sunk into silence like a tavern brawl, but the constitutional principles upon which the Confederacy was founded and for which Jefferson Davis spoke and struggled, for which he gave life and fortune, still survive in all their living power; and when they shall have been, if ever, really destroyed, this Republic will be transformed into one of the most oppressive and offensive oligarchies that has ever arisen amongst the civilized nations of the earth.”

The Times-Democrat of the 10^th had this editorial:

“If there was ever the shadow of doubt in the minds of the people of the United States of the hold of Jefferson Davis upon the hearts of the Southern people that doubt has been removed. From city and country, from every nook and hamlet, have come expressions of profoundest sorrow over his death; of grief at the passing away of the great Confederate chieftain. They turned to him as the Mussulman to his Mecca---the shrine at which all true Southern-born should worship. There has never been any division of sentiment as to the greatness of Jefferson Davis. He has always been the hero of his people---their best beloved. From the day that Lee laid down his arms at Appomattox to the hour of Jefferson Davis’s death the Southern people look upon the ex-President of the Confederacy as the embodiment of all that was grand and glorious in the Lost Cause. Standing alone as a citizen without the power to exercise his citizenship, the last surviving victim of sectional hate and malevolence, he was an exile while on the soil of his native land and in the midst of his own people. Jefferson Davis will go to the grave bathed in a people’s tears.”

(The Memorial Volume of Jefferson Davis, J.W. Jones, 1889, pp.473-509)

Via Bernhard

The Florida Sovereign Nation Flag

Via Jamey Creel, SDYC

The American Lenin

"...... if -- and this usually seems a bit more difficult to most people -- you'd like to know whether an individual is a libertarian or a conservative, ask about Abraham Lincoln."

"And The War Came"

The Center for Civil War Research

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Dear Dr. Neff,

I cannot help but remember a speaker at a symposium pointing out that Lincoln’s statement - “...and the war came...” was, in fact, a deliberate lie. Lincoln used that phrase to obfuscate the actual causes of the war and which side began it! The war didn’t “come”; the war was the direct result of Lincoln and the Republican’s refusal to permit certain states in the Union exercising their constitutional right of secession and the actions they took to prevent that from happening.

On the other hand, the states of the South were driven to secession for economic, political, religious and even cultural reasons (yes, even but not mainly, slavery) and in at least two cases by an illegitimate demand from the federal government for troops with which to wage an unconstitutional war on sovereign states in the South.

Therefore, to use the phrase “and the war came” as the title of your conference is to validate the claim that the war was inevitable (it wasn’t) or, in the alternative, that the war was a result of unprovoked Southern actions which culminated in a justifiable Northern response in an effort to “save the Union”. In other words, the phrase is a lie which conceals and/or excuses a lie. For the actions taken by South Carolina and her sister States in the South were definitely provoked - and over a long period of time - while the response to those actions was not only legally “unprovoked” but were, in fact, illegal, immoral, inhumane and unconstitutional.

Certainly, a study of the issues leading to the war is a noble effort, but if you begin that study with a false premise by virtue of your “motto”, it will be very hard to do anything other than further validate that premise. The book North Over South is an excellent study of the efforts of many outside of Dixie to prevent the South from having any influence in the developing “American” character as the nation moved west. As well, there abound many studies regarding the vilification of the South by the North long before Sumter. The technique of demonizing your enemy or potential enemy so as to be free to make war upon him is as old as war itself.

I would hope that you reconsider your “theme”. The war didn’t “come” as some sort of natural catastrophe. It came because the adherents of the philosophy of Adams and Hamilton wanted to supplant the adherents of the philosophy of Jefferson and Madison; they succeeded and the Republic with its limited government and power residing in the states and the people gave way to an Empire with a strong central government, impotent states and an almost direct democracy (see Amendment 17 of the Constitution). A northern historian, Jay Hoar acknowledged what was wrought by the War of Secession (it wasn’t a “civil war”) when he told authors Walter Kennedy and Al Benson, “The worst fears of those Boys in Gray are now a fact of American life – a Federal government completely out of control.”

Unless you want this conference to be just another rubber stamp of what passes for “history” these days, I strongly suggest that you find another motto.

Valerie Protopapas

Huntington Station, New York