American Statesman, Soldier, Senator, Secretary of War, President
A West Point graduate, Davis distinguished himself in the Mexican-American War as a colonel of the Mississippi Rifles volunteer regiment, and was the United States Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. Both before and after his time in the Pierce Administration, he served as a US Senator from Mississippi.
As senator he argued against secession but believed each State was
sovereign and had an unquestionable and constitutional right to secede
from the voluntary Union of the Founders, just as they had seceded from
England seeking political liberty. Davis resigned from the Senate in
January 1861 after receiving word that his State of Mississippi had
voted to leave the voluntary Union. Davis explained his actions saying:
“[To]
me the sovereignty of the State was paramount to the sovereignty
of the Union. And I held my seat in the Senate until Mississippi seceded
and called upon me to follow and defend her. Then I sorrowfully
resigned the position in which my State had placed me and in which I
could no longer represent her, and accepted the new work. I was on my
way to Montgomery when I received, much to my regret, the message that I
had been elected provisional President of the Confederate States of
America.”
Davis
was a great and patriotic American who tried to save the old
constitutional republic from abolitionist revolutionaries, and who left
the old union with the old constitution intact to form a "more perfect
Union" and with the consent of the governed. He contended that he would
rather be out of the Union with the Constitution than to be in the Union
without the Constitution. Davis remarked in July 1864:
"I
tried in all my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for 12
years, I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North
was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war
came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls
in his tracks, and his children seize the musket and fight our battle,
unless you acknowledge our right to self-government.
We are not
fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or
extermination, we will have....Slavery never was an essential element.
It was the only means of bringing other conflicting elements to an
earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and
loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South
that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.”
Reminded
during the war of the destruction of his Mississippi plantations by
occupying Northern troops, we dismissed it as the cost of war, yet
confessed that he pitied his poor Negroes, who had been driven off by
those troops and abandoned to misery or ruin. He resisted arming the
slaves as they were not trained as soldiers, were needed to raise food
for the armies in the field, and he would not use them as mercenaries
and cannon-fodder as Lincoln was doing to avoid conscripting unwilling
white Northerners.
At the end of the War, when a fellow traveler remarked that the cause of the Confederates was lost. Davis replied:
“It
appears so. But the principle for which we contended is bound to
reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.”
We may be experiencing his prediction now in the midst of State sovereignty resolutions and 10th
Amendment reaffirmations across the country. In 1881, Davis was
critical of the Gilded Age corruption and ignorance of the United States
Constitution and remarked:
“Of
what value then are paper constitutions and oaths binding officers to
their preservation, if there is not intelligence enough in the people to
discern the violations; and virtue enough to resist the violators?”
Davis
was guilty of no treason and demanded a fair trial in order to argue
the constitutionality of the South’s actions in 1860-1861. This was
denied by his tormenters, the reason was revealed by Chief Justice of
the US Supreme Court, Salmon P. Chase, in 1867. Chase admitted that:
"If
you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the
Constitution, secession is not a rebellion. His [Jefferson Davis]
capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one. We cannot
convict him of treason."
President Davis died on December 6, 1889
