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Jefferson Davis - Our Greatest Hero
by Grady McWhinney
11 November 2004
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.
Anti-Davis sentiment was more than mere newspaper talk. Following the war
the citizens of Sacramento, California, true to their vigilante
tradition, hanged Davis in effigy. A few months later the Kansas Senate
passed a resolution to hang him in person. More than ten years after the
war ended, widespread opposition prevented him from speaking anywhere in
the North. In 1876 a Yankee newspaper editor answered the question,
should Davis be given amnesty, with a resounding "no," and in 1880 a man
who cheered for Jefferson Davis in Madison, Indiana, was shot.
"Malice and slander have exhausted their power against you," a Southerner
tried to assure the continually criticized Confederate President. At the
end of the nineteenth century an observer noted: "I believe there never
was a time when a whole people were more willing to punish one man than
were the people of the North to punish Mr. Davis for his alleged crimes."
Twenty years after Davis's death, handbills accusing him in Lincoln's
assassination still circulated, and the New York Times published an
editorial denouncing plans for a Southerner to donate for use on the new
battleship Mississippi a silver service with the likeness of Jefferson
Davis etched on each piece. More than a hundred years passed before the
Congress of the United States officially forgave Davis for being
President of the Confederacy.
No other Confederate leader had to wait so long for either official or
unofficial exoneration. By the early 1900s, Robert E. Lee, the greatest
Yankee killer of all time, had become a national hero, absolved of his
sins, and soon considered so harmless that the government allowed his
picture to be hung on the walls of Southern public schools alongside
those of Washington and Lincoln. When I was young a number of Southern
schools were named in honor of Jefferson Davis, but since then most, if
not all of those, have been forced to change their names to dishonor the
Confederate President.
Such efforts to disgrace him bothered even Southerners who were never his
"particular friend." "I never believed he was a very great man, or even
the best President the Confederate States might have had," wrote John S.
Wise. "But he was our President. Whatever shortcomings he may have had,
he was a brave, conscientious and loyal son of the South. He did his
best, to the utmost of his ability, for the Southern cause. He, without
being a whit worse than the rest of us, was made to suffer for us as was
no other man in the Confederacy. And through it all he never, to the day
of his death, failed to maintain the honor and the dignity of the trust
confided to his keeping. It distresses me to this day," admitted Wise,
"whenever I hear anybody speak disparagingly of this man, who was
unquestionably devoted to the cause for which he lived and died, and who
was infinitely greater than his traducers."
Davis knew how much he was maligned. He rejected an invitation to visit
the North in 1875, explaining "the tide of unreasoning prejudice against
me, in your section, was too strong to be resisted." "Demagogues, who
know better, have found it easier to inflame and keep alive the passions
of the war by personifying the idea [that] I instigated and precipitated
it."
Yankees had even stronger reasons for damning Davis. He was, after all, a
wholehearted supporter of those symbols of Southern wickedness that union
military might had discredited -- slavery, states' rights, and secession.
Davis had defended slavery; described the federal government as having
"no inherent power, all it possesses was delegated by the States"; and he was equally emphatic on the legitimacy and necessity of secession. "The
temper of the Black Republicans is not to give us our rights in the
Union, or allow us to go peaceably out of it," he declared in January
1861. "If we had no other cause, this would be enough to justify
secession, at whatever hazard." A few days later he reported to his old
friend President Franklin Pierce: "Mississippi, not as a matter of choice
but of necessity, has resolved to enter on the trial of secession. Those
who have driven her to this alternative threaten to deprive her of the
right to require that her government shall rest on the consent of the
governed."
The invidious comparisons made between Davis and Lincoln during and after
the war by certain foreigners further embittered Northerners. For
example, William Howard Russell's published diary contained this
unflattering contrast: "[Davis] is certainly a very different looking man
from Mr. Lincoln. He is like a gentleman." Or consider the remarks of
Percy Greg whose "Tribute to Confederate Heroes" appeared in 1882. He
praised Davis as having more "moral and intellectual powers" than any
twenty Federal statesmen, and a man vastly superior in every way to "the
'rail-splitter'. . . whose term, had he died in his bed four or five
years later, would have been remembered only as marking the nadir of
American political decline; the culmination of vulgarity. Lincoln's
uncleanness of language and thought," insisted Greg, "would hardly have
been tolerated in a Southern 'bar.'"
Perhaps even the contrast between the "gentlemanly" warfare advocated by
Davis and the comprehensive destruction practiced by such terrorizers of
civilians as Sherman and Sheridan embarrassed some Yankees. Davis
believed that war should consist solely of combat between organized
armies. He abhorred the killing of civilians and the destruction of
private property during hostilities. Years after the war, when General
Grant was dying of cancer, Davis wrote: "I have felt a human sympathy
with him in his suffering, the more so because I think him so much better
than the pillaging, house-burning, women persecuting Sherman and
Sheridan." Judah P. Benjamin recalled that "when it was urged upon
Jefferson Davis, not only by friends but by members of his Cabinet, that
it was his duty to the people and to the army to repress outrages by
retaliation, he was immovable in his resistance to such counsels,
insisting that it was repugnant to every sentiment of justice and
humanity that the innocent should be made victims for the crimes of such
monsters." Davis proudly proclaimed after the war: "I am happy to
remember that when our army invaded the enemy's country, their property
was safe."
What made Davis so distinct and so utterly intolerable to most Yankees
was his refusal to admit any guilt or to apologize for his actions and
the cause he led. He told veterans of the Army of Tennessee who came to
Mississippi to honor him in 1878: "Your organization was appropriate to
preserve the memories and cherished brotherhoods of your soldier life,
and cannot be objectionable to any, unless it be to one who holds your
services to have been in an unworthy cause and your conduct such as
called for repentance and forgiveness." Davis reminded these old soldiers
that they must maintain pride in their cause as well as in their
soldierly conduct. "The veteran who shoulders his crutch to show how
fields were won must not be ashamed of the battle in which he was
wounded," Davis affirmed. "To higher natures success is not the only test
of merit; and you, my friends, though you were finally unsuccessful, have
the least possible cause to regret the flag under which you marched or
the manner in which you upheld it."
Given this opportunity to explain his views to an understanding audience,
Davis unburdened himself. "Every evil which has befallen our institutions
is directly traceable to the perversion of the compact of union and the
usurpation by the Federal Government of undelegated powers," he
contended. "The events are too recent to require recapitulation, and the
ruin they have wrought, the depravity they have developed, require no
other memorial than the material and moral wreck which the country
presents." Davis still believed in secession: My faith in that right as
an inherent attribute of State sovereignty, was adopted early in life,
was confirmed by study and observation of later years, and has passed,
unchanged and unshaken, through the severe ordeal to which it has been
subjected." He could express such views, he told his listeners, because
he had no "desire for a political future." His only desire was to
establish "the supremacy of the truths on which the union was founded."
As for himself, he asserted, "I shall die, as I have lived, firm in the
State rights faith."
Throughout his remaining years, Davis reiterated these views in speeches,
letters, and interviews. He told an appreciative audience of Southerners
in 1882: "Our cause was so just, so sacred, that had I known all that has
come to pass, had I known all that was to be inflicted upon me, all that
my country was to suffer, all that our posterity was to endure, I would
do it all over again. [Great applause.]" A year earlier Davis had written
to a fellow Southerner: "Nothing fills me with deeper sadness than to see
a Southern man apologizing for the defence we made of our inheritance &
denying the great truths on which all our institutions were founded. To
be crushed by superior force, to be robbed & insulted, were great
misfortunes, but these could be borne while there still remained manhood
to assert the truth, and a proud consciousness in the rectitude of our
course. When I find myself reviled by Southern papers as one renewing
'dead issues,' the pain is not caused by the attack upon myself, but by
its desecration of the memories of our Fathers & those of their
descendants who staked in defence of their rights -- their lives, their
property & their sacred honor. To deny the justice of their cause, to
apologize for its defence, and denounce it as a dead issue, is to take
the last of their stakes, that for which they were willing to surrender
the other."
A reporter who interviewed Davis a few years before he died discovered
that the Confederate President's "heart [was] as warm as ever for the
land he has loved so well," and that Davis "did not desert during the war
and has not deserted since."
His steadfastness, his refusal to desert his cause, made Davis
particularly obnoxious to his enemies. He was so unlike those Southerners
who after the war disassociated themselves from their past as quickly as
did certain Germans after World War II and thus gained American
forgiveness and patronage. Davis was just the opposite of his fellow
Mississippian Confederate General James L. Alcorn, who announced shortly
after the war: "You were right Yankee! We are and ever have been in the
Union; secession was a nullity. We will now take the oath to support the
Constitution and the laws of the United States." As proof of his
sincerity, Alcorn became a Republican governor of Mississippi in 1869 and
a Republican member of the U.S. Senate in 1871. He also recouped his
wartime financial losses and increased his property holdings. Good
Yankees approved of such "enlightened" new Southerners as Alcorn, who
were "eager to keep step with the North in the onward march of the Solid
Nation," as one man expressed it; they disapproved of Jefferson Davis and
their newspapers castigated him as "unrepentant" and "the greatest enemy
of the South."
Davis still carries such encumbrances. Were he alive today, even the most
skilled public relations firm would have difficulty packaging him for the
market. He was too honest and too politically incorrect to be elected to
public office, or even to have any future in higher education, that last
refuge of scoundrels. Scarcely any university professor would want Davis
as a colleague. He probably would be as unsuccessful today in business as
he was after the war. I even doubt that he could have found employment as
a radio talk-show host. He was too dignified and too proud to truckle.
Yankees would have liked nothing better than to recast Jefferson Davis as
a repentant sinner asking for forgiveness, but he refused to accommodate
them. Instead, he assumed the burden of the lost cause, becoming the
symbolic defender of not just the Confederacy and a proud Southern
tradition, but of its people, their culture, and what Yankees judge to be
their unforgivable past. Jefferson Davis is, and should be, our greatest
hero. Like no other, he withstood criticism and denigration without
kowtowing or wavering. Asking for no pardon, he refused to denounce his
people or his cause. His image ought to be everywhere to remind us that
for more than a hundred years he has symbolized our courage, our pride,
and our unity.
In 1882, a year after the publication of his two-volume defense of
himself and the Confederate cause, Davis advocated what Yankees
considered totally unforgivable -- a history of the South written by and
for Southerners. "I would have our children's children to know not only
that our cause was just," he told members of the Southern Historical
Society, "but to have them know that the men who sustained it were worthy
of the cause for which they fought." Davis, full of hope and passion,
outlined in this remarkable address, just what he believed history ought
to be and how it should be used. "It is our duty to keep the memory of
our heroes green," he announced. "We want our side of the war so fully
and exactly stated, that the men who come after us may compare and do
[us] justice." Davis did not call for objectivity. "I will frankly
acknowledge that I would distrust the man who served the Confederate
cause and was capable of giving a disinterested account of it.
[Applause.]" "I would not give twopence for a man whose heart was so cold
that he could be quite impartial," admitted Davis. "You may ask the
schoolboy in the lowest form, who commanded at the Pass of Thermopylae.
He can tell you. But my friends there are few in this audience who, if I
ask them, could tell me who commanded at Sabine Pass. And yet," said
Davis, "that battle of Sabine Pass was more remarkable than the battle of
Thermopylae, and when it has orators and poets to celebrate it, will be
so esteemed by mankind.
His appeal for orators and poets to preserve the deeds of heroic
Southerners reveals that Davis understood the South's heritage.
Southerners, like their Celtic ancestors, were oral and aural people who
perpetuated much of their past in stories and songs. Davis compared the
Confederacy's military heroes with their Scottish forebears: "May it not
come to pass that in some hour of need, future generations, aware of the
grandeur and the virtues of these men, will in a moment of disaster cry
out like the ancient Scot:
O for an hour of Wallace wight,
Or well-trained Bruce To lead the fight,
And cry St. Andrew and our right."
History, Davis believed, must inspire those who learn it. "Let the rising
generation learn what their fathers did," he implored, "and let them
learn the still better lesson to emulate not only the deeds, but the
motives which prompted them. May God grant that sons ever greater than
their fathers may rise whenever their country needs them to defence her
cause. [Applause.]"
The kind of history that Davis advocated was unacceptable to Yankees.
First, it was incompatible with the so-called scientific history taught
in German seminars and in the later nineteenth century being popularized
in the United States by Yankee professors. As adapted for Americans, this
history stressed the evolution of New England institutions and how they
contributed to the greatness of the United States. There was no place in
such history for either the bard or the poet upon whom Davis relied to
celebrate Southern values and heroes. Second, a history of the South that
revered Southerners and their values rather than Northerners and their
values would undermine all that the war had decided. To the victor went
the power to write the history that justified the victory. It was that
simple.
British history is really English history imposed upon the non-English
peoples of the British Isles by their English conquerors. The same may be
said of the history of the United States. What passes for standard
American history is Yankee history written by New Englanders or their
puppets to glorify Yankee ideals and heroes.
In the twentieth century, Yankees gained increasing control over the
historical journals, the university presses, the commercial publishing
houses, and the production and distribution of professional historians;
consequently, the Yankee version of the American past became the history
most often taught in the colleges and in the public schools.
It is precisely this condition that Mississippian Dunbar Rowland first
complained about eighty years ago. "It seems to be admitted on all sides
that the people of the South are neglecting the teaching of Southern
History in all our institutions," he informed the governor. "That we are
neglecting this important field of instruction is made evident by the
astonishing amount of ignorance of Southern and State history among the
rising generation of college students. Something should be done to
enlighten them."
Part of the problem has been that the professors who taught the South's
teachers adopted the "New South" doctrine of national unity as readily as
Southern businessmen. North Carolina educator Robert Bingham announced in
1884 that "the greatest blessing that ever befell us was a failure to
establish a [Southern] nationalism." Bingham boasted that "the past of
the South is irrevocable, and we do not wish to recall it. The past of
the South is irreparable, and we do not wish to repair it."
Yet this teaching of Yankee ideas and biases in Southern public schools,
which Francis Butler Simkins labeled "the education that does not
educate," often has been offset "by the survival of overwhelming
traditions." Robert Penn Warren testified that his sympathetic view of
Confederate history was obtained not from the schoolroom, but rather
"from the air around me."
If today the South's air is still full of Confederate history, the
bookshelves are not. Yankees now control the writing, publishing, and
marketing of most books on the South's history and culture. Yankee
professors and Southerners who think like Yankees have taken over most
Southern colleges and universities. Southerners who believe in the
traditions that Jefferson Davis appreciated are finding themselves
unemployable, denied careers in higher education by national forces that
systematically discriminate against them. Only Yankees and Scalawags who
truckle to the enemies of Southern history and culture get important jobs
where they have the opportunity to train college teachers. Most
Southerners are relegated to academic Siberia where they receive low pay,
scant research opportunities, and rarely see gifted students.
Something not yet fully understood, but that could destroy our culture,
has occurred during the more than forty years that I have been a college
professor. Discrimination against Southerners has always existed, but
today in education it is rampant. Trying to find jobs for young
Southerners is difficult in a market that favors political correctness
and disdains Southerners. No university, not even one in the South, wants
to hire a native son, especially one who appreciates Southern traditions.
Not only has Jefferson Davis remained unforgiven by his enemies; so have
the Southerners who came after him. We are being reduced to the status
once imposed on our Celtic relatives -- the Scots, the Welsh, and the
Irish -- by their English neighbors. God help us!
GRADY McWHINNEY
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Dr. McWhinney holds an endowed chair in Southern history at Texas
Christian University, Fort Worth, and is the author of a number of books,
including Attack & Die and Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South.
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