After Lincoln

by A. J. Langguth

  At the Battle of Buena Vista, a musket ball shattered Davis’s right foot near the ankle. He stayed in the saddle, stanched his wound with a handkerchief, and led his men in the charge that vanquished Antonio López de Santa Anna.

  Zachary Taylor had been commanding the U.S. forces, and Davis had at last impressed his former father-in-law. In his official report, Taylor praised Davis for his “coolness and gallantry.” When the general came by to visit the wounded man, Davis was touched to see “Old Rough and Ready” with “a mother’s softness” in his eyes. A later account may have improved on their conversation by claiming that Taylor said, “My daughter, sir, was a better judge of men than I was.”

  With his new renown, Davis could weigh attractive options for his future. President James K. Polk offered to commission him as a brigadier general, but Davis declined. In an overtly political letter, he thanked the president but pointed out that, under his reading of the Constitution, only the states had the authority to bestow that commission, not the federal government.

  Instead, in the fall of 1847, Davis accepted an appointment to the U.S. Senate from Mississippi and was elected the following year to the remainder of the term. Davis welcomed the escape to Washington as a way of avoiding his wife’s complaints about being shunted off to live with the family of Davis’s older brother.

  Davis wrote to let her know that he could no longer bear her “constant harassment.” But he professed to love her still and to want her with him if only she would be “kind and peaceful.” As proof of his abiding affection, he sent home several tokens, including a bracelet with a cameo of his face.

  • • •

  In 1850, Davis opposed Henry Clay’s compromise on slavery and resigned from the Senate to run for his state’s governorship. Losing narrowly, Davis embraced the cause of states’ rights and campaigned actively for Franklin Pierce, the Yankee nominated for president by Davis’s fellow Democrats. When Pierce won, he rewarded Davis by appointing him secretary of war.

  • • •

  In that post, Davis clashed often with Winfield Scott. Not only had Scott been Pierce’s rival for the White House, he had also contested in the past with Davis’s former father-in-law, Zachary Taylor. In long, angry screeds, Davis denounced Scott for his vanity and his falsehoods.

  Winfield Scott could match Davis’s capacity for invective and had been perfecting it for two decades longer. He accused Davis of trying “to crush me into servile obedience to your self-will.” After many more volleys, Scott shut down his side of their feud: “Compassion is always due to an enraged imbecile.”

  Fellow officers in the army sided with General Scott and found the secretary of war far too imperious. Pierce tried to resolve the problem by suggesting that Scott, as the army’s general-in-chief, move his New York headquarters to Washington. That solution did end their correspondence, but once Scott was based in the same city, Davis simply ignored and bypassed him.

  • • •

  When the Democrats split over extending slavery in Kansas, James Buchanan defeated Pierce for their party’s nomination in 1856 and won the presidency. Davis returned to the Senate. In the summer of 1858, he took an extended leave in New England to treat an ailment that threatened to blind his left eye.

  At that year’s July Fourth celebration and again the next October, Davis gave passionate speeches on the importance of the Union. He still claimed that states had a legal right to secede, but he predicted that the North would never let them go peaceably.

  At the Democrats’ nominating convention in 1860, Davis was one of eight men to challenge Stephen Douglas but drew almost no support.

  Events then took command. Lincoln was elected president. South Carolina seceded from the Union. And, on January 9, 1861, Mississippi joined the Confederacy.

  At that, Jefferson Davis bade a formal farewell to the United States Senate and rode home to Mississippi.

  • • •

  Even though Davis had resolved not to take a prominent role in the looming crisis, a constitutional convention of the new Confederacy unanimously voted him its provisional president. In accepting the position, Davis carefully avoided any mention of slavery. He repeated instead the traditional Southern claim that the rebellion was motivated solely by concern for states’ rights.

  By withdrawing from the Union, the South had “merely asserted a right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 had defined as inalienable.”

  But his vice president, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, dismissed the constitutional argument and cut to the quick: Thomas Jefferson and other Founders had believed “that the enslavement of the African was a violation of the laws of nature,” Stephens told a rally in Savannah, “that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically.”

  But that idea was itself “fundamentally wrong,” since it “rested upon the assumption of equality of races.”

  Stephens explained, “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

  President Davis was disturbed by Stephens’s political tactlessness, but he also called a reunion with the North “neither practical or desirable.” He did, however, appoint a commission to negotiate with Washington over the fate of Fort Sumter, a Union army base in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor.

  Hearing of secession, Union major Robert Anderson had moved his garrison to Sumter from its more vulnerable position at Fort Moultrie. Davis had known Anderson as a fellow cadet at West Point and sympathized with his dilemma. He was sure that Anderson, as a Kentucky slave owner, was suffering from divided loyalties.

  In early January, with James Buchanan still in the White House, South Carolinians had fired on a merchant ship arriving to reinforce Sumter. A showdown had been averted then only because the ship sailed off without returning fire.

  At that time, Davis had called in person on Buchanan to urge that they find a “peaceful solution.” Buchanan had declined, but Davis’s new delegation to Abraham Lincoln fared worse. Lincoln refused to receive them.

  • • •

  From the outset, Davis had hoped that it would not be the South that fired the first shot in the impending war. But he found that South Carolinians would no longer tolerate a Yankee military post on Confederate soil.

  At 3:20 on the morning of April 12, 1861, Major Anderson received a formal message from aides to Pierre G. T. Beauregard, who had been Anderson’s student at West Point. Six weeks earlier, Beauregard had been awarded his rank of brigadier general in the Confederate army.

  “We have the honor to inform you,” the aides wrote, “that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter one hour from this time.”

  At 4:30 a.m., General Beauregard made good on his threat, and the shooting war began.

  • • •

  Over the next months, enthusiasm for the war rose and fell throughout the South with reports from the battlefield. Morale initially ran high when Fort Sumter was evacuated with the death of only one soldier—and that death accidental. Surrender of the fort was followed by the first major confrontation, at Manassas, Virginia—called the Battle of Bull Run by the Union and Manassas by the Confederates. Davis had been severely ill before the battle, and its strategy was devised at his sickbed.

  Again, the South prevailed. On July 21, 1861, General Beauregard saw his raw troops inflict 2,890 casualties on the Union troops, a thousand more than his own men suffered.

  But the South’s political maneuvering was less successful. Adroit gambits by Henry Seward were preventing Britain and France from allying themselves with the Confederacy, while Davis was confronted by the same bureaucratic infighting that was plaguing Lincoln in Washington. By the end of 1864, after William Tecumseh Sherman had devastated Georgia, the tide against the Confederacy seemed unlikely to turn.

  Within Davis’s ca
binet, his secretary of state, Judah Benjamin, recommended that Davis issue his own emancipation proclamation. Benjamin suggested that it might stimulate belated European support and induce newly freed black men to join the Confederate cause. Throughout much of the South, Benjamin was disdained as a Jew, but he had Davis’s confidence, and General Lee also saw advantages to the idea.

  When the Confederate Congress met, however, the proposal was greeted by bitter outcries from the slave owners who made up its membership. The Senate’s president demanded, What did we go to war for, but to protect our property?

  The measure finally passed the Senate but too late to demonstrate its effectiveness, since few blacks took up arms for the South.

  As Confederate hopes spiraled downward, an influential Virginia congressman went to ask Robert E. Lee if he would wrest control of the administration from Davis and proclaim martial law. The men who had rebelled against domination by the North now pronounced themselves ready for a dictator.

  Lee refused the suggestion, but he warned Davis that his starving army was no longer fit to carry on the war. In response, Davis asked his Congress for authority to suspend habeas corpus, the desperate measure that Lincoln had taken in 1861.

  Although Davis could not accept the Confederacy’s inevitable collapse, he had begun on April 3 the long evacuation from Richmond that brought him to Charlotte.

  • • •

  As Davis called together the Confederate troops scattered around his new headquarters, some advisers headed home instead. Others debated whether to urge their president to prepare himself for exile in Europe.

  When Varina Davis wrote from a town in Georgia to assure her husband that she and their children were well, Davis responded that he now distrusted his own troops. Since he had no confidence that they would protect her, Davis set off to meet his family. His security escort was down to ten men.

  It galled Davis to learn later that Andrew Johnson, the newly installed president of the United States, had charged him with being part of the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln and had announced a $100,000 reward for his capture.

  When Davis caught up with his wife’s party, she was adamant that they must separate. She urged Davis to ride off alone, rally the surviving troops, and carry on the fight. She would take their older children to England, enroll them in school there, and return with the two younger children to join him in Texas.

  Davis agreed that his family would be safer without him at their side. But there were reports of nearby marauders, and his horses were too exhausted to go farther. And the rain was unrelenting. Davis would stay one more night. Stripping off his coat and boots, he tried to sleep.

  Then, before dawn, a former slave who had remained loyal to Davis came to report hearing rifle fire nearby. Looking to the horizon, Davis saw a mass of Yankee cavalry bearing down on his encampment. His wife warned him that he had only moments to escape through a swamp a hundred yards away.

  • • •

  Davis hesitated long enough that the approaching troops cut off the road between him and his horse. In the darkness, he snatched up a light overcoat against the rain, and his wife threw a shawl over his head and shoulders.

  He had gone no more than twenty yards when a soldier rode up and ordered him to surrender. To the last, Davis had a plan: He would put his hand under the man’s boot and tip him over the far side of his horse. While he was struggling to get to his feet, Davis would leap onto the man’s saddle and race off.

  But seeing the carbine pointed at her husband, Varina Davis ran to his side and tried to protect him by throwing her arms around his chest. The moment for a final rebellion was lost, and the president of the Confederate States of America was taken prisoner.

  As cavalrymen drew close, they mistook other troops from their own ranks for Southerners. In the confusion of cross fire, two of Davis’s aides were able to walk away. Watching them slip off, Davis endorsed their decision. But left behind, he suffered an unexpected slur on his honor.

  In the gloom, Davis found that he had picked up his wife’s coat by mistake, and he had not waved her away when she wrapped him in her shawl.

  His captors were pleased to tell the world that Jefferson Davis had tried to escape from them by dressing as a woman.

  Pinckney Pinchback

  CHAPTER 4

  PINCKNEY BENTON STEWART PINCHBACK (1865)

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1863, A company of escaped slaves was being led through a military drill to prepare them for serving in the Union army’s First South Carolina Volunteers. The exercise ended abruptly when they were herded together with white soldiers to hear a clergyman read President Lincoln’s order that they were “henceforth free.”

  When the speaker finished, the white commander, Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, grabbed up the American flag by its standard and was waving it over the crowd when he heard a man begin to sing:

  “My country ’tis of thee—”

  The former slave’s powerful voice was joined by two black women harmonizing with him: “Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing!”

  Higginson had never experienced a moment so electric. It was “the choked voice of a race at last unloosed,” he recalled. Their singing “made all the other words seem cheap.”

  The celebration was not confined to Southern slaves. At Tremont Temple in Boston, a mass of white and black abolitionists stood waiting until near midnight to hear confirmation that the majority of the nation’s slaves were now free.

  And in Washington, a fugitive slave told a crowd that his daughter had once been sold away from him. At last, those days were over, and he blessed the Lord that white slave owners “can’t sell my wife and child any more.”

  The New York Times joined in the rejoicing. The newspaper hailed the dawn of a new era in the history of “this country and the world.”

  • • •

  In Louisiana, a handsome twenty-five-year-old nicknamed “Pinch” regarded the jubilation sardonically. As a quadroon—one-quarter black—Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback had learned long ago that good intentions alone did not change men’s hearts.

  Throughout Pinchback’s early life, he had hardly been a slave at all. His father, Major William Pinchback, was a typical Virginia plantation owner in every respect but one: When he first spied beautiful, light-skinned Eliza Stewart, he did not see one more slave but rather the love of his life. She moved into his house, bore his children, and prepared to move with him to his expansive new estate in Holmes County, Mississippi.

  First, though, Pinchback took Eliza to Philadelphia and officially set her free.

  On their way back to Mississippi, the couple was forced to stop in Macon, Georgia, on May 10, 1837, when Pinckney, their eighth child, was born prematurely. Until then, only two of their children had survived—a daughter, Mary, and a son who had been named Napoleon before his mental weakness became apparent.

  In Mississippi, Major Pinchback and his family settled into a life of ease, its comforts provided from the slave quarters. Lighter even than his mother, Pinckney might have passed for white, but he preferred to spend his time among his father’s slaves, listening to their African songs and stories.

  When he was nine and Napoleon seven years older, the boys were sent to study at Gilmore’s High School in Cincinnati. For different reasons, neither of them took to formal education. Pinckney found his way to the city’s waterfront along the Ohio River, where riverboat gamblers adopted him as a mascot and taught him to shoot craps and play poker.

  After eighteen months, his agreeable truancy ended when their father fell ill and summoned the boys home. They were back in Mississippi when Major Pinchback died, shattering their world.

  • • •

  Eliza Stewart learned from the major’s executor that Pinchback’s East Coast relatives were disregarding his wishes and claiming his estate. Worse, she and her children had become so vulnerable in Mississippi that she gathered them up and headed for safety in Cincinnati.

  The danger that they c
ould all be seized as slaves unhinged Napoleon’s fragile mind, and at twelve Pinckney Pinchback became the man of the family. Part of his new role meant talking enough like the black men around him that he aroused no resentment among the white citizens.

  Pinckney hired out as a cabin boy on canal boats running from Cincinnati to the other towns on the Ohio. For five years, earning eight dollars a month, he sent home what he could. Then in 1854, at seventeen, he graduated to a more lucrative occupation. Landing a job on a riverboat, he caught the eye of a well-known gambler named George Devol.

  As Devol’s servant, the young man learned the tricks of his trade, including how to fleece the other passengers with games of three-card monte. Devol worked with three partners, including a grifter notorious as “Canada Bill,” and they were pocketing tens of thousands of dollars.

  Although the partners praised Pinckney’s aptitude for their scams, he could not play against the wealthy white men. He was restricted to belowdecks with the ship’s barber and the other black crew. But he rose to the position of steward, and he could tell time with his solid gold pocket watch.

  Stories circulated later about the risks to his lucrative life: How he had to hide whenever angry deckhands chased after him until he could bribe a ship’s pilot to steer close enough to shore that he could jump to safety. How he had once killed a man in a shootout. How he was forced to marry a pregnant girl but then was stabbed by her brother when Pinckney paid to have the marriage annulled.

  By 1860, at twenty-three, Pinchback was trailed by a swirl of rumors and scandal. But after many affairs, he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old white girl named Nina Hawthorne and married her.

  • • •

  At first, the impending war seemed ready-made for a brave and reckless young man, but blacks were not serving in the Union army. Pinchback made his way to the federal troops who were occupying New Orleans, and by mid-May 1862 he had persuaded other freed black men to petition the commander of the Department of the Gulf to allow them to fight for the Union.