Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  For Jefferson Davis the evening with Calhoun was yet another singular event in a notable year highlighted by his second marriage in February and his election to Congress in November. In the midst of these happy occasions Davis had to deal with one sad event. While campaigning in northern Mississippi, he received the news of his mother’s death on October 3. Immediately he rode to Woodville. Eighty-four years old, Jane Davis died at the original Davis property in Mississippi, Poplar Grove, by that time the home of her daughter Lucinda and son-in-law William Stamps. The precise date of the funeral service is unknown, but with Jefferson present she was buried in the family cemetery at Poplar Grove. Although Varina’s later account is mistaken about Jefferson’s whereabouts at this unhappy time, there is no reason to doubt her testimony that he was “much overcome” by the loss of his mother. He had never expressed any but positive sentiments about Jane Davis, who had always cherished her youngest child and had never given him reason to doubt her affection. Following the funeral, Davis returned to the hustings, with his next recorded appearance in Natchez on October 22.

  With a major political victory and the Calhoun fête behind him, Congressman-elect Jefferson Davis left Vicksburg on November 19 for Washington and the opening of Congress. He did not travel alone. Accompanying him was reelected Congressman Robert W. Roberts, as well as Varina and his niece Mary Jane Bradford. At that time most representatives and senators did not take their wives and families to the capital. The expense of a family in Washington, the paucity of suitable housing, and the relative brevity of many congressional sessions all combined to make almost a literal brotherhood among lawmakers. That Jefferson brought along Varina signals graphically that they very much desired to be together.

  Jefferson’s absence from Brierfield during the long campaign had not dampened their enthusiasm for each other. While traveling around Mississippi courting voters, he wrote openly to his young wife that he missed her. During his political peregrination, Varina kept busy as a plantation mistress. As part of caring for the slaves, she oversaw the making of clothes for them, a task in which she participated, at times rising at dawn to ensure accomplishment of the work. She also spent time with “the cotton book,” which meant that she was keeping track of the critical autumn activity, picking cotton.

  Her social life focused on the Hurricane family and on her older brother, Joseph Davis Howell, who lived at Brierfield while his brother-in-law was away. All got along quite well. Although Varina complained to her mother about “my usual pains” and once suffered from swollen neck glands, for which she used leeches, her brother thought that her health had improved since her marriage. Varina’s letters from these months, along with those of people close to her, describe a happy, fulfilled young woman, though she surely missed her “Jeffy.”58

  Jefferson’s political triumph pleased her immensely, but she wondered whether she was “proper proud of [her] good man” because she saw the victory “as a just tribute to his merit.” She contemplated her role as wife, and she clearly wanted to succeed in it. Writing to her mother, she talked about what she had to do in order to be a good wife. “I feel that Jeff’s love is only to be returned by the practice of self control, and that it is the only mode of gaining his esteem and confidence.” Although she characterized her husband as caring and responsive, she told Margaret Howell that even if he were not, “your approbation must always be incentive to do what I know you will say I should do for God’s sake.”59

  When the Davis party departed from Vicksburg, no one anticipated what Jefferson afterwards called “a very severe trip.” They took the northern route to Washington—by steamboat up the Mississippi and then the Ohio to either Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), or Pittsburgh, and finally overland to the capital. An early winter blast turned the journey into an ordeal. Ice clogging the Ohio stopped boats some forty-five miles downstream from Wheeling, requiring all passengers to disembark. With the ground covered with snow and no public conveyances available, Davis by “considerable maneuvering” procured a common woodshed and nailed stanchions on the sides and planks to them. Sitting atop the baggage on this ersatz sled, the Davises and their companions took two cold days and one spill down a frozen hillside to reach Wheeling. Along the way they spent the night at “a fine looking frame house” where, Varina learned, her mother with a small son had stayed many years earlier. In Wheeling the four passengers shifted to a stage for a jolting ride in which they often found themselves pitched up to the roof. “On several occasions” when the stage threatened to leave the snow-choked road, the men piled out to chock wheels. During this journey Varina reported that Jefferson cheered the group, “always ready with some pleasant story, making light of the discomforts, and sometimes singing ‘We’ll tough it out till morning.’ ” Finally, after some three weeks of “peril, discomfort, and cold,” the travelers reached Washington.60

  No one would have mistaken the national capital in 1845 for a grand city. The great English writer Charles Dickens pictured it as “the city of Magnificent intentions” with “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere.” The federal district appeared more like a half dozen country villages than a unified city. Neither the Capitol nor the Washington Monument had been completed, and the city lacked basic amenities such as gaslights on the streets and any semblance of a sewage system. An omnipresent noisome odor resulted from the nearby swamps and trash-filled vacant lots. In addition, cows, swine, and geese as well as dogs and cats roamed the streets, contributing to the stench.61

  Upon reaching this somewhat ragged place with grand aspirations, the Davises stopped at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. After about ten days they found rooms for themselves and their niece in a nearby boardinghouse, also on Pennsylvania Avenue. Most congressmen and senators who had come to Washington without wives and families lived in boardinghouses, or messes, as they were called. In the Davis mess were two more Mississippians, Jacob Thompson and Stephen Adams, both with wives, and several others. When Davis’s old friend George W. Jones visited during that winter, he too joined the mess.62

  By the time Jefferson Davis had completed his arduous trek to the capital, the first session of the Twenty-ninth Congress had already commenced. On December 8, one week late, he appeared at the Capitol, was sworn in, and took his seat. The chamber of the House of Representatives that Davis entered was “a beautiful and spacious hall, of semicircular shape, supported by handsome pillars,” and still illuminated with candles. The height to the top of the entablature was 35 feet to accommodate a ladies’ gallery at the south end and a larger public gallery. Decorative scarlet curtains hanging in the galleries also muffled sounds. Above the members rose a 57-foot dome with painted caissons to represent the dome of the Pantheon in Rome. At the center of the dome, a handsome cupola served both to please the eye and admit light. All congressmen had their own desks and chairs arranged in groups of three in a semicircle facing the speaker’s rostrum. Above it stood a plaster statue of liberty atop an eagle with wings spread.63

  Freshman representative Jefferson Davis began his congressional career as a member of the majority, with Democrats comfortably outnumbering Whigs. Most of the Democrats wanted to use their dominance to help President Polk enact his program of traditional Democratic measures, such as lowering the tariff and reestablishing the Independent Treasury, and of spurring the westward march of the United States all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Although only in his first term, Jefferson Davis began setting forth ideas and themes that would mark his public life for the next decade and a half.

  Davis had been in the House for some two months when he rose on February 6, 1846, to make his first major congressional speech during the debate on the Oregon question. A fellow representative described his appearance as “prepossessing—tall, slender, with a soldierly bearing, a fine head, an intellectual face; there was a look of culture and refinement about him that made a favorable impression from the first, and the attainments he displayed, even in conversation, comma
nded the respect of those who met him.” In his remarks Davis talked about the uniqueness of his country and the inevitability of American progress. The Oregon matter before Congress involved both ownership and boundaries. Since 1818 the United States and Great Britain had agreed to a joint occupation of the area, with the agreement providing that either party could give notice of one year for terminating joint occupation. That was precisely what President Polk, absolutely confident about his country’s title, wanted to do. But while notification of termination was straightforward, establishing a border was more complex. The Democratic platform of 1844 had called for the occupation of the whole of Oregon, with its northern boundary at 54°40′, far up into British Canada. Britain, recognizing that in Oregon Americans enjoyed a numerical advantage of almost seven to one over its own citizens, decided to give up its claim to the territory in return for American acceptance of a northern boundary at 49 degrees, extending the American-Canadian border from the Rocky Mountains on westward to the Pacific Ocean. That possibility angered many Democrats, especially from the old Northwest, who wanted the president to uphold the party platform, even if it meant war.

  In his address to the House, Davis steadfastly backed the president in his advocacy of notice and his acceptance of 49 degrees. Speaking at length on the right of Americans to colonize Oregon for agricultural purposes, he announced: “Our people have removed the ‘Far West’ into Oregon.” He maintained, “American hearts have gone over the mountains, and American laws should follow,” and found the secret of American expansion in “the energy and restless spirit of adventure, which is characteristic of our people.” In his view, these qualities explained why hardworking citizens “left the repose of civil government to plunge into the haunts of savage beast and savage men.” According to Davis, settlers “have gone to the school of the wilderness” from which they would produce an agricultural country that would benefit many. Declaring that this mission sharply contrasted the Americans in Oregon with the British, who were satisfied with fur trading and had no interest in opening and cultivating the land, he maintained that the westward movement should continue “until our people shall sit down on the shores of the Pacific and weep that there are no more forests to subdue.” Davis had absorbed enthusiastically the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which proclaimed that the superior American culture and people should predominate from ocean to ocean in order to bring civilization and progress to the backward, lesser races, whether Native Americans or Mexicans.

  Despite his ardent convictions about an American Oregon, the prospect of war troubled Davis. Disagreeing with the bellicose rhetoric reverberating through the chamber, Davis said simply that war did not provide “the purifier” nor blood the “aliment” for free institutions. Although he admitted that at times republics, including his own, had been “cradled in war,” he cautioned that “more often they have met with a grave in that cradle.” Advocating the boundary compromise as a policy of peace, he urged approval of 49 degrees. In his judgment, nothing but “national rights or national honor” could justify war, and he perceived neither in this question. Here he could find only the termination of a treaty on agreed-upon terms. In the end, the position that Davis supported prevailed. During the summer the United States and Great Britain assented to a plan that made Oregon solely American and drew its northern boundary along the 49th parallel.64

  The advance of American institutions toward the Pacific was not the only brand of progress that Congressman Davis championed. The first session of the Twenty-ninth Congress had to decide what to do about James Smithson’s gift to the country. An Englishman, Smithson in 1829 bequeathed his fortune to a nephew with the provision that if the nephew died without an heir, the money should go to the United States. When that happened, more than $500,000 was delivered to the U.S. government in 1838. After various proposals for its use had been submitted, including the founding of a national university, the House in December 1845 created a special committee to consider the creation of the Smithsonian Institution. Placed on the seven-man committee, Jefferson Davis became an ardent proponent of using the money for establishing the Institution, which to his mind would benefit science and encourage “the diffusion of every kind of helpful knowledge.” To those who argued that the government had no authority to take charge of education, Davis answered that the proposal did not put education under governmental aegis. Instead, the work accomplished under the auspices of the Institution would aid science and assist in spreading new information throughout the country. His commitment was firm and deeply felt: “Knowledge [is] the common cement that unite[s] all the heterogeneous materials of this Union into one mass, like the very pillars before us.” The House did eventually pass a substitute bill, though it did not alter the purpose which Davis supported so fervently. President Polk signed the bill into law in August.65

  During this session Davis also distinctly enunciated his vision of the Constitution and his concept of federal power. His opportunity occurred during the debate over the Rivers and Harbors Bill, an internal improvements measure that included providing federal funds to construct harbors in river ports and to improve navigation in rivers. Davis registered a strong dissent to the claim that the constitutional mandate of providing for a navy conferred a right for river and harbor improvements in order to promote commercial maritime activities as a “nursery for seamen.” In his judgment, the proposal before the House sought simply “to appropriate money, not to execute a granted power … to substitute the discretion of the Government for the specific enumeration of objects for which, by the Constitution, appropriations are permitted.” The proposition advanced by proponents that constitutional justification derived from “a sort of floating right” by which the government could determine “the means necessary and proper” to effect its chosen end appalled Davis. He denounced this formulation as “wholly irreconcilable to the very idea of specific grants, or the existence of reserved and sovereign powers within the States. When the States entered into a union, and established this Government as the agent of their league,” he lectured his fellow lawmakers, “they gave to it certain carefully enumerated powers, with authority to make all laws which should be necessary and proper for carrying those powers into execution.”

  Davis went on to make absolutely clear his conception of the relationship between the states and the federal government, which under-girded his reading of the Constitution. “To all which has been said of the inherent powers of the Government, I answer, it is the creature of the States; as such it could have no inherent power, all it preserves was delegated by the States, and it is therefore that our Constitution is not an instrument of limitations, but of grants.” As such, “whatever was then deemed necessary was specifically conveyed; beyond the power so granted, nothing can now be claimed except those incidents which are indispensable to its existence; not merely convenient or conducive, but subordinate and necessary to the exercise of the grants.” After this discourse on strict construction, really an exposition of John C. Calhoun’s constitutional theories, Davis called on the memory of his hero—and Calhoun’s archenemy—Andrew Jackson, who in Davis’s view had checked with the presidential veto the internal-improvements mania and the Constitution-stretching of his time. “Let Democrats remember,” he cried, “and make the application.” Not all Democrats heeded Davis’s call, however, and the bill passed the House and the Senate also. But, harking back to his famous predecessor, President Polk vetoed the act.66

  Committed to faith in the beneficence as well as the efficiency of American technological progress, Davis also championed the professionalism beginning to mark the industrializing economies. In congratulating the American army for its victories in May 1846 in several small but sharp encounters against Mexican troops in the Rio Grande Valley, Congress extolled the virtues of American fighting men. Davis participated in the chorus, but he added another verse praising the professional training undergone at West Point by most officers in the engagements. American courage and spirit could not hav
e prevailed, Davis argued, without the “military science” resulting from a professional education. He agreed that neither George Washington, Andrew Jackson, nor Zachary Taylor, the American commander along the Rio Grande, had experienced such an education, but he insisted that all of them understood the need for a school like West Point to train men for the profession of arms. According to Davis, battlefield success depended upon fortifications properly constructed and situated and on artillery correctly handled, and only professional training could guarantee those outcomes. Davis maintained to the House that the events along the Rio Grande proved the worth of West Point.

  Davis’s praise of professionalism got him in trouble with some colleagues for what they perceived as a condescending attitude toward ordinary Americans. Among those offended was Andrew Johnson, Democrat of Tennessee, who not for the last time took issue with Jefferson Davis. While emphasizing the necessity of professional education so that soldiers could effectively handle complex military matters, Davis declared that not just any blacksmith or tailor could do so. Johnson, a former tailor, took exception to remarks that he deemed made “an invidious distinction,” and proudly identified himself with workingmen. He thundered “that he knew we had an illegitimate, swaggering, bastard, scrub aristocracy, who assumed to know a good deal, but who, when the flimsy veil of pretension was torn off from it, was shown to possess neither talents, information, nor a foundation on which you can rear a superstructure that would be useful.” Davis hastened to make clear that he intended no such slight; rather, he “merely said that scientific education was as necessary in the art of war as was the proper training in any other occupation or profession.” He went on to apologize, for he had no intention “of wantonly wounding the feelings or of making insidious reflections upon the origins or occupation of any man.” The reporter noted: “the debate in all its stages not being of an entirely pleasant nature.”67