Jefferson Davis, American

by William J. Cooper

  Throughout 1852 Davis kept up his effort to rebuild the Democratic party. He wanted a “family re-union.” It bothered him that some of his State Rights associates did not approve of his push for party unity. To one of them he wrote, “you remind me that in healing up our party divisions I cooperate with those who stabbed me; I remember more keenly the stab which was given to the state, but have no purpose of revenge which will prevent me from acting with those who return to the standard of Democracy, and aid us in future to uphold the principles of state sovereignty and federal limitations which it was unfurled to sustain.”6

  Davis made an exception, however. Even though he argued that Henry Foote “was too small to be treated as an obstacle round which the course of the democratic party should be bent,” his antipathy toward his former gubernatorial foe led him into an ugly verbal battle in the press. When Foote accused Davis of leading a secessionist band, Davis responded with a vigorous denial while he charged Foote with forgetting the “propriety of his office.” Their public quarrel brought forth pleas even from pro-Davis newspapers for both men to back away from an unseemly squabble. A political friend gave Davis blunt advice: “It is best to let Foote have rope, for the Scamp is hanging himself faster than even his enemies could desire.” Assuring Davis that Foote was politically dead, this observer warned against making any new issues with Foote because doing so could lead to a “personal collision,” which would not do Davis any good. Davis did finally withdraw from the public argument, though he retained a potent animosity toward Foote.7

  The course of the legislature that met in the winter of 1851–52 highlighted Foote’s political problems. It gave the remaining year of his Senate term to a Whig, and a former Union Democrat got Davis’s seat. Although the Union party did well in filling the two vacancies, Democrats succeeded in getting the lawmakers to postpone electing a senator for the six-year term beginning in 1854. When Governor Foote tried to get the legislature to go on record approving the Compromise of 1850, he failed. With the drive for Democratic unity fully underway by the time he became governor on January 10, 1852, Foote could only watch helplessly as his Democratic support began disappearing.8

  When in May the national Democratic convention nominated Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire for president and William R. King of Alabama for vice president, a largely reunified Mississippi Democratic party, with Jefferson Davis in the forefront, enthusiastically embraced the ticket. Davis had met then-Senator Pierce during his visit to Washington back in 1838. To Mississippians he praised Pierce as a foe of abolitionists and a patriot who had served in Mexico. In Davis’s opinion, Mississippi, the South, and slavery could not have a stronger friend in the White House. When he contemplated the reunion of Mississippi Democrats and the satisfaction of the party’s national ticket, Davis shed the anxiety that had cloaked him, quoting Shakespeare, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer.”9

  As soon as news from the convention in Baltimore reached Mississippi, Jefferson Davis stepped forward to champion the ticket. He spoke in Vicksburg on June 8 and the next day before a large public meeting in Jackson. Signaling Davis’s place among Mississippi Democrats, the state party organ hailed him as “the gallant son of Mississippi—the favorite of all—[who] was welcomed with appropriate honors.” The state delegation to the national convention had attempted to get the vice-presidential nomination for him. Even though that effort did not succeed, one delegate reported to a friend, “I assure you he holds a very high stand in the Union both as a man of talents and of high toned integrity and worth.”10

  After his initial appearances in Vicksburg and Jackson, Davis made some campaign speeches, chiefly in northern Mississippi, with one stop in Memphis. The recurrence of eye problems in September severely curtailed his autumn political activities, though he did write a letter for publication in a New Orleans newspaper. When he spoke, he sounded the same themes: states’ rights and strict construction would remain secure with Pierce and the Democratic party. About the Whig nominee, Major General Winfield Scott, Davis had little good to say. The animus he had felt since 1847 was still quite alive. He did admit that Scott had been a good soldier, but he emphasized that the general had no experience in civil affairs, a lack that had never bothered him in Zachary Taylor’s case. Moreover, he found Scott’s personal characteristics especially unsuited to the presidency. He described Scott as a quarrelsome man, “petulant, vain and presumptuous.”11

  The result of the election certainly pleased Davis, and another outcome just as surely surprised him. Nationally, Pierce trounced Winfield Scott by 254 to 42 in the electoral count, though the popular vote was much closer. He won easily in Mississippi, with 61 percent of the vote, underscoring the reunification of the state’s Democrats. Only a month after the election Pierce wrote a warm, friendly letter to Davis, telling him that because of “the circumstances” of their initial acquaintance and their “present positions,” he should not be surprised if the president-elect “much desire[d]” to see him and obtain advice. Then Pierce became more specific; he wanted to consult with Davis on the South, and especially on the makeup of the cabinet. Although Pierce did not offer Davis a cabinet post, he mentioned the possibility, assuring Davis that he most wanted, and knew he would receive, “free and useful suggestions.” After asking whether Davis planned an early trip to Washington or could even possibly come up to Boston, Pierce informed the Mississippian that his opinion on the cabinet would be “definitively formed” by late February, when he intended to go to the capital. In the meantime he requested that Davis respond through a private friend in Boston, ensuring confidentiality. Although Davis’s reply has not survived, it pleased Pierce, who called it a “noble spirited letter.”12

  From the outset Pierce was clearly considering Davis for his cabinet. The president-elect wanted to overcome past Democratic division over the Compromise by including in his official family men who had both opposed and supported it. This intention angered southern Democrats who had gone into Union parties. They believed they deserved presidential accolades and favors; but they did not prevail. Writing from Washington in January 1853, Congressman Albert Brown told Davis the word among politicians placed him in the cabinet, and even Davis’s critics shared that opinion. Because the appointment seemed probable, Brown declared that he would not press his own claims. It “will be glory enough,” Brown announced, to have our “recognized leader” sit in the cabinet.13

  By early February, Pierce had definitely decided on Davis. Pierce had met with Virginia senator Robert M. T. Hunter, who had traveled to New Hampshire carrying the message that southern states’ righters wanted Davis in the cabinet. Brown described Hunter as a “willing witness” in the states’ righters behalf, who was “fully impressed with the importance of having them gratified.” On February 2 a telegram from one of Pierce’s advisers asked Davis to be in Washington by the fifteenth. Davis wired back that he could not make it by that date. The reply flashed south, “Please meet in Washington as soon as possible.” Political confidants urged Davis to accept Pierce’s offer for the benefit of the cause and the party. Still uncertain, Davis left Brierfield on February 22 by steamboat bound via New Orleans for Washington, where he arrived on March 5 and immediately conferred with Pierce. He accepted Pierce’s offer of the War Department, though he later claimed that he intended to decline the cabinet so that he could run for governor again in 1853, rearguing the old issues before Mississippi voters. In Washington, however, he said he confronted the same argument put to him in Mississippi—to turn down Pierce could damage the State Rights cause. Thus, Jefferson Davis once again took on a political role in the national capital, but this time in an executive position.14

  Having accepted Pierce’s offer, Davis rented a furnished house on 13th Street just east of the White House and established himself at the War Department. The department was located just west of the executive mansion on the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street, in a drab two-story brick building bui
lt in the 1820s. Running along about one-third of the front, a colonnade painted white and ornamented with Corinthian pillars attempted to provide some distinction. Davis located his office in three rooms at the rear of the first floor near the stairway.15

  In a photograph taken in 1853, the forty-five-year-old Jefferson Davis confronted the camera, clearly middle-aged, but just as obviously vigorous and confident. His large, pale eyes distinguished and softened an angular face. One who saw him noted his “clear-cut, sharp, refined face” and dignified bearing. Despite his bouts of eye disease and recurring problems with malaria and neuralgia, Davis retained what another observer called a “distinguished appearance,” with a “demeanor and conversation” that “impressed” people around him. Even a staunch political opponent described him as “a gentleman and a scholar, smart as a steel trap.…” An English visitor to the capital city depicted him as a “polished man, more so certainly than any of the others [in the cabinet].” And a well-known Washington hostess and close friend remembered him as “exceedingly slender, but his step was springy, and he carried himself with such an air of conscious strength and ease and purpose as often to cause a stranger to turn and look at him.”16

  When Davis became secretary of war, both the War Department and the U.S. Army it managed were small and ossified. The secretary’s immediate staff totaled only eleven: a chief clerk, seven clerks, and three messengers. There was no assistant secretary and really no other civilian employee of executive rank. By law, the army had an authorized strength of 13,821, but it actually numbered only 10,417, a force far too small to accomplish its major mission: protection of settlers on the advancing frontier. Organized in eleven different geographic commands, the great majority of troops were dispensed in far-flung, isolated posts on the western frontier.17

  This army consisted of two parts so distinct that it seemed at times each wore its own uniform. One, the bureaus or staff agencies, operated under the direct supervision of the secretary of war. There were eight bureaus—adjutant general, quartermaster, pay, subsistence, medical, engineers, topographical engineers, and ordnance. Each had a chief who ruled his universe almost as a medieval fiefdom. That a number of these officers had occupied their positions for a long time, two since 1818, only added to their bureaucratic power and political influence. Movement rarely occurred within the officer corps. Officers assigned to a staff bureau remained there, as did those assigned to the combat arms.

  Jefferson Davis, c. 1853.

  Museum of the Confederacy (photo credit i9.1)

  The combat or line force looked to the commanding general of the army for its orders. Throughout Davis’s tenure in the War Department, the post was held by sixty-seven-year-old Major General Winfield Scott, who had been a general officer since 1814 and commanding general since 1841. A veteran of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, Scott was a first-rate soldier with a distinguished record, capped by his impressive campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City in 1847. Scott’s quest for military glory was matched by his ambition for political preferment, evidenced by his garnering the Whig nomination for president in 1852. Although he did run as a major party candidate for the nation’s highest office, he never resigned his commission because in his time the rules did not require resignation from the military to run for office.18

  The army’s bifurcated organizational structure included a divided chain of command. While the secretary of war traditionally directed the administrative business of the department and the activities of the bureaus, he did not exercise authority over the commanding general, who considered the president his sole superior. Because the Constitution made the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, it would seem that the secretary of war as his personal choice to oversee the War Department would have authority over all of its parts. Matters had not turned out that way, however. Almost an institution in himself, the able, vain, corpulent, and highly successful General Scott zealously guarded his independence. In his mind the secretary was simply another clerk who would depart before too long.

  For decades the department had been basically dormant, with one exception, in the late 1810s and early 1820s, when John C. Calhoun was secretary of war. But since then initiative, planning, and thought had become uncommon commodities in an increasingly encrusted establishment. Seniority dominated all else. With no retirement policy, generals and other officers remained on active duty until too physically or intellectually enfeebled to continue, and sometimes even longer. As a result, promotions occurred at a glacial rate. Rigid rules governed all practices. The one exception was the Mexican War, when the small regular army augmented by volunteers won a foreign war. After 1848, however, procedures in the War Department hastened back into their hidebound pattern.

  Jefferson Davis brought to the war office a background vastly different from his predecessors. Like them, he was a politician, but he also had graduated from West Point, had been an officer in the regular army for seven years, had commanded a regiment in battle in Mexico, and had served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs. Even more important, he possessed a great interest in the U.S. Army, an institution he viewed as both guardian and benefactor of the nation. Moreover, the geographic expansion of the country and the technological changes affecting so many areas of national life excited him. In his mind, the army was vital to both.

  As a cabinet officer, Jefferson Davis joined six other men in President Pierce’s official family. Perhaps the best known nationally was the capable secretary of state, William L. Marcy of New York, a former governor, United States senator, and secretary of war for James K. Polk. Caleb Cushing of Massachusetts, scholarly, hardworking, and a defender of southern property rights in slaves, became attorney general. James Guthrie of Kentucky, physically robust and quite wealthy, presided over the Treasury Department. A slight, quiet former congressman from North Carolina, James C. Dobbin, ran the Navy Department. The great patronage machine known as the Post Office Department was given to the Pennsylvanian James Campbell, who had little experience but important connections. For the newest addition to the cabinet, the Department of the Interior, Pierce chose Robert McClelland of Michigan, who when in Congress had voted for the Wilmot Proviso, but later had become a proponent of the Compromise of 1850. In making his choices Pierce covered both the essential geographic bases and the party’s ideological spectrum, but he certainly did not assemble a distinguished group. It was, however, a congenial cabinet; for the only time in American history no changes occurred during an administration.19

  Franklin Pierce himself brought no special distinction to the White House. Born into an active political family in New Hampshire, he rose to a dominant position in the state party. At the same time he became a successful attorney, noted for his ability to sway juries. He had sat in both houses of Congress between 1833 and 1842, where he compiled an unremarkable record as a loyal Democrat, but he had been away from Washington for more than a decade. He had also served as a brigadier general in Mexico, though he did not emerge with a notable war record. Throughout his career he evinced an unshakable devotion to the classical Jeffersonian doctrine of strict construction and states’ rights, which meant to southern Democrats that he occupied their constitutional ground. An affable man with good political instincts but without great intelligence, Pierce suffered a great personal tragedy just after the election when his only remaining child, a lad of eleven, was killed before his very eyes in a railroad accident. That terrible event turned his wife into a recluse and delivered a fearsome emotional blow just as he entered the presidency.

  Perhaps that trauma helped turn him toward Jefferson Davis. For unknown reasons Davis already thought of Pierce as a friend, though the record reveals no contact between the two men after their introduction in the winter of 1838 until Pierce’s letter in December 1852. Because Pierce was assigned to Winfield Scott’s command, they never saw each other in Mexico. Through the next four years a real friendship did develop, with the president and his war minister becoming
devoted to each other. Varina reported warm, cordial visits from Pierce, with “intimate talks,” and one winter when she was ill, his plowing through massive snowdrifts to ascertain her condition. When Davis met with Pierce on the president’s last day in office, the chief executive did not conceal his feelings: “I can scarcely bear the parting from you, who have been strength and solace to me for four anxious years and never failed me.” Davis often evinced similar feelings, holding to them even into old age. Two decades after leaving the cabinet, he said that “equal magnanimity and generosity of heart” characterized Pierce’s personality. He could be even more complimentary: “Pure grand and good man, I never knew him to falter in the maintenance of sound principle.” Davis’s immense personal regard for Pierce overcame his political judgment; he could never admit the disastrous reality of his friend’s presidency.20

  As an active politician, Davis knew certain of his cabinet colleagues, but he had been familiar with none. He had known Guthrie the longest. Davis remembered that they had met when he was a schoolboy in Kentucky and Guthrie a law clerk. Even though they had not maintained an active friendship over the decades, Guthrie did become Davis’s closest social friend in the cabinet. He seemingly had cordial relations with all the others, particularly Cushing, but details are not plentiful.21

  Taking over the War Department, Davis was temporarily without his wife. Because he had made such a hurried trip to Washington and because he was not absolutely sure about its outcome, he left her in Mississippi with their young son. But Davis left no doubt about his feelings. Writing from Washington in mid-April, and clearly referring to his estrangement from Joseph, he closed: “Farewell my dear and let us hope that happier days will come when our trials have passed, but there can be none in which you will be dearer and nearer to the heart of your husband.” He urged her “always to speak freely and explicitly of everything which concerns you, because it must be equally my affair.”