Then Davis uttered the words that forever more united past and present through the dream of the Lost Cause. “But they are not dead—they live in memory and their spirits stand out a grand reserve of that column which is marching on with unfaltering steps towards the goal of constitutional liberty.” Davis transported his listeners back to the beginning of the Civil War:
I am standing now very nearly on the spot where I stood when I took the oath of office in 1861. Your demonstration now exceeds that which welcomed me then…the spirit of Southern liberty is not dead. Then you were full of joyous hope, with a full prospect of achieving all you desired, and now you are wrapped in the mantle of regret…I have been promised, my friends, that I should not be called upon to make a speech, and therefore I will only extend my heartfelt thanks. God bless you, one and all, men and boys, and the ladies above all others, who never faltered in our direst need.
His remarks done, Jefferson Davis sat down.
What happened next stunned the reporter from the Atlanta Constitution. “Such a cheer as followed the speaker to his seat cannot be described,” he noted. “It was from the heart. It was an outburst of nature. It was long continued. Mr. Davis got up again and bowed his acknowledgments. Men went wild for him; women were in ecstasy for him; children caught the spirit and waved their hands in the air.” Then a lone Confederate veteran shouted, “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” as loud as the old rebel could yell and within moments, thousands of voices repeated the salute.
The Atlanta Constitution reporter followed Davis back to the Exchange Hotel, and later wrote: “Your correspondent, presuming upon a previous acquaintance formed in Brierfield, called upon the noble old Mississippian in his room. He was greeted by a grasp of the hand which proved that Mr. Davis still had a good grip…he expressed himself as in the best of health for one of his years, and judging from his face, in the best of spirits.” A procession of well-wishers, starting with the mayor, interrupted the interview. Soon admiring and swooning women filled the former Confederate leader’s room.
Davis left Montgomery on April 29, but he did not go home to Beauvoir. He had accepted an invitation to go to Atlanta and speak there at the dedication of a sculpture of Ben Hill. Frank Burr wrote, “At every station along the route from Montgomery Mr. Davis was met by tremendous delegations, who shouted and cheered from the moment the train came in sight until it was out of hearing.” Burr penned an extravagant speculation: “All the South is aflame…and where this triumphant march is to stop I cannot predict.” When Davis arrived in Atlanta, he found fifty thousand people waiting for him at the railroad depot. Eight thousand children lined the route—more than a mile—from the station to the home of his host, his old friend Ben Hill. Two thousand Confederate veterans followed Davis’s carriage. Every business closed its doors except for the U.S. Post Office. The authorities in Washington had refused to permit it. At the dedication of the statue on May 1, newspaper editor Henry Grady gave Davis a stirring introduction: “This outcast…is the uncrowned king of our people…the resurrection of these memories that for twenty years have been buried in our hearts, have given us the best Easter we have seen since Christ was risen from the dead.”
Next, Davis traveled by train to Savannah, where he would attend the centennial of a local militia unit, the Chatham Artillery, and participate in the unveiling of two bronze tablets on the monument to the Revolutionary War hero General Nathaniel Greene. This simple forty-foot marble shaft, “the first monument ever erected in the South to a Northern man,” said the New York Times, had stood in the public square forty years barren of inscriptions. To celebrate the Chatham Artillery, the Georgia Historical Society offered to attach the tablets. The train sped three hundred miles from Atlanta to Savannah, making, by one hour, the fastest time ever recorded between those two cities. The five-car train was decorated with rich bunting, and nailed to each side of the train in large letters was the motto: “He was manacled for us.” At the end of Davis’s car, the last one, his portrait, captioned “Our President” in flowers formed into the shape of letters, delighted onlookers. Along the tracks, people gathered to watch the train fly by. At every platform, crowds thronged. When the rain stopped at Macon for twenty minutes, Davis spoke of being brought here as a prisoner twenty-one years earlier.
Davis arrived in Savannah that evening for a four-day visit. The streets were impassible. “As in Atlanta,” the New York Times reported, “flowers were rained upon him from the multitudes.” It was a triumphant return to the city from which Davis had been sent by sea to his captivity in May 1865.
By his second day in Savannah, Davis began to lose his strength. The tour had exhilarated him, but he was also exhausted by the travel. The New York Times reported on his weakened condition:
He is beginning to feel the effects of the demands which his people have made upon his waning strength, as well as those which he himself has imposed. The kindly expressions and demonstrations…have warmed his heart, so that he wants to meet whatever exactions in the way of speechmaking or handshaking are asked of him. When he started, a week ago, he was reluctant to speak more than a few words of thanks…Since then his disposition has changed completely, and he submits himself willingly to the calls from the shouting multitudes for speeches. “Do they want me?” he asked several times yesterday as he lay in his couch in the railway car and heard the rousing cheers at several stations. “All right,” he would continue; “tell them I’m coming.” And then, taking his stout cane in hand to aid his frail steps, he would walk slowly out to the platform and talk.
By that night, Davis had regained his strength and he spoke to more than ten thousand people from the steps of the Comer residence.
That night was another triumph, but it was also the end of the tour. Davis had not planned it, but he had enjoyed it. When it began, he was not sure that anyone would want to see him again. When it ended, he knew he held a place in Southern hearts.
It was no surprise that the next year, in October 1887, he agreed to return to Macon, which had been but a brief stop during the first tour to attend a Confederate reunion and the Georgia State Fair. This time Varina accompanied him. She marveled at the reception, but worried that it would kill him. A newspaper article warned citizens that this was Davis’s “last journey,” and that they must do nothing to tax his feeble strength, not even shake his hand. He was seventy-nine and weaker than he had been the previous year. When Varina cautioned him that he might die during the visit, Davis retorted: “If I am to die it would be a pleasure to die surrounded by Confederate soldiers.”
Several thousand of them did surround him when they charged the house where he was staying. It was like Pickett’s Charge all over again. When they produced a battle flag, David said: “I am like that old flag, riven and torn by storms and trials. I love it as a memento; I love it for what you and your fathers did. God bless you! I am glad to be able to see you again.” Then Davis took the flag and waved it through the air. The veterans went wild.
At the climax of the visit, Jefferson and Varina presided over Children’s Day at the fair. Beginning with the orphans, the Davises blessed and laid hands upon several thousand children. It was as though, by his touch, he sought to pass on the values of the Lost Cause to a new generation. He returned to Beauvoir, confident that he had made his last public appearance.
In March 1888, Davis accepted an invitation to speak to an audience of young men in Mississippi City, Mississippi. He was prepared to decline, but accepted because the venue was not far from Beauvoir, and the composition of the audience appealed to him. It turned out to be one of the shortest—and one of the most remarkable—speeches of his life:
Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens: Ah, pardon me, the laws of the United States no longer permit me to designate you as fellow citizens, but I am thankful that I may address you as my friends. I feel no regret that I stand before you this afternoon a man without a country, for my ambition lies buried in the grave of the Confederacy. There has been consigned not only
my ambition, but the dogmas upon which that Government was based.
Davis sounded like he was about to indulge in bitter sectionalism. But then he changed his tone:
The faces I see before me are those of young men; had I not known this I would not have appeared before you. Men in whose hands the destinies of our Southland lie, for love of her I break my silence, to speak to you a few words of respectful admonition. The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future—a future full of golden promise; a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to make your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished—a reunited country.
Davis reached a milestone on June 3, 1888—his eightieth birthday. He had been inaugurated president of the confederacy twenty-seven years ago; the Civil War had ended twenty-three years ago, and he had survived Abraham Lincoln by the same measure of time; and he had been a free man for the last twenty-one years. Lincoln was only fifty-six when he was assassinated, and he had no time to savor his victory. Davis had almost a quarter century to reflect upon his defeat. From all across the South, from people high and low, congratulations and gifts poured in to Beauvoir. From the state of Mississippi came the gift of a crown, this one fashioned not from thorns, but silver.
One letter, from a former Confederate soldier of no prominence and unknown to Davis, spoke for all the anonymous, faithful veterans who had survived the war.
Lewisville, Arkansas
June 3d. 1888
Hon. Jefferson Davis
Beauvoir, Miss.
My dear Sir:
Permit me to cordially congratulate you upon becoming an octogenarian. As a native of Ponotoc, Miss., and as an ex-confederate, who entered the army at 17 years of age and remained till the last gun had fired, may I not claim a few moments of your time by tendering to you my congratulations on this your eightieth birthday? May Divine Providence bless you with good health and unalloyed happiness.
Many thousands of the old soldiers yet live to congratulate you…but many thousands, in the past two decades, have passed over the river…and they, and the grandest of all armies, our fallen heroes, with those grand commanders, Lee, Johnston and Jackson, are awaiting the arrival of their Commander in chief. All of us are indeed proud that you have been permitted to remain with us until the ripe age of eighty and we pray earnestly that you may be permitted to enjoy many more years of health, happiness and prosperity…My heart goes out to you in your declining years as warmly as when it was beating to the martial tread upon the fields of battle.
…I beg you to pardon me for imposing this long letter upon you. I only intended to express to you my joy upon your attaining your 80th birthday—and wishing you a longer life with us, and greater happiness in the beautiful life “over there”…
With an earnest prayer for your welfare, I am, with great respect,
Yours truly—
W. P. Parks
Dr. Harker’s patent medicine company, manufacturers of “the only true iron tonic” that “beautifies the complexion” and “purifies the blood,” published a handsome advertising card bearing Davis’s image, implying that the venerated former president owed his longevity to its dubious concoction.
In December 1888, former confederate general Jubal Early, a favorite of Davis, visited Beauvoir. He noticed Davis’s threadbare clothes and offered to buy him a new suit. No, Davis demurred, he could not accept such generous charity, but he would be willing to accept just the fabric. He would pay his own New Orleans tailor, Mercier, who still kept his measurements on file, to fashion the garment. Early ignored him. He bought the wool and instructed Mercier to cut a simple, elegant suit. It was a fine garment of Confederate gray.
In 1889, Davis received an unexpected communication that jolted him back a half century in time to his youth. A woman from the North, Miss Lee H. Willis, wrote to him from the town of Richview, in Washington County, Illinois. She had discovered an old, lost love letter from him to Sarah Knox Taylor. Would he like it returned to him? The inquiry resurrected long-buried memories from his remote past. He remembered the letters that Knox had written to him, a romantic correspondence lost for decades. Oh yes, “you rightly suppose it has much value to me,” he replied in a letter to Willis dated April 13, 1889: “The package containing all our correspondence was in a writing desk, among the books and papers I left in Mississippi when called to Alabama [in 1861 as president], and it would be to me a great solace to recover the letters Miss Taylor wrote to me, and which were with the one you graciously offer to restore.”
Memories fifty years old rushed back to him, of the girl he once wrote in December 1834: “Dreams my dear Sarah we will agree are our weakest thoughts, and yet by dreams have I been lately almost crazed, for they were of you…I have read…your letter to night. Kind, dear letter, I have kissed it often…Shall we not soon meet Sarah to part no more? Oh! How I long to lay my head upon that breast which beats in unison with my own, to turn from the sickening sights of worldly duplicity and look in those eyes so eloquent of purity and love.” Davis never found the package of lost letters he’d hoped to recover.
Knox Taylor was not the only memory stirring inside Davis. He brooded over many things. “The shadow of the Confederacy,” Varina confided to her friend Constance Cary Harrison, “grows heavier over him as the years weigh his heart down.” Now, she wrote, “he dwells in the past.”
In November 1889, Davis departed Beauvoir alone for one of his periodic trips to inspect his lands at Brierfield, and he became ill during the trip. It was his lungs, with complications from his lifelong foe, malaria. He was rushed to New Orleans, where Varina, summoned by an emergency telegraph, joined him. Through newspaper reports, the whole South kept a vigil at his bedside. For a time Davis rallied, then declined. Near the end, when Varina
THE TWILIGHT YEARS AT
BEAUVOIR.
raised more medicine to his lips, he declined: “I pray I cannot take it.” He fell asleep, and shortly after midnight, on December 6, 1889, he died peacefully in his bed, his wife’s hands folded into his.
It was nothing like the death of Abraham Lincoln, which was unexpected, sudden, violent, bloody, and when he was in his prime. Neither Lincoln, nor his family, nor the people had time to prepare for it. Lincoln had no time to say good-bye. He enjoyed no final, long look back to recall his life and tally his deeds. Jefferson Davis was granted this privilege. He enjoyed the gift of years to live, to write, and to reflect. He had fallen and yet lived long enough to rise again. And the people of the South had nearly a quarter of a century to prepare themselves for his death. Davis had the chance to review his life in full, and to retrace his journey to the beginning.
For Lincoln, the end was only darkness. But in one way their deaths were the same. Just as April 15, 1865, symbolized to the North more than the death of just one man, so too the death pageant that followed December 6, 1889, was not for Davis alone.
JEFFERSON DAVIS IN DEATH, NEW ORLEANS, DECEMBER 1889.
JEFFERSON DAVIS LIES IN STATE IN NEW ORLEANS.
After Davis was embalmed, while he lay in state, a photographer set up his camera and lights to take pictures of the corpse. But there would be no repeat of the scandal that had occurred after Lincoln’s remains had been photographed in New York City in April 1865. Varina had given permission for one photographer to make several dignified images of her husband’s body, and she allowed at least one print to appear in a memorial tribute volume published by a trusted friend and longtime supporter, the Reverend J. William Jones. These photos of Davis’s corpse, taken much closer to the body, and offering far greater detail than Gurney’s images of Lincoln, captured Davis in elegant repose, dressed in the coat of Confederate gray that Jubal Early had given him, and clasping in his folded hands sheaves of Southern wheat. His lips formed a faint, subtle smile. Varina also consented
to a death mask, an application of wet plaster to the deceased’s face that would result in a perfect, life-size, three-dimensional likeness of Davis’s visage. Edwin M. Stanton had not allowed a death mask of
Abraham Lincoln—it was too morbid and disrespectful, he might have reasoned. For Davis, it would be a necessary artifact for the many monuments his supporters intended to build in his honor. Lincoln’s two life masks, made in 1860 and 1865, had proven priceless for this purpose. So too would Davis’s death mask.
In Washington, the government of the United States took no official notice of the death of Jefferson Davis. The mayor of New Orleans had sent a clever telegram notifying the War Department of the death of, not the former president of the Confederate States of America, but of a former secretary of war of the United States. Protocol dictated that the department fly its flag at half-staff and close for business. But Secretary of War Proctor declined to recognize the passing of Davis, and he refused to lower the American flag. If federal authorities refused to take notice of the death of the former cabinet officer, that did not deter at least one sympathetic private citizen in the nation’s capital from mourning the Confederate president. On Capitol Hill, across the street from the Watterston House, home of the third librarian of Congress, and a local landmark visited by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other luminaries, blatant symbols of mourning adorned a town house, causing a local sensation. The Washington Post reported the unusual occurrence:
Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis Page 36