by Shelby Foote
Late in the spring of the following year a Boston paper called on Davis for an expression of his views on U. S. Grant, who was dying at Mount McGregor, New York, of cancer of the throat. Bankrupt by a brokerage partner who turned out to be a swindler, the general had lost even his sword as security for an unpaid loan, and was now engaged in a race with death to complete his Memoirs, hoping the proceeds would provide for his family after he was gone. He won, but only by the hardest. Reduced by pain to communicating with his doctor on slips of paper — “A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; to suffer,” one read. “I signify all three” — he managed to finish the book within a week of his death in July, and royalties approaching half a million dollars went to Julia and his sons. Davis had declined to comment on the career of this man whose name, in the course of his two White House terms, had come to stand for plunder and repression. “General Grant is dying,” he replied to the request from Boston. “Instead of seeking to disturb the quiet of his closing hours, I would, if it were in my power, contribute to the peace of his mind and the comfort of his body.” Similarly, he had withheld comment on the passing of other former enemies, beginning with George Thomas, whose weight rose above three hundred pounds within five years of the end of the war, when he died on duty of a stroke in the same year as his fellow Virginian, R. E. Lee. Henry Halleck and George Meade, who also stayed in the army, followed him two years later. George McClellan, after serving three years as governor of New Jersey, died three months after Grant, and was followed in turn by Winfield Hancock, who had run against Garfield in the presidential election six years back, just over three months later.
By then it was 1886, the silver anniversary of Sumter. Memorial services and reunions were being planned throughout the South, and Davis was pressed to attend most of them as guest of honor. He declined, pleading frailty, until someone thought to point out that Winnie might never know how dear he was to the hearts of his people unless he gave them the chance to show their love in public. That persuaded him. “I’ll go; I’ll go,” he said, and accepted invitations from Montgomery, Atlanta, and Savannah. In late April he sat on the portico of the Alabama capitol, where he had been inaugurated twenty-five years before, and heard a eulogy pronounced by John B. Gordon, former U. S. senator and now a candidate for governor of Georgia, who also presented Winnie to the crowd, to wild applause. Next day Davis spoke briefly at the laying of the cornerstone for a monument to the Confederate dead — repeating once more his contention that the seceded states had launched no revolution; “Sovereigns never rebel,” he said — then set out for Atlanta, where 50,000 veterans were assembling for a May Day reunion. He was on the platform, receiving the cheers of all that host, when he looked out beyond its distant fringes and saw a man approaching on horseback, portly and white-haired, with cottony muttonchop whiskers, decked out in Confederate gray with the looped braid of a lieutenant general on his sleeves. It was Longstreet. Uninvited because of his postwar views — “The striking feature, the one the people should keep in view,” he had said at the outset of Reconstruction, “is that we are a conquered people. Recognizing this fact, fairly and squarely, there is but one course left for wise men to pursue, and that is to accept the terms that now are offered by the conquerers” — Old Peter had risen that morning at his home in nearby Gainesville, put on his full uniform, come down by train, and ridden out to show the throng that he was of them, whether they wanted him there or not. Dismounting, he walked up the steps of the platform where Davis was seated, and everyone wondered what Davis would do. They soon found out, for he rose and hurried to meet Lee’s old warhorse. “When the two came together,” a witness declared, “Mr Davis threw his arms around General Longstreet’s neck and the two leaders embraced with great emotion. The meaning of the reconciliation was clear and instantly had a profound effect upon the thousands of veterans who saw it. With a great shout they showed their joy.”
One occasion of the Atlanta visit was the unveiling of a statue to the late Senator Benjamin Hill, always a loyal friend in times of crisis. “We shall conquer all enemies yet,” he had assured his chief within two weeks of Appomattox, but admitted nine years later, looking back: “All physical advantages are insufficient to account for our failure. The truth is, we failed because too many of our people were not determined to win.” Davis knew the basic validity of this view, yet he preferred to stress the staunchness of his people and the long odds they had faced. Northern journalists had begun to note the “inflammatory” effect of his appearances, and he tried next week in Savannah to offset this by remarking at a banquet given by the governor in his honor: “There are some who take it for granted that when I allude to State sovereignty I want to bring on another war. I am too old to fight again, and God knows I do not want you to have the necessity of fighting again.” He paused to let the reporters take this down, but while he waited he saw the faces of those around him, many of them veterans like himself; with the result that he undid what had gone before. “However, if the necessity should arise,” he said, “I know you will meet it, as you always have discharged every duty you felt called upon to perform.”
Although he returned to Beauvoir near exhaustion, he recovered in time, the following year, to challenge the prohibition movement as still another “monstrous” attempt to limit individual freedom. His words were quoted by the liquor interests and he was denounced by a Methodist bishop for advocating “the barroom and the destruction of virtue.” But the fact was he had mellowed, partly under the influence of strong nationalist feelings never far below the surface of his resistance. When he went back to Georgia in October, to meet “perhaps for the last time” with veterans at a reunion staged in Macon — where he had first been taken after his capture near Irwinville, more than twenty-two years ago — he spoke to them of the North and South as indivisibly united. “We are now at peace,” he said, “and I trust will ever remain so.… In referring therefore to the days of the past and the glorious cause you have served … I seek but to revive a memory which should be dear to you and to your children, a memory which teaches the highest lessons of manhood, of truth and adherence to duty — duty to your State, duty to your principles, duty to your buried parents, and duty to your coming children.” That was the burden of what he had to say through the time now left him, including his last speech of all, delivered the following spring at Mississippi City, only a six-mile buggy ride from Beauvoir.
Within three months of being eighty years old, he had not thought he would speak again in public; but he did, this once, for a particular reason. The occasion was a convention of young Southerners, and that was why — their youth. He did not mention the war at all, not even as “a memory which should be dear,” though he did refer at the outset to the nation he had led. “Friends and fellow citizens,” he began, and stopped. “Ah, pardon me,” he said. “The laws of the United States no longer permit me to designate you as fellow citizens. I feel no regret that I stand before you a man without a country, for my ambition lies buried in the grave of the Confederacy.” Then he went on to tell them what he had come to say. “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 take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished — a reunited country.”
Those were his last public words, and they seemed withal to have brought him a new peace, one that fulfilled a hope he had recently expressed to an old friend: “My downs have been so many, and the feeling of injustice so great, that I wish to hold on and see whether the better days may not come.” A reporter who came to B
eauvoir for his eightieth birthday, June 3, not only found him “immaculately dressed, straight and erect, with traces of his military service still showing in his carriage, and with the flush of health on his pale, refined face,” but also observed that he retained “a keen interest in current topics, political, social, religious.” He kept busy. In the course of the next year he wrote three magazine articles, a Short History of the Confederate States, and even got started on an autobiography, though he soon put this aside. In early November, 1889, he set out for New Orleans to catch a steamer upriver for his annual inspection trip to Brierfield, which he had lost and then recovered by a lawsuit. Usually his wife went along but this time she remained behind with guests. Exposed to a sleety rain, he came down with a cold and was so ill by the time the boat reached Brierfield Landing, late at night, that he continued on to Vicksburg. Going ashore next morning, he rode down to the plantation, only to spend the next four days in bed, sick with bronchitis and a recurrence of the malaria that had killed his bride and nearly killed him, more than fifty years before, at the same place.
Alarmed, for Davis by then was near delirium, the plantation manager got him back to Vicksburg and onto a steamer headed south. Downriver that night the boat was hailed by another coming up with Varina on board. Warned by telegraph of her husband’s condition, she had set out to join him, and now she did so, transferring in midstream to claim her place at his bedside. New Orleans doctors pronounced him too ill to be taken to Beauvoir, so he was carried on a stretcher to a private home in the Garden District. He seemed to improve in the course of the next week. “It may seem strange to you,” he told an attending physician, “that a man of my years should desire to live; but I do. There are still some things that I have to do in this world.” He wanted above all to get back to the autobiography he had set aside. “I have not told what I wish to say of my college-mates Sidney Johnston and Polk. I have much more to say of them. I shall tell a great deal of West Point — and I seem to remember more every day.” Presently, though, it was clear that he would do none of these things, including the desired return to Beauvoir. Another week passed; December came in. On December 5, within six months of being eighty-two years old, he woke to find Varina sitting beside him, and he let her know he knew the time was near. “I want to tell you I am not afraid to die,” he said, although he seemed no worse than he had been the day before.
That afternoon he slept soundly, but woke at dusk with a violent chill. Frightened, Varina poured out a teaspoon of medicine, only to have him decline it with a meager smile and a faint shake of his head. When she insisted he refused again. “Pray excuse me. I cannot take it,” he murmured. These were the last words of a man who had taken most of the knocks a hard world had to offer. He lapsed into a peaceful sleep that continued into the night. Once when his breathing grew labored the doctors turned him gently onto his right side, and he responded childlike by raising his arm to pillow his cheek on his hand, the other resting lightly on his heart. Midnight came and went, and less than an hour later he too obeyed Anaximander’s dictum, breathing his last so imperceptibly that Varina and the others at his bedside could scarcely tell the moment of his going.
He died on Friday and was buried on Wednesday, time being needed to allow for the arrival of friends and relatives from distant points. Meanwhile, dressed in a civilian suit of Confederate gray, his body lay in state at City Hall, viewed in the course of the next four days by an estimated hundred thousand mourners. Then the day of the funeral came, December 11, and all the church bells of New Orleans tolled. Eight southern governors served as pallbearers, the Washington Artillery as guard of honor; interment would be at Metairie Cemetery in the tomb of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was crowned with a statue of Stonewall Jackson atop a fifty-foot marble shaft. “The end of a long and lofty life has come. The strange and sudden dignity of death has been added to the fine and resolute dignity of living,” the Episcopal bishop of Louisiana declared on the steps of City Hall as the casket was brought out to begin the three-hour march to Metairie. After the service at the tomb, when Taps had sounded, he spoke again. “In the name of God, amen. We here consign the body of Jefferson Davis, a servant of his state and country and a soldier in their armies; sometime member of Congress, Senator from Mississippi, and Secretary of War of the United States; the first and only President of the Confederate States of America; born in Kentucky on the third day of June, 1808, died in Louisiana on the sixth day of December, 1889, and buried here by the reverent hands of his people.”
Much else was said in the way of praise across the land that day, and still more would be said four years later, when his body would be removed to its permanent resting place in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, to join his son Joe and others who had died nearby in Virginia during the war. Lincoln by now had been a full generation in his Springfield tomb, and all he had said or written would be cherished as an imperishable legacy to the nation, including the words he had spoken in response to a White House serenade on the occasion of his reëlection: “What has occurred in this case must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.” Davis could never match that music, or perhaps even catch its tone. His was a different style, though it too had its beauty and its uses: as in his response to a recent Beauvoir visitor, a reporter who hoped to leave with something that would help explain to readers the underlying motivation of those crucial years of bloodshed and division. Davis pondered briefly, then replied.
“Tell them — ” He paused as if to sort the words. “Tell the world that I only loved America,” he said.
List of Maps
Bibliographical Note
LIST OF MAPS
Grant’s Plan, Spring ’64.
Red River Campaign; Camden Expedition.
Six Against Richmond.
Wilderness, 5May: Contact.
Wilderness, Second Attack.
Wilderness; Flankers.
A Race for Spotsylvania.
The Bloody Angle, 12May.
Sheridan’s Richmond Raid.
Sigel; Crook, Averell.
Bottling Butler, 6–17May.
March to the North Anna.
Lee’s Inverted V, 24May.
March to the Totopotomoy.
Cold Harbor, 3Jun.
Grant Shifts to James.
Dalton to Resaca.
Resaca to Cassville.
Kingston to Pine Top, via Dallas.
Brice’s Crossroads, 10Jun.
Kennesaw Mountain, 27Jun.
Chattahoochee Crossings.
Southside Convergence.
Petersburg Assault.
Early Heads North.
Peachtree Creek, 20July.
Atlanta, 22July.
Ezra Church, 28July.
Mobile Bay, 5Aug.
Atlanta Envelopment.
Petersburg, August.
Winchester, 19Sep.
Cedar Creek, 19Oct.
Price Raids Missouri.
Forrest in Tennessee.
Hood and Sherman Part.
Petersburg: Fall ’64.
The March to the Sea.
Hood Sets Out North.
Schofield Flanked.
Franklin, 30Nov.
Nashville, 15Dec.
Nashville: Second Day.
The Close-Out Plan.
Sherman Heads North.
Hatcher’s Run, 5–7Feb.
Kinston, Averasboro, Bentonville, 8–21Mar.
Dinwiddie, Five Forks.
To Appomattox, 2–9Apr.
Maps drawn by Rafael Palacios, from originals
by the author. All are oriented north.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
So there now. Twenty years have come and gone and I can say with Chaucer, �
�Farwel my book and my devocion.” All through the second of these two decades — the drawn-out time it took to write this third and final volume — my debt to those who went before me, dead and living, continued to mount even as the Centennial spate diminished to a trickle and then ran dry. Previous obligations were enlarged, and new ones acquired, on both sides of the line defining the limits of the original material: especially on the near side, where the evidence was assembled and presented in general studies, biographies, and secondary accounts of individual campaigns. Chief among these last, to take them in the order of their use, were the following: Red River Campaign by Ludwell H. Johnson, Lee’s Last Campaign by Clifford Dowdey, Autumn of Glory by Thomas L. Connelly, Jubal’s Raid by Frank E. Vandiver, The Decisive Battle of Nashville by Stanley F. Horn, Sherman’s March Through the Carolinas by John G. Barrett, and two recitals of the Appomattox chase, An End to Valor by Philip Van Doren Stern and Nine April Days by Burke Davis. Similarly, my long-term obligation to works on naval matters was extended by Virgil Carrington Jones’s Civil War at Sea: The Final Effort and Edward Boykin’s Ghost Ship of the Confederacy.