THE OTHER PRESIDENT

(This Jefferson Davis entry immediately follows my Lincoln entry, hence its title The Other President.)

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind is a perennial classic of the South in the American Civil War, but it offers no illumination whatsoever on the curious person of the first and only President of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865) Jefferson Finis Davis (1808-1889). For this reason, very few people, including just a tiny fraction of the Gone With The Wind club of readers and movie viewers are aware of who this man was, what he stood for, and how he is generally remembered by history.

A graduate of West Point, Davis combined a distinguished military career with a political one. Having been elected to the US House of Representatives in 1845, he resigned after just one year to serve his country as a colonel in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 (denounced by John Quincy Adams; see a reference to this in my entry Quincy) he fought bravely and at the end of it he rejoined the big politics as a Senator from Mississippi. From 1853 to 1857, he was Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce, returning to the Senate in 1857. When his State seceded from the Union, in 1861, he resisted the secession but had to resign from the U.S. Senate nevertheless, and was then elected President of the Confederate States of America. In this capacity, he was skeptical about the outcome of any kind of military confrontation between his South and the industrially superior North and consistently sought reconciliation between the two warring parties. Ironically, neither President Lincoln nor President Davis wanted a war, but it was Davis fated to start it. In the case of Fort Sumter, held by the Federal troops answering to Washington, DC, the negotiations about its peaceful transfer to its native state of South Carolina, which was part of the CSA, having failed, Davis was effectively blackmailed by his Southern hawks, including Attorney General Judah Benjamin (see my next entry Betting On The Wrong Horse, to be posted tomorrow) to attack the Fort, unless he wished to become a traitor to the Confederate cause, resulting in his impeachment and arrest. (What a cruel irony for Davis to be declared a traitor anyway, four years later, by the victorious North!)

Thus being faced with unavoidable hostilities, Davis was forced to commit himself to action, and made the sadly unavoidable strategic mistake of ordering the assault on Fort Sumter that opened the tragic war, eventually won by the North.

At the end of the war, Davis was declared a traitor, deprived of US Citizenship and imprisoned. After some two years in prison, he was released (on a $100,000 bail commendably posted on his behalf by a number of prominent citizens from both North and South) and ended his life in permanent retirement, writing valuable historical memoirs, particularly, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government and A Short History of the Confederate States of America.

He seems to have been a decent and even honorable man, drawn into a net of unwelcome circumstances, all (including the unfortunate Fort Sumter decision) apparently beyond his control. It is a tribute to the wisdom of the political thinking of his country that he was not persecuted beyond his actual fairly mild punishment, and was even allowed to travel abroad fairly freely in the later years. His virtual rehabilitation came only in 1978, under the Presidency of Jimmy Carter.