After his release, Davis was forced to ask himself questions for which he had no immediate answers. What did the future hold? Where would he go? What would he do? How would he live? How would he earn money? Like much of the South, his life was in ruins. He had lost everything. He had no cache of secret gold. His plantation was in ruins, no crops grew there, and he owned no slaves to work the fields. They had all been emancipated. Union soldiers had looted his Mississippi home of all valuables. They even stole his old love letters from Sarah Knox Taylor.
He also had to decide what he must not do. His behavior would be scrutinized by Northerners and Southerners alike. He vowed to do nothing to bring dishonor upon himself, his people, or the Confederacy. Because so many Southerners were poor, he decided that he would not shame himself by accepting charity from his supporters while others were in need. He would not speak publicly against the Union or Reconstruction, he decided, out of fear that his words might cause his people to be punished. Nor would he run for public office. He knew without doubt that he could be elected to any political position in the South. But to seek office, he would have to take a loyalty oath to the Union, something he would never do. To swear that oath, to recant his views, to say the South was wrong, would betray every soldier who laid down his life for the cause. He would rather suffer death. And, last, he decided he would never return to Washington, D.C., the national capital he once loved and the scene of many of his greatest achievements and happiest days.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“The Shadow of the Confederacy”
For the first time in his life, Davis needed a job. It was a shocking predicament for a member of the elite, planter class. But he had no choice. He needed money and stability, and the quest for it preoccupied him. For the next two years, he wandered and pursued opportunities that led nowhere. In November 1869, he was offered the presidency of the Carolina Life Insurance Company at the impressive annual salary of $12,000—nearly half the pay of the president of the United States. He took the job. But Davis’s days as a “business man” were numbered. An epidemic killed too many customers, and the economic downturn put the company out of business. Davis pursued other moneymaking opportunities, and he considered various schemes that others proposed to him, but he never achieved the financial success that he craved. Failure embarrassed him.
In 1870, the whole South mourned the death of its great general, Robert E. Lee. Davis spoke at the memorial service with sadness and great eloquence, and it was there that he found the true purpose of his remaining days—remembering and honoring the dead. Soon,
OIL PORTRAIT OF JEFFERSON DAVIS AS HE APPEARED IN THE 1870S.
the theme of “The Confederate Dead”—the idea of a vast army of the departed who haunted the Southern landscape and memory—swept the popular imagination. Soon, veterans’ groups, historical societies, and women’s associations labored to recover the dead from anonymous wartime graves, to build cemeteries for them and to mark the land where they shed their blood with monuments of stone, marble, and bronze. Later, Davis became the symbol of this movement. He was the link between the Confederate living and the dead. For now, Lee’s unexpected death was a warning to Davis that he should not wait too long to tell his story. As early as March 30, 1870, Davis told Burton Harrison that he wanted to write a book: “It has been with me a cherished hope that it would be in my power before I go down to the grave to make some contribution to the history of our struggle.” Lee had hoped to do the same. The general had begun to gather documents. He examined his official papers. But before he could write his memoirs, he died.
In the 1870s, Davis hit his stride as a keeper of Confederate memory. He wrote articles. He read histories of the war written by generals and political leaders. He kept up an active correspondence and answered countless inquiries about the conduct of the war. He supported the creation of the Southern Historical Society. The North may have won the war on the battlefield, but the South would not lose it a second time in the books. Davis became the titular head of a shadow government, no longer leading a country, but leading a patriotic cause devoted to preserving the past.
Davis became a fixed symbol in a changing age. He witnessed the passing of an era and the rise of a different, modern America. The U.S. Army fought new wars on the western frontier, and in 1876, when America was set to celebrate its national centennial, the flamboyant Civil War general George Armstrong Custer found death at the Little Bighorn, eleven years after Appomattox. To take advantage of the patriotic fervor during the centennial, grave robbers plotted to kidnap Lincoln’s corpse and ransom it for a huge cash payment. They broke into the tomb but were arrested. Davis witnessed the industrialization of the nation, the invention of electric lights, and the first hints of America’s future role as a global power. He also witnessed the plight of blacks during Reconstruction in the postwar South, and what happened to them after 1877, when the last of the federal occupying troops returned to the North. In a few years he would read of the assassination of another president, James Garfield, who survived the Civil War only to be shot in the back at a Washington, D.C., train station.
Throughout this era, Davis experienced financial insecurity and
ON THE FRONT PORCH AT BEAUVOIR.
domestic instability. He lacked a proper income or a real home. In 1877, he found his sanctuary at last. A longtime friend and widow, Sarah Dorsey, invited Davis to visit her Mississippi Gulf Coast estate, Beauvoir, near Biloxi. The visit became permanent, and Dorsey willed the property to Davis upon her death. Beauvoir became his haven. It relieved him of significant financial distress, gave him a place to live, and allowed him to finish his book. As Davis labored to complete his memoirs, he also found here, fourteen years after the end of the war, and twelve years since his freedom, a kind of peace. As the years passed at Beauvoir, he became more handsome. His face softened. Photographs from the Gulf coast years capture a gentle smile absent from photos taken earlier in his life, in the 1850s and 1860s.
In 1881, Jefferson Davis published his magnum opus, his two-volume memoir Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. This was not a conventional memoir that tells the story of the subject’s life. Instead, Rise and Fall was in large part a massive, legalistic, dense, and impersonal defense of state’s rights, secession, and Southern independence. It was a dry work of history and politics, not an emotional telling of a riveting life. Yes, partisan publications, including the Southern Historical Society Papers, reviewed it favorably. Loyal Confederates purchased more than twenty thousand copies, but the work did not become a national sensation. It was no more than a moderate, regional success. The heavy volumes may have revealed the contents of Davis’s analytical mind, but they did not unlock the secrets of his heart.
His memoir done, Davis seemed destined for a quiet life at Beau-voir: receiving guests, dining with friends, writing letters, and sitting on the veranda sporting a jaunty straw hat and enjoying the sea breezes. Visiting journalists seemed surprised when they found not an embittered old man, but a genial host and superb conversationalist.
In June 1882, Davis received the most unusual guest to ever visit Beauvoir—the Irish author Oscar Wilde. During his lecture tour to Memphis, an interviewer found him in his hotel room with a set of Davis’s Rise and Fall on the table. Wilde said, “Jefferson Davis is the man I would most like to see in the United States.” Wilde dispatched a letter to Davis asking if, after Wilde lectured in New Orleans, he might visit Beauvoir. The press learned of the fascination, and on June 23, the Mobile Register wrote this about the forthcoming meeting: “We understand that ex-President Davis has invited Mr. Wilde to pay him a visit at Beauvoir…and that the aesthete has accepted.” Almost half a century—and other experiences—separated the seventy-four-year-old senior statesman from the twenty-six-year-old literary voluptuary. The Register could not resist commenting on the bizarre appointment:
THE IRISH AESTHETE OSCAR WILDE VISITS BEAUVOIR.
“It is scarcely conceivable that two persons can be mo
re different than the ex-President of the Confederacy and the ‘Apostle of aestheticism,’ as known to report; and we confess to sufficient curiosity to desire to know the bent of their coming, protracted interview.”
Interviewed in New Orleans in advance of the meeting by the Picayune, Wilde spoke well of the Confederacy and Davis: “His fall after such an able and gallant pleading in his own cause, must necessarily arouse sympathy.”
At dinner, Varina Davis, her daughter Winnie, her cousin Mary Davis, and Oscar Wilde did most of the talking. Jefferson did not say much as he scrutinized the man who must have appeared to him an odd, even alien, creature. The former president retired early, and afterward, Wilde delighted the literature-loving women until late in the night. The next day, after Wilde departed, Davis rendered his laconic verdict to Varina: “I did not like the man.”
Wilde came to the opposite conclusion about his taciturn host. He left a special gift on Davis’s desk—an oversized, presentation photograph inscribed: “To Jefferson Davis in all loyal admiration from Oscar Wilde, June’“82—Beauvoir.” In Davis’s world, it was a cheeky gesture. He did not solicit the memento, and its presentation suggested that Wilde considered himself a peer of the Confederacy’s first man. It was Davis’s introduction to America’s burgeoning popular culture of celebrity.
In the 1880s, Davis did not seek out feuds, but when insulted or provoked, he was not one to seethe in silence. He planned to speak at the dedication of the Robert E. Lee mausoleum in Lexington, Virginia, on June 28, 1883. But when he learned that his archenemy, General Joseph E. Johnston, would preside over the event, Davis backed out. He refused to share the stage with the man who had surrendered his army to Sherman in North Carolina, dooming, in Davis’s opinion, the Confederacy’s last hope east of the Mississippi in April 1865. And it was Johnston who, in an outrageous defamation, had accused Davis of stealing a fortune in Confederate gold. In his youth, Davis would have challenged Johnston to a duel. Instead, his surrogates advised him to remain above the fray while they unleashed a ferocious verbal assault.
In November 1884, Davis counterattacked against charges by General Sherman that Davis had been at the center of a conspiracy to “enslave” the North and not merely win Southern independence. As proof, the general claimed that he had seen secret letters and overheard private conversations implicating Davis. Davis savaged his antagonist. “I have been compelled to prove General Sherman to be a falsifier and a slanderer in order to protect my character against his willful and unscrupulous mendacity…He stands pilloried before the public and all future history as an imbecile scold, or an infamous slanderer—As either he is harmless.”
By early 1886, Jefferson and Varina were living a quieter life at Beauvoir. Jefferson received inquiries from strangers, or from people he once knew. Many asked if he remembered them. He maintained his passionate interest in Confederate history and how the war was remembered. He hoped to live to celebrate his eightieth birthday in two years. But given his lifelong health problems, he must have felt he that he was lucky to have lived that long. Many times over the years, death had tried to pull him into the grave, but his stubborn body had fought back and willed itself to live. He had lived long enough to write Rise and Fall, to correct errors in the record, to survive many of his foes, and to make his own peace with the past. The once-stern expression on his face had softened, and, strangely, the older he got the happier he looked. Yes, he had suffered. He could tally his losses: his first love, Knox Taylor; his first country, the old Union of the United States; his cause of Southern independence; his war; and his presidency; for a time, his liberty; and his sons, now dead, all of them. But in 1886, Davis was serene and at peace at his Gulf Coast sanctuary. His days as a public man seemed at an end. He planned to make no more public appearances, deliver no more speeches before tumultuous crowds, and undertake no more tours of his vanished empire.
Then the invitation came. Would he, the letter from the mayor of Montgomery asked, come to lay a cornerstone for the monument to Alabama’s Civil War dead? And perhaps their former president would agree to say a few words in memory of them? Davis could not say no.
When, accompanied by his daughter, Winnie, he boarded the train at the depot half a mile from Beauvoir, he could not have known that he would return from this trip a different man. He did not know his journey would bring to the surface emotions long buried in Southern hearts, and his own. He did not know that by its end, almost a quarter century after the end of the war, the South would love him more than it ever did. Reporters went on the trip, including Frank A. Burr of the New York World. Burr had pursued other ghosts from the war. He had written about the Lincoln assassination, and, years after the war, he traveled to Garrett’s farm in search of the legend of John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln and Booth were long dead. Now, on this journey, Burr would travel with a living ghost from the past.
On a stop on the way to Montgomery, Davis had two encounters with well-wishers. “At one station,” reported the Atlanta Constitution, “a soldier with a wooden leg got on board and bidding goodbye to Mr. Davis slapped his wooden leg and said: ‘That’s what I got from the war but I’m proud of it.’ To this Mr. Davis responded with a hearty ‘God bless you.’ At another station an old colored woman, a former slave of Mr. Davis, was loud in her blessings of her old master.” These were the first hints of what lay ahead.
Davis arrived in Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy, on April 28. Just before the train rolled into the station, General John B. Gordon, one of Davis’s favorite Confederate officers and who now sought a political career, spoke to the crowd: “Let us, my countrymen, in the few remaining years which are left to our great captain, seek to smooth and soften with the flowers of affection the thorny path he has been made to tread for our sake.” Then train pulled in, cannon fire erupted, and thousands cheered. A drenching rain thwarted a major public reception at the railroad depot. When Davis disembarked from his car, he got into a carriage that drove him to the Exchange Hotel, where he had spent the night before his inauguration as provisional president. Bonfires and electric lights illuminated the route.
Davis prepared to exit the carriage and walk into the hotel. He stood erect, but stayed in the carriage. He paused and looked over the immense crowd. Then he spoke: “My countrymen, my countrymen, with feelings of the greatest gratitude I tender you my most sincere thanks for your kind reception.”
The next day the New York Times filed its report. “Dixie Reigns Supreme,” the headline blared. “This city has simply gone wild over Jefferson Davis.” Davis was welcomed by a “tumultuous crowd that shouts itself hoarse.” The Times could not understand the symbolism: “The explanation of all this is not easy. There are other incidents as strange and perplexing as those already outlined. The leaders of the throng tell you that it means nothing; that it is but a passing show to please their old chieftan, a day of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is all a conquered people can offer him…it is useless to wonder how much more there is stored up in their hearts.”
From the moment he arrived, women flocked to his side, praising him, teasing him, and flirting with him. Some soothed him with fans. They filled his room at the Exchange Hotel with roses. One woman who shook his hand exclaimed, “I am more of a rebel right here than ever before.”
Davis’s old friend Virginia Clay witnessed some of these encounters: “I saw women shrouded in black fall at [Davis’s] feet, to be uplifted and comforted by kind words. Old men and young men shook with emotion beyond the power of words on taking [his] hand.”
That night, when Davis spoke at the old capitol, the mayor introduced him as the representative Southern man: “It is with emotions of the most profound reverence that I have to introduce you to that most illustrious type of southern manhood and statesmanship—our honored ex-president, Jefferson Davis.”
Davis rose and began to speak. His lips moved, but no one could hear him. The sound of thousands of cheering voices drowned him out. “A cheer long pent up si
nce 1861 rent the air, was taken up by the crowds on the streets, and echoed and re-echoed all over the city,” reported one paper. Davis bowed to his right and left and tried to make himself heard above the roar.
“Brethren,” he cried, in that same clear, pleasing, distinctive voice that had once charmed Varina the day they met, and that had thrilled listeners when he spoke on the floor of the U.S. Senate. That single word—“brethren”—incited the throng to shout even louder. Women stood on their chairs and, weeping and laughing from joy, flapped their handkerchiefs in the air like the wings of birds, or like little signal flags.
In his seventy-eight years, Davis had never seen anything like it, not even on the day when, twenty-five years ago, he was inaugurated the Confederacy’s president. The audience silenced itself and allowed him to speak.
“My friends,” he began, “it would be vain if I should attempt to express to you the deep gratification which I feel at this demonstration; but I know that it is not personal, and therefore I feel more deeply grateful, because it is a sentiment far dearer to me than myself.” With those words, Davis reminded his listeners that he did not return to the first capital of the Confederacy to claim honors for himself, but to tender honors to others—the Confederate dead. “You have passed through the terrible ordeal of a war which Alabama did not seek…a holy war…Well do I remember seeing your gentle boys, so small, to use a farmer’s phrase, they might have been called seed corn, moving on with eager step and fearless brow to the carnival of death; and I have also looked upon them when their knapsacks and muskets seemed heavier than the boys, and my eyes, partaking of a mother’s weakness, filled with tears. Those days have passed. Many of them have found nameless graves…” The poetic image of the “seed corn” that never grew to maturity broke the hearts of the parents of those boys. Davis, the old master orator of the U.S. Senate, still knew how to read a crowd. His audience was on the verge of a frenzy.