Like the framers of the Constitution, like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans in the South and the North, like almost every previous president of the United States, and like many antislavery leaders and abolitionists, Davis believed in white racial superiority. He admired the North and praised its industry, traveled there often, sought to know its mind, and developed many friends in New England and the Northeast. He even vacationed there. He gave well-received speeches in several of the great cities of the North. And, as the political crisis over slavery and the admission of new states into the Union grew more divisive through the 1850s, he refused to join the shrill ranks of the Southern fire-eaters and rabid secessionists. As a U.S. senator, he admonished radical hotheads in both parties and abhorred the idea of disunion. He favored comity, not confrontation.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, in his seventh and final debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois, referred to Davis as “that able and eloquent statesman.” Davis had earned a reputation as one of the first men of the South and as one of the chief spokesmen not only for his home state of Mississippi but for half the nation. He was a friend to many of the great statesmen of his age, the widower son-in-law of President Zachary Taylor, and a confidant and counselor to other presidents. At his Washington, D.C., town house, he and his sparkling second wife, Varina Howell Davis, presided over a brilliant salon that welcomed leaders from North and South. Harper’s Weekly published a front-page woodcut portrait of him. He looked like a statesman. Some said he resembled an eagle, and many viewed him as a plausible Democratic candidate for the presidential election of 1860. He favored logic and reason over undisciplined passion, and his beautiful speaking voice was one of his most powerful political attributes.
By any measure, Jefferson Davis was one of the most well-known, respected, admired, and influential political leaders of pre–Civil War America. His achievements were all the more remarkable because, beneath this shining surface of privilege, talent, and success, he had suffered through all of his adult life from a collection of serious, chronic, and sometimes disabling illnesses, which had brought him near death more than once. He was plagued by, among other things, malaria, neuralgia, and progressive blindness in one eye. But his resilient body and will to live had kept him alive. Indeed, his unconquerable life force suggested that perhaps fate and destiny had preserved him for some great task.
After secession began, he neither campaigned for, nor even desired, the presidency of the new Confederate States of America. Only after his adopted state of Mississippi seceded on January 9, 1861, did Davis resign his Senate seat. His farewell speech from the Senate floor on January 21 moved observers to tears, caused a sensation, and won him praise from both Southerners and Northerners. Davis was chosen by acclamation as the provisional president of the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. Later, he was elected to a six-year term as president and was inaugurated on February 22, 1862, George Washington’s birthday.
Lincoln and Davis were both born in rustic Kentucky cabins, one year and one hundred miles apart, but their early years could not have been more different. Born February 12, 1809, Lincoln lacked family sponsors. His father, Thomas, an uneducated, illiterate, restless manual laborer who seemed proud of his limitations, made no effort to educate his son. Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Kentucky to Indiana and then to Illinois, but wherever he lived, success and prosperity eluded him. After young Abe’s mother died when he was nine years old, he lived in the squalor of his father’s cabin like a wild, feral child. When Thomas brought home a new wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, the rough, downtrodden state of Abe and his siblings horrified her. But she grew to love them and, though uneducated herself, took a special interest in her tall, awkward stepson. Abe had less than a year of formal schooling, but he learned to read and write and perform elementary mathematics. “Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen, he will be good, but God knows when,” he inscribed in his boyhood sum book. While his indifferent father exploited him as a manual laborer—Abe had a rail-splitting axe thrust into his hands at age nine—his stepmother encouraged his learning. Years later, after being elected president, Lincoln would not leave Illinois without paying her an emotional—and perhaps final, he thought—visit.
When young Abe Lincoln reached maturity he had no connections, no money, no proper education, and no prospects beyond following his father’s footsteps into a lifetime of physical toil. But he was driven by ambition for a better life. He widened his world through a variety of occupations: flatboat river pilot, surveyor, storekeeper, and postmaster. He studied law on his own, became a member of the Illinois bar, and joined a two-man firm. He prospered in that trade, earning a reputation for honesty and ability while he rode the circuit from courthouse to courthouse. Unlike Jefferson Davis, who possessed a large private library and who studied all manner of subjects, Lincoln owned few books, but he read narrowly and deeply in politics, Shakespeare, the Bible, and history.
Elected to Congress for a single term in 1846, Lincoln made little impression on official life in the nation’s capital. When war broke out between the United States and Mexico, President James K. Polk and Senator Thomas Hart Benton viewed the conflict as an opportunity to pursue America’s Manifest Destiny and create an empire that stretched from sea to sea. Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the war, said so on the floor of the House, and quibbled with President Polk about whether hostilities had begun on American or Mexican soil. Lincoln implied that the president had provoked the war to justify an unlawful land grab. In stark contrast, Jefferson Davis resigned his seat in Congress, led Mississippi troops in combat against superior numbers of enemy infantry and deadly cavalry lancers, and distinguished himself in the Battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. Had Davis not left Washington on July 4, 1846, he would likely have met Lincoln there in 1847. Lincoln and Davis were in Washington at the same time in December 1848, and also in early 1849, after Davis had been elected to the Senate, but they did not meet then.
At the end of Lincoln’s undistinguished single term, he went home to Illinois and rose to prominence in the Illinois bar. Never a lawyer of national renown, like Daniel Webster, William Wirt, or the other great Supreme Court and constitutional advocates of his day, Lincoln practiced in the local, state, and federal courts and handled a diverse mix of criminal and civil cases, with collections work occupying a significant portion of his practice. He did not travel widely beyond Illinois, possessed little firsthand knowledge of the South, and did not cultivate friendships with influential Southerners.
He was headed for a life of local celebrity, prosperity, and respectability—and national obscurity—until he was aroused in 1854 by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the possibility of admitting new slave states to the Union. Between his famous Peoria speech in 1854 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858, he emerged as a major antislavery voice. Lincoln lost that election but the debates, published in book form for the presidential campaign of 1860, made him a national political figure and helped him capture the nomination and then the White House.
When Lincoln took the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1861, he was, on paper, one of the least-qualified chief executives in the nation’s history. Of his fifteen predecessors, any comparison to the first five—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—would have been considered absurd. Of the following ten, not all enjoyed successful presidencies, but every one surpassed Lincoln in raw qualifications for the office. Perpetually disorganized, Lincoln had never administered anything bigger than a two-man law office, and he had done a poor job of that, often unable to keep track of essential paperwork. And the myth is true—he often stuffed important documents into his stovepipe hat.
Davis, in addition to his other military and political merits, had held an important cabinet post and had overseen the administration of the U.S. Army. In November 1860, a majority of Americans would have said that Jefferson Davis was far more qualified than Abraham Lincoln t
o occupy the White House. If the Democratic Party had not split and produced two rival candidates, Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, and if Jefferson Davis had been nominated in 1860 as the sole Democrat to run against Lincoln, Davis might have been elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Indeed, Lincoln won the race with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. He may have secured an electoral majority, but 60 percent of the country voted for someone other than him.
Lincoln, who was not an abolitionist, agreed with Jefferson Davis that the Constitution protected slavery. Thus, the federal government had no power to interfere with it wherever it existed. And like Davis, Lincoln—at least the Lincoln of the 1840s and 1850s—accepted white racial superiority. But Lincoln parted ways with Davis and the South over the morality of slavery and the right to introduce it into new states and territories.
Lincoln believed that slavery was a moral crime—“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” He argued that even if blacks were not “equal” to whites, they should enjoy the equal right to liberty and the fruit of their labor. Lincoln insisted that the founders had allowed slavery with the uncomfortable understanding that it was an unholy compromise necessary to create the new nation, and that the founders had envisioned, at some future time, slavery’s natural and ultimate extinction. Lincoln also opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and states, fearing that its spread would give it a second wind, thus perverting the intentions of the founders and the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
Davis and his fellow Southerners rejected that ideology, insisting that slavery was not a necessary evil but something good that benefited both masters and slaves. The “peculiar institution,” they argued, civilized, westernized, and Christianized a primitive, heathen African people. Southern leaders resented the accusation that slavery was a moral evil and not a positive good, and they interpreted the rising antislavery movement in the North as part of a conspiracy to outnumber the slave states with new free states to strip the South of its political power in Congress, especially in the Senate.
Despite their differences, Davis and Lincoln had many things in common. They possessed striking physical similarities. Both were tall, thin—even cadaverous-looking—men. At six feet, four inches, Lincoln was the bigger man, but Davis’s erect military bearing, a disciplined posture drilled into him at West Point and that he maintained into old age, made him appear taller than his five feet, eleven inches. Both had angular, craggy faces, and both men looked underfed. Lincoln and Davis were sparse eaters and indifferent to the pleasures of the table.
Both men had lean builds, but they had been strong as young men. When Davis was a boy, he learned to wrestle with slaves, and as a young man he possessed quickness and strength, gaining the better of several men in fights. Lincoln was a spectacular wrestler, contending in legendary matches with the Clary’s Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois. Years of manual labor with the axe and the maul had given him prodigious strength. In their later years, both men displayed astonishing moments of physical power.
Neither man was distracted by luxuries. Yes, Davis cherished his fine and extensive library—it was one of his proudest possessions—but, like Lincoln, he had no taste for fine antiques, furniture, or artworks. Neither man was a Beau Brummell, but Lincoln’s indifference to his personal appearance—wrinkled, ill-fitting shirts and suits and wild, uncombed hair—outdid Davis’s, who had at least learned during military service how to dress. Each man possessed an inner confidence, a belief that he was, somehow, different from other men. Both men shared memorable appearances. When Davis or Lincoln appeared in public, people noticed them and talked about it. Frozen nineteenth-century photographic daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, albumens, or tintypes failed to capture it, but in person Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were charismatic, captivating, and unforgettable.
In youth, Davis and Lincoln could be fun-loving, high-spirited, and undisciplined. More than once, Davis was almost expelled from West Point for carousing, drinking, and other forbidden behavior. Lincoln was not a drinker, but he possessed a natural talent for jokes and storytelling, many of them dirty. They were also young men of mirth and love, and sorrow and longing.
Davis met her in August 1832, when she was eighteen years old and he twenty-four. Sarah Knox Taylor was the daughter of General Zachary Taylor. Jefferson and Knox, the name she went by, fell in love, but her parents, seeking to protect her from the hard life of an army officer’s wife, and due to a possible misunderstanding between Davis and the general, denied permission to marry. Undeterred, the young lovers persisted for more than two years until Jeff won the Taylors over. They married on June 17, 1835, and journeyed by steamboat to Davis Bend, the site of brother Joseph Davis’s plantation on the Mississippi River. In August, Jefferson and Knox traveled south to visit his sister Anna Smith at Locust Grove, in Louisiana. There, just three months later, Jefferson endured an unspeakable loss that nearly killed him and changed his life forever.
It was the hot season, when the mosquitoes reigned over the plantation fields of the Deep South. They spread a dangerous form of malaria that the first generations of slaves had brought over from Africa almost two centuries earlier. Jeff and Knox contracted the disease. He almost died, but then, after suffering days of fever, chills, delirium, and nausea, he rallied to live. But Knox, her new husband beside her, succumbed. On September 15, 1835, Jefferson Davis surrendered to the grave the body of his twenty-one-year-old bride of twelve weeks. He was a lost man. When she died, something in him died too. He retreated into a private inner world, a “great seclusion,” he once called it, with slaves and crops and books and his protective mentor Joseph. When Jefferson Davis emerged from that selfimposed isolation several years later, he was a different, reserved, harder, more mysterious man. Knox survives in a single letter to her family, in one to her from Jefferson, and in a lone image, a portrait painted in oils. She was a gorgeous, spirited girl with dark hair and generous eyes. Jefferson Davis cherished the memory of her for the rest of his life.
Abraham Lincoln met Ann Rutledge, four years his junior, in 1831 in the small village of New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a surveyor, storekeeper, and postmaster. Ann, engaged to a ne’er-do-well sharp operator who left town and never returned to claim her, grew close to the awkward but interesting Lincoln. He exhibited little of the confidence and extraordinary powers that would reveal themselves later, but the core of his character had already formed. What happened next has been mostly suppressed by historians and belittled by Mary Lincoln apologists for the past one hundred and seventy-five years, but its truth can no longer be denied. In that tiny, isolated village on the Illinois frontier, Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge formed a deep emotional bond. “Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammar,” reads Lincoln’s affectionate handwritten inscription in an ancient, tattered book on that subject. Family and neighbors noticed the connection, heard the talk, and observed, by 1834 and early 1835, the familiar, age-old rituals of courtship. No documents survive to prove their love. No letters between them exist. But decades later, after Lincoln’s assassination, his last law partner, William Herndon, collected evidence of Lincoln’s early life from people who knew him, including the old villagers from the New Salem ghost town. They remembered everything.
They told Herndon that it was common knowledge that Abraham and Ann were in love, and that friends and family had expected them to marry until Ann became ill, probably from typhoid fever, and died on August 25, 1835. They could not forget how her death shattered Lincoln, how he visited her grave during thunderstorms and collapsed upon it, embracing her in death, how they feared for his mind and suspected that he might take his own life. In time, he walked in the world again. But after he left New Salem, he never, as far as anyone can tell, spoke or wrote of their bond or her death. Three decades later, when he was president of the United States, no one heard him mention her name. He possessed no portrait of her but for the one locked in his memory. Her death predate
d the introduction of photography, and anyway who would have thought to make a photograph or paint a portrait of a simple, poor young girl who lived in a little river town on the Illinois frontier? A physical description of her survives. Years later, one of her brothers described to William Herndon the girl Lincoln once knew: “She had light hair, and blue eyes.”
Lincoln served as a volunteer captain in the Black Hawk Indian war in Illinois and Wisconsin in the early 1830s but never faced the enemy. Still, his election by the men of his company as their leader gave him immense pleasure. Later, while serving in Congress, Lincoln made light of his brief military career, joking that he had fought many bloody battles with the mosquitoes. This was to be Lincoln’s only military experience—until nineteen years later, when he commanded great armies and navies.
Davis also served in the Black Hawk War, holding a superior and more prestigious rank as an officer in the regular army. He earned a singular honor. On a journey from Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, to St. Louis, he was placed in charge of the captured Native American warrior Black Hawk. When a group of white visitors taunted the shackled captive in his cell, Davis rebuked their lack of respect toward his prisoner. Impressed, Black Hawk praised Jefferson Davis as a great warrior and man of honor.