1858 (5 page)

Davis scoffed at the idea that Kansas would be overrun with slaves because the soil and climate did not lend themselves to the production of cotton or any other crop that had been successfully raised on warm-weather Southern plantations requiring slave labor. He pointed out that in 1858 Kansas actually only had six official slaves and even the total number of rumored slaves was barely over one hundred. The state had no need for slaves and the congressional argument over the issue was pointless. This was, he insisted, yet one more case of the North stepping into the business of the South and its slaves—uninvited—with no purpose other than to cause trouble.
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Throughout the debates in the Senate over the Kansas constitution, no senator argued the side of the states’ rights, proslavery faction with more force than Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. Once more, as he had so often in the past, he laid all the blame for the earlier warfare in Kansas and its current troubles on meddling out-of-state abolitionists and Northern politicians. He said, yet again, that this was one more attack by the Northerners on the Southerners, and not just a slavery issue. “You have made it a political war,” he said to the Northerners in the Senate. “We are on the defensive.”
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He told the legislators that the Senate chamber looked ready for war, not debate, and in numerous passionate speeches, he argued that the Northerners were trying to wreck the Union that he loved.

Few men in the nation’s capital had grown more in stature as an effective public figure than Jefferson Davis. Over the years, he had become one of the country’s most eloquent speakers, whether in senatorial debates, at public appearances, or on the stump for himself or fellow Democrats. Friends said that he had a rich voice that contained much fluctuation. He was not a rousing “Fourth of July” speaker, noted one newspaper editor. “He seldom stormed, he seldom spoke loudly or impetuously; but he often filled the hearts of his hearers with unspeakable passion, and captured their entire sympathies by that evidently forced moderation of tone and language.”
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“I never saw him worsted in a debate. He was an off hand speaker and debater and always thoroughly up on every question that he discussed,” wrote friend Lucius Lamar, later a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
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When he campaigned for Congress in 1843, James Ryan, the editor of the
Vicksburg Daily Sentinel
wrote that people “anticipate for him a proud and honorable career, should a sphere for the display of his talents once be presented.” The editor of the
Macon (Mississippi) Jeffersonian
wrote that “he is dignified, with a bold and noble countenance, commanding great attention, using chaste and beautiful language, giving no just ground for offense, even to his opponents who are, at the same time, withering under his sarcasm at every sentence.”
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He had not only become the South’s states’ rights champion, replacing the venerated John C. Calhoun, but by the winter of 1858 he was seen in that capacity by Northern senators and congressmen and even influential Northern newspaper editors such as Horace Greeley of the New York Herald Tribune.

The flamboyant Greeley, with his long, snow-white beard, floppy hats, loose clothing, and ambling walk, saw Davis as one of the most important men in American government. The editor, whose newspaper enjoyed a national circulation and whose editorial stands were emulated by many Northern journalists, wrote that, “Mr. Davis is unquestionably the foremost man of the South today. Every Northern senator will admit that from the Southern side of the floor the most formidable to meet in debate is the thin, polished, intellectual-looking Mississippian with the unimpassioned demeanor, the habitual courtesy and the occasional unintentional arrogance, which reveals his consciousness of the great commanding power… He belongs to a higher grade of public men in whom formerly the slave-holding democracy was prolific.”
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Davis’s strident leadership of the Southern support for the Lecompton Constitution gained him many admirers. His forcefulness in speaking on behalf of slavery in the Senate debates brought him fame in the Southern states, but his skillful management of the Southern faction in the discussions and his behind-the-scenes politicking impressed legislators both North and South.

But the stress created by the Kansas debate nearly cost him his life.

Jefferson Davis lived a life that a romantic novelist might have invented. The handsome, elegantly dressed senator and West Point graduate was a successful planter who had married a much younger, beautiful, and brilliant woman, Varina Howell. She would bear him two adorable children. Davis had also been a war hero in not one, but two wars—the Black Hawk War and the Mexican War—and even worked as secretary of war. He had risen rapidly up the ladder of power, serving as both a congressman and U.S. senator.

Jefferson Davis was born in 1808, one of ten children, and grew up on his father’s modest plantation near the Mississippi River, where as a child he enjoyed the friendship of the family’s slaves. He graduated from Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky, and then went to the United States Military Academy at West Point. At the same time, his brother Joseph, twenty-four years his elder, was becoming one of the wealthiest businessmen in the South.

When Davis was twenty, he graduated from West Point, twenty-third in a class of thirty-three, and went into the army. Davis the soldier looked dashing. His neatly pressed uniforms, always spotless, fit him perfectly. The young lieutenant had become one of the finest horsemen in the country too, and galloping across a field on horseback in his uniform he looked like a character from a Sir Walter Scott tale. The newly-minted lieutenant was lucky; he was assigned to Iowa under the command of Colonel Zachary Taylor, one of the army’s best officers. The gruff Taylor, who later earned the nickname “Old Rough and Ready” when he became a hero in the Mexican War, saw a brilliant future for Davis and took him under his wing.

His luck improved even more when the Black Hawk War broke out on the frontier. Taylor received a tip that Chief Black Hawk himself was hiding on an island in the middle of the Mississippi River. He sent his protégé, Davis, to capture him. Black Hawk surrendered without a shot being fired and young Davis became an instant military hero in the eyes of the public.

Davis did not enjoy the army as he had hoped, because his high-strung emotional demeanor always prevented him from doing so. The suddenly famous lieutenant was constantly involved in arguments with other officers, wrote nasty letters to Washington when he was overlooked for promotions, and was even court-martialed over an argument with a superior officer. He could not get along with many people in the service. The only thing he liked about the army was Sarah Taylor, the commander’s daughter. She and Davis were married on June 17, 1835.

Sarah brought joy to the entire Davis family, whose members embraced her. She was an attractive, bright, lively, and remarkably cheerful girl who, his brother Joe hoped, would help cure his younger brother of his dangerous intensity. Joe liked her so much that he gave the couple two thousand acres of land with a cabin next to his own plantation, plus ten slaves. The two plantations were on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, some thirty miles south of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The newlyweds moved to their new plantation—they named it Brierfield after its hundreds of brier bushes—and prepared for their first summer as man and wife. It would be their only summer. Both came down with severe cases of malaria, a common affliction in the torrid summer months in the South. Jefferson, a physically strong man, survived it—barely. Sarah did not. The twenty-one-year-old bride, sweating profusely as a high fever crippled her, passed away on September 15, her husband clinging to her hands, hardly able to move himself.
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Davis, devastated by the death of his wife and extremely weak, went to Cuba to recuperate. He soon had the first of numerous bouts with herpes and spent his first weeks in bed, his swollen left eye covered over with a slick film, that hideously pockmarked face with black pimples. His nervous system was also debilitated. The disease, which must have been transmitted by a sexual encounter, would be with him all of his life and would, at times, threaten to kill him.

Over the next few years, Davis turned Brierfield into a successful cotton plantation. He built a larger home for himself, cabins for his 72 slaves (the number would rise to 106 by 1860), storehouses for baled cotton, corn, and other crops, warehouses, stables, and blacksmith shops.

He developed Brierfield with the help of slaves with whom he shared a close relationship and was a benevolent master. He and his brother Joe were good to their slaves, lenient in discipline and always mindful of their welfare. Davis never whipped his slaves; he set up a slave courthouse where slaves determined punishments for infractions of work rules, such as slowdowns or stealing. Workers were not assigned nicknames as they were at most plantations, but selected their own names. They were permitted to travel through the Mississippi River basin alone, often to New Orleans and Natchez, and trusted to return. None fled. They were encouraged to read and the faster learners were given supervisory jobs that ordinarily went to white overseers. Slaves could grow their own food for consumption or sell it at local markets. Violent overseers were fired.

At first, Davis brought the best doctors to Brierfield to make house calls for his slaves when they were ill. Later he built his own slave hospital on the grounds of the plantation with a full-time nurse, thought to be the only one of her kind in the South. He hired a minister to visit the plantation each Sunday to preach to the slaves and the Davis family, and paid a dentist to call regularly to treat his laborers. He purchased new dresses for the slave women when their old ones looked worn and always bought a brand-new wedding dress for a slave girl who was about to be married. Davis paid for a lavish reception for the new couple. He played with the offspring of the slave families as if they were his own and often referred to them as his children.
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Davis was so close to his slaves, whom he referred to as “his people,”
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especially James Pemberton, that he frequently dined with them. Planters who knew Davis called his slaves “his devoted friends.”
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Other planters ridiculed Davis, referring to his slaves as “Jeff Davis’s free Negroes” and joking that if anyone wanted to see the latest women’s fashions from New York or Paris they should not look for high society matrons in New Orleans, but rather Jeff Davis’s slave girls in Brierfield. He was lampooned for bowing in greeting to any slaves or freed blacks he met on the street.
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In 1843, after years of a lonely existence at Brierfield as a widower, Davis emerged to begin a life in politics and to once again fall in love.

The thirty-five-year-old Davis seemed like a natural political figure for the leaders of the Democratic Party in Mississippi. He was a sophisticated, handsome, wealthy man and a staunch supporter of slavery. Best of all, he was the renowned hero of the Black Hawk War.

In the fall of 1843, he found himself the accidental candidate for Congress. The original nominee dropped out of the race just two weeks prior to the election. The Democrats begged Davis to fill in for him, assuring him that they did not expect him to do very well in such a short span of time against his Whig opponent. Davis was glad to help out the party and surprised party leaders, and himself, by winning 43 percent of the vote in the losing cause.

A year later, he ran for a full term in Congress (the state chose at-large congressmen). In his second campaign he was a better speaker and had plenty of time to plan. He delivered more than a dozen major speeches, attended barbecues, corresponded with political allies, and appeared as if he had been a politician for years. He favored fair tariffs, river improvements, the annexations of Texas, California, and Oregon, and demanded a stronger national bank and treasury system. Party officials were pleased with his conduct during the campaign and his victory. “He left behind him fame as an orator and statesman,” wrote one editor.
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