Jefferson Davis - The Papers of Jefferson Davis

Winner of the Jules and Frances Landry Award for 2015

THE PAPERS OF
JEFFERSON DAVIS

SUPPORTED BY
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission
The National Endowment for the Humanities
Mississippi Department of Archives and History
Mary Seaton Dix
Elmer C. Hogue, Jr.
Webb Family Fund

SPONSORED BY
William Marsh Rice University
The Jefferson Davis Association

VOLUME 14
1880 1889

Lynda Lasswell Crist, EDITOR
Suzanne Scott Gibbs, ASSISTANT EDITOR

INTRODUCTION BY
William C. Davis

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BATON ROUGE
2015

Published with the assistance of the V. Ray Cardozier Fund

Copyright 2015 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
(Revised for vol. 14)

Davis, Jefferson, 18081889.
The Papers of Jefferson Davis.
Vol. 14 edited by Lynda Lasswell Crist and Suzanne Scott Gibbs.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Contents: v. 1, 18081840. v.14, 18801889.
1. Davis, Jefferson, 18081889 Archives.
2. Presidents Confederate States of America Archives.
3. Confederate States of America History Sources.
I. Monroe, Haskell M. II. McIntosh, James T.
III. Title
E467.1D2596 2015
ISBN 08071-0943-6 (v.1)
ISBN 978-0-8071-5909-5 (v. 14, cloth) ISBN 978-0-8071-5910-1 (pdf) ISBN 978-0-8071-5911-8 (e-pub) ISBN 978-0-8071-5912-5 (mobi)

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

by William C. Davis

JEFFERSON DAVIS HAD AN intimate and lifelong acquaintance with tragedy. His Confederate States of America lived just four years until it died before his eyes. He and his wife Varina Howell Davis had four sons, and by 1880 all four of them had died, the most recent being Jefferson Davis, Jr., a victim of yellow fever in October 1878. For the better part of eighteen months Davis and Varina lived apart, separated by her anger at his living on the grounds of Sarah Dorseys home Beauvoir on Mississippis Gulf Coast. Finally in May 1878 Varina relented, and for Davis, even if his sons were all gone and his one-time nation evaporated, at least his marriage had resumed the normality of old.

What sustained him through those dark years was work on his book, the history of the nascent nation he helped create and then led through four years of turmoil and ultimately catastrophe. If the Confederacy itself might not live, still he could recreate it in print as he chose to remember it, castigate those who failed it and him set old wrongs aright, win the battles lost, and leave behind for eternity an indelible monument to the nation that should have been. Most of all, he could make certain that posterity would know that the South had been constitutionally and morally correct in standing for its rights in 186061, that the Confederacy had been right in seeking to institutionalize those rights in a new nation, that Confederates were not and never had been traitors, and most of all that he had been right right about virtually everything. Such a book would be a monumental task, especially considering the destruction of so much of the documentary record in the fires of defeat, and the fact that the Yankees in Washington were in no mood to grant access to what survived in their hands to help an old traitor create a monument to his treason.

But to Jefferson Davis, when a man was right, no task was too daunting. Vindication, justification, memorialization all these he owed to posterity and to the memory of the hundreds of thousands who had lost their lives following his banners. As early as 1870 his friend and aide William Preston Johnston began urging him to write a memoir of his Confederate presidency. During the years that followed rumors often surfaced that Davis was doing so, and by 1875 he had formed a partnership with William T. Walthall whereby the latter would gather letters and recollections from a multitude of men of note in the defunct Confederacy and write some of the historical narrative, while Davis addressed himself to the text dealing with constitutional issues, secession, and more, furnishing notes and sketches from which Walthall was to compose the manuscript, subject to Davis final authorial revision.

For the next five years they worked intermittently, through the death of Jefferson, Jr., and Davis painful separation from his wife and secondly to his engaging Dorsey to work with him as secretary though there was no outward hint of impropriety a role Varina believed her own years of marriage and sacrifice entitled her to play. In the end, Walthall proved a disappointment. He dallied and made excuses, and by early 1880 the work sat still unfinished, and Davis himself scarcely knew its status.

We were told long ago that of making books there was no end, Davis remembered from Ecclesiastes in 1880. As the penultimate decade of his century dawned, he had been at his book for five years when his publisher sent James C. Derby to get it back on track. He told Walthall to do only the first of what was projected to be two volumes, and engaged another collaborator to handle the second. Davis set to with renewed vigor, personally overseeing Walthall, and by May the manuscript of the first volume was done. Then in April 1881 he finished the second and in an amazing two months the books were off press and on sale, and Davis was on the way to yet more disappointment. He had hoped for a substantial sale to help him settle debts and build something for him and Varina in their last years, but the response in bookstores and by subscriptions was tepid at best. He hoped for a favorable critical reception, but reviewers proved unimpressed, seeing only the argumentative and sententious nature of his text, and the mistakes, omissions, and wide gaps of content that resulted from the rush to print. Indeed, Davis himself was more than once surprised to be told something important was not in the books. He had been so hurried in the last months that far too much slipped past him.

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government did achieve one thing, however. It put Davis on record in response to his critics, particularly Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, who served him none too well during the late war, and spent the years following trying to shift blame for their failings onto their president. Throughout these thick books what was constantly on display was Davis thin skin. In the years remaining to him, his correspondence would be dominated by his feuds and debates with those men and others over a host of issues arising from the demise of the Confederacy: Why were Confederate soldiers so ill-supplied? Why did European powers not recognize the new nation? Why did not victorious Confederates follow up their great opening victory at First Manassas? What would have happened if Davis had not relieved Johnston of command on the eve of the climactic fight for Atlanta in 1864? Johnston, Beauregard, and others were pointing their fingers at Davis even before the surrenders, and kept it up with renewed vigor afterwards, fighting him in print with a great deal more energy and courage than they showed the enemy during the war. Now in