1858 (8 page)

Seward was one of Davis’s first visitors when he became ill and, throughout his nearly eight weeks of recuperation, saw him often, sometimes seven days a week. Seward went to his friend’s home on foot and, after the visit, walked home to his house in Washington in the wintry weather, sometimes in snowfalls or rainstorms.

Davis and the charming Seward were friends, but their colleagues in both the House and Senate could not understand why; neither could any of the political writers in the capital. The two men had never met until they were introduced to each other in Congress in 1846. They did not share common friends; their wives did not socialize together. They had no mutual business interests and did not share personal interests or hobbies. Yet they were as close as two men could be. Perhaps it was politics that gave them their special bond.

During Davis’s illness, Seward would stop at his home at the end of the day and recount the entire day’s activities in the Senate, relating to him what bills had been introduced and approved or voted down. He discussed at length who had supported the bills and who had opposed them and why. Seward referred to a Northern Republican politician as “his man”; if they were friendly to the Mississippi senator, he called him “your man.” Seward brought a smile to his sick friend’s lips and a twinkle to his eye when he mimicked their colleagues in the Senate. His deft impersonations skewered not just the Democrats, but his trusted Republicans too, and on some evenings Seward would practically stage a one-man show, imitating a Republican and Democrat arguing back and forth on the floor of the Senate.
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They swapped stories about efforts to cajole other senators to vote for their bills and support their causes over the years and exchanged political “war stories” about their past campaigns, filled with anecdotes about colorful men and women in their states. Davis would relate his stories about campaigning with his green goggles and the raucous barbecues where so much politicking was accomplished in Mississippi. Seward would regale him with stories of his battles with the New York political machines, such as Tammany Hall, and his feuds with newspaper editors like Horace Greeley.

William Seward’s affection for Davis was genuine, as was the Mississippian’s admiration of the New Yorker. Varina did not understand the attraction. She always upbraided Seward for his antislavery stands, which had become more vocal over the years. Seward always explained his staunch opposition to slavery to her and her husband as cordially as any discussion of the explosive issue would allow. Senator Davis always disagreed with him, in an equally friendly manner.

The Davises disagreed with Seward’s rather callous view of the political world, too. Davis loved to give lengthy speeches to large groups of people gathered in public squares or in assembly halls or to debate in the Senate, because he enjoyed questions from crowds or the back-and-forth arguments with his fellow legislators. Seward did not. He preferred to talk to newspaper reporters and editors because his remarks reached the largest number of people in the columns of the most influential journals in America. He never enjoyed arguing with senators, he said, and deflated the Davises whenever he told him that he preferred “talking to the empty Senate.”

The New Yorker told the couple that he took stands that he did not like and supported bills that he did not think were useful purely for political purposes. He had supported public figures with whom he did not agree and made appearances for party nominees for whom he did not much care. Seward told the Davises on several occasions that, in fact, he had few genuine political convictions. His enemies charged that his politics were at worst duplicitous; even friends said he practiced “dexterity” in politics. The Davises were also amazed at this lack of commitment from the New Yorker. Varina Davis wrote that Seward was “a problematic character full of contradictions.”
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During the long hours that Seward sat at Davis’s bedside during his terrible illness in February and March of 1858, the subject came up once more. Seward again reiterated his stand that he did not have any real conviction about any public issue and found it impossible to genuinely care about many public policy questions. Davis, appalled as always, turned to his friend and told him with great fervor that he himself had nothing but conviction. He had been completely committed to every single bill he had offered in the Senate and every vote he had ever cast. The weakened Mississippian gasped to Seward, “Do you never speak from conviction alone?”

“Ne-ever,” said Seward, stretching out the word as he leaned forward in his chair.

Davis raised his head from the pillow, looked right at his Northern friend, and said in a low voice, “As God is my judge, I never spoke from any other motive.”
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Perhaps it was the fact that they had had this discussion on many previous occasions, or that his close friend was so ill and his face looked so disfigured from poor health, but Seward, apparently for the first time ever, was genuinely moved. He rose from his chair, went to Davis’s bed, half sat in it next to him, put his arm around his ailing friend, and whispered in his ear, “I know you do.”
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Regardless of their political differences, Varina, who attended almost all of Seward’s daily visits, liked the New Yorker. “There was an earnest, tender interest in his manner which was unnaturally genuine. He was thoroughly sympathetic with human suffering and would do most unexpected kindnesses to those who would…anticipate the opposite only,” she said.
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Seward was disturbed by Davis’s condition and watched him grow weaker as the weeks passed. At one point a doctor turned to Varina and told her he was certain an operation was needed to remove Davis’s bad eye and that he would spend the rest of his life with one eye and a patch. That might force the senator to leave public life. Seward, sitting there with them, nearly burst into tears. “I could not bear to see him maimed,” he said to the doctor and Varina Davis. “He is the embodiment of manhood.”
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(Seward saved Varina Davis’s life during a snowstorm. Varina, suffering through a very difficult pregnancy, was home alone that afternoon and suddenly became very ill. She got word to Seward, who had a nurse race to her home in his sleigh and take Varina to her doctor immediately; the doctor said Seward’s quick action prevented her death.
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Drained of nearly all energy, Davis insisted on writing a letter to former President Pierce to let his good friend know how bad his condition had become. He wrote, “[I am] suffering under a painful illness which has closely confined me for more than seven weeks and leaves me at the time quite unable to read or write.”
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One doctor told him bluntly that if he got out of bed to make a political speech the stress on his eyes would kill him.
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Davis feared that too, but was determined to deliver an important speech in the Senate in support of a coastal survey bill that would help a personal friend of his, Dallas Bache. His doctor, wife, and friends told him that it was too dangerous for his health. Davis dressed warmly, pulled his jacket tight around his chest, and walked to a carriage outside his house for the ride over the cobblestoned streets to the Capitol. “I must go if it kills me,” he said. “It is good for the country and good for the friend of my youth.”

It nearly did kill him. The senator delivered his speech and then sat down behind his Senate chamber desk and consumed some beef tea and wine to give him sustenance. He felt badly, though, and he nearly fainted. Men had to help his wife escort him out of the Capitol, back into the carriage, and then home, where he promptly collapsed and was put into his bed once again as his wife rushed to summon doctors.
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Again, in April, when a crucial vote on the Lecompton Constitution was to be taken, Davis disregarded his doctors’ orders that a visit to the Senate might be his last. He had servants carry him into the Senate chamber and help him take his seat. The Lecompton vote was delayed one day and Davis returned, in much worse shape, this time physically held up by his wife on one side and his doctor on the other. Friends who saw him shuddered. One said he “was a pale, ghastly looking person, his eye bandaged with strips of white linen, his whole aspect denoting feebleness.”
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Davis would not be muzzled, though, and worked out an agreement with his doctor that if the physician would let him spend just one hour in the Senate each day he would take care of himself at home. He resumed his Senate duties in May, an hour a day.

Weakened and irritated from the neuralgia, Davis slowly recovered his old arrogance. A senator from Louisiana, Judah Benjamin, a very successful lawyer who maintained his practice while in the Senate and one of the few Jewish public officials in America, offered some mild criticism of Davis’s assessment of rifles during a June 8, 1858, discussion on the properties of a new breech-loading rifle as part of a hearing on an army appropriations bill. The Mississippian snapped angrily at Benjamin and Benjamin snapped back. Heated words followed and Davis sarcastically called Benjamin a “paid attorney,” referring to his refusal to give up legal fees while in office. Benjamin was insulted.

Davis had offended someone yet again because of his truculence and anger. He knew he had a problem with his emotions. “I have an affirmity [sic] of which I am horribly ashamed. When I am aroused in a matter, I lose control of my feelings and become personal,” he once said of his hair-trigger temper.
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All of his life, Jefferson Davis exhibited a rigid, dismissive, unforgiving personality. He always assumed he was right and could never admit that he was wrong. He firmly believed that anyone who disagreed with him had to admit he was in error. He was stubborn, as his wife often told him, and would never change his mind. Davis would never overlook a social slight, even if unintentional, and would hold a grudge against people for years. He would not compromise on issues. Davis found it difficult to deal with mild-mannered people and could not and would not work with strong-willed and personally difficult people.
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His belligerence was evident in public speeches as well as private conversations. Edward Pollard, the editor of the Richmond Examiner, who wrote about him often, put it best. “[He] was haughty and defiant, and his manners singularly imperious. He spoke as one who would not brook contradictions, who delivered his torrents of truth as if without regard to anything said to the contrary and who disdained the challenges of debate.”
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Students at West Point respected his intellect and love of the army, but disliked him personally and wondered how anyone with such personality problems could succeed in public life. “His four years at West Point…instead of inculcating in him the pliancy and assumed cordiality of the politician, was to develop a personality of the reverse order,” wrote one.
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And now that difficulty had surfaced again in his dispute with Senator Benjamin.

Benjamin promptly challenged Davis to a duel with pistols. The shocked Davis dismissed the confrontation. “I will make this all right at once. I have been wholly wrong,” said Davis and apologized to Benjamin on the floor of the Senate the next day, ending the dispute. He may have been persuaded to do so by his wife, who did not think that Benjamin was as timid as most suggested. She saw deep rage in the Louisiana senator and wrote of his well-known public courtesy that it was “like the salute of the duelist to the antagonist,” whom he hoped to kill “with the fiercest joy.” She also was afraid that both men were too hot-headed and that if a duel occurred one or both might die. “They both [possess] nervously excitable temperaments,” she wrote of their anger. Benjamin was satisfied with Davis, but the incident created a frosty relationship between the two. In time the rift healed, and when Davis became the president of the Confederacy he named Benjamin his Attorney General.
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Davis’s doctor was disturbed by the incident. His patient had almost died from neuralgia and now he had just managed to avoid a deadly duel. It was not the first time Davis had nearly engaged someone in a duel or become involved in a brawl when his famous temper flared. In 1847, recovering from his wounds in the Mexican War, Davis, still walking with one crutch for assistance, became so enraged with something that his fellow Mississippi congressman, Henry Foote, said to him that he attacked him in Gadsby’s Hotel, where both resided, beating him severely with his fists and the crutch. Davis screamed that he would kill Foote, but before he could lunge at him again another legislator pulled him back. Davis then beat up the second legislator. Foote demanded a duel, but mutual friends prevented it.
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Prior to that, when he was in the army, Davis challenged another officer, W. H. Bissell, to a duel with muskets at fifteen paces. That, too, was halted by friends.
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Davis saw nothing wrong with anger and duels; his own brother-in-law had shot a man in a duel.