1858 (9 page)

The physician ordered Davis to take a lengthy vacation far from Washington to obtain needed rest, both physical and mental. Just about everyone of prominence evacuated Washington, DC, in the summers of the 1850s. The city and the surrounding Chesapeake Bay region was oppressively hot and humid in the summer. The wide streets of the city, most still dirt, became dusty in summer; the dust was so bad that people returned home from work on a breezy day covered in it. The city had still not developed a system to water down the streets in summer, as other communities had. The combination of dust and heat drove hundreds of families, including the Davises, out of town. Some, of course, remained. Robert E. Lee remained that summer at his home in Arlington House, the plantation across the Potomac River from Washington. Lee had been a friend of Davis’s since the latter named him superintendent of West Point.

Senator Davis’s wife and family were thrilled by the doctor’s suggestion. At first, the Davises made plans to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to the south of France to join former president Pierce and his family for a vacation of several weeks, at the president’s invitation. The arrangements for the trip became complicated, though, and instead Davis decided to take Varina and his children, Maggie and Jeff Jr., to Maine. The journey of the national leader of the proslavery supporters in the South to New England, the home of the country’s most ardent abolitionists, would become one of the most important vacations anyone in the United States took in the summer of 1858, but for reasons that no one could possibly foresee.

As soon as Jefferson Davis stepped on board the
Joseph Whitney
, moored in Baltimore harbor, he felt relieved. His doctor was right, the easy rumble of the ocean and the fresh sea air helped his neuralgia recede, and within just a few days aboard the ship he realized that the anger that had brought him close to a duel had disappeared. By the time he reached Portland, Maine, where he had been invited to use a vacation cottage owned by his friend, Montgomery Blair, he seemed better, much to the relief of Varina and their two children.

Davis was leery of traveling to anywhere in New England, the hotbed of abolitionism, home to radical antislavery newspapers such as the
Liberator
. To his surprise, a group of friendly townspeople serenaded the senator and his family when they stepped off the boat on July 9 in Portland, Maine. He and Varina felt comfortable right away. In gracious remarks, the Southern senator began by reminding the crowd gathered that Mississippi and Maine were not enemies, but “sister states” whose people had “one voice and one heart.” In an unprepared but stirring speech, he applauded the rich heritage of the people of Maine and New England, especially their participation in the American Revolution. He spoke out against the practice of English ships stopping American merchant ships in search of slaves and said it was as much a nuisance to the New England merchant ships as to any slave ships. Finally, he advocated building a transcontinental railroad that would help industry in New England. He brought cheers when he said that their warm welcome made him feel “that I was still at home.”

His audience was thrilled by what he said and even more by his appearance. Jefferson Davis was not a two-headed slave-owning dragon at all. He was a well dressed, well mannered, amiable man, a family man with an attractive, attentive wife and two adorable children. He didn’t preach about slavery, but issues that were important to New Englanders. Perhaps he was not the devil portrayed in the abolitionist press after all.
¹²⁵

The Mississippi senator had been calling for American unity since he left his sickbed in Washington, DC. Just before he sailed for Maine, he wrote several Pennsylvanians a letter in which he declined an offer to speak in Philadelphia on Independence Day because of his health. But he told them that, “so long as their descendants may emulate their patriotism, their virtue and their wisdom, why may not the union of the Constitution stand?”
¹²⁶

During the voyage north on the Fourth of July, the captain of his ship asked him for an impromptu address and he pleased the assembled crowd of passengers and crew gathered on the deck of the vessel with “a beautiful speech,” that emphasized national unity, according to a reporter from the
Boston Post
, not on board, who later scribbled notes about the speech from details provided by those who were present.
¹²⁷

Davis’s speech at Portland made him popular, and the Maine Democratic Convention, meeting at that time, asked him to address it. Davis strode into the convention of the northernmost wing of his party, where so much antislavery talk had been heard, and delivered another heartwarming speech calling for unity in a time of crisis. At one point, as he looked about the room he asked the assemblage, “Shall narrow interests, shall local jealousies, shall disregard of the high purposes for which our Union was ordained, continue to distract our people and impede the progress of our government towards the high consummation which prophetic statesmen have so often indicated as her destiny?”

He paused and hundreds jumped to their feet shouting “No! No! No!” and cheering.
¹²⁸

He was heralded as the hero of the Mexican War when he inspected a local militia company in Belfast, Maine. There, he reminded the men of their ancestors’ victory in the Revolution and their own neighbors’ victory, fighting with him, in Mexico. Again, he called for unity, telling the troops that the American flag was “the emblem and the guide of the free and the brave…”
¹²⁹

The visitor from Mississippi was asked to speak at just about any event he attended. He was drowned in sustained applause wherever he appeared, such as at the Maine State Fair, an annual event that attracted tens of thousands of people. He told that crowd that he saw himself and the people of Maine as “brothers.” He said that in the South the word “Yankee” was usually a term of reproach, but now, having met so many residents of Maine, he knew that it meant “honorable.” He wound up telling the huge crowd at the state fair that the disintegration of the Union was “not the sentiments of the American heart; they are the exceptions and should not disturb our confidence in the deep seated sentiment of nationality which aided our fathers when they entered into the compact of Union and which has preserved it to us.”
¹³⁰

Everywhere he spoke in Maine, Jefferson Davis emphasized three things: 1. all Americans, North and South, share a single, proud heritage; 2. all local matters, like slavery, should remain just that—local; and 3. Americans, regardless of their home state, have common national interests that unite them, not divide them.
¹³¹

The trustees of Bowdoin College, Maine, the town where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the antislavery best-seller
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, bestowed an honorary LLD degree on the senator from Mississippi amid thunderous applause from a large crowd that had gathered.

Davis and his family accepted just about every social invitation extended to them. It was a summer vacation like none that Davis of Mississippi, so far from home in Maine, had ever experienced. Relatives of the Blair family entertained them and took them on boat trips to the islands in Casco Bay. They were invited to a succession of large communitywide clambakes at Cape Elizabeth and enjoyed individual picnics with families there. Someone invited them to the graduation ceremonies at Portland High School and to the reception afterward, where the Davises thoroughly enjoyed themselves, congratulating the happy graduates and mingling with those in the crowd.

Jefferson Davis carried his three-year-old daughter Maggie around the clambakes and picnics on his shoulders, to her delight. Sea captains in Portland between voyages regaled Maggie with stories about their adventures in the Pacific. Davis’s daughter had become the center of attention in town. People fawned over her wherever she went and continually offered her cakes, cookies, and candies. She was such a familiar figure in Portland that when people introduced Jefferson Davis he was often not presented as the U.S. senator from Mississippi, but rather as “little Maggie’s father.”
¹³²

The family accepted an invitation from a Professor Bache to travel with him to the top of Mount Humpback to make astronomical observations. His wife remembered riding on horses through a lengthy valley filled with enormous granite outcroppings that reminded her of the pyramids of Egypt. They spent several nights camping out on a plateau at the top of the mountain. They joined Bache in an ad hoc barbecue, dining on recently caught speckled trout, and were entertained by the professor, who read to them since Davis’s eyes were still weak. The professor then played a Verdi song on a music box and Davis, delighted with the song, sang it. His love of music, reported those who were there with great humor, was not equaled by his skill as a tenor.
¹³³

His two months in Maine had made him the toast of New England, and on his way home he was asked to speak at Boston’s Fanueil Hall on October 11 and to stop off at New York on October 19 to talk at the Palace Garden. In Boston, where they stayed at the Tremont House Hotel, Jeff Jr. was stricken with the croup. The Davises were overwhelmed with advice, help, and medicine for Jeff Jr. In the middle of the night, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, a leading abolitionist who was from the influential Otis family, arrived with her own medicines, tonics, advice, and genuine concern for the little boy. Varina Howell was impressed with Mrs. Otis and the people of Boston. “This memory is clear and blessed to me, and her name has always been honored in our household,” Varina wrote thirty years later.
¹³⁴

The senator was met with jubilant receptions in both Boston and New York. To capacity audiences, he again reiterated his admiration for Northerners, the common history of North and South, brotherhood among Americans. He also tried to dampen the fires about slavery. “There is nothing of truth or justice with which to sustain this agitation, or grounds for it… I plead with you now to arrest fanaticism which has been evil in the beginning, and must be evil in the end… The danger lies at your door, and it is time to arrest it. Too long have we allowed this influence to progress,” he told cheering audiences in both cities.
¹³⁵

Throughout the North, newspaper editors praised Davis’s speeches and the warm reception he received in New England. Horace Greeley of the
New York Herald Tribune
wrote that his speeches were not only imbued with patriotism, but that Davis exhibited the type of common sense that politicians North and South needed. In some quarters, his newfound Northern admirers said that the Union-loving Mississippi senator would make a fine president of the United States in 1860.
¹³⁶

The reaction in the South, however, was just the opposite. Davis was severely criticized for his olive branch approach to the people of New England and roundly castigated for trying to appease the Yankees. The stri-dent states’ rights politicians and the editors of some of the most important newspapers in the South roundly condemned him in virulent language. They damned him for his speeches and even for being so accepting of New England hospitality. One editor savagely criticized Davis just because he “had praised the Yankees” and another wrote with venom that in befriending the people of New England, Davis had become “a propagandist for dis-union.”
¹³⁷
One of the loudest salvos fired against him in the newspapers was a scathing editorial in the
Charleston Mercury
, where editor Robert Rhett wrote that Davis was “a Union Mormon,” a “pitiable spectacle of human weakness” who should have stayed in Boston. “Of all the signal examples of startling Southern defection that the venality of the times has afforded, there is none that can at all compare with this…the Jefferson Davis we knew is no more!”
¹³⁸

Davis was shaken by the tidal wave of vituperative editorials in the Southern press. He wondered if he had gone too far in trying to serve as a bridge between North and South. Perhaps the critics were right; maybe he had been too friendly. Maybe the warm reception he had received and the generosity of people in Maine to his wife and family on a personal level had blinded him to their true nature as a people politically devoted to the destruction of slavery and Southern rights. Was it in fact no longer possible, given the events of the 1850s, for harmony to be attained anywhere in the United States? Maybe the time was past when a political leader could tell people on both sides of an issue what they wanted to hear in order to bring them together.

He was reminded of that in a letter he received from a man named Campbell. He wrote, “I think the time is coming when the people will prefer to know exactly what a man’s views are and then they will know exactly what to expect from him.”
¹³⁹

Davis and his family returned to Brierfield, the plantation on the banks of the Mississippi River, for three weeks in September to oversee damage from a summertime flood. The trip to Maine was undertaken so he could recover physically. Now it was time for him to recover politically. At his beloved Brierfield, Davis had time to think about what he had said in New England and the animosity his words had engendered throughout the South. The senator knew the time had finally come to make up his mind about what course of action he was going to pursue, permanently, on the slavery issue. He did.