Dixie Betrayed (3 page)

Davis performed adequately in his studies at West Point—as well as compiling substantial numbers of demerits—and graduated
twenty-third out of thirty-three in the class of July 1, 1828. Commissioned a brevet second lieutenant, he spent seven years
in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer. Frontier duty and occasional clashes with Indians marked the period. He was commissioned
a first lieutenant of dragoons before resigning, in 1835. That year, he also married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary
Taylor, and the couple moved to Mississippi to commence farming. Plantation life on the Davis’s eight-hundred-acre estate
seemed a reasonable dream, but shortly after their marriage, the newlyweds contracted a fever, and on September 15, 1835,
Sarah Taylor Davis died. Ill and depressed, Davis went to Cuba to recover. He eventually returned to Mississippi, to his Brierfield
plantation, but stayed in seclusion.

Davis spent the next ten years mostly locked away from the world. When he returned to public life, he turned to politics in
Mississippi and the companionship of a very young girl from Natchez, Varina Howell. When they were married in early 1845,
Varina was nineteen, Jefferson thirty-six. Independent and volatile, Varina irked her new husband at intervals but eventually
transformed herself into an engine of support and encouragement for him. Soon after their marriage Jefferson was elected to
Congress as a representative from Mississippi. But Davis’s term in Congress was cut short by war clouds looming to the southwest,
and he was commissioned colonel of the First Mississippi Rifles, joining his former father-in-law’s army in Mexico.

Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War career was wholly successful. His regiment, raised in the little town of Vicksburg, was assigned
to Maj. Gen. Taylor’s army, while much of the army accompanied Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the army, as
he marched from Veracruz to Mexico City. As Taylor’s force moved against Monterrey, Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna
attacked Taylor’s force, hoping to demolish it and then turn toward Scott. Davis heroically aided the United States’ victory,
was wounded in the foot, and returned home. In 1847 he was appointed to be a brigadier general in the U.S. Army but was never
commissioned as such; instead, Davis was elected U.S. senator from Mississippi.

Throughout the 1850s Jefferson Davis was transformed into the leading proponent of Southern rights in Congress, succeeding
John C. Calhoun, who had died in 1850. In that year Davis resigned from the Senate and entered the race for governor of Mississippi,
an act designed to help the Democratic Party by keeping his eccentric opponent out of office. Davis joined the race late and
faced the irascible, reckless Henry Stuart Foote. Foote had been born a Virginian, in 1804, but settled in Alabama by age
nineteen, becoming an attorney and newspaperman. Foote “called ’em as he saw ’em,” and soon this shoot-from-the-hip style
led to duels with politicians he had called out in the paper. By 1850 Foote was a successful Mississippi politician who, despite
his strong advocation of state rights, fancied himself a staunch Unionist.

Prior to the election the two men already had a checkered relationship. In 1847, on a festive holiday night at Gadsby’s bar
in Washington, they came to blows after a heated argument over slavery and the territories, a subject that would come to be
called “squatter sovereignty.” Davis violently disagreed that territories should have the right to decide if they wanted slavery
to exist within their boundaries, and the argument turned fiery. Foote said Davis was fueled by “arrogance,” and Davis’s comment
that Foote had uttered “offensive language” is hardly surprising, given the latter’s record. Dragging his wounded foot, Davis
lunged at Foote and began to “pummel him with repeated blows until others pulled him off.”
²

Davis later wrote that Foote, shocked, had started to leave the room and then turned and emphasized that Davis had struck
the first blow, which would mean that in a duel, Foote would choose the weapons. In a complete meltdown Davis shrieked, “Liar!”
broke free from those who were holding him, and shook his fist toward Foote. Another senator jumped on Davis and began fighting,
and someone shouted that Foote and Davis should be put into a room where they could square off. Foote asked, “Do you have
coffee and pistols for two?” Davis replied, “Yes,” and Foote hesitated, balking at Davis’s military experience. Others in
the room finally convinced the two to drop the matter and to write it off as a “Christmas frolic.” But the two men would hate
each other forever. In the 1851 gubernatorial election, Foote won, further enraging Davis. The two men’s paths would cross
repeatedly in the coming drama.

Davis rose to his height in 1853, when Franklin Pierce made him U.S. secretary of war, in which role he excelled at army organization
and developed a keen sense of military protocol and personalities. In 1857 he again returned to Washington as senator from
Mississippi, a position from which he directed a fusillade of Southern spirit at the increasingly Northern-controlled government.

Four years of Yankee-bashing from his post on Capitol Hill had raised Davis to preeminence among Southern politicians. Now,
in a new capital city in the making, Davis prepared to take on the leadership of the South. On the morning of his inauguration,
Davis left the Exchange Hotel in an open barouche led by six white horses for the journey to the Alabama State House. Bands
played for the thousands strewn along Commerce Street, and thunderous cheers, smiles, and screams of joy rang throughout the
city, following Alabama politician William L. Yancey’s shouted declaration that “the man and the hour have met. . . . Prosperity,
honor, and victory await his administration.”
³

“All Montgomery had flocked to Capitol Hill in holiday attire,” wrote Thomas Cooper DeLeon, a Southern journalist, of the
festive day. “Bells rang and cannon boomed, and the throng—including all members of the government—stood bareheaded as the
fair Virginian [Letitia Tyler, granddaughter of John Tyler] threw that flag to the breeze. . . . A shout went up from every
throat that told they meant to honor and strive for it; if need be, to die for it.”
⁴

As the carriage approached the State House, a band struck up the anthem “La Marseillaise,” and applause greeted the president-elect.
On a platform constructed at the State House, Davis sat beside the vice president-elect, Alexander Hamilton Stephens of Georgia.
The band also played a northern minstrel song, “Dixie,” which was liked by the crowd and, in time, would become the unofficial
song of the Confederacy. Davis and Stephens sat beside Howell Cobb II of Georgia, who had served as president of the Provisional
Congress that had commenced its meetings two weeks before.

As Davis looked out over the massive crowd, which perhaps numbered five thousand, he “saw troubles and thorns innumerable.”
⁵
The South in 1861 resembled a set of European-style nation-states, each with its own distinctive flavor and outlook on the
world. Unity meant you were friendly with adjoining states, but you had little in the way of official relations with them—governmentally
or politically. A shrewd politician, Davis immediately saw trouble in the diversity reflected across the sea of faces spread
before him. A strong, unified Confederacy under the control of a central government would be necessary if the war that most
saw as inevitable were to come. The unity of this moment, Davis worried, might be short lived.

Waves of cheering cascaded onto the platform as Davis stood up and stretched his tall, lean form and was introduced as savior
to the new Southern nation. The Mississippian invoked the spirit of 1776 and referred to “the American idea that governments
rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they
become destructive of the ends for which they are established.” The crowd erupted into applause. Davis continued, saying that
if the Northern states attempted to coerce the Confederacy back into the Union, “the suffering of millions will bear testimony
to the folly and wickedness of our aggressors. It is joyous, in the midst of perilous times, to look around upon a people
united in heart,” Davis shouted, “where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole—where the sacrifices to
be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard,” he asserted,
“they cannot long prevent the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice, and sustained by a virtuous people.”
⁶

Shouts and applause electrified the air around the State House—Davis had won his audience. Yet Davis was no one’s fool. A
long, difficult road lay ahead if the Confederacy were to survive and prosper. What he could not yet see, however, were some
of the specific obstacles to come, including two who were seated on the platform alongside him.

T
HE
Confederacy’s new vice president couldn’t have been a worse choice—at least from the president’s point of view. Alexander
Hamilton Stephens was a tiny, sickly man who had a “ghostly, spectral appearance.” Born in 1812, a product of Crawfordville,
Georgia, Stephens was called “Little Aleck” by those who knew him, and despite his constant systemic ailments and chronic
depression, he had achieved great success. Those who saw Stephens in political meetings often thought he was a visiting teenager,
or worse—as one commentator put it, “until he occasionally blinked, he seemed to be stone dead.”

He stood five feet seven inches tall and weighed ninety-six pounds and seemed to have aged prematurely. He was ghost white
and stooped; at times his weight dropped to a mere eighty pounds. He was a world-class hypochondriac. But his thoughts extended
beyond ailments real and imagined. Highly intelligent and gifted as an orator, Stephens had taught school before becoming
a prosperous lawyer. He was a quiet intellectual who excelled at nothing more than writing thoughtfully composed letters.
Little Aleck maneuvered into politics in 1836 and never looked back. Never married, he was always very close with his half-brother,
Linton.

Little Aleck’s path to the Confederacy was no less exciting than Davis’s had been. Elected to the U.S. House as a Whig in
1843, Stephens became an independent in 1850, upon the party’s decline. In 1854 he helped to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act
in the House, one of the key events that propelled America toward war. This act promoted popular sovereignty, the idea that
territorial citizens should decide themselves whether their newly formed states should permit slavery.

Exhausted by unsuccessful attempts to promote slavery in the territories and statehood bills, Stephens resigned from Congress
in 1859. A political supporter of Stephen A. Douglas in the Democratic Party’s race for the 1860 nomination, Little Aleck
was a powerful state rightist who, nevertheless, opposed secession; still, he came to Montgomery in 1861, when asked by Georgia’s
political leaders. Once there he played a leading role in scripting the Confederate Constitution.

To appease politicians in the Deep South (some of whom were anti-secession) and present a united front to the world, Stephens
was chosen to be vice president beside Davis in the provisional slate of officers of the new Confederacy. Davis was a more
astute politician, and the differences in political savvy emerged quickly. A month after the Montgomery inauguration, Stephens
made a speech in Savannah, Georgia, to his friends in the Georgia convention. Given the chance for limelight and the fresh
opportunity to summarize the meaning of the new Confederacy, Stephens took full advantage. Having cited the abolitionists’
shocking assertions about equality of the races, Stephens proclaimed, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite
idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”
⁷
Davis was understandably upset at Stephens’s public remarks—not the remarks, but their public nature. It didn’t help that
Davis was a simplistic analyst; in his mind, you were either for him or against him. Everything was black or white. Although
Davis may have agreed privately, he would not do so publicly—to him, the issue of slavery would be covered under the mantle
of state rights versus central government.

For the first weeks of his vice presidency, Little Aleck tried to make the case to the public that the South had attempted
to thwart war, that it was Lincoln’s government that had brought it about. “No one can more deeply regret the threatening
prospect of a general war between the United States and the Confederate States than I do,” he said. “Such an unfortunate result,
if it should occur, cannot be charged to the seeking or desire of the Confederate States government. On the contrary, I feel
assured in saying that every honorable means has been resorted to by the government to avoid it.”
⁸
Privately, Stephens was more candid. “Revolutions are much easier started than controlled,” he wrote a friend in late 1860,
“and the men who begin them, even for the best purposes and objects, seldom end them. . . . The selfish, the ambitious, and
the bad will generally take the lead.”
⁹
Stephens had little idea how prescient he was.

Among the Georgia circle that would congregate around the vice president was one Howell Cobb—a longtime rival of Stephens’s.
Born on a plantation in Jefferson County in 1815, Cobb rose through the political ranks to become president of the First Confederate
Provisional Congress, in Montgomery, where the obese, bearded politician presided over the formation of the South’s new government.

Two weeks before Davis’s inauguration, delegates from the seven original states that seceded flocked to the new capital to
define the Confederacy and how it would work. Trains unloaded parties from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and Texas as—one by one—the men who would make a new government checked into dusty hotel rooms and into history.