DAVIS, JEFFERSON (1808–1889)

A Mississippi planter, Jefferson Davis graduated from West Point, served with distinction in the Mexican War, and was a congressman (1845–1846), senator (1847–1851, 1857–1861) and secretary of war (1853–1857). In 1861 he reluctantly resigned from the Senate when Mississippi left the Union. Davis served as Confederate President (1861–1865) and at the end of the civil war was indicted for treason and jailed but never tried because prosecutors were unsure they could legally convict him. Stripped of his citizenship, Davis never returned to politics, but he did write a tedious and defensive two-volume history of secession and his presidency, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881).

Davis came to national political prominence with his opposition to the compromise of 1850. He was one of ten senators who voted against California statehood. Davis supported only the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which he thought should be passed and enforced "as a right not to be estimated … by the value of the property, but for the principles involved." Unlike john c. calhoun, with whom he usually agreed, Davis opposed a constitutional amendment to secure southern rights in all the territories. Davis supported extending the missouri compromise line to California.

After Calhoun's death Davis was the Senate's foremost supporter of southern rights and states ' rights. He asserted that secession was constitutional because: the Constitution did not prohibit it nor provide power to coerce a state to remain in the Union; the national government was created by "the states," not "the people," and therefore the states could exist separately from the national government; and the Union "was in the nature of a partnership between individuals without limitation of time" and could be dissolved by the unilateral action of any of the parties.

Davis was ambivalent, however, on whether the theoretical right of secession should be implemented. He opposed secession at the nashville convention (1850), arguing that southern rights could be protected within the Union. In 1851 he unsuccessfully sought the Mississippi governorship on a "states' rights" ticket, but later in the decade he opposed states' rights parties because he thought southern interests could best be protected by alliances with sympathetic northern Democrats. In 1860 he attempted to mediate a compromise that would have taken John Bell, john c. breckinridge, and stephen a. douglas out of the presidential contest, in favor of a single Democratic candidate. In 1858 he said publicly that if a Republican were elected "I should deem it your duty to provide for your safety outside the Union." In 1859 he said that the John Brown raid meant that loyalty to the Constitution required secession. Even so, after abraham lincoln's election Davis urged compromise, and served on the Committee of Thirty-Three. Only when this committee failed did he support secession.

Davis was ambivalent in other ways. He believed that blacks were inferior to whites, that congressional prohibition of the African slave trade was unconstitutional, and that the federal government should not interfere with slavery. Yet his plantation was a model, surpassed only by his brother's for treating blacks with compassion and for giving them a great deal of self-government. He opposed reopening the slave trade on moral grounds and in 1865 advocated emancipation to save the Confederacy. He saw secession as a conservative measure to protect the Constitution from tyranny by Lincoln and the national government. But as Confederate president, Davis implemented conscription, suspension of habeas corpus, and impressment of supplies. A lifelong states' rights man, Davis was vilified by politicians and governors as he sought, unsuccessfully, to create a Confederate national policy.

Paul Finkelman
(1986)

Bibliography

Dodd, William E. 1907 Jefferson Davis. Philadelphia: George Jacobs.

Mc Cardell, John 1979 The Idea of a Southern Nation. New York: Norton.