Pursuit:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ his sisters, his wife, his personal friends, and his political enemies. He considered it strength of character.

      Everyone else found it maddening.

      Once Davis made up his mind that the course he had chosen in his politics, or in his personal or business affairs was correct, he never wavered from that decision. Once his decision was made, he never changed his mind despite the best efforts of his supporters to offer their own differing opinions.

      Davis not only believed he was right all the time, he also believed he was the only person he knew who was prescient about the course of history. Sometimes he was tragically correct.

      For at least three years preceding the opening of the war, Davis believed that a war between the North and the South was inevitable unless both sides listened to a voice of reason. He firmly, if humbly, believed that he was the one to voice those warnings, and if his voice was ignored, there would be hell to pay.

      In an 1858 speech in Faneuil Hall to the citizens of Boston Davis hinted at civil war if the federal government continued to trample on the sanctity of states’ rights. Throughout the speech Davis coyly suggested that Massachusetts political heroes like Samuel Adams and John Hancock had invented the concept that states were the primary political unit in the nation. Such a view was in accordance with his belief that the Constitution was an instrument designed to govern a voluntary Union of all states.

      Davis cleverly explained his bedrock belief in states’ rights over federal control of those states by reminding the Bostonians that Massachusetts Governor Hancock once refused to call on President George Washington who was visiting the state. Hancock believed that the nation’s president should defer to the assumed power of the state governor he was visiting and that Washington should have called, hat in hand, on him.

      Davis warned that any action based on the belief that the federal government was superior to the states’ power would have dire consequences.

      Skillfully working in references that it was in Faneuil Hall that Massachusetts’ political leaders had plotted secession from England, Davis said:

      Thus, it is that the peace of the Union is disturbed; thus it is that brother is arrayed against brother; thus it is that the people come to consider, not how they can promote each other’s interests, but how they can successfully make war upon them.

      Firebrands on both sides ignored the warnings from Davis, the best known and most popular in the North of all the Southern senators. Nearly three years after his widely reported Boston speech, the debate between the states’ rights advocates for the South and the unbreakable Union advocates for the North ended in December 1860 when South Carolina left the Union. Starting in January 1861, six other Deep South states followed South Carolina out of the Union, just as Davis had predicted.

      After Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union, Davis assured his Senate colleagues in his January 21, 1861, resignation speech that people in the South “hope for peaceful relations with you, though we must part.” Knowing his suggestions had been ignored in the past, Davis also gravely warned that “the reverse will bring disaster on every part of the country.”

      For days after leaving Washington on January 22, 1861, all Davis could think about was the coming calamity of war. After arriving in the capital city of Jackson, the governor of Mississippi appointed him major general of volunteers and suggested that the purchase of 75,000 muskets would be sufficient to defend the state.

      Davis scoffed: “We will need all and many more than we can get, I fear.”

      After accepting visitors in his hotel room who were confident of a successful, peaceful severing of ties with the Union, Davis wailed to his wife, “God help us, war is a dreadful calamity even when it is made against aliens and strangers. They know not what they do!”

      When the seceded states planned their constitutional convention for early February in Montgomery, Alabama, Davis must have known, even before leaving Washington, that his name would be brought up as a potential president for the proposed “confederacy” of slaveholding states. As a humble but true Mexican War hero, a popular United States Secretary of War in the Franklin Pierce administration, a former congressman, and most recently a widely respected senator, Davis was one of the most government-experienced Southerners on the national scene.

      But Davis had always been a reluctant politician. He hated shaking hands and meeting common voters. He hated the backslapping and the toasting to other politicians’ health. He hated the backroom dealing and trading of votes to get bills passed and money appropriated. He hated everything about nineteenth-century politics except making laws and protecting the South’s interests.

      With the secession of Mississippi and his resignation from the Senate, Davis was suddenly free of public service for the first time in more than fifteen years. He no longer had to participate in the grubbiness he detested, which almost certainly would be a part of the forming of the new nation. He had never expressed any interest in even discussing how to form this new country, nor had he asked any of the Mississippi delegates to the secession convention to put his name into nomination. He did not even ask them to keep him informed. In fact, Davis gave a letter to one delegate specifically stating that he did not think himself suited for the job as president in the event his name came up for nomination.

      His name did come up. Davis was the only presidential candidate seriously discussed after former United States senator Robert Toombs from Georgia made a spectacle of himself openly drinking to excess at the convention hotel. The Mississippi delegate whom Davis had asked to discourage his nomination never took Davis’s letter from his vest pocket. After former United States senator Alexander Stephens from Georgia was nominated for the vice president’s slot, Davis was unanimously nominated and elected by the delegates to a single six-year term as president on February 9, 1861.

      Davis had not told anyone he wanted the job. He had not campaigned for it. He had done everything he could to avoid being considered for it. Yet as he had feared, his career as the most famous and successful of Southern politicians in the late 1850s had doomed him to fill the slot.

      A courier who had ridden hard from Montgomery with an important letter in his satchel found Davis on February 10 tending his rose garden at Brierfield, one of the Davis family’s plantations near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The man handed Davis a sealed telegram.

      For the fleeting instant it took Davis to unfold the paper, he must have hoped that the message agreed with his own belief that the Confederacy did not need the services of a perpetually ill, fifty-three-year-old man who had already served his previous nation for nearly two decades. But knowing the firebrands who were taking the Southern states out of the United States, they would demand something of its most famous politician. Davis held out hope that he would be offered a generalship in the still-forming army. And, if he were to take that post, he wanted to do more than recruit and train militia. He wanted a field command, something that would take him back to the thrill of leading men under fire.

      When Davis read the telegraph’s few lines congratulating him on his unanimous election to the post of president of the Confederate States of America, his hands quivered and his face darkened. Davis looked so stricken with grief that his wife, Varina, thought that the message had informed her husband of a death in the family.

      Varina remembered: “After a few minutes of painful silence, he told me, as a man might speak of a sentence of death. As he neither expected nor desired the position, he was more depressed than before.”

      Despondent but ever certain that a man did not shirk from duty thrust upon him, Davis departed for Montgomery the day after receiving the telegram. He would take the job that he did not want. He would take the job that would quickly make him one of СКАЧАТЬ