Outside of Seward, Sumner and Stevens, the most prominent public man of the time was Salmon P. Chase, an Ohioan who had for many years taken an important part in the anti-slavery controversy. Although sent to the Senate in 1849 as a Democrat, he left the party on the nomination of Pierce in 1852, when it stood committed to the support and extension of slavery. Three years later, he was elected governor of Ohio by the Republicans. He was Lincoln's secretary of the treasury, and financed the country during its most trying period in a way that compelled the admiration even of his enemies. He served afterwards as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, dying in 1873. He was another man whose life was embittered by failure to attain the prize of the presidency. Three times he tried for it, in 1860, in 1864, and in 1868, but he never came within measurable distance of it. For he lacked the capacity for making friends, and repelled rather than attracted by a studiously impressive demeanor, a painful decorousness, and an unbending dignity, which was, of course, no true dignity at all, but merely a bad imitation of it. In a word, he lacked the saving sense of humor—the quality which endeared Abraham Lincoln to the whole nation.
Another Ohioan who loomed large in the history of the time was John Sherman, a lawyer like all the rest, a member of Congress since 1855, not at first a great opponent of slavery, but drawn into the battle by his allegiance to the Republican party, forming an alliance with Thaddeus Stevens, and collaborating with him in the production of the reconstruction act. He was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Hayes, in 1876, and his great work for the country was done in that office, in re-establishing the credit which the Civil War had shaken. He, also, was bitten by the presidential bacillus, and was a candidate for the nomination at three conventions, but each time fell short of the goal—once when he had it seemingly within his grasp. A stern, forceful, capable man, he left his impress upon the times.
Of the men who guided the fortunes of the Confederacy, only two need be mentioned here—Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens; for, rich as the Confederacy was in generals, it was undeniably poor in statesmen. The golden age of the South had departed; with John C. Calhoun passed away the last really commanding figure among Dixie's statesmen, and from him to Jefferson Davis is a long step downward.
Davis's early life was romantic enough. Born in 1808 in Kentucky, of a father who had served in the Revolution, appointed to the National Military Academy by President Monroe; graduating there in 1828 and serving through the Black Hawk war; then abruptly resigning from the army to elope with the daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor, and settling near Vicksburg, Mississippi, to embark in cotton planting; drawn irresistibly into politics and sent to Congress, but resigning to accept command of the First Mississippi Rifles and serving with great distinction through the war with Mexico; and, finally, in 1847, sent to the Senate—such was Davis's history up to the time he became involved in the maelstrom of the slavery question.
From the first, he was an ardent advocate of the state-rights theory of government, and the right of secession, and for thirteen years he defended these theories in the Senate, gradually emerging as the most capable advocate the South possessed. That fiery and impulsive people, looking always for a hero to worship, found one in Jefferson Davis, and he soon gained an immense prestige among them. On January 9, 1861, his state seceded from the Union, and he withdrew from the Senate. Before he reached home, he was elected commander-in-chief of the Army of the Mississippi, and a few days later, he was chosen President of the Confederate States.
From the first, his task was a difficult one, and it grew increasingly so as the war went on. That he performed it well, there can be no question. He was the government, was practically dictator, for he dominated the Confederate Congress absolutely, and its principal business was to pass the laws which he prepared. Only toward the close of the war did it, in a measure, free itself from this control, and, finally, in 1865, it passed a resolution attributing Confederate disaster to Davis's incompetency as commander-in-chief, a position which he had insisted on occupying; removing him from that position and conferring it upon General Lee, giving the latter, at the same time, unlimited powers in disposing of the army.
But it was too late. Even Lee himself could not ward off the inevitable. On the morning of Sunday, April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis sat in his pew at church in the city of Richmond, when an officer handed him a telegram. It was from Lee, and read, "Richmond must be evacuated this evening," Lee had fought and lost the battle of Petersburg, and was in full retreat. Davis left the church quietly, called his cabinet together, packed up the government archives, and boarded a train for the South. For over a month, he moved from place to place endeavoring to escape capture, his party melting away until it comprised only his family and a few servants; and finally, on May 9th, he was surprised and taken by a company of Union cavalry near Irwinsville, in southern Georgia. Davis was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe for two years—a thoroughly senseless procedure which only served to keep open a painful wound—and on Christmas Day, 1868, was pardoned by President Johnson.
Davis's imprisonment had added immensely to his prestige. The South forgot his blunders and short-comings, seeing in him only the martyr who had suffered for his people, and welcomed him with a kind of hysterical adoration, which lasted until his death. The last years of his life were passed quietly on his estate in Mississippi.
When Davis was chosen President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens was chosen Vice-President. Stephens had also had a picturesque career. Left an orphan, without means, at the age of fifteen he had nevertheless secured an education, and, in 1834, after two months' study, was admitted to the Georgia bar. He at once began to win a more than local reputation, for he was a man of unusual ability, and in 1836, he was elected to the Legislature, though an avowed opponent of nullification.