The Life of Jefferson Davis

by Frank H. Alfriend

Working in great harmony between its executive and legislative departments, the new government, within a very few weeks, presented an extraordinary spectacle of compact organization, though in all its parts it was yet purely provisional. The Cabinet announced by the President, embraced, for the most part, names well known to the country in connection with important public trusts. It may not be inappropriate to speak briefly here of those who sustained to President Davis the close relations of constitutional advisers.

Mr. Robert Toombs, the Secretary of State, was indebted for his appointment not less to the position of his State, the first in rank in the Confederacy, than to the public appreciation of his abilities. For several years he had represented Georgia in the United States Senate, and in that body his reputation was very high as a debater and orator. His oratory, however, was a good index of his mind and disposition, strong and impassioned, but desultory, vehement and blustering. Mr. Toombs had contributed largely to prepare the people of Georgia for secession, and his fierce and persistent eloquence had greatly accelerated the movement. His capacity for agitation and destruction was indeed immeasurably superior to any qualification that he may have had for reconstructing the broken and scattered fragments of the governmental column. Restless, arrogant, and intolerant—a born destructive and inveterate agitator—Mr. Toombs speedily demonstrated his deficiency in statesmanship. His connection with the Confederate Cabinet was of brief duration, and his subsequent military service undistinguished. The War Department—the second post of distinction in the Cabinet—was given to Alabama, the second State of the Confederacy, in the person of Mr. Leroy P. Walker. His connection with the Government, like that of Mr. Toombs, was brief, and wholly unmarked by evidence of fitness. Mr. Memminger, of South Carolina, the Secretary of the Treasury, made an exceedingly unpopular officer, and, as the sequel demonstrated, was incompetent to the delicate task of financial management. The Attorney-General, Mr. Benjamin, of Louisiana, an eminent lawyer and a prominent Senator, was, beyond all question, the ablest of Mr. Davis’ Cabinet. He was a man of marvelous intellectual resources, an orator, a lawyer, and gifted, to an unexampled degree, in the varied attributes, entering into the savior faire of politics and diplomacy. Mr. Benjamin continued the trusted counselor of President Davis during the whole period of his authority. Mr. Mallory, of Florida, was the Secretary of the Navy—a gentleman of excellent sense, unpretending manners, who probably conducted his department as successfully as was possible, with the limited naval resources of the South. The Post-office Department was given to Mr. Reagan, of Texas, noted for his fidelity, industry, and good sense.

The Cabinet of President Davis was destined to many changes in the progress of subsequent events. Of those originally appointed, Messrs. Benjamin, Mallory, and Reagan continued their connection with the Confederate Government during the entire period of its existence. The brief experiment of Confederate independence was fruitful in illustrations of the important truth that political distinction achieved in the ordinary struggles of parties, in times of profound peace, is not the sure guarantee of the possession of those especial and peculiar qualifications which befit the circumstances of revolution. That President Davis, in the selection of some of his advisers, was at fault, is to be ascribed rather to the novelty and necessities of the public situation than to errors of his judgment. Not only must public sentiment respecting men be to some extent consulted, but the test of experience must, necessarily, after all, determine the question of fitness, where all were untried.

Jefferson Davis now occupied a position in the highest sense historical. It was plain that his name was destined to be indelibly associated with a series of incidents forming a most thrilling and instructive episode in political history. As the exponent of a theory of constitutional principles never asserted, and unknown save through the inspiration of the genius of American Liberty, and as the head of a Government whose birth and destiny must enter conspicuously into all future questions of popular government, he stood, in a double sense, the central figure in a most striking phase of the drama of human progress. Splendid as had been American history until that day, it was now to contribute, still more generously, to the illumination of the great truths of political science.

The issue was again to be joined between constitutional freedom and the odious despotism of an enthroned mob. On the one side were asserted the principles of regulated liberty, without which free government can never be stable—order, allegiance, and reverence for law and authority. On the other, the wild passions of an infuriated populace, hurling down the restraints of law, shattering constitutions; and when its frenzied lust had been satiated by the destruction of every accessible image of virtue and order, transferring supreme power from its polluted grasp to the hands of demagogues—capable agents of the depraved will which invests them with authority.

Such was really a faithful contrast of the two powers which were now inaugurated in what had been the United States. It was still the old Greek question of the “few or the many,” the “King Numbers” of the North against the conservatism of the South. The old contest was to be revived, of Cleon and Nicias, in the Athenian Agora, and struggling on through the political battle-fields of free governments in all ages.

It is not an abuse of language to characterize the North as realizing the ultra theory of popular government. Its political fabric rests exclusively upon the Utopian conception of an intelligence and integrity in the masses which they have never been known to possess. Carrying out its pernicious construction of the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are born free and equal,” it professes to hold in light esteem the obvious distinctions of race, property, and color. Earnestly devoted to the successful illustration of the experiment of Democracy, it has sedulously directed its social and political development to the overthrow of caste, the obliteration of necessary social distinctions, and the practical assertion of the principle of absolute social, political, and personal equality among all men. The election of Lincoln was the grand, decisive triumph of these tendencies. He went into power as the avowed champion of the interests of the poor and laboring classes, which he declared to be in conflict with those of the slave-holding aristocrats of the South. Entirely undistinguished, with no political record, his popularity was based upon his vulgar antecedents—no slight recommendation to the populace, gratified at the prospective promotion of one of its own class.

A free society, politically, in which wealth and distinction were debarred to none, the aristocratic influences of slavery were the propitious inducements in the South, to the cultivation of that personal dignity which marks the refinement of rank, in contradistinction to the vulgar pretensions and affectation of a mere aristocracy of money. The patrician society of the South sought the noblest type of republicanism—regulated liberty—beyond the influence of ignorant and fanatical mobs, that perfect order which reposes securely upon virtue, intelligence, and interested attachment, which all human experience teaches are the only reliable safeguards of freedom.

The noblest achievement of constitutional liberty would have been the realization of the Southern ideal of republicanism. The success and beneficence of such a government would have been in perfect accord with the philosophy of history. Every nation to which has been guaranteed a free constitution is indebted for its liberal features to its educated, patrician classes, while all the decayed republics of history owed their downfall to the corruption and excesses of an “unbridled Democracy.”

Of such a government, Jefferson Davis was the appropriately chosen head. An ardent republican, in the truest and noblest sense of that abused term, a foe to absolutism and radicalism in every shape, he was the noblest product of a conservatism in which the elements of distinction were ability, intelligence, refinement, and social position. When, added to this representative quality, are considered his splendid career of public service, and his varied talents, exemplified on almost every field of exertion, it must be conceded that no ruler was ever more worthily invited to the head of a nation, and assuredly none ever was invited with such unanimity of popular acclaim.