“For four years they kept the fates banded against them uneasy.”
The parallelism of the fall of the confederacy to that of Troy has incalculably deepened the interest I take in Vergil’s great description. Especially of late years do I realize more vividly how his goddess mother removed the cloud darkening his vision, and gave Æneas to see Neptune, Juno, and Pallas busy in the destruction of the burning city; and a lurid illumination falls upon the statement,
“Apparent diræ facies inimicaque Troiæ
Numina magna deum.”[120]
CHAPTER XIII
JEFFERSON DAVIS
For some time after the brothers’ war it was very generally believed that Davis had been one of the Mississippi repudiators; that through all his ante-bellum public career he had been an unconditional secessionist—what we in the south mean by a fire-eater; that cherishing an accursed ambition for the presidency of the southern confederacy he organized a secret conspiracy which consummated secession; that as the chief executive of the Confederate States he aided and abetted the perpetration of inhuman cruelties upon federal prisoners of war; that he was accessory to the murder of President Lincoln; and that when captured he was disguised as a woman. I suppose that these accusations—all of which are utterly untrue—are still in the mouths of many at the north. They have attained some currency abroad. I note that the leading German encyclopedia—that of Brockhaus—repeats those as to the conspiracy and disguise. But “The Real Jefferson Davis,” as Landon Knight has of late presented him,[121]—without hostile bias and with something like an approach to completeness—is at least beginning to be recognized outside of the south. It is about as certain as anything in the future can be that all detraction from the moral character and patriotism of Davis will after some while wear itself out. I believe far greater favor than mere vindication from false accusation will at last be awarded him in every part of his own country and also abroad. Later in the chapter I shall try to bring out fully the praise and appreciation which world history will, as seems probable to me, shower upon his career. Here I can take time to mention only the beginning of that great fame which we of this day have looked upon. We saw him fall from one of the highest and proudest places in which for four years he had been the talk and envy of the earth. We saw him in sheer helplessness, accused of murder and treason, his feeble health and personal comfort made a jest of, disrespect and insult heaped upon him—we saw him endure all the most refined tortures of imprisonment. Then we saw him set free—his innocence confessed by the acts of his accusers. Then for over twenty years he lived with the people who under his lead had been conquered and despoiled; and we saw them always eager to pay him demonstrations of the warmest love; we saw them bury him with inconsolable grief; and we see them keeping his memory green by reinterring him in the old capital of the Confederate States, giving him there a conspicuous monument, and making the anniversary of his birth a legal holiday in different States. This—which we impressively mark now as only a beginning of glory—must develop into something far larger.
Whenever Davis comes into your mind, of course, you first think of that with which his name is most closely connected—his elevation and his great fall. Therefore it is quite right that we make our start from this point, which is, that he was the head of a subverted revolutionary government. He is one of a few who, like Richard Cromwell, Napoleon, and Kruger, were suffered to survive deposition. Nothing in nature hates a rival more than sovereignty—which, be it remembered, is the representative of a distinct nationality. Note how inevitably a young queen bee is killed by her own mother when found in the hive by the latter. Humanity has not in this particular evolved as yet very far above bee nature; and the fate of Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, usually befalls the sovereign head of a defeated revolution. To the student of history it is a surprise that the life of Davis was spared when American frenzy was at its height. Think of some of the things which then occurred. Mrs. Surratt and Wirz were hanged; the cruel cotton tax; the negroes were made rulers of the southern whites; it was provided ex post facto that the high moral duty of paying for the emancipated slaves should never be done. While good men and women both of the north and the south will always censure with extreme severity the treatment which Davis as a prisoner received, they ought to note it as a most significant sign of American progress that he was at last allowed to go forth and live without molestation the rest of his life among his old followers.
Before we begin the sketch which we contemplate let us bring out more vividly the novelty of his example by contrasting him with the failing leaders of revolutions mentioned above. Richard Cromwell could be tolerated as a private man by the restored royal government, because his protectorate had been, so far as he himself is considered, a mere accident. It was the mighty Oliver, his father, that overthrew and beheaded Charles I, and then took the reins of rule. These, when he died, came to his son, who in ability and ambition was a cipher. They who set him aside would have been ashamed to confess the slightest fear of him. His captors exiled Napoleon, and Kruger exiled himself. Richard Cromwell, having been cast out of the protectorate, living forgotten in England, is no parallel to Davis spending his last years in Mississippi honored by the entire south with mounting demonstration to his death. Had Napoleon lived in France and Kruger in the Transvaal, each after his overthrow, they would be parallels. As it is, the subsequent life of Davis is without any parallel.