The Brothers' War

by John C. Reed

Of course had Davis possessed the chief qualifications of popular leadership he would have made a fast friend instead of a bitter enemy of this man, whose rise from low estate to greatness proves that he had in him elements of manhood and virtue that ought to have homage from the highest and proudest.

It was by his course in the Mexican war that Davis commenced life in the eye of the nation. Without canvassing for the place—he never did canvass for a place—he was elected colonel of the First Mississippi volunteers, and “he eagerly and gladly accepted.” The president, authorized by a new law, offered to make him a brigadier general. Mrs. Davis says: “My husband expressed his preference for an elective office; when pressed, he said that he thought volunteer troops raised in a State should be officered by men of their own selection, and that after the elective right of the volunteers ceased, the appointing power should be the governor of the State whose troops were to be commanded by the general. This was his first sacrifice to State rights, and it was a great effort to him.”[128]

General Scott doubted if the percussion lock was as well suited to field use as the flint lock, but Davis knew better. He had his men furnished with the percussion-lock rifle, a very superior arm to the old smooth-bore. He drilled his regiment well. And he kept its members from pillaging.

As the storming of Monterey opened, the head of the column recoiled in confusion from a deadly cross-fire, “producing the utmost confusion among the front of the assaulting brigade. The strong fort, Taneira, which had contributed most to the repulse, now ran up a new flag, and amid the wild cheering of its defenders redoubled its fire of grape and canister and musketry, under which the American lines wavered and were about to break. Colonel Davis, seeing the crisis, without waiting for orders, placed himself at the head of his Mississippians, and gave the order to charge. With prolonged cheers his regiment swept forward through a storm of bullets and bursting shells. Colonel Davis, sword in hand, cleared the ditch at one bound, and cheering his soldiers on, they mounted the works with the impetuosity of a whirlwind, capturing artillery and driving the Mexicans pell-mell back into the stone fort in the rear. In vain they sought to barricade the gate; Davis and McClung [the lieutenant-colonel] burst it open, and leading their men into the fort, compelled its surrender at discretion. Taneira was the key of the situation, and its capture insured victory. On the morning of the 23d of September, the following day, Henderson’s Texas Rangers, Campbell’s Tennesseeans, and Davis’s Mississippians, the latter again leading the assault, stormed and captured El Diabolo, and the next day General Ampudia surrendered the city.”[129]

Davis’s quickness, coolness, and dash—and especially his promptness to take such wise initiative as is permissible to a colonel in action—shone forth conspicuously in this affair.

He was the very soul of the glorious stand of the Americans at Buena Vista against odds of more than 4 to 1. At the opening of the battle a ball drove a part of his spur into the right foot just below the instep, making a very painful wound. He kept his seat as though nothing had happened. Later in the day, his bleeding foot thrown over the pommel, he spurred his horse into leaping a ravine, in which he saw a horse and cart beneath him as he flew over. But his great exploit was the re-entering line of his regiment and Bowles’s Indianians, with which he received the charge of a host of heavy cavalry. His rifles being without bayonets, the hollow square, then the approved mode of defence, was not to be thought of. So necessity, the mother of invention, suggested to him a formation which poured something like two crossing enfilades into the head of the cavalry column. The brilliant conception was brilliantly executed. The carnage that befel the cavalry drove it from the field. Did not the spirit of Napoleon looking on regret that he had not given the pesky Mamelukes like punishment? The world has noted how Sir Colin Campbell learned from Davis the right way of opposing infantry to the onset of heavy cavalry.

The great distinction won most deservedly by Davis, as the colonel of a raw regiment in these important engagements, is, so far as I know, without any parallel. It was but natural that he should always afterwards believe himself to be a great military genius. Of course he had become famous throughout the whole country.

There was a vacancy in one of the United States senatorships from Mississippi, and Davis was appointed to fill it. I need not go into much detail at this point. He was warmly greeted at his entrance into the upper house. He maintained himself with growing ability. While he was independent and self-reliant enough now and then to differ with Calhoun, in the main he followed the latter as his leader. There was a dignity and poise in his nature that suited the senate better than the house of representatives. And he was doubtless frank when he asserted later that he preferred the senate to any other place. As I contemplate his record at this part of his life he impresses me as that one of all the more prominent southern public men who was most fixed in the opinion that the very surest preservative of the union was for the south to be always unflinching and utterly uncompromising in demanding exact enforcement of every constitutional protection of slavery. He loved the union most fondly. It was only the south that he loved more. Conscientious doctrinaire as he was, he believed that the rights of the south were so plain and palpable that if they were but stated they would be conceded by the great mass of the northern people. He thought it was to encourage disunion to surrender even a jot of our claim to equality in the Territories and that the fugitive slave law should be fully enforced. His anticipation was that the more we yielded to the anti-slavery men the more we would be asked to yield, until at last we would be driven into the ditch, when we could save the south only by secession. So he counselled with all his might that the south should resolve to surrender nothing whatever—to go out of the union rather than so to do. Let the north understand this and the abolition party will disappear. That is the only way to save the union. This explains why he refused to support the compromise measures of 1850. He was beaten for governor of Mississippi on that issue. He was classed with the fire-eaters. But that was utterly untrue. Remember that in 1860 he actually contemplated being the democratic presidential candidate, and that Massachusetts sent a delegation to the Charleston convention instructed for him.

A word or two as to his secretaryship of war. He was as up to date in adopting every new thing of merit as he had been in insisting upon percussion-lock rifles for his regiment in the Mexican war. The diligence and prolonged labor which he conscientiously gave his official duties were truly exemplary. I wish especially to have my reader reflect upon two things belonging here. In selecting men to fill offices, from the highest to the lowest, he was utterly regardless of their politics. When remonstrated with by democratic partisans for not giving democrats the preference in competition for appointments, he declared positively that he should always make fitness and qualification the only conditions of such selection. And his actions as long as he held the important office spoke even louder than his words. Surely here is an example for these times to profit by. The second thing really belongs to the same class as the first. It is that when civil war actually prevailed in Kansas between the anti-slavery men on one side and the pro-slavery men on the other, and the commander of the federal troops in the Territory would virtually be absolute in power, though Davis was the very extreme of pro-slavery he gave the place to Colonel Sumner, an outspoken abolitionist, “whose honor, ability, and judgment recommended him as the best man for the difficult duty.”[130]

The secretaryship must be noted as deepening the regular-army grooves in which Davis’s thoughts and tastes had long been moving.