So did this thrice-noble man sacrifice his dearest wishes and with superhuman resolution step into the arena at the command of the fates, to be the target of their wrath against his people.
He was like Hamlet upon whom destiny had imposed a high task far beyond his powers. We can believe that to the end of his presidency Davis sorely sighed more and more often:
“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.”
His official career from beginning to end was full of fatal mistakes. But in every one of these he did the right—to use Lincoln’s grand word—as God gave him to see it. This will more and more through all the future turn his failure to glory. He will be like Hector, who draws the admiration of the world a thousand-fold more than Achilles, his vanquisher.[136]
At the last, when the sword of Grant had beaten down the sword of Lee, and all of us, it seemed to me, knew that it was the highest duty of patriotism to yield our arms, he was for fighting on. Casabianca would not go with those who were leaving the burning ship until his dead father bade him go. Davis would not abandon the cause of his nation without its command; and it could give none; for it was dead and he did not know it. He was trying his hardest to reach the west, intent upon prosecuting the war from a new base, when he was taken.
His capture was accepted by the southern people as the fall of the blue cross. Every man, woman, and child old enough to think, in the late confederacy became sick and faint. Sorrow after sorrow, and grief after grief tore their hearts. The first was the thought, for all the blood we have poured out during four years of such effort on the battlefield as the world never knew before we have lost; we have been beaten, and we are subjugated. The next thought that pierced was, the property that made our homes the sweetest and most comfortable on earth has all been destroyed, and for the rest of their lives our dear ones must pine in hardship and misery. O how this pang actually killed many old men and women! It seems to me that heart failure commenced in the south with the great harvest it gathered in the first five years succeeding the war. But the agony of agonies was that the negroes were put over us. Those five years—particularly the last three of them—are the one ugly dream of my life. To pay his debts, which would have been a small thing to him had he kept his slaves, but which were now monsters, my father overworked himself, while trying to make a cotton crop with freedmen. I did not learn of his imprudence until I had been summoned to see him die. There was something like this in every family. A night of impoverishment, misery, contumely, and insult descended upon us, and the sun would not rise. I kept the stoutest heart that I could. Now and then it was a comforting day dream to imagine how well it would have been for me if I had fallen in the front of my men on the second day of Gettysburg, when I was trying my utmost to make them do the impossibility of charging across the narrow bog staying us, and mixing with the men in blue lining the other side. Had that happened to me I should never have known, in the flesh, of our decisive defeats, nor of the trials of my people after they laid down arms; and even if my grave could not have been found, there would have been at a place here and there for some years honorable mention of me with tears on Memorial Day, to gladden my spirit taking note. This would sometimes be my thought, and thousands of others had like thoughts.
Early in this time of sorrow and suffering the women of the south instituted Memorial Day. Each year when it comes they do rites of remembrance to the fallen soldiers of the confederacy. These soldiers lie in every graveyard from the Ohio and Potomac to the Rio Grande. When the day comes these women in their unforgetting love assemble the people, have praises and lamentations of their dead darlings fitly spoken; and then they deck their graves with the fairest flowers of spring. It is an annual holiday, sacred to grief for our heroes who died in vain. It is the fairest, tenderest, and sweetest testimonial of love ever given—love from those who have nothing else to bestow, lavished upon those who can make no return; and it is further the most splendid and glorious, being the co-operative demonstration of a whole people of “true lovers.”[137]
I cannot say where and when the observance of Memorial Day began. Perhaps Miss Davidson correctly asserts that it was in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1866.[138] It had reached its height at Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1867, when as prelude to decorating the graves in Magnolia cemetery, Timrod’s hymn, containing this oft-quoted passage, was sung:
“Behold! your sisters bring their tears,
And these memorial blooms.
“Small tributes! but your shades shall smile
More proudly on these wreaths to-day,
Than when some cannon-moulded pile
Shall overlook this bay.
“Stoop, angels, hither from the skies!
There is no holier spot of ground
Than where defeated valor lies,
By mourning beauty crowned.”
The “true lovers” could no more forget their living leader in prison than they could forget their soldiers in the grave. “Out of sight, out of mind” could not be said of Davis during his two years’ confinement. The concern of his people mounted steadily. They made all his sufferings their own, lamenting and praying for him as a loved father. When he was about to be released on bond the news gave the south a wilder joy than did the unexpected victory of First Manassas. He was brought in custody to Richmond by a James river steamboat. Mrs. Davis thus describes how he was received: