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00:00:00In the State Capitol Building in Frankfort, Kentucky,
00:00:29stand two statues.
00:00:31They depict two of the state's most prominent sons,
00:00:36Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
00:00:44Lincoln stands in the center of the rotunda,
00:00:48Jefferson Davis at the center of controversy.
00:00:52The thing that has really, really done Jefferson Davis in
00:00:57is the attitude that people have towards the Confederate flag,
00:01:01because his reputation is inextricably bound up
00:01:06with all that people think about when they see that image.
00:01:11And so there is no pre-Confederacy Davis.
00:01:17It's almost as if he were, in the average American's mind,
00:01:20born in 1861 out of nowhere.
00:01:24And the idea that there was a Davis before
00:01:27and a Davis after simply does not exist.
00:01:30By 1861, the year the Union split and led to Civil War,
00:01:41Jefferson Davis had already lived over half a century.
00:01:45Those 53 years were not spent, though, as a radical or rebel,
00:01:49fire-eaters they were called.
00:01:51Instead, Jefferson Davis lived as a patriot of the United States of America
00:01:55and as a firm advocate of the Union.
00:02:00Even during the war, Davis often referred to his devotion
00:02:05to what he called the Old Union at that point.
00:02:08He said that he had been educated by the Union,
00:02:12which he was, of course, at West Point,
00:02:14that he had served the Union both as a military man
00:02:17and as a young Army officer and in the Mexican War,
00:02:20that he had served the Union in Washington as a Congressman,
00:02:25as a Senator, as Secretary of War.
00:02:27He always described himself as a National Democrat,
00:02:31not a Southern Democrat.
00:02:34And I think he always held a devotion for the Union.
00:02:38Even the sight of the United States flag during the war
00:02:41often affected him emotionally,
00:02:43because that was the flag to which he had sworn allegiance
00:02:46so many years earlier when he was at West Point.
00:02:49And I think he found the ties very, very difficult to break.
00:02:54Jefferson Davis went from being the South's greatest statesman in the Union
00:02:59to the appointed leader of the Confederate States of America.
00:03:03His uncompromising principles and unwavering devotion to the cause
00:03:07led the Confederacy through its formation
00:03:10and four long and painful years of war.
00:03:13With the same tenacity he fought to keep the United States together,
00:03:17Davis struggled to keep the Confederate States alive,
00:03:21even in the face of inevitable defeat.
00:03:24The war's end found Jefferson Davis imprisoned,
00:03:36charged with treason against the United States.
00:03:39His release after two years was embraced by the people of the South,
00:03:44but Reconstruction was as hard on him personally
00:03:47as it was on the former Confederate States.
00:03:54In the face of all that was lost,
00:03:56Jefferson Davis would go on.
00:03:58He would live another quarter century as president of an extinct nation,
00:04:09a man without a country,
00:04:15and an exile on his native ground.
00:04:32Jefferson Davis lived an epic life,
00:04:35filled with great accomplishment and tremendous loss.
00:04:38But his long life of 81 years started very simply in 1808,
00:04:43born the last of ten to a struggling family on the Kentucky frontier.
00:04:48Jefferson Davis probably had no recollection whatever of his childhood in Kentucky.
00:04:56He was born into an average, middle-class, by-western-terms family.
00:05:01His father was a planter, sometime innkeeper.
00:05:04Built a dog-trot cabin,
00:05:06that is two cabins side-by-side with an open breezeway between them.
00:05:11In the early 1790s, Jefferson Davis' parents,
00:05:14Samuel and Jane Cook Davis,
00:05:16left the land in Georgia that Samuel earned for service in the Revolutionary War.
00:05:21They followed the shifting American frontier to Kentucky.
00:05:26Samuel Davis, like so many people of his time and place,
00:05:30out of this western frontier in the early 1800s,
00:05:33was hoping to improve his own financial station,
00:05:36hoping to improve the situation of his family at large.
00:05:40He had done all right in western Kentucky, but he'd failed to prosper.
00:05:43There was newer land as a result of the Louisiana Purchase,
00:05:46and cheap land available south.
00:05:49In Louisiana first.
00:05:51But once he moved to the Bayou Tex country,
00:05:53Samuel quickly found out that it didn't suit him or his family.
00:05:56The climate seemed unhealthy to them.
00:05:59It was a raw and unsettled country.
00:06:01It was an economy that was going to be based on sugar cultivation,
00:06:04about which Samuel Davis knew nothing whatever.
00:06:07So Samuel Davis decided to move the family again,
00:06:11this time to Mississippi,
00:06:13to the booming cotton economy in the southwestern part of the state.
00:06:16The family settled in Wilkinson County,
00:06:19outside the small town of Woodville.
00:06:21You look at his moves from Georgia to Kentucky to Mississippi,
00:06:25and the years between the early 1790s
00:06:28and the end of the first decade of the 19th century,
00:06:30this was not an easy task,
00:06:32to move a family these kinds of distances at that time.
00:06:36He was obviously ambitious for his family.
00:06:59With the family finally settled,
00:07:01Samuel Davis cleared the land,
00:07:03started his crops,
00:07:05and began building a modest home.
00:07:07He owned nearly 400 acres of southwestern Mississippi frontier,
00:07:11and by 1810 he completed his house,
00:07:14calling it Poplar Grove.
00:07:17They later changed the name to Rosemont,
00:07:24for his wife Jane Cook Davis' love and cultivation of her favorite flower.
00:07:30In the last year of his life,
00:07:32Jefferson Davis wrote of Rosemont,
00:07:34there my memories begin.
00:07:37Woodville, Mississippi, and Rosemont,
00:07:43where young Jefferson Davis traced his first memories,
00:07:47where he went through the boyhood that all boys most remember,
00:07:51was perhaps an idyllic place.
00:07:53It was a picture of the early 19th century rural frontier,
00:07:58in which a boy could ride and hunt and shoot.
00:08:01He had enormous freedom when not under parental guidance.
00:08:05It was a place where he could grow and expand.
00:08:07He could build a host of experiences
00:08:09that are the kinds that fill the imaginations of boys of his time,
00:08:13romping with friends, playing on the river,
00:08:16hunting, riding horseback,
00:08:18everything that the young boys of his time and his class most dreamed of.
00:08:22It's not surprising that his earliest recollections
00:08:26would trace to Woodville and to Rosemont,
00:08:29because that's where he was a boy.
00:08:31That was his first and his last chance to be a boy.
00:08:35He was the adored youngest child,
00:08:38particularly close to the two sisters who were closest to him in age,
00:08:41who had lived, of course, at the family home when he was growing up.
00:08:44He really didn't know his older brothers that well,
00:08:48except for Joseph, who took him in hand in the 1820s.
00:08:52He particularly liked his sister Lucinda Stamps,
00:08:56who lived at the family homestead
00:08:58and continued to live there her whole life.
00:09:00But Rosemont never grew into the expansive plantation
00:09:04that Samuel Davis dreamed of.
00:09:06They were not the landed wealthy.
00:09:08They were not the aristocrats that say the first families of Virginia
00:09:11were a thousand miles to the east.
00:09:13Yet they were there in a time and place
00:09:15where they could become among the first families of Mississippi,
00:09:18setting up a new aristocracy and a new frontier.
00:09:21And as a young boy, Jefferson Davis witnessed firsthand
00:09:24the most integral part of that aristocracy, slavery.
00:09:29He was born in a slave society.
00:09:31He was raised in a slave society.
00:09:33His father owned slaves.
00:09:35Never very many, but his father owned slaves.
00:09:37The one tangible thing he inherited from his father was a slave.
00:09:41Really, it's the only tangible thing he inherited from his father
00:09:43was this one slave, James Pemberton.
00:09:45The one thing, though, that Samuel Davis valued more than slaves,
00:09:50more than land, was education.
00:09:53But Frontier, Mississippi offered few opportunities
00:09:56for his bright, beloved Jefferson.
00:09:58So Samuel sent his eight-year-old son
00:10:01on a 700-mile journey north to central Kentucky.
00:10:04Jefferson Davis would call St. Thomas College home for the next two years.
00:10:10Just the journey there alone stayed in Davis' mind for the rest of his life.
00:10:14I think perhaps the first opening of his eyes to the fact
00:10:17that there was a world beyond the limits of his father's plantation.
00:10:21Not only was young Jefferson leaving his family and his home,
00:10:26he was entering a Catholic institution and, by his own recollection,
00:10:30was the only non-Catholic boy there.
00:10:33Samuel Davis, a Baptist, to send his son from Mississippi to Kentucky
00:10:39to a Roman Catholic school, and Jefferson Davis went.
00:10:42We're talking about eight years old.
00:10:44He was a child.
00:10:46It was really unusual.
00:10:49During those two years, Samuel sent letters to his son
00:10:52reminding him of the importance of education.
00:10:55In one letter he wrote,
00:10:57Use every possible means to acquire useful knowledge,
00:11:01as knowledge is power,
00:11:03the want of which has brought mischief and misery
00:11:06on your father in old age.
00:11:16When suitable academies opened in Mississippi,
00:11:19Jefferson Davis returned home,
00:11:21continuing his education at both Jefferson College
00:11:24and Wilkinson Academy.
00:11:27Mathematical prowess would always elude him.
00:11:30It was the humanities, especially classical languages
00:11:33and history in which Davis excelled.
00:11:36But fortunately for young Davis,
00:11:38lessons were not just reserved for the classroom.
00:11:41When he was attending the academy there in Woodville,
00:11:45he came home one day very distressed
00:11:48that the schoolmaster had disciplined him
00:11:50and he didn't want to go to school anymore.
00:11:52And so Samuel said,
00:11:54Okay, if you don't want to go to school,
00:11:55you can do the work of a man.
00:11:57And Samuel put him out to work alongside the slaves
00:12:00and work in the fields.
00:12:02And Jefferson Davis found out very quickly
00:12:04that this was not exactly how he wanted to spend his life
00:12:07and so he went back to school.
00:12:09And by the early 1820s,
00:12:10the most prominent university west of the Appalachians
00:12:14was Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
00:12:17At Transylvania University,
00:12:24young Jefferson Davis' intellect flourished
00:12:28as he embraced the institution's focus on the humanities.
00:12:32Jefferson Davis' years at Transylvania University
00:12:35were perhaps the happiest of his young,
00:12:38and I mean young, manhood.
00:12:40It was opening to his intellect
00:12:42to encounter the distinguished staff
00:12:45at this Western University.
00:12:47He made friends quickly.
00:12:48He became a popular student there at Transylvania
00:12:53and he gave an oration at the end of his junior year
00:12:56and the local newspaper there in Lexington praised it
00:12:59and said that Jefferson Davis was an individual
00:13:01who would make a name for himself in the world.
00:13:04While young Jefferson was expanding his world view
00:13:07beyond the scope of plantation life,
00:13:10back home in Woodville,
00:13:12his father struggled to keep him in school.
00:13:15He did fall on hard financial times
00:13:17and he was saved by his oldest son, Joseph,
00:13:20who became Jefferson's surrogate father.
00:13:22Joseph Davis had become an attorney in Natchez.
00:13:24He'd become a very prominent man
00:13:26and he'd begun buying up a lot of land as well.
00:13:29He was beginning to accumulate the wealth
00:13:31that would make him one of the richest men
00:13:33in the state of Mississippi.
00:13:34And he did come in and help out his father
00:13:36at the very end of his father's life.
00:13:38In fact, Samuel died at Joseph Davis' plantation
00:13:43up in Warren County, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg.
00:13:46I cannot describe the anguish I felt
00:14:07at the news of the death of my father.
00:14:10He was apparent ever dear to me,
00:14:12but rendered more so, if possible,
00:14:14by the disastrous storms
00:14:16that attended the winter of his old age.
00:14:19When I saw him last,
00:14:20he told me we would probably never see each other again.
00:14:24But I still hope to meet him once more.
00:14:27But heaven has refused my wish.
00:14:33Jefferson Davis, August 2nd, 1824.
00:14:42Joseph Davis immediately took over as father figure
00:14:49for his brother Jefferson.
00:14:51And his first decision was that Jefferson
00:14:54would not graduate from Transylvania University.
00:14:57Through a political connection
00:14:59with then Secretary of War John C. Calhoun,
00:15:02Joseph secured an appointment for Jefferson
00:15:04at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
00:15:07Well, think about Jefferson Davis
00:15:09Jefferson Davis is a young man of 16
00:15:11who's been at Transylvania a year and a half
00:15:13and has sort of become,
00:15:15they wouldn't have used a term like big man on campus,
00:15:17but he's a notable person.
00:15:18And he's up in the senior class now
00:15:20and he's a person to be reckoned with
00:15:22and all of a sudden he would go to West Point,
00:15:24which is a long way away,
00:15:26way up in New York State.
00:15:27He'd never been so far away
00:15:28and he'd have to be a freshman.
00:15:30You'd have to go back to knowing nobody,
00:15:32being nobody,
00:15:33and being a very long way from home.
00:15:35Jefferson Davis was obviously not enthusiastic about going,
00:15:39but Joseph Davis wanted him to go.
00:15:41Joseph Davis insisted that you go.
00:15:43And Jefferson Davis,
00:15:44like many other teenagers before and since,
00:15:47when parental authority,
00:15:49though Joseph is surrogate parental authority,
00:15:51say go, you go.
00:15:53Jefferson Davis and the U.S. Military Academy
00:15:56were not a perfect fit from the start.
00:15:59The idea of going into an academic environment
00:16:02in which discipline and obedience,
00:16:04unquestioning obedience,
00:16:06were the rule of the day,
00:16:07did not necessarily come naturally to him.
00:16:10But Jefferson Davis wasn't your model student.
00:16:12Indeed, Sylvanus Thayer,
00:16:16who is seen as the real father of West Point,
00:16:20used to refer to Jefferson Davis
00:16:22as his unnatural child
00:16:24because Jefferson Davis was a problem,
00:16:26a disciplinary problem at West Point.
00:16:35While at West Point,
00:16:36Davis met fellow cadets Robert E. Lee,
00:16:39Albert Sidney Johnston,
00:16:40and Leonidas Polk,
00:16:42men who would all feature prominently
00:16:44in the war between the states.
00:16:46Throughout the rest of his life,
00:16:48he would always look back on those friendships
00:16:50formed at West Point as the best of his life.
00:16:53Benny Haven's Tavern was a tavern
00:17:00near the campus at West Point.
00:17:03It was off limits for students to go there.
00:17:05But students did go there.
00:17:07They would go there and they would smoke
00:17:09and they would eat and they would drink.
00:17:10Jefferson Davis seems to have been
00:17:12a fun-loving, enthusiastic,
00:17:14young college student,
00:17:16just like all college students in all eras.
00:17:18He probably had all the makings of a good frat boy
00:17:20by later definitions.
00:17:22Edgar Allan Poe, a classmate of Jefferson Davis's,
00:17:29was miserable at West Point
00:17:31and often sought comfort at Benny Haven's.
00:17:34Davis commiserated,
00:17:36stealing away along that well-worn path to the tavern
00:17:39to join Poe for late-night merriment.
00:17:41Jefferson Davis got caught down there.
00:17:45He was caught by one of the cadre,
00:17:48that is officers in West Point were down there.
00:17:51They caught Davis with some of his fellow students
00:17:54and Davis was put on a formal trial.
00:17:57He was court-martialed.
00:17:58As was the custom at West Point,
00:18:00the cadets conducted their own defense.
00:18:02Davis conducted his own.
00:18:03The boys were ingenious though.
00:18:05They could not prove that Jefferson Davis had taken a drink
00:18:08at Benny Haven's tavern,
00:18:10because what the boys would do when they would get ready to drink,
00:18:12they would all face the wall.
00:18:14They could honestly say,
00:18:15I did not see somebody taking a drink,
00:18:17because they were facing the wall,
00:18:19so they couldn't see anybody taking a drink.
00:18:21He made the technical argument
00:18:23that the rules of the military academy
00:18:27forbid cadets from drinking ardent spirits.
00:18:30And what he drank, he claimed, was beer.
00:18:33And therefore, beer wasn't an ardent spirit,
00:18:36and therefore he did not get dismissed from West Point.
00:18:40But it was actions like this
00:18:42that really drove Sylvanas Thayer crazy.
00:18:45In previous years, parties at West Point had gone completely out of control.
00:18:53So, beginning in 1826,
00:18:55Superintendent Thayer decided to ban the tradition of Christmas eggnog.
00:19:00But Jefferson Davis was amongst a group of cadets who said,
00:19:03we're going to have eggnog no matter what.
00:19:05And they obtained the spirits necessary,
00:19:08provided allegedly by the same Benny Havens.
00:19:12And the eggnog was made on Christmas Eve,
00:19:15and people began to drink it.
00:19:17After midnight Christmas morning,
00:19:19Jefferson Davis' north barracks became eggnog central.
00:19:23And Thayer, no fool, sent out officers looking for drunk cadets.
00:19:28Jefferson Davis learned they were coming,
00:19:30and he ran into one of the rooms and called out,
00:19:33put away the grog boys.
00:19:34Of course, one of the officers was standing in the room,
00:19:36and so he was a day late and a dollar short.
00:19:39But that may have saved his career at West Point.
00:19:41Because he was ordered to go back to his room by this officer,
00:19:45and he went back to his room.
00:19:47The party got completely out of hand,
00:19:50and the chief participants in it were expelled from West Point.
00:19:55Jefferson Davis did not receive demerits for that at all.
00:19:59There were so many boys involved in this eggnog riot.
00:20:02When the investigation was held,
00:20:04the superintendent realized if he threw out everybody connected with the riot,
00:20:08he would have thrown out such a large percentage of the school,
00:20:11that the school could be in trouble.
00:20:13And so he was looking for ways to keep people in.
00:20:22Despite demerits, pranks, and a relatively low class standing,
00:20:26Jefferson Davis did graduate in 1828.
00:20:29He would always look back on West Point with fondness,
00:20:32and regarded the institution with great respect.
00:20:35Years later, when Davis was Secretary of War,
00:20:38there was an opportunity to create a military academy exclusively for Southerners.
00:20:43He opposed it.
00:20:44In a letter written in April of 1854, he voiced his dissent.
00:20:49Experience has shown that the bringing together of young men from all parts of the country
00:20:54at a period of life when they imbibe lasting impressions
00:20:58creates friendships among Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western youths.
00:21:10After a visit home to Mississippi, Jefferson Davis began his military career as a second lieutenant.
00:21:16His commission was signed by his childhood hero, President Andrew Jackson.
00:21:22Very few really stayed in the Army in the 1820s and 30s.
00:21:27The Army was not a wonderful path to career advancement.
00:21:32For Davis, as for so many out of the Frontier Army,
00:21:35it was a case of going from one post to another, all of them very much alike.
00:21:39Today I am 22 years old, and when I was a boy and dreamed with my eyes open, as most do,
00:21:54I thought of ripening fame at this age, of wealth and power.
00:21:58But as I grew older, I saw the folly of this, but still thought,
00:22:03at the age of 22, I should be on the highway to all ambition desired.
00:22:09And lo, I am 22, and the same obscure poor being that I was at 15.
00:22:17Jefferson Davis, Fort Winnebago, June 3rd, 1829.
00:22:33And in the letter he mentions the possibility of going to law school,
00:22:36that he's ordered law books.
00:22:38Here again, we think he was probably emulating Joseph Davis, his brother, who was a lawyer.
00:22:44And being a lawyer was a profession that was looked up to in Mississippi.
00:22:48It was also a road to politics.
00:22:51Jefferson Davis often took time on his many furloughs home to Mississippi
00:22:56to seek counsel from Brother Joseph on what to do with his life.
00:23:00Joseph Davis continually encouraged his younger brother to stay in the military.
00:23:05At the same time, restless Americans moved confidently westward,
00:23:10often sparking conflict on native lands.
00:23:13And in 1832, when Jefferson Davis returned to Fort Crawford,
00:23:17he saw the end of the Black Hawk War.
00:23:20Jefferson Davis will miss most of what is called the Black Hawk War.
00:23:24That is, he'll miss active engagement in any of its battles.
00:23:28But he'll be present when Black Hawk himself, the great warrior, is forced to surrender.
00:23:33Black Hawk was taken to Fort Crawford, where Colonel Zachary Taylor assigned Jefferson Davis
00:23:38to be the escort guard, taking the chief to St. Louis.
00:23:42Black Hawk, of course, was to be sent east in chains.
00:23:45Davis got the chains taken off of him,
00:23:47because he knew how they would humiliate a proud man like an Indian chief.
00:23:51Davis understood how this proud man, once leader of his people,
00:23:56must have felt in this situation of abject humiliation.
00:24:00What Davis, of course, could not know is that 30 years later,
00:24:03he would be in exactly the same spot himself.
00:24:12While Jefferson Davis was at Fort Crawford, he fell in love with Sarah Knox Taylor,
00:24:17daughter of his commanding officer, Colonel Zachary Taylor.
00:24:21The feeling was mutual, and the two spoke of marriage.
00:24:25While Jefferson Davis and Colonel Taylor got along well at first,
00:24:30a rift occurred when Davis voted against him during the court-martial of a fellow officer.
00:24:35After that, Taylor would not give Sarah and Jefferson his blessing.
00:24:40Dreams, my dear Sarah, are our weakest thoughts,
00:24:51and yet by dreams I have been lately almost crazed,
00:24:55for they were of you,
00:24:57and the sleeping imagination painted you not such as I left you,
00:25:01not such as I could like to see you.
00:25:04Sarah, whatever I may be hereafter,
00:25:07I will ascribe to you.
00:25:09Neglected by you, I should be worse than nothing.
00:25:13And if the few good qualities I possess shall,
00:25:16under your smiles, yield of fruit,
00:25:19it will be yours.
00:25:21Jefferson Davis, Fort Gibson, Oklahoma Territory, December 16th, 1834.
00:25:39Knox was every bit as strong-headed as Jefferson Davis
00:25:42and kept pushing them for permission.
00:25:45Davis even resigned from the Army
00:25:48because the stated reason why Colonel and Mrs. Taylor
00:25:52would not permit the marriage
00:25:54was because they did not want their daughter
00:25:56marrying a military officer.
00:25:58The Taylors didn't want their daughters to go through
00:26:00what the daughter's mother had.
00:26:02So naturally, every Taylor daughter wound up marrying an Army officer.
00:26:06In May, 1835, Jefferson Davis resigned his commission
00:26:11in the United States Army.
00:26:13And after two years, the Taylors finally consented to the marriage.
00:26:17Sarah and Jefferson wed the following month.
00:26:21Probably no man was ever happier than Jefferson Davis
00:26:24when he finally got permission to marry Sarah Taylor.
00:26:27He persuaded her very early to come on to his plantation
00:26:32because I think he simply could not wait to be home
00:26:35in the new plantation his brother Joseph was setting him up with.
00:26:38He couldn't wait to have Sarah, now Davis, there with him
00:26:42to begin their lives, to begin families,
00:26:44to start the next chapter in the lives they were to have together.
00:26:49And he persuaded her, in fact, that it was perfectly healthy to do so,
00:26:54even though this was the summer.
00:26:56It was known as the sick season,
00:26:58where people believed that the low-lying areas
00:27:01around the southern Mississippi River bred disease,
00:27:04most notably, malaria.
00:27:07The Davis plantations lay right along the Mississippi River.
00:27:11In terms of feet above sea level, you're talking in the double digits.
00:27:14It's very low ground.
00:27:16It's swampy in those places that haven't been cleared.
00:27:19And Jefferson was concerned that he and his new bride
00:27:24moved to safer ground.
00:27:26So Jefferson took Sarah, in August of 1835,
00:27:30to his sister's plantation in Louisiana, Locust Grove.
00:27:34But by then, it was too late.
00:27:37Both of them were struck down, however.
00:27:40Both were struck by a virulent form of malaria.
00:27:43She got much sicker, much faster.
00:27:46And as they settled in to go through their illness,
00:27:49and they hoped convalescence at Locust Grove,
00:27:52perhaps because of her smaller constitution,
00:27:55Sarah much more quickly succumbed.
00:27:58Sarah and Jefferson shared few memories
00:28:01from only three months of marriage,
00:28:03but their love of music,
00:28:05especially the song,
00:28:06Fairy Bell's Haunted Locust Grove.
00:28:09I dreamt, t'was but a dream
00:28:13that were my bright love.
00:28:18I dreamt...
00:28:20She dies in a delirium,
00:28:21even while her husband Jefferson is in another room
00:28:24in the same house himself,
00:28:25almost delirious from the disease,
00:28:27and hallucinating that he can hear her singing.
00:28:30While fairy bells came tinkling over the water,
00:28:40merrily, merrily, merrily it fell,
00:28:45merrily, merrily, merrily it fell,
00:28:50the echo of that fairy bell.
00:29:03Jefferson himself escaped death,
00:29:05but he almost died,
00:29:07and he was severely ill for a number of months after that,
00:29:10and the ravages of this malarial attack were with him
00:29:14until he did die 54 years later.
00:29:19Jefferson Davis was shattered
00:29:22by his young wife Knox's death.
00:29:26He goes into a period of grieving
00:29:30that will last almost a decade.
00:29:33He reeled emotionally and literally.
00:29:37I think for the rest of his life
00:29:40he utterly cherished the memory of Sarah Knox.
00:29:44He will never be the same man again.
00:29:47The joyous, fun-loving, impish,
00:29:50sometimes miscreantish young man
00:29:52he'd been at West Point and even in the Army
00:29:54disappears with Sarah Taylor's death
00:29:58to be replaced by the more cool, the aloof,
00:30:02the Jefferson Davis that people would come to know
00:30:04when he went into his public life.
00:30:12But before life after Sarah could begin,
00:30:15Jefferson Davis had to recover.
00:30:18The malaria that took his young bride
00:30:20had come very close to taking his life as well.
00:30:23He was going to start farming up there,
00:30:29Davis been with his brother Joseph,
00:30:31but he was still very weak.
00:30:34He was still basically a sick man
00:30:36in the fall of 1835.
00:30:47Evidence of just how deeply the loss of Sarah hurt Davis,
00:30:50and I think as well evidence of just how much
00:30:52he felt his own agency in her death,
00:30:55is the fact that for the first two years
00:30:57after Sarah's passing,
00:30:58Jefferson Davis became almost a total recluse.
00:31:01It took him nearly a decade to cope with Sarah's loss,
00:31:05and in the end it was largely through the aid
00:31:07of his brother Joseph,
00:31:09who provided a plantation for Jefferson,
00:31:11who provided the money he needed,
00:31:12who provided him his first slaves.
00:31:14It's Joseph who begins to force Jefferson Davis
00:31:17out of the walls that he's built around himself
00:31:19to deal with his grief.
00:31:22For reasons not altogether clear,
00:31:25Joseph never titled Briarfield in his brother's name.
00:31:29So in 1835, Jefferson Davis was a widower with no career,
00:31:34and who truly owned just one thing,
00:31:37the inherited slave James Pemberton,
00:31:40who had been Davis's constant companion
00:31:42since the frontier posts.
00:31:44He returned with Davis and was at first the only person
00:31:49helping him clear this new plantation,
00:31:51the land that his brother Joseph had given him.
00:31:54And the two of them worked and they built a house
00:31:56and they cleared the land and started it,
00:31:59and only gradually did Davis acquire some additional slaves.
00:32:03Over the years, James Pemberton would become Davis's most trusted plantation manager,
00:32:10or overseer.
00:32:12Especially as Jefferson began studying in the vast library
00:32:15his brother had amassed at Hurricane Plantation
00:32:18and was looking beyond Davis Bend and his own broken heart.
00:32:22Joseph teaches him how to be a planter, a slave owner,
00:32:31how to be a southern gentleman,
00:32:34and the issues on which southern gentlemen were basing their heritage and their society.
00:32:44But in 1838, Jefferson Davis yet again seemed to question his life path.
00:32:51Whether it was the ghost of Sarah Knox Taylor,
00:32:54or the ghosts of his own insecurities that motivated him,
00:32:58Davis took a trip to Washington, D.C.,
00:33:01seeking a commission in the expanding United States Army.
00:33:05This is the same Jefferson Davis who was so tired of the military,
00:33:09even when he was at West Point, that he thought about leaving.
00:33:12This is the same Jefferson Davis who, doing frontier duty,
00:33:15thought the military had ruined him for any other occupation,
00:33:19but then he would turn around and think about,
00:33:21maybe I should go into railroading,
00:33:22or maybe I should go home and be a planter.
00:33:24He always wants to be somewhere, he always wants to do something,
00:33:27but it's often not what he's doing or where he is at the moment.
00:33:31Politics? I am out of my element,
00:33:43and naturally slip back to seeding and plowing the canebrake in which I live.
00:33:47I am as retired as a man on the great thoroughfare of the Mississippi can be.
00:33:52Jefferson Davis, letters written from Briarfield, late 1830s.
00:34:06For the next five years, he did not stray very far from Davis Bend,
00:34:10resolving to be a southern planter.
00:34:12But the political bug had bitten Davis, however gently at first,
00:34:16during his visit to Washington.
00:34:18True to character, Brother Joseph did everything to encourage him.
00:34:26In August 1840, Jefferson Davis arrived at the Warren County Courthouse in Vicksburg,
00:34:32where he was named a delegate to the Mississippi Democratic State Convention.
00:34:37And Davis would be, from that moment on, he would be in Mississippi politics.
00:34:42He moved along very quickly in Mississippi politics.
00:34:44His first attempt at office, he ran for the legislature from Warren County.
00:34:49He lost. Warren County was a Whig county,
00:34:52and in fact, the regular Democratic candidate dropped out of the race
00:34:56only a couple weeks before the election.
00:34:58It was his first try for elective office, and he didn't make it.
00:35:01This ended him to his Democratic fellows,
00:35:03because he was willing to pick up the torch when it was down,
00:35:06to go out and fight the good fight, even though he didn't win.
00:35:10Despite his defeat, Davis did not quit.
00:35:14And in 1844, he was named a Democratic elector for the state of Mississippi.
00:35:19Davis went out and camp, he went all across Mississippi,
00:35:21campaigning for the Democratic ticket for James K. Polk.
00:35:24And when James K. Polk was elected president and he carried Mississippi,
00:35:28again, that helped Jefferson Davis.
00:35:30He was now becoming a known quantity in Mississippi, apart from Warren County.
00:35:36Politics was not the only area where Joseph took an interest in Jefferson's life.
00:35:41Joseph took it upon himself to invite down to Davis Bend,
00:35:45the spirited young Verena Banks Howell, daughter of Joseph's close friend in Natchez.
00:35:51For the first time, at least as far as the record shows, he really has an interest in a woman,
00:35:58for the first time since Sarah Knox's death.
00:36:00Sarah Knox died in 1835.
00:36:02We are now talking about the beginnings of 1844.
00:36:06So we've gone through eight years, and he has really spent this young woman.
00:36:12We do know that she had somewhat ambivalent feelings about him.
00:36:16She wrote a letter shortly after meeting him in which she said she thought he might be an older man,
00:36:20but then he might be a young man. He seemed to be both.
00:36:23He seemed pleasant and affable, yet on the other hand, he seemed proud and aloof.
00:36:28She was not sure she liked him.
00:36:31When she leaves to go back to Natchez, the letters he writes her, this is a fellow who is just head over heels in love.
00:36:38He talks about he can't bear from her sight.
00:36:41He can't bear for the male to come on the steamboat and not get anything from her.
00:36:45He's all concerned about her.
00:36:47My own dearest Verena, I doubt not of any man who, having an opportunity to know you, would not love you.
00:36:57In addition to the desire I have to be with you every day and all day,
00:37:02it seems to me, but proper and necessary, that I should announce to your parents my wish to marry you.
00:37:10Jefferson Davis, Hurricane Plantation, March 8th, 1844.
00:37:16But, history seems to be repeating itself because there's this vast age difference.
00:37:24And Verena Davis' mother is concerned about this age difference.
00:37:29She's also concerned because she knew how important Sarah Knox was to Jefferson,
00:37:34and how devastating Sarah Knox's death was to Jefferson.
00:37:38She knew that because of Joseph's relationship with her husband, William Howell.
00:37:43On February 26th, 1845, Jefferson and Verena were married at her parents' Natchez, Mississippi home, called the Briars.
00:37:53Jefferson Davis was 26 when he married the first time to Sarah Knox Taylor.
00:38:01He was 37 when he married Verena.
00:38:05There's a big difference between being in your mid-20s and in your mid-30s,
00:38:09especially if by your mid-30s you have already lost a wife, you have lost several of your siblings, your parents.
00:38:17By the 1840s, he knew a lot of tragedy in his personal life.
00:38:23He knew that things did not always go as you planned.
00:38:26The newlyweds returned to Mississippi, to Davis Bend, and Jefferson resumed his life as a southern planter.
00:38:47To be a planter in the 19th century was more than to sit on a veranda and sit mint juleps.
00:38:52Sometimes the picture that we place in our mind sees a person who does very little except to enjoy life.
00:39:01In actuality, the planter leader had tremendous responsibilities and tremendous obligations.
00:39:07First of all, they had to run a business.
00:39:10They were agrarian capitalists, really.
00:39:13They weren't farmers.
00:39:14They liked to talk about themselves as farmers in the land.
00:39:17But they were capitalists providing a crop, a product, and looking into the world market to sell it.
00:39:24With a social structure similar to the class system in England,
00:39:28the southern planter lorded over the land and a race of people who looked to him as master.
00:39:34Davis believed that in the south, the southern society could not survive without slavery
00:39:41because he believed, as did most white southerners, in fact most white northerners and white Europeans at the time as well,
00:39:46that blacks were inferior to whites.
00:39:48And when you had large numbers of blacks, the superior race had to control the inferior race.
00:39:53The method of control was slavery.
00:39:55Jefferson Davis, like every other American in the 19th century, very few exceptions, was a racist.
00:40:04In that, I mean that Americans in the 19th century, be they an Abraham Lincoln or be they a Jefferson Davis,
00:40:12believed that the Caucasian race had an obligation, as what they called the superior race,
00:40:20to take care of less fortunate people.
00:40:23There were some masters who truly believed that slavery was a good thing,
00:40:28that we are introducing you into a higher civilized society.
00:40:35And so they weren't burdened down with the guilt.
00:40:40I mean, they felt that they were really doing you a favor by introducing you through this form of apprenticeship.
00:40:48Davis believed that slavery was good for blacks because he said it was the great Christianizing and civilizing mission for white southerners to bring heathen Africans to the United States,
00:41:00Christianize them and civilize them.
00:41:02In 1860, when the slave regime ended, he had 103 slaves, so he went from one to 103.
00:41:08There was natural increase on his slave plantations.
00:41:11I mean, men and women had children.
00:41:13He kept buying slaves throughout the 1840s and 50s.
00:41:17There is no evidence that he sold slaves.
00:41:20Beyond the numbers, modern scholarship is divided over the day-to-day specifics of slave life on the Davis brothers' plantations,
00:41:28but most scholars agree on the generalities of slave life on Davis Bend.
00:41:34He had grown up with slavery.
00:41:36Slavery was a fact of life for him.
00:41:38Slavery was provided for in the Constitution.
00:41:42Slavery was an American institution, not just a southern one.
00:41:47Northerners owned slaves, too. He knew that.
00:41:49I think he saw slavery as a beneficent institution, mainly from watching what went on around him as far as the treatment of slaves.
00:41:58His brother Joseph was known as a particularly tolerant and easy slave owner, gave his slaves a lot of freedoms.
00:42:06And because of their isolated location, Davis didn't have the opportunity to observe other slave owners who might have been more harsh and doctrinaire.
00:42:16The disagreement, however, surrounds the lack of written records from the 1830s through 1865,
00:42:23versus the family's oral tradition that's based on written accounts from nearly half a century after the fact.
00:42:29A letter from Joseph's granddaughter, written in the late 1880s, and Verena's own memoir, written in 1890.
00:42:37Both accounts depict a utopian portrait of slave life on Davis Bend.
00:42:42And the two Davis brothers were, if anything, very atypical slaveholders.
00:42:48For a start, they didn't believe in cruelty.
00:42:51Jefferson Davis would always have difficulty keeping an overseer because they would be too rough on the slaves.
00:42:59He did not.
00:43:00He loathed the idea of cruelty to a child, and he loathed the idea of cruelty to a slave, as he always seemed to equate the two.
00:43:09Slaves were like children in Davis's mind.
00:43:11When one of the Davis slaves was accused of misbehaving, he allowed the slaves to compose a jury in a court of their own, and they tried each other.
00:43:20They were tried by their peers, in fact.
00:43:23And he found, incidentally, that the slaves tended to be much more harsh in the punishments they dealt out to one of their own than Davis was likely to be.
00:43:31I don't get any feeling that there's a general schooling, but there certainly was not, there was no discouragement.
00:43:37I mean, you sometimes hear that the slaves were discouraged from becoming literate.
00:43:42That was certainly not the case with the Davises.
00:43:45They had too much respect for learning and literacy, and quite different from some plantation systems.
00:43:52There is no evidence whatsoever that there was any misconduct toward the female slaves.
00:44:01As I said, there's nobody walking down the back path at Briarfield or Hurricane.
00:44:07There was a respect for the family and the children and the unity.
00:44:12In the context of the time, and it's important to remember this is in the context of that time,
00:44:17these were enormously enlightened and benign views on slaves and on slavery itself.
00:44:24There's no question that Davis believed that slavery was the proper station for blacks in American society.
00:44:31He didn't think they were sufficiently intelligent or mature or responsible enough to function on their own.
00:44:39The whole truth, though, will never be known, because during the war between the states,
00:44:43the books and records at Hurricane Plantation were burned,
00:44:46and the records at Briarfield were plundered and scattered by Union troops.
00:44:51What remains are fragments and anecdotes, like those of the slaves who contacted Davis after the war.
00:44:57One of his former slaves, who was living somewhere in the north, I think,
00:45:01heard that he had been released from prison and was very poor and was looking for, you know, a job or something.
00:45:09And he said, well, Mr. Davis was always very kind to me,
00:45:14and if a thousand dollars would be of any help to him, I would be glad to advance it.
00:45:19Now, that's a fair statement of confidence, your former master.
00:45:25One surviving specific element that Davis scholars agree on
00:45:29is the historical record detailing the relationship Davis had with his first slave, James Pemberton.
00:45:36He and James Pemberton would sit and talk over the plantation affairs.
00:45:40Davis would always invite him to sit down and they would chat.
00:45:44And when the session was over, he would give James Pemberton a cigar.
00:45:49So I guess James Pemberton likes cigars, too.
00:45:52It's a very interesting relationship that they could be so close.
00:45:55It was crucial that Davis have a trusted overseer,
00:45:58because for the next 20 years Davis would not stay at Briarfield on a regular basis.
00:46:03Politics was calling, and Washington and the campaign trail would be his primary home.
00:46:09Jefferson Davis could no longer hide from the world.
00:46:12He couldn't remain a reclusive planter, burying himself in books at night.
00:46:17Issues like slavery, the annexation of Texas, and the incendiary issue of tariffs
00:46:23all conspired to draw him away from his plantation and thrust him squarely into politics.
00:46:29So in 1845, Jefferson Davis ran for the United States House of Representatives.
00:46:36He had covered the state as a presidential elector.
00:46:39But he was elected to Congress in 45, and he went to Washington to take his seat in December of 45.
00:46:45So 1845 is a notable year.
00:46:47He begins a political career, and he begins a second marriage.
00:46:50But like most of Jefferson Davis' years, 1845 was bittersweet.
00:46:56In the face of new and great accomplishments, he lost his beloved mother, Jane Cook Davis.
00:47:02He left the campaign trail.
00:47:04He went down to Woodville to her funeral.
00:47:07She is buried at Rosemont, the Davis family home there.
00:47:11But politics called, and he left the funeral and went back to campaign.
00:47:32Jefferson Davis was elected to the House of Representatives in November 1845,
00:47:38and in December made the journey east to take office for what, for him,
00:47:43was going to be a very brief tenure indeed.
00:47:45Freshmen congressmen then, as now, were expected to be seen and not heard,
00:47:51to learn the ropes, to learn where everything was,
00:47:55to learn who the committee chairpeople were,
00:47:57to learn the ways of the House of Representatives.
00:48:00But that was not Davis' way.
00:48:02He stood up to make his first speech on the floor of the House
00:48:04ten days after he'd taken office.
00:48:07This was virtually unheard of.
00:48:09To all which has been said of the inherent powers of this government,
00:48:13I answer, it is the creature of the states.
00:48:17As such, it could have no inherent power.
00:48:20All it possesses was delegated by the states,
00:48:24and it is therefore that our Constitution is not an instrument of limitations,
00:48:29but of grants.
00:48:31Jefferson Davis, House Floor, 1846.
00:48:37Jefferson Davis' participation and speeches caught the attention of fellow congressmen
00:48:42and former president, John Quincy Adams.
00:48:45In addition to his sectional and states' rights platform,
00:48:52Jefferson Davis championed several national causes.
00:48:55One, in particular, has had lasting social impact,
00:48:59the Smithsonian Institution.
00:49:01Davis was very interested in progress,
00:49:04and progress of all kinds of material progress.
00:49:06He was interested in technology.
00:49:08He was interested in science.
00:49:10And the Smithsonian Institution was really the first national institution in this country
00:49:17that had a mission of trying to do something about advancing technology.
00:49:23Perhaps echoing in part his own educational fortune,
00:49:27Jefferson Davis enthusiastically supported such an establishment,
00:49:31calling knowledge,
00:49:33the common cement that could unite the Union into one mass.
00:49:38Congress, though, was divided on whether the national institution should exist.
00:49:42But Davis' passionate speeches and foresight saw the measure pass,
00:49:47and President Polk signed into law on August 10, 1846,
00:49:52the bill that created the Smithsonian Institution.
00:49:56We don't know how his whole first term as a congressman would have played out,
00:50:00because the war with Mexico came along to put an end to it.
00:50:03Tensions between Mexico and the United States
00:50:06inflamed over the U.S. annexation of Texas,
00:50:09and the situation very quickly evolved into a border dispute.
00:50:13President Polk orders General Taylor in the march to the Rio Grande
00:50:16to assert American sovereignty.
00:50:18On the banks of the Rio Grande, the inevitable happens.
00:50:22Taylor's men and Mexican soldiers come in contact with each other,
00:50:25and they're shooting.
00:50:27And the shooting occurs on the northern bank of the Rio Grande,
00:50:31and James K. Polk says that American soldiers are shot in American territory,
00:50:35therefore we must go to war.
00:50:37And he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Mexico,
00:50:40which he gets.
00:50:42I have the honor to acknowledge and accept the commission of colonel
00:50:45in the 1st Regiment of Mississippi Volunteers.
00:50:48For this most gratifying mark of confidence,
00:50:51I return my sincerest thanks.
00:50:54Jefferson Davis, Washington D.C., June 20th, 1846.
00:51:00Verena Davis was not at all happy that her husband Jefferson Davis
00:51:04wanted to go off, become colonel of the Mississippi Volunteers,
00:51:07and go off to war with Mexico.
00:51:09There will be hints then and later that Davis will have difficulty making up his mind,
00:51:14difficulty completely committing himself to something.
00:51:17He always wants to be somewhere, he always wants to do something,
00:51:21but it's often not what he's doing or where he is at the moment.
00:51:25And his desire to go into the military in 1846 is part of that.
00:51:29But to his young wife, to whom he has been married only months,
00:51:33the idea of her husband leaving her, going to an unknown climate, to an unknown fate, was terrible indeed.
00:51:42And she appears to have actively tried to persuade him not to do so.
00:51:46But in the end, as so often in their marriage, he would make the decision and she would simply decide to abide by it.
00:51:53So, on July 4th, 1846, Jefferson Davis left Washington, D.C., bound for Mexico with one final stop,
00:52:03Briarfield Plantation.
00:52:05He wanted to tie up affairs in case he didn't return.
00:52:09Jefferson Davis was almost 20 years older than Verena Howell,
00:52:12and I think he did take on the tone of a parent.
00:52:16And Verena was very feisty, she was very opinionated,
00:52:20and I think he found that a little difficult in the early years of their marriage.
00:52:25He suddenly found himself faced with more of an equal than he had planned.
00:52:30He thought she was going to be, I think, a lot more planned than she turned out to be.
00:52:34She definitely had her own opinions, and they obviously were voiced.
00:52:38But before leaving the plantation, Jefferson Davis had a heartfelt, sincere discussion with his slave, James Pemberton.
00:52:45Davis did offer to manumit him when Davis himself left for the Mexican War,
00:52:52and James Pemberton refused to be liberated.
00:52:55He preferred to stay on what had become his home,
00:52:58and to take care of Verena Davis and the other slaves who were there on the place.
00:53:04Dear Verena, After an extraordinarily quiet voyage, we are at anchor, waiting for a lighter to get ashore on the Brazos Island.
00:53:27Again, I ask that the season of our absence may be a season of reflection.
00:53:32My love for you place my happiness in your keeping.
00:53:37Husband would kiss the paper he sends to wife,
00:53:40but is in the midst of the men who, though talking and whistling and wondering when the lighter will come,
00:53:46have time enough to observe anything the Colonel does.
00:53:50I send a kiss upon the wires of love,
00:53:53and feel air, earth, and sea cannot break the connection.
00:53:59Jefferson Davis, July 29th, 1846
00:54:04Davis showed remarkable energy in building his regiment of Mississippi Volunteers.
00:54:11He had a number of things to drive him in this.
00:54:13One, of course, he had a West Point education, so he thought he understood the military.
00:54:17He thought he understood frontier service, and indeed he had seen several years of it.
00:54:21He also, of course, had the benefit this time not of being an obscure second lieutenant or first lieutenant.
00:54:27Now he was to be Colonel of the Mississippi Volunteers.
00:54:30He would have command of his own regiment in a position with a rank of real prestige.
00:54:35Being a Colonel was going to open doors for Davis anywhere in the south.
00:54:39Indeed, at that time, anywhere in the Union.
00:54:42With his Mississippi rifles in fighting form, Davis marched his men, along with a column of 15,000 troops, down into Mexico.
00:54:50They first met the enemy outside the city of Monterey.
00:54:55It was Jefferson Davis' baptism under fire, and Davis did very well as a regimental commander in the Battle of Monterey.
00:55:02Both in the taking of a Mexican fort on the outskirts of the city, and in the fighting down in the interior of the city, in the street fighting as they approached the main square in the city.
00:55:12Davis' prowess as a field commander did not go unnoticed, especially by his former father-in-law, and once again commanding officer, General Zachary Taylor.
00:55:23Whatever hard feelings had been felt were put away, and the two men embraced each other, and they formed a friendship, or recreated a friendship, or I probably should say refashioned a friendship is probably the best word to say.
00:55:37But, like so much of Jefferson Davis' life, just as one thing was going well, another was in turmoil.
00:55:44Davis asked for leave to return to Mississippi.
00:55:47Allegedly, he asked for leave to come home to check on health and so forth, but the reason he came home was because his wife, Marina, and his eldest brother, Joseph, were literally at war with one another.
00:56:00And he felt he had to come back to see if he couldn't pacify the two people who meant most to him.
00:56:07Davis traveled for two weeks and almost 1,000 miles to mediate between his beloved wife and brother.
00:56:14Upon reaching Mississippi, he laid down the law and expected total compliance from his wife.
00:56:20By December 1846, he was back on board a ship bound from Mexico.
00:56:25During his absence, the war was going well for the Americans, and they saw victories on all fronts.
00:56:31Davis returned to Taylor's army in the Mexican interior just as the Mexicans were launching an offensive.
00:56:37Zachary Taylor takes his army down there to confront this Mexican advance, and in February of 1847, the two armies collide at a place called Buena Vista, which was the name of a Mexican Hacienda.
00:56:52And in a bitter fight there, the 1st Mississippi Regiment has a really cardinal role to play in terms of foiling attempts by the Mexican army to turn the American left flank.
00:57:04And it was the Mississippi Rifles who held the left flank.
00:57:09That was a very touch-and-go battle, and his men managed to hold the position for the United States Army.
00:57:17And he had this infantry regiment with him, his own infantry regiment, and some reinforcements behind him.
00:57:22And when he saw these people coming, he thought the only thing he could do was to put his units in a V and have them fire toward the center.
00:57:31The V formation was actually an upside down V formation.
00:57:36It meant that he met the enemy with the center of his regiment pulled back from the two exposed flanks.
00:57:46And in so doing, he invited, if you would, the enemy into the area where his men could more effectively fire upon the Mexican troops.
00:57:56During the battle, he suffered a wound.
00:57:59What happened was a bullet shattered a brass spur, and it drove shards from that spur into his foot.
00:58:08Pieces of brass would work its way out of Davis' foot, and he would be in constant pain.
00:58:15It was something that would trouble him for much of the rest of his life.
00:58:19After Buena Vista, the Mississippi Rifles became part of an army of occupation.
00:58:26They saw little further action in the field.
00:58:29They entered Mexico with 900 troops.
00:58:32Only 376 would return to Mississippi.
00:58:36Davis came back from Mexico a bona fide hero.
00:58:39He came back with everything a young man of his time and place could hope to have.
00:58:44A high rank as a colonel, an important role in a significant victory behind him, and a wound he had bled for his country.
00:58:55The Mexican War did not produce that many heroes, but one of them was Jefferson Davis, and it would be the foundation of his political career to come.
00:59:04No sooner did he get home than Jesse Spate, a sitting senator from Mississippi, died, and the governor had it in his power to appoint a successor for the balance of Spate's term, and that appointment went to Jefferson Davis.
00:59:17But it wasn't an easy decision for Jefferson Davis because President Polk had a brigadier generalship to award, and he was pressured to award the new commission to Davis.
00:59:27Well, if there's one thing better than being a colonel, it's being a general.
00:59:32And yet this is Davis, who so often did not want to be in the military, yet wanted to get back into it.
00:59:38Now he has the chance of staying in the military with an enhanced position or leaving that and going into an enhanced position in politics.
00:59:47Jefferson Davis wrote personally to President Polk and declined the appointment of brigadier general.
00:59:53He gave, as his primary reason, the firm belief that troops should only fall under state, not federal command, a position he'd have to reverse as Confederate president.
01:00:04So Jefferson Davis accepted Mississippi Governor Albert G. Brown's appointment to fill the vacant seat in the United States Senate.
01:00:13Jefferson Davis entered the Senate on December 6, 1847.
01:00:18And if I had to pick a date throughout the whole two-century-plus history of the Senate to be a senator, that would be at the very top of my list.
01:00:28The Senate had really come into its own by the late 1840s.
01:00:32And you could tell that by the people who were members of the Senate.
01:00:36There was Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, Sam Houston of Texas.
01:00:46The senator could stand up in that wonderfully intimate small Senate chamber, the one that's called the old Senate chamber today.
01:00:54And it was, if anything, it was a theater.
01:00:58What you'd see on that floor was memorable.
01:01:02On the way to Washington D.C. in November of 1847, Jefferson Davis suffered a month-long recurrence of malaria combined with his lingering war wound.
01:01:12And after hobbling up on crutches to take his oath of office, his first order of business was to get himself elected in his own right.
01:01:20There were opponents, but Davis, he was such a hero that nobody had a chance.
01:01:25Mississippi was a democratic state. Davis was a hero.
01:01:28He really didn't have much trouble getting elected in his own right in 1848.
01:01:33The paramount issue facing all politicians of the day, though, was how to deal with slavery in the United States territories.
01:01:41The land ceded to the United States from the Mexican War continued the national expansion west
01:01:46and further divided the country politically between the north and the south.
01:01:51This comes to the whole idea of states' rights.
01:01:55Where does the ultimate power lie?
01:01:58Does it reside with the people of the states separately considered,
01:02:02or does it rely with the people of the United States collectively considered?
01:02:07And there are arguments on both sides.
01:02:10So, as the United States begins to expand, as it receives all this land from the Mexican War,
01:02:17the question comes, can slavery expand into the new territory?
01:02:23Southerners claim that they should have every right to take their slaves to the territories.
01:02:28They say they're American citizens, and the territories belong to American citizens.
01:02:33And all American citizens have the right to go to the territories and take their property.
01:02:37The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution says that property can't be taken without due process.
01:02:43We think of the Fifth Amendment in terms of not to incriminate yourself, but it's also a due process clause.
01:02:48And they said, so Congress can't just pass a law and say you can't take slaves to the territories.
01:02:58Publicly, the debate circled the morality and ethics of slavery.
01:03:02But for Southern Senators, the debate also hinged on political power.
01:03:07Shall a discrimination against one section, the palpable object of which is to totally destroy political equality,
01:03:16be sanctioned by the common agent of the states and hasten its progress to the inevitable goal of such a principle,
01:03:23the disunion of the states?
01:03:26Jefferson Davis, Senate Floor, July 12th, 1848.
01:03:29Jefferson Davis, Senate Floor, July 12th, 1848.
01:03:33Southerners believed that they were American.
01:03:43They believed that they were moral.
01:03:45They believed that they were loyal.
01:03:46They believed that they were patriotic, just like Jefferson Davis.
01:03:49And to be told that, no, you're not, that you're not moral, that you're not patriotic,
01:03:55that you're not American, was a slap in their face.
01:04:00Davis and the other Southern leaders were concerned that if the federal government decided the issue against slavery in the territories,
01:04:07then it was just a matter of time before it encroached on the rest of an individual state's sovereign rights.
01:04:13It was the dispute over the extension of slavery that was linked in very closely to the balance of political power between the northern states and the southern states.
01:04:24The North feared that the extension of slavery would tip the balance even more in the favor of the South,
01:04:30and so that they could get their way with federal legislation.
01:04:33For every five slaves, there were counted as three people for purposes of determining how many members of Congress there would be in each state.
01:04:41And so if slavery were to go into the new territories, that would have artificially inflated the congressional representation of the Democratic Party,
01:04:50which was the southern, mostly in the south.
01:04:52They feared the plantation system, which is like Walmarts coming into your small town.
01:04:58Now, a large plantation coming into perhaps the west or something might make it impossible for the small farmers to survive.
01:05:08So there were other issues.
01:05:10The South, on the other hand, said slavery is not something that is illegal or unconstitutional.
01:05:17Therefore, the national government has an obligation to protect slavery wherever slave owners want to go.
01:05:26The first area of compromise, later known as the Compromise of 1850, was whether or not to allow slavery in the territories won in the Mexican War.
01:05:36Jefferson Davis was a great believer in the democratic process.
01:05:40Though he opposed many facets of the Compromise of 1850, he always felt that the battle should be waged with argument on the Senate floor,
01:05:49not with rifles on the battlefield.
01:05:51We of the South stand now as we always have stood, upon the defensive.
01:05:59We raise not this question, but when raised, it is our duty to defend ourselves.
01:06:05We, sir, are parties to this union only under the Constitution, and there is no power known in the world that could dictate to my little state
01:06:15a union in which her rights were continually disrespected and trampled upon by an unrestrained majority.
01:06:24Jefferson Davis, Senate floor, January 10, 1850.
01:06:36The governor's race in Mississippi called Jefferson Davis, and his allegiance to his beloved state, home.
01:06:42The incumbent governor in Mississippi was John A. Quitman, who had been a major figure in Mississippi politics for a generation.
01:06:49In fact, he'd become a major general in the Army during the Mexican War and was Jefferson Davis' immediate commander at the Battle of Monterey.
01:06:56Early in 1850, Quitman withdrew from the race, and Whig candidate Henry Stuart Foote became the frontrunner.
01:07:03And with very little time left, the state's rights party drafted Davis as their candidate.
01:07:09And he pulled within fewer than a thousand votes of Foote, but he lost.
01:07:13What's even more amazing about that, when he agreed to run with this thing, he resigned from the Senate,
01:07:19so he no longer had his United States Senate seat, didn't want to hold that while he was running for governor.
01:07:23On top of that, he had just passed through an excruciatingly painful illness, but he got up from this sick bed
01:07:30to make this run for the state rights party.
01:07:34No longer in politics, Davis returned to Briarfield for his longest period of time as a southern planter, 18 months.
01:07:43But 1852 comes very quickly, and 1852 is a presidential year.
01:07:47And the newly constituted Democratic Party regained control of the executive office with the election of Franklin Pierce.
01:07:55Interestingly enough, Franklin Pierce from New Hampshire ended up bringing Jefferson Davis back into national politics.
01:08:00Franklin Pierce and Jefferson Davis had similar political views.
01:08:04They had met in Mexico. Pierce knew him as a senator, and he also knew he had military experience.
01:08:11He was the perfect man for Secretary of War.
01:08:14As Secretary of War, he showed a great deal of confidence in handling the office.
01:08:20Perhaps the one he's best known for was the so-called Camel Corps.
01:08:24With the Mexican War, we brought in a tremendous amount of territory, and much of it was desert.
01:08:31The camels did work, though, and that's what people forget.
01:08:35The camels worked. They were an asset to the army in the desert.
01:08:39But with the coming of the railroad, the coming of the Civil War, they were forgotten.
01:08:43Many of them were sold to circuses, and supposedly a few simply ran wild in the desert.
01:08:50Davis continued his innovative plans as he targeted other parts of the United States military,
01:08:56including increasing the size and pay of the army, providing for widows and orphans,
01:09:02and building homes for wounded soldiers, revamping the curriculum at West Point,
01:09:07and had routes surveyed to the Pacific Ocean for the Transcontinental Railroad.
01:09:12He also modernized weapons and battlefield techniques.
01:09:15These advancements, though, would all come back to haunt him when he faced that very same strengthened army
01:09:21as president of the Confederacy in less than a decade.
01:09:26Jefferson Davis was one of the two best secretaries of war.
01:09:32John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, interestingly, both Southerners, both senators, were two outstanding secretaries of war.
01:09:44I think Jefferson Davis' contribution was he was not looking for political benefits.
01:09:50When Jefferson Davis went in to do a job, he went in to do it professionally.
01:09:55But Davis' least known and yet most enduring accomplishment was overseeing the expansion of the United States Capitol Building.
01:10:04I would argue that Jefferson Davis, more than any other single person, is responsible for the way the Capitol Building looks today.
01:10:11And not only the outside with its great cast iron dome and the Statue of Freedom on top of it and the big bronze doors.
01:10:20He was responsible for the design of that statue and for the design of those doors.
01:10:25But from my point of view, even more important, once you go into the building, you start from the center and you see a fairly severe building
01:10:35and not a lot of color in the older portions.
01:10:38But once you move into what we still call the new portions of the Capitol, the parts that were opened in the late 1850s,
01:10:45you see rich gold leaf, you see bright colors in frescoed works of art.
01:10:53That was all Jefferson Davis is doing.
01:10:55He had a strong commitment to making the building beautiful, making it attractive, and making it sort of a national gallery of art.
01:11:03He is considered to be the father of the Capitol Extension because he wrote the legislation.
01:11:10Davis' legacy is a very important contribution as a key player who transformed a small, rather idiosyncratic building
01:11:23that had been begun by George Washington in 1793, had been nurtured through the Jefferson administration
01:11:30and burned by the British in the War of 1812, and finally drawn to a conclusion at the beginning of the Jackson administration.
01:11:38And what we have, thankfully and gratefully, is a building that has been transformed into the magnificent structure that commands the world's respect.
01:11:50A building that has been admired for its grace and its beauty is a symbol of national pride today.
01:11:59But for all of Davis' accomplishments as Secretary of War, there was, yet again, terrible personal tragedy.
01:12:09Samuel Davis, Jefferson Verena's first child, born in 1852, died in the summer of 1854.
01:12:15Davis rejoiced in this little man. After all, Davis in 1854 was a person who was 46 years old. This was his first child.
01:12:25He was joyous with him. He talked about him. His wife would say he would come home from the office of the water department to play with him.
01:12:34And when Samuel got sick, probably with some childhood disease, we can't know for sure exactly what he had.
01:12:42And he died pretty quickly. Davis, of course, his father was devastated. This was the first and they waited so long for him.
01:12:48Verena recalls hearing him pacing the room all night long. He couldn't, he couldn't rest, he couldn't sleep.
01:12:55He was so, in such grief over this. She, of course, was grieving too, but handled it more easily than he did.
01:13:07He simply was inconsolable about the loss.
01:13:11Though Verena had had a difficult time carrying a pregnancy up to Samuel's birth, thereafter, other children came in quick succession.
01:13:21And she had two more before 1860 and another one in 1861. So children came very quickly thereafter.
01:13:28And the Davis household was not without the patter of small feet for very long.
01:13:33On the morning of March 4th, 1857, Jefferson Davis resigned from his successful tenure as Secretary of War.
01:13:42At noon, the very same day, he was sworn in as a senator from the state of Mississippi.
01:13:48Two days after his swearing in, the United States Supreme Court decided on the Dred Scott case,
01:13:54sanctioning the southern view of slavery in the territories.
01:13:57Davis fully supported the new Democratic president, James Buchanan,
01:14:01seeing in him a strong proponent of states' rights.
01:14:05Even though the sectional cauldron continued to boil, Davis still felt that the South's future lay within the Union.
01:14:13For Davis, there was renewed hope that his beloved Union of States would continue unabated and undivided.
01:14:22When Davis re-enters the Senate, after he leaves office as Secretary of War,
01:14:27he's now one of the leading spokesmen for the southern position in Washington.
01:14:32As a result, Davis returns to the Senate with a voice that, before it's first heard,
01:14:37is already more powerful and more influential than that of most other southern leaders of the time.
01:14:45It's a tense, uptight Senate. The optimism is gone, and it's just a long, difficult march toward disaster,
01:14:55at a time when Jefferson Davis himself must have been feeling terribly physically.
01:14:59Davis suffered his worst bout with neuralgia, the disease affecting his left eye.
01:15:04It left him in excruciating pain and nearly incapacitated.
01:15:09But by 1858, with his health failing and less than two years into his second Senate term,
01:15:15hope, even for Optimus Davis, was beginning to wane.
01:15:19In spite of debilitating illness, he continued to work on the Capitol expansion as senator.
01:15:24He wanted to create a great temple to democracy, a veritable art gallery, putting the United States on the world stage.
01:15:31But what was happening inside those renovated doors was far from Davis's ideal,
01:15:37and the renovation, for all its beauty, could not conceal the turmoil inside its walls.
01:15:43These were not the arguments which our fathers made when, through the struggles of the Revolutionary War,
01:15:50they laid the foundation of this union.
01:15:53These are not the principles on which our Constitution, a bundle of compromises, was made.
01:16:00Then, the navigating and agricultural states did not war to see which could most injure the other,
01:16:07but each conceded something, from that which it believed to be its own interest,
01:16:14to promote the welfare of the other.
01:16:17Those debates, whilst they brought up all the struggles which belonged to the opposite interests and opposite localities,
01:16:24showed none of the bitterness which so unfortunately characterizes every debate in which this body is involved.
01:16:34Jefferson Davis, Senate Floor, February, 1858.
01:16:39Well, as Davis begins to get well, his physicians recommend he take a trip to New England.
01:16:44He does go up to New England, he spends a good bit of time in Maine, and he's rejuvenated.
01:16:49He had an enormously successful visit in Maine.
01:16:52He made a number of public speeches, he had a tremendous, it was a positive public reaction to him,
01:16:57and Davis began to believe that what he had first thought in the Pearson administration was really true,
01:17:03that there were enough Northerners who were willing to give the Southerners what the Southerners saw as their rights,
01:17:09that the country could go on along, that things weren't going to come to an end.
01:17:15Democrats, patriots, by whatever political name any of you may be known,
01:17:28you have a sacred duty to perform to your ancestry and to posterity.
01:17:33The time is at hand for good or for evil.
01:17:37The questions which have agitated the public mind are to be solved.
01:17:42Jefferson Davis, Portland, Maine, September 11th, 1858.
01:17:47Ironically, he got in trouble when he was in Maine, political trouble,
01:17:52but not from Republicans, not from Northerners, from sectional radicals in the South,
01:17:58who thought that Davis' comments in the North were too mild.
01:18:04Davis had said things like the Union should survive.
01:18:07Davis had said things like people should not carelessly talk about throwing away the Union.
01:18:12And these radical Southerners got very upset about this.
01:18:16And in fact, Davis' political colleagues in Mississippi, some of them recognized Davis' trouble,
01:18:20and they told him right away, you've got to cover yourself on this.
01:18:23And as Davis turned his focus to put out the political fires in the South,
01:18:27William Henry Seward and the growing Republican Party were developing a strategy to win its first national election.
01:18:34And the Republican Party was a new thing in American history.
01:18:38It was a sectional party.
01:18:40The Republican Party made no effort in the slave states, no effort in the South.
01:18:43It wrote off the South.
01:18:45It said, we can win a national election by taking all the free states.
01:18:48There are enough electoral votes.
01:18:49If we can get them all, we can win.
01:18:51So they run on a very powerful anti-South platform.
01:18:54And the Republicans, this is their message, and they made a very astute move in their convention.
01:18:59While the Democrats were coming apart, the Republicans turned against the odds-on favorite,
01:19:04who was a man by the name of William Henry Seward.
01:19:07So they picked a man who was perceived as much more moderate than Stewart,
01:19:11a man who they thought could carry that Southern tier across what we call the Midwest now.
01:19:15They picked Abraham Lincoln.
01:19:17And Abraham Lincoln, of course, did carry every single free state except New Jersey.
01:19:23But other than that, Lincoln carried every single free state.
01:19:27He carried no slave states.
01:19:30And he won a national election.
01:19:32He only had 40 percent of the popular vote, however.
01:19:36Only 40 percent.
01:19:38During the 1860 election, the Democratic Party turned on itself and sharply divided.
01:19:44Before the convention held in South Carolina in April of 1860 finally broke apart,
01:19:49it unanimously adopted a resolution that if a Republican were named president,
01:19:55it would be deemed a declaration of hostility.
01:19:58Yet in the face of Lincoln's election and howls of Southern secession,
01:20:02Davis did not give up on the Union.
01:20:06And he tried anything and everything to keep it together.
01:20:11Jefferson Davis had been a member of the Senate Committee of 13 that met in the latter months,
01:20:18the latter weeks of 1860 to try to forge a compromise.
01:20:23When that so-called Crittenden Compromise fell apart,
01:20:26Jefferson Davis knew that it was just a matter of weeks before Mississippi would withdraw from the Union.
01:20:34And so he prepared two speeches.
01:20:36One he delivered on January 10, 1861, to a packed Senate chamber,
01:20:42in which he gave sort of an extended explanation of his views
01:20:47and said the time is coming when I'm going to have to leave.
01:20:51Jefferson Davis never advocated immediate secession.
01:20:54Davis had always maintained that secession was constitutional.
01:20:57But Davis realized that he was walking a political tightrope because after Lincoln's election,
01:21:04the governor of Mississippi invited the state's congressional delegation to meet with him in Jackson.
01:21:10Davis found that he was the only one who was opposed to immediate secession.
01:21:14But he told them before he left that whatever they did, he would follow Mississippi's course.
01:21:19He really delayed long after the secession vote was a sure thing.
01:21:23All the other congressmen and his fellow senator had already left for Mississippi.
01:21:28I don't know whether he was still hoping against hope that something would happen to change things,
01:21:33but he did linger in Washington longer.
01:21:36He loved Washington.
01:21:38I mean, he loved his days in Capitol Hill.
01:21:42He loved being Secretary of War.
01:21:44He loved being a member of the original board of the Smithsonian Institution.
01:21:49I mean, the fondness that he had for this place is just unbelievable.
01:21:54When he gave his farewell speech, it was a major event in Washington.
01:21:57The galleries were crowded long before the Senate convened.
01:22:00Everyone wanted to see him for what might be the last time, hear what he had to say.
01:22:05The speech was very emotional for everyone, concerned even his political enemies,
01:22:10because I think they respected him as a person of principle.
01:22:14They realized that he was saying what he said because he truly believed it.
01:22:18Davis spoke last, and you could hear a pin drop.
01:22:23The time for nullification talk is over.
01:22:26Now it's time to leave.
01:22:28I am sure I feel no hostility to you, senators from the North.
01:22:39I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussions there may have been between us,
01:22:46to whom I cannot now say in the presence of my God, I wish you well.
01:22:53And such, I am sure, is the feeling of the people whom I represent towards those whom you represent.
01:23:02I therefore feel that I express their desire when I say I hope, and they hope, for peaceful relations with you, though we must part.
01:23:14Mr. President and senators, having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to me to require,
01:23:24it only remains to me to bid you a final edge.
01:23:33And at that point he turned and walked up the center aisle of the chamber, and out the rear doors,
01:23:40and you could hear, as one observer put it, the silent muffled weeping.
01:23:46People knew at that point that the fat was in the fire, that the nation had come to a major crossroads,
01:23:52and people for decades afterwards who were there, who witnessed that,
01:23:58talked about that as one of the most startling and memorable moments of that particular Civil War era.
01:24:07.
01:24:12Mr. President, I was very pleased to have the emotion for you,
01:24:14who was the first one of the firstnen years of shooting,
01:24:19and I was so pleased with the heart of him from the beginning.
01:24:25Well, I had an amazing experience for him, and was so pleased with the presence of the people who wanted to make their heart,