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00:00:00To be continued...
00:00:30The United States of America was not yet a century old when in 1861 its very existence
00:00:39was in jeopardy.
00:00:41In January of that fateful year, Jefferson Davis gave his farewell address to a packed
00:00:46senate chamber that truly mourned his leaving as much as he despaired in going.
00:00:52Jefferson Davis had spent the majority of his adult life in service to the Union.
00:01:07Jefferson Davis served his country out of loyalty to his state and the Constitution, he
00:01:13believed bound all the states together voluntarily to form the Union.
00:01:18So when he delivered his farewell address to the senate and then promptly departed his
00:01:22beloved Washington D.C. never to see the capital city again.
00:01:27It nearly broke his heart.
00:01:32For Davis it was a terribly, terribly emotional time.
00:01:51He told one friend that this was the saddest day of his life and he told others, he told
00:01:59Franklin Pierce as a matter of fact, that it was like leaves torn from the Book of Fate.
00:02:04The year 1861 was always terribly important for him.
00:02:10The post war years, for the books that survived that he had, most of them, his name is put on
00:02:17page 61.
00:02:19Even in his own copy of Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, he wrote his name on
00:02:23page 61.
00:02:24The day after his farewell address to the United States Senate, Davis, his wife and three children
00:02:33boarded a train down from Mississippi.
00:02:36He would never see the completed capital, his beloved city of Washington, or be a United States
00:02:42citizen for the rest of his life.
00:02:44When Davis returned to Mississippi in January 1861, he wished only to return to his plantation
00:02:55at Briarfield and tend his roses and raise his crops.
00:03:00He maintained then and later that he had no desire to be involved further in either Mississippi's
00:03:05course as an independent state after secession or in the course of whatever confederation of
00:03:12seceded states was likely to eventuate.
00:03:14He seems to have had no long-range plan.
00:03:17I think he really was so deeply hurt by what had happened to the Union, so discouraged for
00:03:23the future, that he would not have been entirely displeased if he could have been allowed simply
00:03:27to stay on his plantation and let the rest of the world go to hell around him.
00:03:33But as was the case so often in Davis's life, the world would not let him sit idly by.
00:03:40By the time he and his family returned to Davis Bend, Mississippi Governor John Pettis
00:03:45had already appointed Jefferson Davis Major General of the Army of Mississippi.
00:03:50Davis's return to private life lasted all of two days.
00:03:56He does accept command of the Mississippi State Militia as its Major General.
00:04:00And this to him would be a very natural course.
00:04:03And this, indeed, is the direction in which Davis felt his best talents could be used in
00:04:08preparing Mississippi to defend itself using his military experience as an officer and then,
00:04:15of course, his organizational experience as Secretary of War.
00:04:18By February 1861, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas
00:04:27had all left the Union. Each state sent a delegation to Alabama where a convention was forming.
00:04:33The goal was to, as South Carolina Delegate William Trescott put it,
00:04:37weld them while they're hot. Montgomery must be the forge.
00:04:40They believed from the outset that they had to confederate. And even before they began to leave
00:04:48Washington in the late December of 1860, January of 1861, the decisions were being made about
00:04:55uniting the Confederates, uniting the southern states that seceded into a Confederacy.
00:05:01In a previous revolution, Benjamin Franklin, a Yankee, had said to the divided 13 colonies,
00:05:08if we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.
00:05:12They may have, for all the fear that they may have had of what could happen in a new confederation
00:05:17after they'd seen what had happened to the old one, they instinctively seemed to know.
00:05:22Whether they're the reunifiers or whether they're the art secessionists, all agree almost on one thing,
00:05:27which is that in safety they must have numbers.
00:05:36But as they sought to band together, the delegates were charged not to repeat what so many of their
00:05:42constituents saw as infringements on the individual states' rights, the containment and the abolition
00:05:48of slavery, and the taxation of the South in the form of protective tariffs.
00:05:53The problem, of course, is what is being protected, and what increasingly being protected was costly to the South.
00:06:03When Lincoln and the Republicans gained power, the very first thing they did in 1858, 1859,
00:06:10was to propose doubling the tariff rate, more than doubling it, from 15 percent on average to 32 percent,
00:06:17which they did. That was one of the very first things Lincoln did as president, was sign the moral tariff.
00:06:24Now, put yourself in the shoes of Southerners who were complaining,
00:06:29we're paying most of the tax, and the money is being spent up north. And so they felt they were being plundered.
00:06:36With so much uncertainty surrounding which, if any other states would follow the initial seven,
00:06:42the delegates moved quickly to address the major grievances, and within days,
00:06:47drafted the provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America.
00:06:53Word for word, most of it is identical to the U.S. Constitution. Both constitutions protected slavery.
00:06:59Slavery was constitutional in the U.S. Constitution in 1861. It was constitutional in the Confederate
00:07:06Constitution. The big difference was the Confederate Constitution allowed each individual state to
00:07:13decide on its own if it wanted to end slavery. That was not true of the U.S. Constitution. So,
00:07:18you know, irony of ironies, the Confederate Constitution was actually less protective of
00:07:24slavery than the U.S. Constitution was in 1861. The framers of the Confederacy were still stinging from
00:07:30the taxes imposed on them by the old Union, and outlawed protectionist tariffs in their new
00:07:36country. And they sought to curtail their federal government by removing the general welfare clause
00:07:43altogether. So the big difference between the Confederate Constitution and the U.S. Constitution
00:07:48is the Confederate Constitution was more restrictive of the central government and gave more latitude to
00:07:54the citizens of the states in controlling their government, and it term-limited the president to
00:07:58one six-year term. And so it was more conducive to smaller government than the U.S. Constitution was.
00:08:04With the framework of government in place, the delegates from the seven seceded states focused on
00:08:10appointing a provisional leader. Davis was on what we would call everybody's short list. He brought a
00:08:17series of qualifications that nobody could match. Davis sort of represents those who were in between.
00:08:22He represents the middle, which is where revolutions always go very quickly. After the fire eaters and the
00:08:29hotheads bring on an uproar, the sensible people realized that there's strength and safety in the
00:08:35middle. When it came time to vote, all votes were unanimously cast for Jefferson Davis as president
00:08:43and Alexander Stevens of Georgia as vice president. A telegram was sent to Mississippi and a writer
00:08:51delivered the news. He is at his plantation and a messenger comes to give him a message and his wife
00:08:59watches all this from the veranda and he's down working on trees in the front yard. And the messenger
00:09:06presents this paper to him and she says she noticed how depressed and all of a sudden terribly downcast he was.
00:09:15And he came up finally to the veranda and told her that he had been elected president of the
00:09:21Confederate States. And he knew the burden of the office, but he took it. Because of the southern
00:09:28railroads, which were really infants as compared to the northern railroad system, he took a very long
00:09:36and strange route to get from his home in western Mississippi to Montgomery in central Alabama,
00:09:42including going up to Tennessee and back down. So there was plenty of chance for him to be seen
00:09:48along the ways, which was a good thing probably for a lot of people to see what their new president
00:09:52looked like and to hear what he had to say.
00:09:59We will maintain our right to self-government at all hazards. We ask nothing, want nothing,
00:10:06and we'll have no complications. Our separation from the old union is complete. No compromise,
00:10:15no reconstruction can now be entertained. Jefferson Davis, Railway Dispatches,
00:10:21February 11th through the 16th, 1861. When he got off the train in Montgomery after this trip,
00:10:28there were crowds around. It was late at night. They still called on him to speak. He went to his hotel,
00:10:33he went out on the balcony, and he made a talk. In all of his talks, he talked about the southerners
00:10:38coming together, that all southerners were of one mind about this now. There was great unity.
00:10:43We have, henceforth, I trust, a prospect of living together in peace. Heaven will so prosper the southern
00:10:51confederacy and carry us from sea to the safe harbor of constitutional liberty. We shall show that southern
00:11:00valor still shines as brightly as in the days of 1776. Before he was inaugurated in February of 1861,
00:11:10he commented on how the crowds were all very enthusiastic and his reception was just so warm
00:11:15and marvelous. But he said, beyond this, I see troubles and thorns innumerable. He was a realist.
00:11:21On the morning of February 18th, 1861, Jefferson Davis left the Exchange Hotel,
00:11:29bound for the Alabama State Capitol building, where he would be inaugurated as the confederacy's first
00:11:35president. There was great fan fan hoopla. There was a parade. There was a carriage. He went from the
00:11:42hotel up the hill to the state capitol. In his inaugural address, Davis sounded one theme chiefly. It was a brief
00:11:50address. He said that the confederates stood where their ancestors had stood in 1776. They had struck for
00:11:58their independence against tyranny, that they were following in the footsteps of their fathers and
00:12:02grandfathers, that they were the true Americans, that they were descendants of liberty. And this whole
00:12:08thing, this whole confederate experiment, was about Americans defending liberty against oppressive tyranny.
00:12:14We have changed the constituent parts, but not the system of our government. The constitution formed by
00:12:32our fathers is that of these confederate states. We have a light which reveals its true meaning. It is
00:12:41joyous in the midst of perilous times to look out upon a people united in heart,
00:12:48where we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace, and to posterity.
00:12:54117 days elapsed between Lincoln's election and his inauguration. And during that 117 days,
00:13:06a whole new country comes into existence to be led by Jefferson Davis, probably the most prominent
00:13:14politician Washington had since the days of his namesake, Thomas Jefferson. And so here is a man
00:13:25that leaves reluctantly. He loves the Senate. And he then becomes the president of this new nation,
00:13:33or this new, this independent country. He is the founding father of a second American revolution.
00:13:44In less than two months, the seven states that left the union banded together, formed the basis of a
00:13:56government, and elected a leader, Jefferson Davis. After his inauguration, Davis wasted no time assembling
00:14:03his cabinet and making reality the ideas forged at the Confederate Convention just weeks earlier.
00:14:09It was a monumental task for just one man to oversee, and Davis set a work schedule
00:14:15that began before dawn and lasted well after midnight.
00:14:24As a result of the confusion and the mass of people with conflicting and sometimes contradictory
00:14:31aspirations who had settled in on Montgomery in February 1861, when Davis arrived to take office as
00:14:38president, he walked into a virtual carnival. The Confederates were scrambling to establish their new
00:14:44government before the old union could react, and their first order of business was money.
00:14:49The Confederate treasury began with a loan of five dollars from Henry Capers to a captain of
00:14:54volunteers who came to the treasury department and Capers pointed to a safe in the wall on which the
00:15:00door was open. There'd be no point in closing it because there was no treasury. They had to line up money.
00:15:05Davis realized his major responsibility was protecting this fledgling country,
00:15:10and he called for volunteers from each of the states to create a Confederate army.
00:15:15That same day, March 4th, when Lincoln takes his oath of office, the newly adopted Confederate flag will
00:15:21be raised for the first time as a national symbol in Montgomery. Enlistments are coming in almost
00:15:28of the United States. Jefferson Davis wasn't the only president taking office on American soil in 1861.
00:15:39Abraham Lincoln faced a union in crisis, having lost almost a quarter of the states to secession.
00:15:45In his first inaugural address, Lincoln sounded the call for reunification at all costs.
00:15:52Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, lest it be known, you know I personally do not like slavery,
00:15:57but I have sworn to uphold the Constitution as it is, not as I would like for it to be.
00:16:04And slavery is protected by the Fifth Amendment.
00:16:07Only once Lincoln is in office will the Confederates know what the Union's going to do.
00:16:13Will they, as Horace Greeley said, let the Erring sisters go? Will they make no effort
00:16:18to keep the southern states in the Union? Will they acknowledge that secession was a right,
00:16:23and that there are now two nations on the North American continent?
00:16:26Lincoln said as he left Springfield that he faced a job harder than George Washington.
00:16:34Well, believe me, Jefferson Davis faced a much harder job than that.
00:16:38Our policy is peace. It is our sentiment also, and surely it must be the interest of both parties
00:16:58concerned. We have waited, hopefully, for the withdrawal of garrisons which irritate the people
00:17:04of these states and threaten the respective localities, and which can serve no purpose to
00:17:09the United States unless it be to injure us. With equal confidence in our power to meet the political
00:17:16danger of peace and the physical danger of war, I await the determination of a problem which belongs
00:17:22to the government of the United States to control. Jefferson Davis, Montgomery, Alabama, April 6, 1861.
00:17:34Jefferson Davis was always willing to have peace in the United States. He said so from the beginning,
00:17:45but peace for him required two things, independence and the maintenance of slavery. We should just say
00:17:50one thing, independence, because if the Confederacy remained independent, it could do what it wanted
00:17:55with slavery. Abraham Lincoln took control of a country in crisis, and it was apparent by his speeches and
00:18:01Inaugural address that reunification was his top and only priority in regard to the seceded states,
00:18:09and he was prepared to bring them back by any means necessary.
00:18:13He said, I think it will have to, it will ultimately have to come to a crunch,
00:18:18and it should come now. The longer we wait, the stronger they'll be.
00:18:24President Lincoln had a terrible decision to make, because shortly after he became president,
00:18:31he was informed that the garrison at Fort Sumter had six weeks of supplies left. In other words,
00:18:36if they weren't resupplied or reinforced within six weeks, they'd be starved out.
00:18:40So Lincoln had to make a decision about what to do.
00:18:42David Davis was not for firing on Sumter, because he was, he was very seriously worried
00:18:50about the South firing the first shot. He also was hoping there wouldn't be any shot
00:18:56at all. It could be avoided. Lincoln finally made a decision, and Lincoln's decision
00:19:01was a brilliant one. He decided he would not withdraw. He would not reinforce. He would simply
00:19:07resupply. He would send food and medical supplies to the garrison. As long as Fort Sumter is in federal
00:19:14hands, can the Confederacy claim to be in charge of its own territory? And the conclusion finally was,
00:19:25no, they had to force the issue.
00:19:31April 12th, 1861 sounded the shot heard round the world as Confederate troops opened fire on Fort
00:19:37Sumter, beginning the bloodiest, costliest war in American history.
00:19:43Fort Sumter was reduced very quickly. There were really no casualties in the bombardment,
00:19:48but the Union soldiers were allowed to march out, boarded ships, and went back north.
00:19:55With Fort Sumter now in Confederate hands and a line drawn between the North and the South,
00:20:00Jefferson Davis focused on shoring up his country's defenses.
00:20:04He found out fairly soon that there were about a hundred thousand muskets
00:20:10available in all of the southern arsenals. Gunpowder was extremely short.
00:20:18It was positioned mainly in the old forts along the coastline.
00:20:26Where do you make it? Do you have a powder works? As he told his friends,
00:20:32we have a chore before us that is whether or not we can succeed, I don't know.
00:20:43Jefferson Davis always found great comfort and strength in his family. And shortly after arriving
00:20:50in Montgomery, he sent for wife Verena and their three children, Margaret, Joseph, and Jefferson Davis,
00:20:56Jr. They all moved into the first Confederate White House in Montgomery. But they barely had
00:21:02time to settle in before the Confederate government was packing up and moving north to Richmond,
00:21:07Virginia. April and May of 1861 saw Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia secede and
00:21:15join the Confederate States of America. With the entire Lower South and the bulk of the Upper South
00:21:21already committed to the cause, the Confederate government decided, against Jefferson Davis's
00:21:27wishes, to move the Confederate capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond, Virginia.
00:21:33Virginia was both the cradle and mother of the South, so symbolically you couldn't get much richer.
00:21:39Geographically, though, and militarily, you could scarcely get more dangerous.
00:21:44There are very practical and sensible imperatives behind the move of the
00:21:49Confederate capital from Montgomery to Richmond. True, Montgomery is far more distant, much more
00:21:56difficult for enemy armies to get to, and therefore it's more secure. But that very distance also works
00:22:02against it. If there's an invasion of the South, it's going to come out of Washington, it's going to
00:22:08cross the Potomac, and the first thing it's going to hit is Virginia. So much of Confederate activity
00:22:13is forced upon them by circumstance. They were concerned, very concerned, about keeping Virginia
00:22:23in the war. So many Southerners were not fighting for this idea of Confederacy. They were fighting for
00:22:32their home state. And once their home state was lost, they really had no reason to continue to fight.
00:22:39On June 1st, 1861, 4,000 cheering people, bouquets of flowers, and a parade greeted President
00:22:49Davis and his family upon their arrival in Richmond, Virginia. Much like the crowd that roused him from
00:22:56his room in Montgomery, this one also urged him to speak. From the balcony of the Spotswood Hotel, he addressed
00:23:02his people. The cause in which we are engaged is the cause of the advocacy of rights to which we were born,
00:23:11those for which our fathers of the Revolution, the richest inheritance that ever fell to man.
00:23:17And in these Confederate States, we observe those relations which have been poetically ascribed to the
00:23:23United States, but which there never had the same reality. Pray God crown our cause and our country with success.
00:23:34The firing on Fort Sumter, the secession of the Upper South, and the turmoil in the border states
00:23:40prompted President Lincoln's call for troops to put down what he named the Rebellion and to blockade the
00:23:46coast of the rebel states. The thorns of war that Jefferson Davis so feared were suddenly in sharp
00:23:53relief. By the time Davis and company set up government in Richmond, he had placed troops from
00:23:58an ever-increasing Confederate army under Generals Braxton Bragg in the South, Joseph E. Johnston in
00:24:05Harper's Ferry, and General Beauregard, the victor at Fort Sumter, led the troops in Virginia,
00:24:11facing Washington City. Beauregard had a plan to wipe out the Federals with one decisive victory on
00:24:17the Union capital, but before any Confederate plan was enacted, Union General McDowell led an assault on
00:24:24Beauregard's troops at Manassas Junction, Virginia. In the first Battle of Manassas, which was in July 1861,
00:24:32it really was a touch-and-go battle. It could have gone either way, but in the late afternoon when the Union
00:24:39forces decide to withdraw from the field, which is the hardest tactical maneuver for any commander to do,
00:24:47get his troops off the field, became a panic, and the Confederate forces had won. The question was,
00:24:56why not follow them? Why not invade the North? Davis, who was on that battlefield, is going to be
00:25:04criticized later for not ordering the troops to do so. Davis felt, and I think quite rightly, first of all,
00:25:13the Confederate troops were equally as green as the Union troops, and it was a lucky chance that they
00:25:20won so significantly in that first battle. Had they continued to attack, God knows what would have
00:25:26happened on the way north. Secondly, and more importantly for Davis as the commander-in-chief,
00:25:34he did not want to invade a foreign country. He wanted to repel aggressors, and he had been
00:25:41successful in doing it. He had no idea that the war was going to last another four years almost,
00:25:48and therefore, they had done what he wanted to do.
00:26:02The victory at First Manassas, also known as Bull Run, sealed the fate of an already popular and widely
00:26:08admired provisional president, Jefferson Davis. When he ran for the six-year presidential term in November
00:26:151861, Davis did so unopposed. On January 1st, 1862, Davis continued the American presidential tradition
00:26:25and opened the Confederate White House on New Year's Day. Though he charmed the stream of well-wishers,
00:26:32he did so on the heels of a two-month bout with his recurring malaria, and during his inaugural address on a
00:26:38cold, rainy February 22nd morning, he spoke temperately of the lights and shadows, describing the first
00:26:45Confederate year.
00:26:48His second inaugural in February of 1862, of course, happened almost a year after the war had begun.
00:26:55So, of course, it was quite different from the first one when there was no war, and everything was
00:27:00still a great possibility for the Confederacy. Also, by 1862, he was the permanent president. He was just
00:27:07not the president of a provisional government, but this was a permanent arrangement, and they realized
00:27:12that they were going to have to fight for independence.
00:27:16A war of conquest they cannot wage, because the constitution of their Confederacy admits of no
00:27:23coerced association. Civil war? There cannot be between states held together by their volition only.
00:27:38During the war, Davis's relationship with his generals ranged from respect and adulation to downright
00:27:44antipathy. The problems Davis faced managing his generals would plague him throughout the war
00:27:50and haunt him for the rest of his life. And so Davis gives us mixed performance. With generals who know
00:28:00how to work Davis, who know how to subordinate themselves to their goal and their job, as Lee certainly did,
00:28:07Davis gets along wonderfully and gets wonders out of them. With men like Johnston and Beauregard and a number
00:28:14of others who constantly had their egos between them and the president, they were
00:28:20destined never to achieve anything. At times those internal conflicts with the generals
00:28:27went public, as when Joseph E. Johnston felt slighted when Davis named him the number four
00:28:33instead of the number one Confederate general. Now what did Joe Johnston show him? Joe Johnston showed
00:28:38him that Joe Johnston was more important than the Confederate States of America. Joe Johnston showed
00:28:43him that his own personal ambition was more important than the cause. Jefferson Davis
00:28:48never forgave him and never got over it. Jefferson Davis' whole conception of the Confederacy was that
00:28:53it was a sacred cause. When the Union had failed, Davis was despondent. With the Union gone, the Confederacy
00:29:00had to succeed. It was his last hope to save the American Revolution as he saw it. And Davis believed that he had
00:29:08put all of himself into this task. Davis believed that he had overcome personal self-interest,
00:29:14that the goal was all, that the cause was all. And he expected that same from all around him, civilian
00:29:22and general, but especially from his professional military. The problem though for Jefferson Davis was
00:29:28that his counterpart across the Potomac, Abraham Lincoln, did not hold those under his command to the same
00:29:34standards. For Lincoln, reunification justified all means.
00:29:39He could not look at it like Lincoln did. He could not see that human foibles, ambition,
00:29:47pettiness, was a part of the human condition that was going to be around. Davis believed that the
00:29:52Confederates had to overcome all that to succeed. And he believed he had overcome it. And he judged other
00:29:59people by his own perception of what he'd managed to do. Lincoln knew that the human condition didn't change.
00:30:10The Confederate White House at 12th and Clay Streets in Richmond was both a working
00:30:15office for Davis and home to his wife and children. During the war, Verena gave birth to son Joseph Evan
00:30:22in 1861 and Verena Ann, known as Winnie in 1864. But Verena Davis was also a very active first lady,
00:30:32presiding as mistress of the White House and trusted advisor to the president. Mrs. Davis was,
00:30:41I think, an excellent hostess at the White House, at the Confederate White House. Now, certainly,
00:30:48Mrs. Lincoln was not. In addition to a seemingly never-ending flow of nieces, nephews and cousins,
00:30:55the Davises adopted a Richmond orphan named Jim Limber. According to Verena, they had seen him in
00:31:03Richmond being abused by his caretaker, guardian, that Davis had rescued the child and had procured
00:31:12his free papers from the Richmond city government. Unfortunately, those records don't exist anymore.
00:31:18But in any case, the child was brought to live with the Davis family. He was about the same age as one
00:31:23of the Davis children. He lived in the mansion with the children, played in the nursery with them,
00:31:28was taken with the Davises when they left Richmond. And he is mentioned in several letters. When the
00:31:34Davises were captured, they turned him over to Rufus Saxton, who had been a friend of theirs. He was a
00:31:40general in the Union Army in Savannah. And they turned the boy over to General Saxton for safe,
00:31:47for safety, really, because obviously he couldn't go with them to prison. And whatever was going to
00:31:52happen to them, they had no idea. So it was a very tearful scene, apparently, when this child was torn
00:31:57from the family he had lived with for a couple of years and I'm sure felt very safe and secure with when
00:32:02he was turned over to the Union General. The General sent him to school in South Carolina and then
00:32:08in Massachusetts. And unfortunately, the record goes blank at that point. No one really knows what
00:32:14happened to Jim Limber after the war. The Davises always seemed to fare best as a couple in the face
00:32:25of external challenges. They could work as a team and Verena could exit the Victorian shadow cast on all
00:32:32women of the day. But I think she was a fairly good foil for him. She had a good sense of humor and a
00:32:44wit which he needed. He had it too, but he could never rarely expose it to people. He had a little
00:32:52room in the White House, the snuggery, and there where he would entertain, if he wanted to talk to
00:32:58somebody privately, he'd take them in the snuggery. And that's where they had some of the best
00:33:04conversations. People who were there would say it in their diaries. He would let his hair down and be a warm
00:33:10influential speaker.
00:33:15Jefferson Davis's cabinet changed throughout the course of his administration, especially Secretary
00:33:21of War, which saw six different men in the post, most notably Judah P. Benjamin, who would go on to
00:33:27be Secretary of State from 1862 until the end of the war. James Seddon held the longest tenure as
00:33:33Secretary of War from late 1862 until the spring of 1865.
00:33:39David Davis was really his own Secretary of War in terms of making decisions. He liked to confer
00:33:46with his Secretary about any and all subjects, minor and major, but he kept to himself decision making.
00:33:52The charge is often made that Davis was a micromanager, and it's definitely a criticism when you're trying
00:33:58to manage a war, manage a country, manage the Congress, manage your own life, etc., and I think
00:34:04it's a fair charge. I think increasingly, as the war went on, he began to see small issues as things
00:34:11that he could control, and so he did often involve himself in small matters that should not have taken
00:34:18so much of his time and attention, and wore down his health. He was conscientious, if you can say
00:34:24that conscientious to a fault, I would say he was.
00:34:27The problem was from the beginning that the Confederacy did not start
00:34:51with the kind of financial backing that the President wanted them to have, and that was the
00:34:58beginning of the undermining of the government, and he knew it, and he kept pushing for this,
00:35:04and they kept pushing back. But Jefferson Davis knew that all the economic policies were not going
00:35:10to be enough, especially in the midst of war. The Elanger Bank, considering the family connections,
00:35:18made a loan to the Confederate government of $15 million. Now, Elanger, the senior Elanger,
00:35:27Emile, was appalled by this. He said, I will gladly lend you $500 million with which you will win the war,
00:35:40but $15 million I'm throwing away. But the Confederate Congress was still that laissez-faireist group,
00:35:52and they had a wonderful attitude. They told Davis, how can we burden future generations of the
00:36:00Confederate people with a terrible debt? And his answer was just what you would have expected. Suppose there
00:36:09isn't any future for the Confederate people.
00:36:18All too often, Jefferson Davis found himself at odds with the Confederate Congress over domestic policy,
00:36:46foreign policy, and the execution of the war between the states.
00:36:55The Confederate States of America are a good example to all of us for the need for two or more
00:37:02viable political parties. There were no political parties, per se, in the Confederacy. There was only
00:37:13the people representing a certain group of fellow Southerners. And although the ideal of working
00:37:21harmoniously together for the good of all sounds very good, the two-party system, or a multi-party
00:37:30system, will come up with policies and will come up with people who are capable of bringing those
00:37:37policies about. So what happens with Jefferson Davis and his political enemies is they become personal
00:37:44enemies. And once a problem becomes a personal problem, it's very difficult to resolve.
00:37:51And he kept pushing for the same devotion on the part of everybody else. And he kept being frustrated.
00:37:59And I think it often puzzled him why other people didn't react to the Confederacy like he did and
00:38:07try to support it, particularly Congress. Jefferson Davis felt deeply that in order for the Confederacy to
00:38:16survive, everyone would have to set aside their differences for the country and the cause.
00:38:21I think his problem was this. You go to Congress and you know what needs to be done. And you can't
00:38:32understand why they don't know what needs to be done. And if you tell them, why don't they do it?
00:38:39Davis's greatest failure is probably his failure to appreciate the need for diplomacy within his own
00:38:47household. The need to get along with people whom he did not like, whether it be generals like Joseph
00:38:54E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard, state governors like Joe Brown of Georgia or Zebulon Vance of
00:39:01North Carolina or Thomas Moore of Louisiana. Davis was never able to take his ego out of the line of fire
00:39:08in dealing with difficult people. With Davis and the Confederate government ensconced in Richmond,
00:39:14Virginia 100 miles from Washington, and the increasing military pressures in the upper Mississippi
00:39:20theater, the Confederates lost focus on their largest and most prized strategic and commercial center.
00:39:28The largest city in the Confederacy, New Orleans, fell to the Federal Navy in April of 1862.
00:39:34Nobody had any idea that New Orleans was any danger. So New Orleans fell was a terrible blow to him and a
00:39:40terrible surprise to him. The loss of New Orleans called into question the overall Confederate war
00:39:46strategy. But the problem wasn't solely a matter of tactics. The issues Davis and his administration
00:39:53faced cut to the core of the Confederacy's position, not only in defense of itself, but moreover,
00:40:00whether anyone in the world even recognized its existence.
00:40:10The Confederate States of America and its president, Jefferson Davis, felt that not only had they
00:40:18every legal right to be a nation, but that they had actually achieved that idea. So consequently,
00:40:27what you have there is a nation that's being invaded by foreign forces.
00:40:34One of Davis's main tasks as president is to devise the strategy to win the war.
00:40:41And he has sometimes been criticized by those who don't know that he had no strategy. That's not the case.
00:40:53Jefferson Davis was both a West Point graduate and an experienced soldier, so he knew the challenges
00:41:00that the Confederacy faced. He proposed an offensive defensive strategy that had the armies attack when
00:41:07able and then give up ground to attack another day. The problem, though, was that Davis would never set
00:41:14foot on the battlefield after bull run. And implementing his strategy required his out-thinking his opponents
00:41:21from the Confederate White House. He's confident of his military skill, his ability to plan as well as,
00:41:29if not better than, anyone else. And he's reluctant to yield his hands-on control over the military.
00:41:35But Davis had to relinquish control to his pieces in the field, even though some,
00:41:41like Johnston and Beauregard, would cause him trouble throughout the conflict. Davis increasingly
00:41:47turned to Lee to help him fight back Lincoln and his most powerful pieces.
00:41:52And basically what he wanted to do was to win a sufficient number of victories in the field
00:41:59that the people of Washington would begin to demand that the government stop the war,
00:42:05and that they could achieve their independence in the way in which Vietnam achieved their independence,
00:42:12because the greatest weapon that an army has is the will to win. Once you strip them of that weapon,
00:42:18it doesn't matter how much firepower they have. If they don't have the will to win, then the war is over.
00:42:23Throughout his presidency, which cannot be separated from the war between the states,
00:42:29Jefferson Davis was continually forced to be commander-in-chief over states, suspicious of
00:42:35federal tyranny. And he told people as early as 1861, look, when there were all kinds of cries from
00:42:42the Confederate public, carry the war to the enemy, go to the enemy, fight, fight. Davis said there was
00:42:47nothing more he wanted to do, but he didn't have the means to do it. Regardless of Davis's overall war
00:42:53strategy, his political maneuvering with the states and the Congress, or his sheer force of will,
00:42:59the Union still had more money, men, and materiel. Through 1863, the high watermark of the Confederate
00:43:07States of America, the tide of war shifted back and forth between the North and the South.
00:43:13Politically, Jefferson Davis held steadfast to Southern independence, but never gave up on the
00:43:18possibility of peace with the North. Jefferson Davis wrote once to Lincoln, but it was not
00:43:26replied to. He sent delegations to a delegation to Washington in 1863. The delegation was not received
00:43:34by Lincoln. It was turned away, I think, before it even got to the White House.
00:43:40So there really is no direct communication between Lincoln and Davis at all.
00:43:44The problem was that Lincoln refused to ever meet
00:43:51with representatives of the Confederate States of America. He would meet with them as individuals,
00:43:57or he would meet with them as representatives from their states, but never the Confederacy.
00:44:07Even in the face of staggering losses in the field and personal losses,
00:44:12like the death of Davis's good friend Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh, and Davis's favorite
00:44:17nephew Isaac Stamps at Gettysburg, Jefferson Davis held firm his beliefs that the Northern leaders had
00:44:24betrayed the Constitution by wielding the federal government against the states, and that the
00:44:29invasion of the South was yet one more act of tyranny that the Confederates had the constitutional
00:44:34responsibility to repel. I think there's a very important part of understanding Davis,
00:44:41is that the Civil War really is a war, a tale of two cities. You've got Richmond
00:44:50versus Washington, and they literally are 100 miles apart. So the Army of Northern Virginia's job
00:44:56is to protect Richmond, and if possible, conquer Washington. Washington's job is he's got to conquer
00:45:04Richmond. He's got to conquer the capital of the rebellion. In the summer of 1862, when Joseph E.
00:45:11Johnston was wounded outside of Richmond, Virginia, Jefferson Davis made his most fateful decision of
00:45:17the war. He appointed Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. Joe Johnson makes that
00:45:25famous remark, which I wish I could have remembered verbatim, that the best shot that was fired in the
00:45:33Civil War was the one that wounded me. Because in wounding me, taking me out of the mix, Davis went to Lee,
00:45:43and there is the man who really was the one who was the miracle worker. Lee and Davis were of a similar
00:45:50mind in terms of prosecuting the war. And as soon as Lee took command, he went on the offensive and
00:45:56pushed back the Union siege of Richmond. Lee, unlike Generals Joseph E. Johnston and PGT Beauregard, held the
00:46:04nation, the cause, above his own personal advancement. So naturally, he got along famously with President Davis.
00:46:11In Lee, Davis saw America. He says to one of his daughters, if Lee would take one wing and I could
00:46:22command another wing, I think we could wrestle our independence from those people. In the fall of
00:46:281862, Davis and the Confederates placed all their hopes on invasions of border states Kentucky and Maryland.
00:46:35In many ways, though Gettysburg is often considered the high watermark of the Confederacy, in many ways,
00:46:42this two-pronged invasion is. Because success in both those places, even in one of those places,
00:46:49might have tipped the balance with Great Britain and would have far-reaching impact on this side of
00:46:55the ocean as well. Unfortunately for Jefferson Davis and his side, both of those invasions turned back.
00:47:01The Confederacy was desperate for foreign recognition, but Europe and Britain remained neutral.
00:47:08A furious President Davis asserted that their so-called neutrality was in fact aiding the North.
00:47:14The Confederacy always hoped for recognition from Europe and sent ambassadors, well, they were emissaries,
00:47:21they were not really ambassadors, to England and France and Belgium and a few other countries. But most
00:47:27countries were not willing to recognize the Confederacy because of slavery. So recognition was just
00:47:36really a vain hope. There were a few politicians who spoke for it on the continent and in England, but
00:47:42it just never got very far. Even in 1861, while going through the motions of sending diplomats abroad,
00:47:48he privately confided to friends that there was very little chance that England would recognize the
00:47:54Confederacy and give its help until the Confederacy had already proven that it didn't need it.
00:48:00Lincoln becomes a correspondent with Tsar Alexander of Russia. The Tsar says to Lincoln,
00:48:08if the French and the British intervene on the side of the South, you will have my support. And he sent two
00:48:14fleets of ships, one to San Francisco, one to New York. I mean, we almost had World War I in the 1860s.
00:48:21Davis tried bargaining with the European powers by using the South's chief export, cotton. But the
00:48:28global economy had finally caught up with the Southern staple, and the rest of the world seemed
00:48:33to take a wait-and-see approach to the North American conflict. So without the economic persuasion or
00:48:40coercion to bring European nations in on the side of the Confederacy, and with the disinclination on the part
00:48:46of those nations to take the side of a nation that still practiced slavery, the Confederacy had nothing
00:48:53to offer. When someone said to him, you sent Duncan F. Kenner to England to offer emancipation for
00:49:03recognition, did you have the constitutional right to do that? He said, no. But I thought that if we won,
00:49:12it wouldn't matter. And that's what Lincoln said, you know, early in the war. I was probably,
00:49:18I'm fighting an unconstitutional war. But if I win, no one will mind.
00:49:28Capitalizing on the Confederate retreats in the fall of 1862, and the neutral to positive support from
00:49:34abroad, President Lincoln played his political trump card, the Emancipation Proclamation, with the hopes that
00:49:41it would end the war with a single stroke of the pen. Lincoln knew he had a cause. But the cause,
00:49:49at first, finally kind of fizzled on him. You know, at first, the cause was the Union. And there had been
00:49:57a lot of people before the war, you know, in the North, who had said, great grief, do we have to have
00:50:04another one of these secession crises? Let's let the Erring sisters go in peace. So he's got a problem
00:50:11here. What does he do about his cause? So then he sees his own emancipation, which he thinks is
00:50:19unconstitutional, you know. But he thinks that emancipating the slaves will be the cause. And it
00:50:26finally generates into the cause. The modern textbooks portray the war as the North solidly in support of
00:50:36abolishing slavery, emancipation, and so on. The South solidly in support of
00:50:42slavery, and nothing could be further from the truth. The South was as divided over secession as
00:50:50much as the North was divided over slavery. Men like Sherman and Grant and Sheridan and McClellan
00:50:57could care nothing about slavery. They were interested in reunification. The genius of Lincoln
00:51:03was that he was able to meld these two threads together, being able to say that, yes, I know
00:51:10there are people in the North that are all in favor of our army being an army of emancipation,
00:51:16and there are also that number of people who see our army as an army purely of reunification,
00:51:21and I've got to deal with both of these constituencies. And he was able to pull it off.
00:51:25But the Emancipation Proclamation was a political gamble for Lincoln, because on face value,
00:51:30the document did not free any slaves. In fact, it specifically kept in bondage any slave in Union
00:51:37controlled territory. It specifically exempted all the parishes in Louisiana, for example,
00:51:42where the Union army was at the time. It was occupying these different parishes. It exempted
00:51:47West Virginia, which had seceded and was part of the Union. And so Lincoln was excoriated severely
00:51:55by newspapers in America and in Europe for the Emancipation Proclamation, because people looked at
00:52:02it and understood that it didn't free the slaves. So the position was essentially, if you support the
00:52:08Union, you can keep your slaves. If the Emancipation Proclamation had gone before the court, as it
00:52:15should have, it would have been found unconstitutional, because it is in complete defiance of the Fifth
00:52:22Amendment. And Lincoln obviously used the War Powers Acts that allowed him to do certain things during the
00:52:30time of war, because he's the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. I mean, if you go back and you look at
00:52:36the constitutionality of some of Lincoln's conduct during the conflict, I mean, you know, you're
00:52:41really stretching. I mean, he's the first president to really employ what the founders meant when they
00:52:50said, you're also Commander-in-Chief. Lincoln had made it clear publicly that in order to save the Union,
00:52:57he would free all the slaves, none of the slaves, or some of the slaves. He would do what was necessary
00:53:03in order to win. He was a practical man. Davis, on the other hand, was a man of principle. He stood on
00:53:12the issues that he felt was most important, had a very difficult time in making decisions that would
00:53:20overturn his principle.
00:53:23The Emancipation Proclamation was a document that changed the course of history and the war. Foreign
00:53:32recognition for the Confederate States of America was all but lost, and it cast the shroud of morality
00:53:38over the conflict. It was now nearly impossible for Davis to argue states' rights, tariffs, the tyranny
00:53:44of a federal government in the face of human bondage. After the war, Davis would label slavery the occasion,
00:53:52not the cause. But, in effect, Lincoln had played a card that trumped everything in Davis' hand.
00:53:58Increasingly, Jefferson Davis became more isolated within his own government, his own country,
00:54:05his own cause. The rise of the Confederacy peaked by the end of 1862, and the devastating
00:54:12losses of Vicksburg and Gettysburg sealed the Confederate fall. Davis' grand constitutional
00:54:18Confederacy began imploding under the weight of slavery, increasing Union resources,
00:54:25forces, and a citizenry that could never muster his same passion for the cause. But, most crushing
00:54:32of all, was time.
00:54:34He turns to Lee, and he suggests that Lee sends some of his army, which had been so successful
00:54:43at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, to send some of his army, and perhaps himself, into the Mid-South.
00:54:49Lee, however, is the type of commander who has his own persona and his own individuality,
00:54:56and therefore turns to Davis and says, no, I have a better plan. And his plan is to invade the North.
00:55:03But what you have there really are two different things. You have a Jefferson Davis whose idea of
00:55:10nationhood and the Confederacy means that all parts of the 11 states that formed the Confederate States of America
00:55:16are equally valuable to the nation. Whereas you have a Robert E. Lee, who is focused upon one of the 11 states,
00:55:28less than a tenth of the Confederacy, in Virginia. There was no way that Lee was going to leave Virginia
00:55:36and go to Mississippi at that particular time. So what you have there, again, is split policy.
00:55:43Who is calling the shots? Which may be okay if the whole national policy followed that. But at the same time,
00:55:51that's going on. Disjointed from it is this invasion that's going on in the center of the South.
00:55:57And when the Confederacy loses both of these at Gettysburg on July 3rd and at Vicksburg on July 4th,
00:56:04that really is the changing tide, the ebbing tide of the Confederacy. They didn't know it then.
00:56:11But with hindsight, we can go and see, Lee is never going to take the offensive again. He can't.
00:56:17And in the South, in the center of the South, there's going to be a constant falling back,
00:56:23and yet it never becomes policy. It's only when it becomes policy, you see. When Washington in the
00:56:29Revolution made that policy, then it had sense. When it just occurs, then you're losing ground for
00:56:37nothing. And that's what Davis never manages to package together as a national military strategy.
00:56:45After Vicksburg, the demoralized Confederate Army in the West was plagued with dissension in the ranks.
00:56:51Davis left Richmond and traveled personally to Tennessee,
00:56:55hoping his presence would reunite the forces.
00:56:57And everybody, all the subordinate generals are grumbling. Davis goes out to see what's going on.
00:57:05And he meets a unanimous opinion of the Corps and division commanders that Bragg is a butt.
00:57:12For God's sake, get rid of him. And he doesn't. He leaves him in command. That ain't smart.
00:57:18While Davis continually struggled with his military leadership outside of General Lee,
00:57:25Lincoln handed over the Union Army to its rising star, Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln demanded
00:57:31unconditional surrender of the South. And Grant, with his right hand, William Tecumseh Sherman,
00:57:37engaged in total war on all inhabitants of the Confederacy.
00:57:41Sheridan and Sherman and Grant became successful not because of strategy or because of tactics,
00:57:51but because of scorched earth. Remember that after Grant takes command in March of 64,
00:57:59the Civil War dramatically changes. All the romance and chivalry that we see even as late as Gettysburg,
00:58:07all that's gone. Now is scorched earth. It's a war of attrition.
00:58:13The way Jefferson Davis waged the war is there were some attacks on civilian targets.
00:58:20General Jubal Early burned some houses and some warehouses in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in retaliation
00:58:26for some of the attacks on private property and private homes in Virginia. Stonewall Jackson could
00:58:32well have gone into Philadelphia and bombed Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. for that matter,
00:58:38but he didn't. And when Robert E. Lee went into Pennsylvania during the Battle of Gettysburg,
00:58:43they didn't destroy everything in their path like the Federal Army did when it went through the South.
00:58:50I mean, when your plan is burned, I mean, when after the Battle of Cedar Creek in Shenandoah,
00:58:59it was a war. And Sheridan looks out at the valley and he says to his commanders,
00:59:04I'm going to so destroy this valley that if a crow flies across it, it's going to have to carry its own
00:59:11rations. And then he sought to burn the valley. I mean, you burn the Shenandoah Valley. I mean, that's
00:59:17that's crazy. General Grant also took a hard line with regard to prisoners of war and refused to continue
00:59:23the prisoner exchange. Grant did not want to exchange prisoners because he simply did not want
00:59:29to put Southern soldiers back in the ranks. And he had enough soldiers. He never said he did for,
00:59:35you know, really, he was always wanting more soldiers to enlist and certainly believed in the draft.
00:59:40But he saw no point in releasing Southern soldiers who would immediately pick up their arms and
00:59:45return to the front lines of Lee's army. In the absence of exchange, the prisons in both the North
00:59:51and the South became overcrowded and the conditions quickly deteriorated. What happens is that as,
00:59:59after the war is over, the stories of prisoners get out, the stories that are the worst are from
01:00:05Andersonville, where the conditions are execrable. You know, the place is built for 13,000. It has 30 or 40,000.
01:00:15It has one stream running through it. That's the water and everything else. The disease is,
01:00:22the death from disease is unbelievable. Conditions are, people are starving to death.
01:00:31And after the war, they try Captain Wertz, who was the commander, because of his fiendish treatment of
01:00:39prisoners of war, mainly because he didn't feed them. One of the problems is that they were getting
01:00:48the rations that Lee's army was getting. The Confederacy could only do what it could do,
01:00:56and it didn't have all the supplies it should have had. During Captain Wertz's trial,
01:01:00Union prosecutors tried to have him implicate President Davis, but Wertz refused. He was sent to the
01:01:06Gallows. Well, there's no evidence that I've seen that Davis really knew what was happening in
01:01:14Andersonville. He doubtless knew what was happening at Libby, because it was right there in his front yard.
01:01:23He was for fair treatment of the prisoners. He was also not forgiving the prisoners more than his army was
01:01:32in the beginning. But the conditions in northern prisons were equally bad, and Union and Confederate
01:01:37soldiers that were captured had less than a 30 percent chance of getting out alive. So you run into
01:01:44places like Point Lookout, like Johnson's Island, where the conditions are anything but commendable.
01:01:55Same kind of conditions as in Andersonville. The difference being that the North had the capacity
01:02:05to supply the prisoners and didn't.
01:02:11Leading a country is never a small task. Forming a country harder still. But leading a still
01:02:18forming country in the midst of war is Herculean in nature. Even though Davis was likened to George
01:02:25Washington, the United States first president, George Washington didn't have to perform all of his jobs
01:02:31at the same time. By the last years of the war, the physical toll on Davis was immense, and his recurring
01:02:39illnesses from malaria to the neuralgia that blinded him kept cropping up. He always found solace in his
01:02:46family. But in 1864, tragedy once again would strike the Davis home.
01:02:51In the spring of 1864, a young Joe Davis, as he was known, fell off a porch wall in the executive
01:03:03mansion and he fell to a brick floor and he crushed his head and he lived a very short time. He died the
01:03:11very same day. Jefferson Davis himself was at his office. His wife was there with him. She'd carried
01:03:17him lunch. Word came that the boy had fallen. They raced back up. They realized there was no hope for
01:03:22him. Jefferson Davis was just absolutely destroyed. Verena was pregnant at the time and Davis was as
01:03:34worried about her as he was for himself. They both tried to soldier on and everyone said they were very
01:03:41brave and dignified, but there are several descriptions of them at the graveside, you know, standing totally
01:03:47defeated looking, and that Davis himself was really not able to do much of anything for a few days after
01:03:56Joseph Davis's death. It also helps to explain, I think, why Davis, above all Confederates, to the last
01:04:03instant could not recognize that the South was doomed because Davis had put himself into the Confederacy
01:04:10in a way that he had dedicated himself to nothing else in his life. And I think for him the Confederacy
01:04:15had become yet another of those sons and he could no more willingly oversee its death by surrender than
01:04:24he could willingly watch yet another one of his boys die. Abraham Lincoln also suffered some of the same
01:04:30personal tragedy as his southern rival losing son William in 1862, but it was contrast more than
01:04:37comparison that characterized the two presidencies. So far as we know there was never any direct personal
01:04:43contact between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. They did briefly serve in Congress at the same time
01:04:50in 1846, so chances are as a matter of formality and courtesy they may have shaken hands and said hello,
01:04:57but there's no indication they ever socialized together before the war and during the war there
01:05:01is no direct correspondence between them or whatever because Lincoln's position from the first is there
01:05:06is no such thing as the Confederate States of America, therefore there is no such thing as a
01:05:10Confederate president, and to receive correspondence from him or to deal with him in any fashion
01:05:15risked an acknowledgement that he was in fact a legitimate entity. Lincoln better understood the
01:05:21reality of the situation at the time and was more adaptable to that reality. Davis looking backwards,
01:05:31I mean some people would say it's not a revolution the Confederate States of America it's a reaction.
01:05:37So what Davis is looking back toward the past the way things were when it was rapidly becoming modernized
01:05:44and therefore Davis never had the ability to make people see the future. Davis was known for his
01:05:52melodious voice and skills as an orator, but he had difficulty speaking to the common man. He wrote
01:05:59brilliant legal arguments but failed to stir emotion. Lincoln wrote on an entirely different plane
01:06:07of persuasion. I'm not just talking about the Gettysburg Address, you're talking about the second
01:06:13inaugural things of that kind. This is almost prose poetry. Davis couldn't do that, but Davis could be
01:06:22clear and make exactly the statements he wanted to make. They don't sing, they march.
01:06:30As commanders-in-chief and war leaders, they were both people of enormous will, of utter and total
01:06:39commitment. Each was as committed as the other. I mean Lincoln matched Davis in commitment. Of course
01:06:46that was one of Davis's problems. The man on the other side was as determined and as strong-willed as
01:06:52he was. If the Emancipation Proclamation sealed the fate of foreign recognition of the Confederacy,
01:06:58the re-election of President Abraham Lincoln cemented the North's vitality that it would not,
01:07:04as Jefferson Davis hoped, succumbed to the exhaustion of war. When Lee saw Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,
01:07:16he knew that that was Lincoln's first campaign speech for re-election. If we don't continue this
01:07:24work at hand, then these men will have died in vain. We can't let that happen. And when Lincoln was
01:07:32re-elected, Lee knew. Not only have these people re-elected the president, no president had been
01:07:41re-elected since Andrew Jackson. When they re-elected Lincoln as president, they were also re-electing
01:07:48him as commander-in-chief. And there is no way that we have four more years of being able to resist
01:07:56these invaders. When Petersburg fell in the spring of 1865, Lee knew that they could no longer defend
01:08:05Richmond, so he sent word to Davis to evacuate the Capitol. President Davis was attending services
01:08:12when he received Lee's message. Davis quickly exited the church and the congregation knew that
01:08:18Richmond's fall was very near. On April 2nd, 1865, when Davis boarded a train along with most of his
01:08:25government ministers to flee the dying city of Richmond, he didn't articulate at the moment
01:08:30exactly what his long-range plan was, if he even had one. Everything now had to be contingent upon what
01:08:36the enemy did. But he certainly entertained no thoughts, no designs whatever, of quitting. Indeed,
01:08:43when he reached Danville, Virginia the next day, and Danville becomes for a few days the new
01:08:47Confederate Capitol, Davis will actually issue a proclamation to the people of the Confederacy.
01:08:59We have now entered upon a new phase of a struggle, the memory of which is to endure for all ages
01:09:05and to shed ever-increasing luster upon our country. Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities in
01:09:12particular points, important but not vital to our defense, with our army free to move from point to
01:09:18point and strike in detail the detachments and garrisons of the enemy, operating in the interior
01:09:25of our own country where supplies are more accessible and where the foe will be far removed from his own
01:09:31base. Let us but will it, and we are free. Let us meet the foe with fresh defiance and with unconquered and
01:09:40unconquerable hearts.
01:09:50People in Danville who saw the proclamation were seen to be laughing in the street because it was
01:09:55pretty severely detached from reality at that moment. Fortunately, with telegraph lines down,
01:10:00most people in the Confederacy never saw it. But it shows that Davis's thinking at that moment
01:10:06had nothing to do with defeat or surrender, but only in how to continue the contest.
01:10:12A lot of people think that the new phase in the struggle
01:10:16phrase from his proclamation meant that he was willing to undertake guerrilla warfare.
01:10:23I personally don't think that is true. I think neither he nor Lee, who were both
01:10:28educated West Point gentlemen, believed that that was the way to conduct a war.
01:10:36While Jefferson Davis delivered his proclamation in Danville, Abraham Lincoln had followed the Union
01:10:41troops into Richmond and was preparing to tour the Confederate White House.
01:10:45To begin with, I think the visit itself was astounding because he went around Richmond with no guards.
01:10:52He just walked around himself. I know he sat in Davis's office and must have been remarkably pleased to be there.
01:11:02I think, oddly enough, they had an admiration for each other.
01:11:06Lincoln kept calling him, you know, that other fellow, always wondering what the other fellow was doing.
01:11:14And how could Davis not have been interested in what Lincoln was doing? Had to be.
01:11:19But in spite of losing the Confederate capital, Davis still had the makings of a grand strategy
01:11:31to marshal what was left of the Confederate forces. The plan unified the armies of Northern Virginia
01:11:36under Lee and the Army of Tennessee under Joseph Johnston into one force that would repel the Union
01:11:42onslaught from the South once and for all.
01:11:45Well, his plan blew up in his face because, well, one week after he left Richmond, April the 9th, Lee had to surrender.
01:11:53Not only did Davis's military plans make it out to the generals, but so did the proclamation Davis made from Danville.
01:12:00Lee hears that speech, realizing, well, not hear it, but he knows of the speech.
01:12:06And he does not correspond with Lee, I mean, Davis at all.
01:12:11The next and last major battle is the Battle of Salus Creek on April the 7th.
01:12:16Lee's troops are just horribly, badly defeated by Sheridan's forces.
01:12:22By this time, Lee realizes, I've got to correspond with General Grant.
01:12:28He does not correspond with his commander-in-chief, which is President Davis.
01:12:35General Grant then relayed the news of Lee's contact to President Lincoln.
01:12:40And then he said, well, do you have any guidance for me?
01:12:43And Lincoln tells Grant, if I were in your place, General, I would let Lee up lightly.
01:12:50At one point, which is, you know, almost makes you teary when you think about it.
01:12:56Before he was going to meet, to meet Grant, Lee said to General Wise, I've got to go meet with General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths to do that than do that.
01:13:10He said, what will the country think of me?
01:13:12And General Wise looked at him, he said, what country?
01:13:15There hasn't been a country for the past year and a half.
01:13:19As far as these men are concerned, you are the country.
01:13:23And Grant knew that.
01:13:25If we treat Lee with respect, everything will turn out fine.
01:13:31If we humiliate him and embarrass him, those boys will go up in the hills, and we'll have a guerrilla war until God knows when.
01:13:39After Lee's surrender, Virginia was no longer safe.
01:13:43So President Davis and the remnants of his staff moved south, first stopping in Greensboro, North Carolina, to meet with General Joseph E. Johnston, who informed the president that his army was too reduced to fight.
01:13:57Davis increasingly, desperately, placed all of his hopes in the Trans-Mississippi, the Confederate lands west of the Great River.
01:14:05They were reluctant to leave Virginia.
01:14:07That was, they really felt that if they left Virginia, they basically signaled that the war was over, because everybody began scattering, and indeed that was true.
01:14:16After they left Virginia, the various cabinet members scattered to their homes, and everyone was saving what they could and saving themselves.
01:14:23Davis tenaciously clings to the idea that resistance can be sustained.
01:14:28He does know, and he's right, that as long as there's Confederate resistance, no matter where it is, then the cause is still alive, and there's still always the chance that the North will decide to stop.
01:14:40Even after Lee's army has surrendered, weeks later, even after the Army of Tennessee has surrendered by Joseph E. Johnston, Davis is still telling those around him, stand by me.
01:14:51If necessary, we'll cross the Mississippi.
01:14:54They had no boats, and the Union controlled the Mississippi, so we don't know how they'd have gotten there.
01:14:58But he'd cross the Mississippi, where there's an army of cavalry still in the field under General Kirby Smith, and they would consolidate, and they'd ride north once again.
01:15:07If they had to pull back into the New Mexico Territory, even into Mexico itself, they would come back, and as long as they could keep coming back, they could keep holding out, making themselves enough of a nuisance to Yankee authorities that in the end, the Union would say, enough is enough, you may go.
01:15:25I think in those last days of the war, he probably was not very realistic.
01:15:30I think he was probably about the last person to believe that the Confederacy could survive by April of 1865.
01:15:37Before the fall of Richmond, Davis sent Verena and the children south to the Carolinas, and then when Virginia fell with Lee's surrender, he sent a letter instructing her to meet him in Abbeville, South Carolina.
01:15:50Dear Verena, everything is dark.
01:15:56You should prepare for the worst by dividing your baggage.
01:16:01I have lingered on the road and labored to little purpose.
01:16:06Dear wife, this is not the fate to which I invited you when the future was rose-colored to us both.
01:16:12But I know you will bear it even better than myself, and that of us, too.
01:16:19I alone will ever look back reproachfully upon my past career.
01:16:23Jefferson Davis, April 14, 1865.
01:16:27They became separated and remained separated for about a month, and their main concerns back and forth were for each other's existence for a while, to be sure they were all alive.
01:16:40He was worried about the children.
01:16:41She was worried about him.
01:16:42Every letter she tells him what each child is doing and how they're faring and how the pets were that the children took along and the servants and so forth.
01:16:50But near the very end, they both realized that things were just falling apart, that there really was not much order anymore in the countryside,
01:17:00that there were predatory bands of Union and Confederate soldiers just roaming about without any supervision.
01:17:06And they feared losing their wagon trains, losing their supplies, being separated even more than they were already.
01:17:13And they just mainly tried to get back together and decide where to go next.
01:17:17But the following day, April 15, 1865, while Davis kept pushing south and west, trying to find a safe base of operations,
01:17:28as General Lee dispersed his troops, a single event, a bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth assassinating President Lincoln,
01:17:38would irrevocably alter the final course of the conflict and color everything to follow.
01:17:44I have never seen one shred of evidence that connects Davis with John Wilkes Booth's plot to kill Lincoln.
01:17:50At the same time, there were Confederate efforts to do various things across the Potomac River,
01:17:57in the District of Columbia in Maryland, to free Confederate prisoners from the big prison camp at Point Lookout,
01:18:03to do various things in Washington, even to the kidnapping of certain officials.
01:18:08Now, Davis, after the war, maintained that he never had anything to do with any sorts of plots like that.
01:18:16Davis discouraged all such talk of Confederate attempts to interfere in the election,
01:18:22either by bribing people or by injecting money to buy votes in the North,
01:18:26because this was not how a democracy ought to behave in relation to other democracies,
01:18:31even one with which it was at war.
01:18:33In later years, with hindsight his faithful companion, Davis reflected on Lincoln's assassination.
01:18:44He could not be regarded otherwise than as a great misfortune to the South.
01:18:49He had power over the Northern people and was without personal malignity toward the people of the South.
01:18:55His successor, Andrew Johnson, was without power in the North and the embodiment of malignity toward the Southern people.
01:19:04As Jefferson Davis fled further south, newly appointed President Andrew Johnson,
01:19:21seeing in Davis a Lincoln conspirator, placed a $100,000 bounty on the Confederate president, dead or alive.
01:19:29Davis' days as Commander-in-Chief were waning.
01:19:31The Confederate military east of the Mississippi was disappearing into unconditional surrenders.
01:19:38And when he finally arrived in Abbeville, South Carolina, Davis met with his remaining commanders for the last time.
01:19:46Davis kept moving south into Georgia.
01:19:49Townspeople had become less hospitable for fear of Union reprisals.
01:19:53And Davis and his entourage had to camp outside the small town of Irwinville.
01:19:58The last Confederate hope lay far away with General Kirby Smith in Texas.
01:20:09Jefferson Davis was captured in this little village of Irwinville by two who were surrounded.
01:20:15His party was surrounded by two federal cavalry regiments who had been sent out looking for him.
01:20:21They knew generally where Davis was.
01:20:23It had been reported on the road.
01:20:25Davis, when he heard the cavalry coming, grabbed a raincoat.
01:20:29The raincoat was a raglan-sleeved outer coat that would be worn by either men or women.
01:20:39Later it was alleged he was in woman's clothes, but he was not in woman's clothes at all.
01:20:43A trooper noticed Davis' boots under the coat and ordered him to halt.
01:20:47And Davis claimed he was going to attack the trooper.
01:20:52He was going to throw him off the horse.
01:20:54At that point, Verena came, hugged Davis, and asked the trooper not to farm her husband.
01:21:01With the capture of Jefferson Davis, the voluntary union of the states and their sovereign constitutional rights vanished.
01:21:10From that point on, power would be centrally consolidated, and the idea that the federal government would act as the agent to the states
01:21:18was replaced with the states being subservient to Washington, D.C.
01:21:23The day ever comes when the federal government gets to determine the limits of its own powers,
01:21:31then before too long it will decide that there are no limits to its powers.
01:21:35And that, of course, wasn't the purpose of the founders.
01:21:38The whole purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of the government.
01:21:41Robert E. Lee, in 1866, predicted that the centralized or consolidated government was sure to become, in his words,
01:21:50despotic at home and aggressive abroad.
01:21:53And he was right.
01:22:01Over 600,000 Americans lost their lives in the war between the states,
01:22:06what Lincoln first called the war to save the Union, and then later the war to free the slaves.
01:22:12But most of those who fought, north or south, never owned slaves,
01:22:15and the rest of the world found ways to end slavery peacefully.
01:22:19The albatross of slavery has been hung on Jefferson Davis.
01:22:25In Jefferson Davis' mind, he didn't see himself as perpetuating slavery as such.
01:22:32He truly believed that since the Constitution was entirely silent on the subject of secession,
01:22:43the states voluntarily entered the Union,
01:22:45and therefore they reserved for themselves the right to voluntarily exit the Union.
01:22:50And there was nothing to stop them from doing it.
01:22:53And so declaring their independence, meaning Jefferson Davis and his followers,
01:22:58they saw themselves as the second American Revolution.
01:23:02What had begun for the South's most prominent statesman in the Rose Gardens of Briarfield
01:23:13ended 51 months later in the isolated woods of Georgia.
01:23:18The Confederate president, a beleaguered fugitive.
01:23:22For four years, Jefferson Davis chased the dream of a second American Revolution.
01:23:26His cause was the reinstatement of a trampled American Constitution.
01:23:31But as the Confederacy's founding father, Davis' tragic flaw was believing that the Confederacy was filled
01:23:38with Jefferson Davis's, willing to sacrifice, as he had, everything.
01:23:45No one believed in Confederate nationalism more than Jefferson Davis.
01:23:49And with his capture, there was no one left to champion the cause.
01:23:54The Confederacy did not end on a battlefield.
01:23:58It did not end in the political sparring of the city-states, Washington and Richmond.
01:24:03The Confederacy ended with its George Washington ensnared in the thickets and brambles of the Deep South.