Jefferson Davis: Last President of the Jeffersonian Republic

The following is the text of a presentation commemorating Jefferson Davis that the author presented recently at Oakwood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia:

​Ladies and gentlemen, and fellow compatriots, it is a privilege to be with you all here today, and with the ghosts of these thousands who rest here among us, men who gave their lives defending our land and our people from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance, just as their fathers and grandfathers had done in the days of ’76. I wish to thank Mr. Andrew Morehead for honoring me with the invitation to offer a presentation commemorating President Jefferson Davis, the only president of our Confederacy, and the last president of our Jeffersonian Republic.


Time is an interesting thing to contemplate, and when one is approaching middle age, as I am, one tends to think about it sometimes. In his book Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner said “It’s all now, you see: yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow, and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” For us, certainly, yesterday is not over. When I was a boy, Jefferson Davis and the war that these men who rest here fought in was still within living memory. The last reunion of Confederate veterans was held when I was about five years old. And when these men were boys, the Revolutionary War and the subsequent founding of the Jeffersonian Republic of 1787 was still in living memory, for there were still some old veterans of that war alive when Lincoln invaded the Confederate States of America, the last remnant of that Republic.


From the beginning of that voluntary compact of sovereign States, the industrializing mercantile North, with its growing sectional majorities, attempted to take over the central government, unconstitutionally increase its powers, and treat the agricultural Southern States as their Colonies. Finally the Southern States, with the sanction of the Declaration of Independence, peacefully withdrew from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America in order to maintain for themselves the original Republic as it had been intended by the Founders. But the North would have none of it, and it all went down in a bloody cataclysm when Lincoln drove the Southern States back into the Union at the point of the bayonet, and transformed the old Republic into a coerced Yankee Empire.


From the beginning of the compact, there developed a struggle for the balance of power between the Northern and the Southern States. The two sections differed from the very beginning of their Colonial settlements, with the gallant Cavaliers who followed the Stuarts in the English Civil War settling in the congenial latitudes of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay, and with the Puritan Roundheads who followed Cromwell in that war settling in the flinty coasts of Massachusetts and New England. Thus the antagonistic division between the two sections was inscribed from the beginning, although they unified in their common struggle against England in the War for Independence. The geography of the two regions and the character of the two peoples determined the evolution of the respective cultures, with the Northern Colonies evolving into a trading, seafaring, and mercantile economy, and the Southern Colonies evolving into a planting and agrarian economy. The wealth of the South – tobacco, rice, cotton and naval stores – eventually provided not only the raw materials for the North’s manufacturing and shipping, but were the Union’s primary exports to Europe. While the North’s manufactures began to provide some of the finished goods for the South, much of the South’s preferred finished goods were traditionally imported from Europe, and the modest duties on these imports supported the modest financial needs of the central government of the young Republic. 


As time went by, populations moved westward and new States were formed and admitted into the Union. The New England migrants moved into western New York, northern Ohio, and the Great Lakes region. Southern farmers moved into Kentucky, Tennessee and the Ohio River Valley, and planters into the new cotton lands of Alabama and Mississippi. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase opened up the Trans-Mississippi, and President Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River on their famous expedition to explore the region. In 1820 Missouri Territory applied for Statehood, and opened up the first major controversy over slavery in the Territories - a manifestation of the ongoing struggle between the North and the South concerning the political balance of power, and a controversy that alarmed Thomas Jefferson as “a fire-bell in the night.” It ended with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, but Jefferson rightly saw it to be “The knell of the Union.” He saw that the mercantile North and the agrarian South had evolved to the point where their differences essentially made them two different countries under one government.

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The government founded by the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 was a compact of sovereign States that delegated certain limited and enumerated powers to a central government for the equal benefit of all, such as providing for the common defense against foreign aggression, or the regulation of interstate commerce, but the States retained unto themselves all other rights and powers not specifically enumerated. The Southern States stood firmly by this interpretation of the Constitution, expressed eloquently in Jefferson’s “Kentucky Resolutions,” Madison’s “Virginia Resolutions,” and John C. Calhoun’s arguments in the Senate. The North, on the other hand, ever since the days of Alexander Hamilton at the Founding, was forever agitating for a loose interpretation of the Constitution that would give the central government more power – and, of course, put that power under the North’s control. This evolved into Sen. Henry Clay’s “American System,” which called for a National Bank, an expansion of the “General Welfare” clause of the Constitution to allow the central government to build railroads and infrastructures for the benefit of the North (paid for by taxes from all), and to raise tariffs to not only pay for the government, but to subsidize Northern industries and crony capitalists at the expense of the South. The Southern argument against this was based on Art. I, sec. 8 of the Constitution, which required all taxes to be uniform among the States, and which certainly implied that the benefit of all taxes should be uniform as well. As John Randolph of Roanoke said: 

It eventuates in this: whether you, as a planter, will consent to be taxed in order to hire another man to go to work in a shoemaker’s shop, or to set up a spinning jenny. For my part, I will not agree to it, even though they should by way of return agree to be taxed to help us to plant tobacco; much less will I agree to pay all and receive nothing for it… Sir, there should be none but an ad valorem duty on all articles which would prevent the possibility of one interest in the country being sacrificed to another by the management of taxation...

John Randolph saw, as did Thomas Jefferson before him and John C. Calhoun after him – and Jefferson Davis after that - that the manufacturing North’s economic desires and political policies involved sacrificing the interests of the agricultural South to the interests of the manufacturing North by the management of taxation, duties, and tariffs. A prime example was the “Tariff of Abominations” in the 1830s, which almost lead to the secession of South Carolina. That eventually got settled, but by 1860 a prominent economist named Thomas Prentiss Kettell, in his book entitled Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, noted that the manufacturing and mercantile North had become to the agricultural South what England had been to the thirteen North American Colonies in 1776. And, as you may remember, we seceded from England over that matter.
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Through their growing Congressional majorities, the manufacturing North was extracting profits from the wealth of the agricultural South through the manipulation and management of tariffs and taxation, but in order for the Northern interests to fully tip the political balance of power of the central government in their favor, they had to politically crush the Southern stumbling block and their troublesome Constitutional arguments. The issue they hit upon was slavery in the Territories. This would divide the Democrat Party in the agrarian West from the Democrat Party in the agrarian South - and one day deliver the political power to the Radical Republican Party of the mercantile North.


While the South’s Constitutional struggle for slavery in the Territories was only one manifestation of her broader struggle to maintain the balance of power between the two sections that had been going on from the beginning, the North’s struggle for political domination was now masked entirely as a righteous Abolitionist Crusade. This began with the Missouri Compromise of 1820 – which had alarmed Thomas Jefferson as “a fire-bell in the night.” It continued through the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and “bleeding Kansas,” then on to John Brown’s Raid, and ended with their success in the election of Abraham Lincoln and his strictly sectional Northern political party - which led to the secession of the Southern States. Thomas Jefferson was proved a prophet when he had said forty years earlier that the Missouri debates of 1820 were “the knell of the Union.”


To hear their vitriol and hatred for the South, one would think the North would have been glad to see these Southern Apostates gone from polluting their Puritan “Citty upon a Hill,” but beneath their loathing of the South ran a deep undercurrent of avariciousness. Cotton was “king” at the time, and with the “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and free trading with Europe, and no longer paying extortionate tariffs to support Northern industries and Yankee crony capitalists, the North’s “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse into financial ruin and social anarchy, so Lincoln launched an armada against Charleston to provoke the South into firing the first shot, and got the war he wanted. He then called for troops to drive the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union at the point of the bayonet and put it under Northern control. Virginia, “The Mother of States and Statesmen,” had stood solidly for the Union she had sacrificed so much to create, but when she received Lincoln’s call for troops, she refused, seceded from the Union, and joined the Confederacy. Four more States (including occupied Missouri) followed her out, and the rest is history – the truth of which has been distorted ever since by “The Myth of the Righteous Cause,” which claims that the “Civil War” (which it was not) was “about” slavery (which it was not) and the “righteous” North went to war against the “evil” South to free the slaves (which it did not). It was simply Lincoln’s war against the South’s secession. Slavery was just the smelly “red herring” that covered his tracks in “The Myth of the Righteous Cause.” As the French philosopher Voltaire once said, “History is the propaganda of the victorious.”


At the formation of the Confederate government, Jefferson Davis was elected President. He had been born in 1808 on a farm in southwestern Kentucky, was educated at West Point, and became a cotton planter in Mississippi. In the Mexican War, he commanded the 1st Mississippi Regiment with gallantry and effectiveness. He subsequently was elected to the US Senate representing Mississippi. During his first term, he advocated extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, but the proposal was voted down - mostly by Northern senators in order to limit the possibility of more “Slave States” entering the Union and diluting their political power. It also gave them the whole of California as another “Free State.” In his book A Short History of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis said that the Missouri Compromise, which had settled the question of slavery in the Territories for thirty years, was thus thrown out of the window by the North, which opened up the Pandora’s Box of troubles that followed. It was during these controversies that Senator John C. Calhoun passed away. Allen Tate, a noted biographer of Jefferson Davis, said Davis was “the ablest debater for Southern rights since Calhoun,” and he was to stand by his convictions to the end.    


Davis was reelected to the Senate and began his second term in March of 1851. At his party’s request, he resigned his seat, ran for governor, and was narrowly defeated. However, during his campaign, he advocated for a meeting of the Southern States to see what could be done to alleviate the tension between the North and the South. Davis was a staunch Unionist who merely wanted to avoid postponing adjustments to the controversies before they devolved into greater evils, but his proposed meeting did not come about.

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Davis retired from public life and returned to his life as a cotton planter on his plantation “Brierfield,” but it was not to last. Franklin Pierce was elected president in November of 1852, and he asked Jefferson Davis to join his cabinet as Secretary of War, which he accepted. After serving the Pierce administration and strengthening the US military, he took a seat once more in the US Senate in 1857, a seat which he held until the secession of Mississippi from the Union. Mississippi seceded on January 9, 1861. As soon as Senator Davis received the official information, on January 21, he took formal leave of the Senate. In his farewell speech he said:

​I rise, Mr. President, for the purpose of announcing to the Senate that I have satisfactory evidence that the State of Mississippi, by a solemn ordinance of her people in convention assembled, has declared her separation from the United States… It is to be justified upon the basis that the States are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it. I hope the time may come again… [W]e but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence…

Jefferson Davis returned home with a commission as Major General of Mississippi Troops. Although few in the South thought so at the time, he predicted a long and bitter struggle to come.

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On February 4th, the seceded States met in Montgomery, Alabama, for the assembly of a Congress. On the 8th a Provisional Constitution was ratified. It was based on the US Constitution with only several modifications, such as giving the President a line-item veto, and limiting him to one six-year term of office. On the 9th, the Congress began voting for officers of the Provisional Government, and Jefferson Davis was elected President. He had not wanted the office, preferring to remain in command of the Mississippi troops, but he accepted it as his duty. On the 16th he arrived in Montgomery amid bonfires and cheering crowds. On the gallery of the Exchange Hotel, flanked by great men of the South, William Lowndes Yancey, with a graceful gesture towards Mr. Davis, said “The man and the hour have met.”


After the firing on Ft. Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops, and with the secession of the States of the Upper South, the Confederate Capital was moved to Richmond, Virginia. The Confederacy was put on its war footing in a defensive posture. President Davis, as Commander-in-Chief, felt that such a posture would show the world that the South had no desire for conquest, but  merely wished to be let alone, and that recognition by Europe would soon follow. Lincoln was setting up a blockade of the Southern coast from Virginia to Texas, but it had not yet become effective. Nonetheless, the Confederacy’s vast cotton crop was held in hopes that a “cotton famine” would urge Europe to recognize her. It was not to be, but as the war progressed, when it appeared that the South was about to win her independence and Europe was about to recognize her and lift the blockade, Lincoln, in desperation, issued as a war measure his Emancipation Proclamation. This claimed to free only the slaves behind Confederate lines, but as for the rest of the slaves, both North and South, a plain reading of it showed that slavery was just fine with “The Great Emancipator” as long as one were loyal to his government, proven six months later when he admitted West Virginia, a “Slave State,” into the Union. However, this was enough to keep Europe from recognizing the Confederacy and lifting the blockade, and the isolated South was left to fight on alone.


Paul Kennedy, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, lists in detail the disparity between the two countries. While the Confederacy’s infrastructure was being systematically destroyed, the United States’ industrial might was in full swing, building railroads and ships, and manufacturing guns and ammunition. While the US Navy’s blockade of the Confederate coast was augmented and tightened, steam-powered ironclad gunboats were gaining control of the Southern Rivers. The US Army was twice the size of the Confederate Army, and while the Confederate Army was steadily dwindling away from four years of battle, the US Army was continually being replenished with runaway slaves and mercenaries from the European ghettoes recruited on the docks of Philadelphia and New York with liberal bounties. In the Overland Campaign of 1864, Grant lost 60,000 men from Spotsylvania to Cold Harbour, but when he laid siege to Richmond and Petersburg he had as many men in his army as when he had started. Abraham Lincoln waged total war against the Southern Confederacy with the raping, pillaging, burning and destruction of homes, farms, towns and cities from western Missouri to the Shenandoah Valley, from Mississippi to Georgia and South Carolina, and from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. General Sherman said that the only way for America to conquer the Confederacy was to exterminate the Southern people. They are still working on that, it seems.


When the end came at last from “overwhelming numbers and resources,” Davis and the Confederate Government fled from Richmond in hopes of making it to the Trans-Mississippi to carry on the fight. But with the news of the surrenders one by one of the Confederate armies, the remnants of the government melted away, and President Davis was captured in Georgia and sent to prison in leg irons at Fortress Monroe. The North was in a fury over the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and they wanted to “hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” For two years he endured abuse in his prison cell, appealing all the while to be tried for the treason that the Yankees were threatening to hang him for, but although the carpetbaggers empaneled a Grand Jury in Richmond for a trial, Chief Justice Salmon P. Case called it off on a technicality. He knew that Davis – and with him, the South - would be acquitted by the Constitution, and the Yankees would lose in court what they had won on the battlefield. So after two years, and after he had been made the Sacrificial Lamb for the Southern People to appease the Northern mobs, the President was finally released from his prison cell.  


Lincoln’s War and the iron heel of Reconstruction was purely a revolution that transformed the Jeffersonian Republic of sovereign States into an Empire pinned together by bayonets. Chattel slavery was ended but it was merely replaced by the far more profitable “debt slavery,” where “Ole Marster” was merely replaced by a Wall Street banker who has enslaved us all, and all of our unborn generations, with the servicing of a thirty-six trillion dollar national debt never to be repaid, and with all of the “hidden tax” of inflation and paper money that goes along with it.


Jefferson Davis never wavered from his Constitutional convictions of 1861. He never applied for a pardon. He said pardons were for criminals, and he had committed no crime. The Leader of The Lost Cause was “The President” to his people unto the end. He died in 1889 and was buried in New Orleans, but later, at the request of his widow, Varina, his remains were removed to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, a fitting final resting place for the last President of the Jeffersonian Republic. But our president left us with this:


The contest is not over: the strife is not ended. It has only entered on a new and enlarged arena. The champions of constitutional liberty must spring to the struggle … until the Government of the United States is brought back to its constitutional limits, and the tyrant’s plea of ”necessity” is bound in chains…  


As William Faulkner said, yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow, and so, you see, the Lost Cause is not yet lost…