“Who cares?” might be your first reaction; after that, sarcasm
might take over: “We know how he would vote — and it wouldn’t be
for someone named Barack Obama.”
First let’s establish why you should care; then maybe we can
knock away some of that sarcasm too.
We venerate Lincoln, but in many ways Jefferson Davis was far the
more interesting statesman. Both men were born in Kentucky, but
while Lincoln was largely self-taught Davis received a classical
education that led to graduation from both Transylvania
University (a school of future statesmen in Kentucky) and West
Point.
While Lincoln’s early years were nondescript and his only
military experience was ninety days’ uneventful service in the
militia during the Black Hawk War, Jefferson Davis served as a
professional soldier for seven years (and in fact, befriended
Chief Black Hawk as he led him into captivity). He later resigned
his seat in the United States Congress to lead the Mississippi
Rifles in the Mexican War, a war that Lincoln, as a young
Congressman from Illinois, opposed as one of the most vocal
members of the anti-war faction in the U.S. House of
Representatives.
Before he became president of the Confederacy, Davis had been a
United States congressman, a U.S. senator (the New York
Times called him “the Cicero of the Senate”), and Secretary
of War; he had also been a planter; and when his first wife
(Zachary Taylor’s daughter) died of fever early in their
marriage, he spent long hours in his library, not only in
mourning, but eventually in study — of literature, politics, and
constitutional debates. Davis was a very well-read man.
Lincoln eventually found a career as a lawyer. Some thought he
had a lawyer’s (and a politician’s) slipperiness; some even
thought him coarse. But no one ever said that Jefferson Davis was
coarse. He was seen as stern, unbending, dignified, and a man of
principle — indeed, to a fault. He certainly compromised, as all
politicians must do, but he was not what we’d call a trimmer.
NOR WERE HIS principles unworthy. It is true that Davis thought
slavery in the South was a positive good — that the “peculiar
institution” uplifted and Christianized blacks from heathen
savagery. His own roseate view of slavery was determined by his
experience — he and his brother were kindly, high-minded
masters: educating their slaves, providing them with religious
instruction, forbidding harsh treatment of them (the whip was
forbidden), caring for their health, and treating them with
respect (in Davis’s case, he regarded his black manservant James
Pemberton as a trustworthy friend and confidant, and made him
overseer of his plantation).
Lincoln certainly opposed slavery, but on grounds that might make
us uncomfortable today. He wanted to keep the Free States (or
newly created Free States) the domain of white labor. He said he
wanted new territories “to be homes of free white people. This
they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be
planted with them. Slave states are the places for poor white
people to move from.”
Lincoln reassured nervous voters during the Lincoln-Douglas
debates that he had he had never been “in favor of bringing about
in any way the social and political equality of the white and
black races—that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making
voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold
office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in
addition to this that there is a physical difference between the
white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two
races living together on terms of social and political equality….
I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior
position assigned to the white race.” Lincoln’s solution to the
problem of slavery was expatriating black Americans to Africa or
Central America or the Caribbean.
Today, though the Republican Party is “the Party of Lincoln,” few
people, I wager, would claim that race would determine Lincoln’s
support for his party’s nominee. There is even less reason to
think that race would determine Jefferson Davis’s vote. Unlike
Lincoln, Davis did not envision an all-white future. He saw —
and approved of — blacks and whites living and working in close
proximity, their children playing together. He believed that the
ultimate end of slavery might be “the preparation of that race
for civil liberty and social enjoyment”; he said, “it is quite
within the range of possibility that the masters” would
eventually, of their own volition, desire to free the slaves
“when their slaves [themselves] would object.” If that day came,
Davis, like Lincoln did not believe that black and white could
exist on equal terms. But he doubted because, in his experience,
they never had been equal — and if he worried that uneducated
free blacks would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous whites,
Reconstruction only confirmed his fears.
But if we give Lincoln the benefit of the doubt of one hundred
years’ experience, we should do the same for Davis. Though few
call the Democrats “the Party of Jefferson Davis,” there seems
little doubt that he would have no more qualms about casting a
vote for Barack Obama than Lincoln would, should he deem him the
better candidate.
THAT LEAVES the final question: how would Jefferson Davis vote?
Davis’s principles were those of free trade; strict
constitutionalism; a limited federal government and expansive
state’s rights; outspoken opposition to federal spending on
“internal improvements,” which were the proper province of the
states or better still private enterprise, unless they could be
justified on grounds of national security (he was a proponent of
federal support for a transcontinental railroad running along a
Southern route); and an imperialist foreign policy.
Davis favored not only the war with Mexico, but American
“filibusters” in Central America, and the annexation of Cuba. It
is ironic, perhaps, that Davis, a man devoted to his sectional
interest, was also a man determined to advance America’s imperial
interests while Lincoln, who opposed the conquest of a great
Western empire for the United States (one of the prizes being
John McCain’s state of Arizona), found himself full of
belligerence when it came to bloodletting on an almost
unimaginably larger scale against his fellow Americans.
Davis did indeed put his country first. Before the war, he
believed that his country was his state, the state that had
elected him to high office and where he farmed, Mississippi.
After the war, he proved to his own satisfaction, in a massive
treatise, that secession had been constitutional. He wanted to
show also that the South had fought with honor and courage. But
now that the great cataclysm of war had proved secession
“impracticable” he accepted the verdict so that “on the basis of
fraternity and faithful regard for the rights of the States,
there may be written on the arch of the Union, Esto
perpetua.”
Davis’s support for limited government, federalism, and an
expansionist foreign policy makes it all but certain that he
would cast his vote for John McCain (Davis would have considered
Arizona an honorary Southern state).
You won’t see anyone seeking the mantle of Jefferson Davis, but
he was a worthier man than politically correct history would have
you think.
