Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era

3. JEFFERSON DAVIS AND STATES’ RIGHTS IN THE CONFEDERACY

33 3 Jefferson Davis anD states’ rights in the ConfeDeraCy States’ rights and its influence on the Confederate States of America is a staple of southern history. Perhaps its most famous, and in some ways most lasting, formulation came in 1925 when historian Frank L. Owsley penned his famous epitaph for the Confederacy—“Died of State Rights.” Jefferson Davis, as Confederate president, was certainly at the center of this issue, especially the extent to which he promoted the doctrine in the South or jettisoned it in favor of centralized power during a time of war. Two distinct, though closely related, questions more pointedly focus the discussion on Davis’s role in promoting or retarding states’rights.First,did a sharp difference on states’rights exist between the antebellum and the Confederate Davis? Second, did Davis and the issue of states’rights have significant sway on the course of Confederate history?1 Davis is generally depicted as a steadfast states’righter, in my judgment correctly so. Early in his political career, he identified with what legions of southerners regarded as the orthodox states’rights doctrine formulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and given political expression in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799. In fact Davis absorbed the ideological testament even before his political career began, for he identified himself as a Democrat and Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era 34 follower of Andrew Jackson, who in Davis’s mind had revitalized the old Jeffersonian party. He also proudly professed loyalty to the ideas of the leading states’ rights spokesman of his day, John C. Calhoun. Of course,by the 1830s Jackson and Calhoun had become political enemies ,but Davis never acknowledged their falling out,maintaining his twin loyalty. As a newly elected congressman, Davis proved his doctrinal orthodoxy by opposing even the venerated Calhoun on a constitutional issue . In his quest to unite the South and the West, and to further his own presidential ambitions, Calhoun in the mid-1840s came up with the idea of the “inland sea.” He used this inventive approach to get around the traditional states’ rights opposition to internal improvements , federal expenditures for state and local projects usually connected with transportation. In this scheme the South Carolinian designated the Mississippi River and its major tributaries as the “inland sea.” In this guise federal expenditures could pass states’rights muster, for all agreed that the national government could support coastal improvements such as lighthouses and harbors.2 Addressing the House in 1846, Davis announced that he could not go along with Calhoun’s stance.He repeated the pure states’rights gospel that decreed that the Constitution had to be strictly constructed and that Congress only possessed the powers specifically granted to it in the written Constitution. “To all which has been said of the inherent powers of the Government, I answer, it is the creature of the States.”Thus according to Davis, the federal government “could have no inherent power, all it preserves was delegated by the States, and it is therefore that our Constitution is not an instrument of limitations, but of grants.”3 All through the 1850s Davis adhered to his oft-stated belief that states’ rights, the inherent power residing in the individual states, remained at the core of the Constitution and American liberty.To a Mississippi audience in 1858, he made absolutely clear his view: “I would cling tenaciously to our constitutional Government, seeing as I do in the fraternal Union of equal States.” Speaking before the Senate for 35 Jefferson Davis and States’ Rights in the Confederacy the final time in January 1861,Davis defended secession as “an essential attribute of State sovereignty.”4 Yet there was one huge caveat in Davis’s devotion to states’ rights: national defense, or what today we would call national security. In this area he did not hold to a strict ideological position.In fact in this matter he found himself in Calhoun’s spot with his “inland sea,”with states’ rights purists faulting him. The key issue was a transcontinental railroad .As secretary of war from 1853 to 1857, Davis had responsibility for the military defense of the country. By this time, of course, the United States had become a continental nation. The Oregon Territory had been organized in 1849 and California admitted as a state a year later. As secretary of war,Davis worried about the potential...