At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis

5 Jefferson Davis, Horace L. Kent, and the Old South

160 E 5 Jefferson Davis, Horace L. Kent, and the Old South enator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, like most political leaders in the Lower or Cotton South, began the secession winter of 1860–61 as a hesitant disunionist but came to endorse the decision to quit the Union as regrettable but necessary. He hoped that the U.S. government would let the seceding states depart in peace and avoid an internecine war. In this stance, Davis seems clearly to have spoken and written what the great majority of disunionist southerners thought and hoped on the eve of the Civil War. For this reason and for the obvious reason that he became the Confederacy’s first (and only) president, Davis’s life story before the secession crisis provides a valuable window on the historical evolution of the Old South, setting the stage for a more wide-ranging analysis of his region’s economy and society. This analysis addresses some substantial differences between the Upper and Lower Souths and discusses some individual citizens—in particular, a Virginia slaveholding merchant, Horace L. Kent, and his employee, Robert Granniss—to help illuminate those differences. Jefferson Davis’s father was Georgia native Samuel Emory Davis, probably born in 1756 and soon orphaned. After fighting against the British as a teenager during the American Revolution, Samuel Davis became proprietor of a two-hundred-acre land grant in Wilkes County and married Jane Cook of South Carolina in 1783. By the mid-1780s, his estate had grown to more than four thousand acres, though most remained uncleared, and by 1787 he owned his first slave, Winnie. In 1793, he and some of his wife’s relations responded to the lure of the fabled and fertile lands in trans-Appalachian Kentucky, just separated from Virginia as an independent state. After several years there, Samuel settled his family in the southwestern part of the state in what later became Todd County. He owned a second slave by 1801. Seven years later, forty-eight-year-old Jane gave birth to her tenth child in twenty-three years. Given the first name Jefferson in honor of the Virginian then serving as president , the boy received as his middle name Finis, Latin for “the end”: Jane clearly intended that he would be her last child. Jefferson Davis spent his first two years on his father’s tobacco and horse farm, housed in “a double log cabin with two large rooms on either side of a Davis, Kent, and the South 161 covered passageway, the classic dogtrot design,” in the words of biographer William J. Cooper Jr. Samuel then moved his family again, this time south to what in 1812 would become the state of Louisiana. Samuel and Jane soon moved one last time, east to Wilkinson County in the southwestern corner of the Mississippi Territory, which became a state in 1817. Samuel built his final home, Poplar Grove, near the village of Woodville. As of 1820, he owned nearly four hundred acres and eleven slaves. Although he and Jane could read and write, according to Cooper, “nothing suggests that any of their first nine children had any more contact with formal schooling than they did.” But young Jefferson Davis attended academies (preparatory schools), first Roman Catholic St. Thomas College in central Kentucky; then Jefferson College near Natchez, Mississippi; and finally the new Wilkinson County Academy, where the boy studied for five years under John Shaw, an erudite and demanding Bostonian.1 Samuel’s eldest son, Joseph, had worked as a storekeeper’s apprentice in Kentucky and then read law in Kentucky and Mississippi. By the 1820s, he “had become a prosperous attorney in Natchez as well as a substantial landowner .” When Samuel encountered financial problems in 1822, Joseph helped out by buying the family farm. Jefferson later remembered his brother as “my beau ideal when I was a boy” and as his “mentor and greatest benefactor.” In 1823, Jefferson enrolled at Transylvania University, the nation’s oldest college west of the Appalachian Mountains. The next year, his father died, and young Davis received an appointment to West Point, receiving his commission as a cadet from Secretary of War John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Jefferson Davis was accompanied to West Point by James Pemberton, a personal slave inherited from his father, in accordance with U.S. Army policy. While at the U.S. Military Academy, Davis penned his first known observation about North-South differences, in the process revealing something about his...