Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era

2. JEFFERSON DAVIS AND THE POLITICS OF SECESSION

19 2 Jefferson Davis anD the politiCs of seCession Because Jefferson Davis is best known as president of the Confederacy , most people assume that he advocated secession and that he played a leading role in breaking up the Union. These assumptions are simply wrong. Some historians have recognized that Davis was not a fire-eater, the term often used for those who preached secession and actively campaigned to destroy the Union, but still many of these scholars identify him as an extremist on sectional questions, especially slavery in the territories, which became the one insoluble issue in the crisis of the Union. According to their view, Davis’s commitment to extremism bound and shackled him,causing him to approach the issue as an ideologue, not a politician.1 But here I will posit a different view. Without doubt Davis believed in the constitutional right of secession, yet he had a profound devotion to the Union. Moreover, he never considered the southern situation sufficiently perilous to warrant Mississippi’s exercising her constitutional prerogative of secession. In addition, his perception of the South’s position in the Union changed between 1850 and 1860. In Davis’s mind these two issues—the place of the South in the Union and the question of secession—were inseparable. With his belief in the constitutionality of secession, Davis heeded Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era 20 the states’ rights interpretation of the Constitution widely accepted in the South before 1861. Initially formulated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s and pushed even further by John C. Calhoun in the 1820s and 1830s, this exposition argued that the states, through their ratifying conventions,created the Constitution and thus the federal government.The states,the creators,were sovereign,not the federal government, the created. Carried to its logical conclusion, this thesis maintained that just as states had decided individually to come into the Union,each could individually decide to leave it.But for Davis secession was never the preferred action; he stressed that it should only occur “as the last remedy, the final alternative.”2 Assessing the place of the South, Davis operated from two fundamental bases.To him, as to most other southerners before 1861, the Constitution guaranteed southerners as Americans equality in the nation. Davis also accepted Calhoun’s position that only the possession of political power by the South ensured that equality. By the time that the Mississippian became an influential political figure in the late 1840s, southerners viewed that equality grounded in the U.S. Senate. There were fifteen free states and fifteen slave states in the Union; each group had thirty senators. By this time faster population growth in the North had already made that section dominant in the House of Representatives. Davis burst on the national scene as a war hero after his exploits in Mexico in 1846 and 1847. Upon his return to Mississippi in mid-1847, he had to decide between two attractive offers.The governor of Mississippi offered him a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, while the president of the United States offered to make him a brigadier general in the U.S. Army. In making his decision to appoint Davis a general, President James K. Polk underscored Davis’s public standing. Polk found “public sentiment”clamoring for Davis; he decided that to keep Mississippi a Democratic state,he had “to yield”to that opinion.Choosing the Senate over the army, Davis arrived in Washington in November 1847 as an enormously popular military hero who had rapidly ascended to the highest level of Mississippi politics.3 21 Jefferson Davis and the Politics of Secession The first major political issue the new senator confronted had to do with equality in both senses: the South in the nation and southerners as Americans. He concentrated on the territories, American lands not yet admitted as states; his focus would remain there until the Union came apart.The points at issue in 1847 and 1848 were the Oregon Territory and,more importantly,the Mexican Cession,the area that came to the United States after the Mexican War: the modern Southwest, with the jewel of California. The specific question that absorbed the attention of so many, including Davis, was slavery. Would slavery be permitted in those territories? The answer was so critical because it defined the American future. From its founding, the United States had been both slave...