Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (review)

172CIVIL WAR HISTORY Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back. By Robert Penn Warren. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980. Pp. 114. $8.75.) Jefferson Davis has often served as the prism through which so much light has been directed on a cause romanticized, condemned, debated, or simply observed. Butseldomhave alltheelements beenso effectively fashioned into one as in Robert Penn Warren's Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back. OriginaUy an essay for theNew Yorker, thebriefbook with a skiUful blend of fact, reminiscence, and imagery presents a changing South traced from Warren's boyhood until recent years. And through aU the author's first-hand memories looms the specter ofDavis. As a child growing up in Kentucky, Warren learned of the Civil War from his grandfather, a former captain ofConfederatecavalry, and also simply "got it from the air around" him. It was all very confusing as images and surroundings clashed with history. After all, Warren recaUs, the only "Old Jeff Davis" he knew was the tramp whotripped alongthe local L. & N. tracks foUowed by his tobacco-chewing wife. As the years passed and the stories heard and the books read increased , Warren began to grasp a sense not only ofwho the Confederate president was but also what he had come to represent. A visit to Fairview , Kentucky and its incomplete monument to Davis impressed Warren in his youth. Hard times, insufficient funds, and finally the more important concerns of the World War had aUhampered its construction. But the monument, like the man and cause it represented, somehow embodied the "mystery of the pain, vision, valor, human weakenss, and error of the past being somehow transformed into, glorified into, the immobile thrust of concrete (not even the dignity of stone) . . ."(p. 23). From the broad imagery, Warren then moves to a specific and engrossing analysis of Davis. Much of his career is viewed as tragic, from the labored death of his bride Sarah Knox Taylor to his shame and capture in 1865 near IrwinviUe, Georgia, when Union troops ransacked his belongings. Davis's tragedy then took on its symboUc cast when fortwo years he was imprisoned in Fortress Monroe, a punishment which did a great deal to refurbish his reputation among Southerners. Given repeated opportunities to recant, he, as did his region, refused to admit that he had violatedany estabUshed constitutionalprinciple. So obsessed was he with the righteousness ofhis cause thathis long awaited memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, was not the exposé or personal testament expected but instead a long, legal treatise on the right of secession. He never gave in. Others did though, and in May 1979 with the efforts of Senator Mark Hatfield, Davis was restored to citizenship. One has to wonder, however, what he would have thought of the gesture. Warren relates a story which reveals much of Davis's stubborn pride. His child Varina Anne had been born during the war, and thus in the postwar years "Winnie" labored under the responsibiUty and psy- BOOK REVIEWS173 etiological burden ofbeing"theDaughter oftheConfederacy."Asagain fate would dictate, she fell in love with a young lawyer from Syracuse, New York. Davis would have none of it. Duty bound, she bowed to her father's demands. Thereafter her health declined. She never again feU in love and died at the age of thirty-four, "perhaps the last casualty of the Civil War" (p.93). Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr. Virginia Historical Society Antebellum Politics in Tennessee. By Paul H. Bergeron. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Pp. xii, 208. $18.50.) This book treats Tennessee pohtics from the first presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson in 1824 through the election of 1860, in which another Tennessean, John Bell, ran for the presidency. The emphasis, however, is on the period of intense two-party competition between Whigs and Democrats. Beginningin 1836when Hugh LawsonWhiteand other erstwhile Jacksonians challenged Martin Van Buren as Jackson's successor, this period of Whig-Democratic rivalry persisted through the 1850s. Tennessee's antebeUum political development divides into three periods, Bergeron finds, roughly analagous to the decades of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s; and he has structured his book accordingly. The late 1830s saw the creation of Tennessee's...