Jefferson Davis, American: A Biography

Dates Covered: 1808 - 1889
ISBN: 0394569164
HH Rating:

Our Take

Jefferson Davis gets to start his new biography marching to somewhere important through dreary weather. If biographers of nineteenth-century statesmen are to be believed, nearly everybody gets to start a significant transition in his life by marching somewhere important through dreary weather. Fortunately, once the perfunctory cliche' is over, William J. Cooper, Jr. reveals a work of compelling depth. Cooper has an unusual gift: he divines what consumes Davis' attention at various moments during the man's life, and then digs up the damnedest details on them.

Jefferson Davis, for those who didn't grow up in the South, was the President of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Prior to that, he was a United States Senator hailing from Mississippi, and, as one might well imagine, a vociferous proponent of states' rights. As an individual, despite his voluminous writings, he is frequently portrayed as a bit of an enigma -- there are just some individuals that are difficult to read, even for an accomplished biographer, and Davis is one of them.

It shows. Despite Cooper's incredibly detailed research, it's still difficult to get a grip on who Davis was, exactly. This is not to fault Cooper: his book is worthwhile and sometimes even a laugh riot. How can you not love a biographer of an imposing, if frequently-ignored, statesman who notes the subject of his work once bested a trained pig in a spelling contest?

Cooper peppers the book with such astonishing finds. Davis turns out to have been quite the rabble-rouser in his youth, narrowly escaping court-martial from West Point for throwing a clandestine drinking party. Brawls and threats of duels abound; at one point at age 30 he went to a "large party" with Senators from Ohio and Missouri that ended up in Davis' stumbling and plunging headfirst down a cliff. In Ohio Senator William Allen's words, "Davis fell headforemost upon the stones and was nearly killed," and had "blood, mud, and water trickling down [his] face." Davis was summarily treated with camphor and laudanum (opium); attending Dr. Lewis Linn (also Senator from Missouri) opined that without such prompt treatment, Davis would have died.

Cooper sensibly suggests, "Whether that diagnosis was correct is impossible to ascertain, but in all likelihood the fall resulted in a concussion as well as lacerations." Despite medical history not really being Cooper's line of work, he still manages to compile impressive, even ridiculous, amounts of information regarding Davis' health. Davis, we are told, had "great irritability in the nerve of the eye"; but Cooper refuses to stop there. He takes the contemporary account claiming "the eye has ceased to weep, and has rather an unnatural dryness, and heat, but without any engorgement of the blood vessels" to decide that "it is most probably that Davis' disorder resulted from a herpes simplex infection of the cornea of the left eye, a condition known as herpetic keratitis." Not finished even then, Cooper reveals that a "prominent membrane" extended in Davis's eye, names the exact membrane ("Descemet's"), names the actual condition ("intraocular pressure of the aqueous humor [formed] what is termed a Descemetococle,"), and remarks that for two years when his eye gave him an unusually nasty amount of trouble Davis took care to be photographed only in profile so that the damaged organ wouldn't be seen. Oy!

Such powers of perception are by no means restricted to medical history. Cooper spends ample time discussing Cooper's domestic responsibilities when such things came to the forefront. The reader is treated to discussions of Davis's male-to-female slave ratio; Cooper notes "a knowledgeable student of antebellum Mississippi cotton culture pronounced [Davis's farm's yields] 'exceptionally large' for the county." Cooper produces reports of Davis and his brother evacuating "some 900 animals" in response to an 1828 flood; he busts out census appraisals of the Davis farm that show its value tripling in a decade (1850-60). Cooper also darkly notes that there were no old slaves on the Davis property ("the paucity of older slaves is striking"), and that Davis had a hospital built to tend to the slaves' needs.

Davis supported slavery. This shouldn't surprise anyone; he was the President of the Confederacy. He adopted the old argument that the Old Testament smiled on the practice, and believed that slavery cured the "sordid and vicious" side effects of the relationship between management and hired labor. He argued that slaves were "happy and contented", and, regarding potential insurrections, had "no more dread of our slaves than I have of our cattle." He was overwhelmingly popular in Mississippi, and as the election of 1860 ominously approached, prepared himself for action.

Lincoln won the contest while not even being on the ballot of ten Southern states, and this threw Davis' feelings concerning state rights and sovereignty into disarray, a viewpoint he held to his grave. Even after the Civil War was over, the man contended that "The States are the sovereign parties to the compact of union, & sovereigns cannot rebel." He ended his life defending himself and his purpose against Northerners and Southerners alike, much as he had during the war.

Cooper only devotes about 200 pages to the war out of some 650. He does, however, spend nearly all 650 trying to get at the roots of Davis's occasionally violent character. Davis gave as good as he got, and his domestic life was no exception. He steadfastly held to his principles, even when they no longer reflected the world he lived in. The release of his mammoth, two-volume, 1500-page Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, as much a treatise on the constitutionality of secession as a depiction of the war, received mostly faint praise. Writes Cooper, while Davis supporters agreed with his views, "... other substantive reviews contested Davis's interpretation of the Constitution and denounced his labeling of the North as the aggressor. All depicted him as a man of the past, out of touch with the world of 1881."

Indeed, at the twilight of his life, a single episode is emblematic to the changes the world was experiencing while it left him behind. The flamboyant, witty, and resoundingly gay Oscar Wilde, on a tour of the United States in 1882, decided he wanted to meet Davis above any other citizen. As Cooper reports, "... he captivated Varina and Winnie [Davis' wife and daughter], though Davis found his demeanor and dandyish dress offputting. Wilde left him an unrequested, signed photograph."

It was the twentieth century knocking at Davis's door that day, and he simply didn't know what to do with it. He died seven years later.

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