A Tribute to Jefferson Davis page 7

A Tribute to Jefferson Davis

In 1886, Mr. Benj. Williams, of Massachusetts, wrote in the Lowell Sun: "When Mr. Davis was a prisoner, subjected to the grossest indignities, his proud spirit remained unbroken and never since the subjugation of his people has he abated in the least his assertion of the cause for which they struggled. The seduction of power or interest may move lesser men; that matters not to him; the cause of the Confederacy as a fixed moral and constitutional principle, unaffected by the triumph of physical force, he asserts today as unequivocally as when he was seated in its executive chair at Richmond. Now, when we consider all this—what Mr. Davis has been and, most of all, what he is today, in the moral greatness of his position—can we wonder that his people turn aside from time-servers and self-seekers and from the common-place chaff of life and render to him that spontaneous and grateful homage which is his due? The Confederacy fell, but not until she had achieved immortal fame. Few great established nations in all time have ever exhibited capacity and direction in government equal to hers, sustained, as she was, by the iron will and fixed persistence of the extraordinary man who was her chief."

On January 25, 1890, in an address before the Virginia Legislature, Senator Daniels said of him: “No public man was ever subject to sterner ordeals of character or closer scrutiny of conduct. He was in the public gaze for nearly half a century. Proud, high-minded, sensitive, self-willed, but not self-centered; self-assertive for his cause, but never for his own advancement; aggressive and imperious as are nearly all men fit for leadership; with the sturdy virtues that command respect, but without the same diplomacies that conciliate hostility, he was one of those characters that naturally makes warm friends and bitter enemies; a veritable man, terribly in earnest, such as Carlyle loved to count among the heroes.

“I can recall no public man who, in the midst of such shifting and perplexing scenes of strife, maintained so firmly the constancy of his principles and who, despite the shower of darts that hurtled around his head, triumphed so completely over every dishonorable imputation.

"It was fortunate for the South, for America and for humanity, that at the head of the South in war was a true type of its honor, character and history; a man whose clear rectitude preserved every complication from impeachment of bad faith, a patriot whose love of law and liberty were paramount to all expediencies. A publicist whose intellectual power and attainments made him the peer of any statesman who has ever championed the rights of commonwealths in debate or stood at the helm when the ship of State encountered the tempest of civil commotion. Had a less sober-minded and less strong than he been in his place, the Confederacy would not only have gone down in material ruin; it would have been buried in disgrace."

History will do justice to the man, and it only remains for us who now stand at the end of his century to fully appreciate the grandeur and nobility of his character; to honor his unswerving devotion to principle and to venerate his dignity in adversity.

Then we will show ourselves able to discriminate between him who enjoys and him who deserves success, and will be true to our duty as lovers of all those virtues which make up the patriot and hero.

“The world does not to-day think less of Warren because he fell at Bunker Hill a red-handed colonial rebel, fighting the old flag of his sovereign even before his people became secessionists from the Crown; not because his yeomen were beaten in the battle.

“Oliver Cromwell is a proud name in English history, though the English Republic which he founded was almost as short-lived as the Confederacy and was soon buried under the re-established throne of the Stuarts. And we but forecast the judgment of years to come when we pronounce that Jefferson Davis was great and pure as a statesman, man and patriot."

This article is from the Confederate Veteran, Vol. IV, No. 10, Nashville, Tenn., October, 1896.