Davis and Confederate Nationalism

own political fortunes fluctuated considerably, Davis had shifted from his earlier states rights radicalism towards a more nationalist vision of how the
South’s interests could best be protected in Escott’s words, he became a man struggling to protect the South within the Union.”
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Throughout the secessionist winter Davis stayed firmly in the “cooperationist” camp, and it was with feelings of genuine sadness that he delivered his valedictory speech to the US. Senate on January 21, 1861. Had he been bending over his father,
slain by his countrymen his wife later recalled, he could not have been more inconsolable.”
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Jefferson Davis’s nationalism embodied a profound respect for the Union and the Constitution which transcended the specific circumstances within with the slave South found itself. If I have a superstition, sir, which governs my mind and holds it captive, it is a superstitious reverence for the Union,”
he admitted in June, For Davis, as for Webster, Lincoln and other mid- nineteenth-century political leaders who had been nourished upon the founding mythology of the Revolution and its aftermath, the Union had come to represent a powerful emotional commitment, the abandonment of which could be contemplated only under the most dire circumstances.
It is surely no coincidence that Davis’s hero, and the man who largely inspired his early political endeavors, was Andrew Jackson, whose uncompromising nationalist stance against the South Carolina nullifiers Davis had endorsed,
even as he rejected the coercive means Jackson would have employed to bring the Palmetto state to heel. (According to his wife’s memoir, Davis, as a serving officer, claimed he would have resigned his commission rather than be employed in military action against a sister Southern state.)
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As Brian R.
Dirck has argued, the question of whether or not the future Confederate
President was fundamentally an early states rights enthusiast or an early nationalist is moot he was both.”
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There is a second, often unremarked aspect to Davis’s antebellum nationalism. Throughout the sands the Mississippian’s strongest political enthusiasm next to defending Southern rights was undoubtedly the expansion and development of the American West. As a product of the westward movement himself—his family had moved from Kentucky to Mississippi in pursuit of new cotton land—Davis consistently supported proposals to encourage western expansion both within and beyond the United States’
existing territorial borders. Unlike his great mentor Calhoun, Davis apparently saw little to fear in the annexation of Mexican land, even though he opposed the All Mexico movement and, like the South Carolinian,
warned against the mixing of the races that such expansion could encourage Indeed, so enthusiastic was Davis about the Mexican conflict that in 1846 he resigned his seat in Congress in order to pursue the issue at firsthand as the colonel of the st Mississippi regiment of volunteers. The following decade, first as Secretary of War in the Pierce administration and
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subsequently in the Senate, Davis fought passionately for the construction of a transcontinental railroad. He also played an instrumental role in the
Gadsden Purchase Treaty of 1853, which added a further 45,000 square miles to the territory of the United States, and in the unsuccessful movement to acquire Cuba.
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Throughout the late antebellum period Davis’s expansive nationalism did not come into conflict with the regional interests which, as a leading
Southern politician, he was pledged to protect. Inmost instances the two commitments plainly complemented one another in advocating the transcontinental railroad, for example, Davis clearly hoped that the preferred
Southern route would help compensate for the slave states increasing economic disadvantage within the Union it would also encourage slave- holding migration to the West, thus further promoting the South’s regional influence. For Jefferson Davis, as for the vast majority of his contemporaries,
regional economic and political interests were best advanced within an expanding national Union in which the distinctive rights of all communities were recognized and protected. Speaking in Newark, New Jersey, in July, Davis gave full rhetorical rein to this vision of a broadening union of compatible interests and liberties. Although there are many different states,
the Mississippian argued, we have but one history, one pride, one destiny,”
under which the Union can goon expanding wider and wider until its great temple reaches not only from sea to sea, but from pole to pole.”
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By the end of the s, as John McCardell has described, the South’s defense of its regional or sectional interests had metamorphosed into a movement for Southern nationalism. The ideological and cultural underpinnings of this movement were clearly revealed during the nullification crisis of the early Jacksonian period, but it was not until after the secession of the slave states in the winter of 1860–61 that Southern nationalism achieved concrete realization in the establishment of the Confederacy. In one respect, therefore, white southerners choice of Jefferson Davis as Confederate president would seem to have been an ideal one, in that he, perhaps unusually among his planter-statesman contemporaries, combined a traditional states rights commitment, with its implied protection of local interests, with a dynamic vision of national progress through which the South’s economic and social resources could be harnessed for the common good. At the same time, it was not immediately clear how Davis’s antebellum expansionism could be yoked to the cause of establishing a Southern national identity.
The question remains what distinctive national identity did Jefferson Davis envisage as he sought to persuade ordinary southerners to abandon long-held loyalties in return for the uncertain benefits of Confederate citizenship?
In his inaugural address, delivered to a large and enthusiastic crowd in the provisional capital Montgomery on February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis
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attempted to give tangible expression to the new Confederate nationality.
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Davis’s address, which was generally well received in the South, has invariably been overshadowed by that of his Northern counterpart, but it remains a highly significant speech, albeit a characteristically prosaic one. The speech followed the general pattern of nineteenth-century inaugurals, which, as
Jeffrey K. Tulis has observed, were more concerned with articulating the
President’s understanding of republican principle than with outlining specific policies or initiatives There was a familiar preoccupation with constitutional issues, again in conformity with prevailing practice, as well as the predictable invocations to the virtue and patriotism of the people”
and to Davis’s humble distrust of his own abilities to perform the duties assigned to him.
No amount of rhetorical convention could disguise the critical situation faced by the new republic and its leader in February, 1861. We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by a powerful opposition Davis wrote to his wife a few days after the inaugural In his speech Davis was concerned to stress both the innate justice of the Confederate cause and the peaceful and responsible manner in which his government’s domestic and international duties were to be discharged. At the same time he was determined that such sentiments would not be misunderstood as either a sign of weakness or, perhaps more likely, an indication that the South might voluntarily reenter the Union. Although recognizing that the provisional constitution allowed for the admission of new states to the Confederacy,
Davis nonetheless suggested that a reunion with the States from which we have separated is neither practicable nor desirable.”
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At the heart of Davis’s dilemma was the problem of defining the true character of the Southern nation. In February, 1861, the self-styled Confederate States of America consisted of a mere seven states South Carolina, Mississippi,
Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and, most recently, Texas. The people of these states, through their secession conventions, had reclaimed the sovereign powers originally delegated to the federal Union and voluntarily reorganized themselves into anew confederation. But what distinguished them from those states that remained in the old Union, and upon what common foundation would popular allegiance to the new constitution and government be established Unless such questions could be answered, the future of the Confederate states as a separate and independent nation could hardly be guaranteed.
In his inaugural address, therefore, Jefferson Davis was forced not only to confront the practical (and frightening) implications of the new Confederate nationalism, but also, more fundamentally, to give texture and meaning to the founding process itself. The people of the Southern states, after all,
were being asked not merely to support anew administration, but to transfer their loyalties from the old Union, which had nourished and protected them
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since 1789, to anew and untried confederation whose very existence was threatened by the federal government’s refusal to admit the legality of secession. As a reluctant secessionist himself, Davis was acutely aware of the fragile political foundations of the new nation. The vote for delegates to the secession conventions had revealed significant divisions in the Deep
South states, and only in Texas would secession be ratified through popular referendum. Moreover, in the upper South there were few positive signs in February, 1861, that secession would ever be consummated, and without such politically and economically strategic states as Virginia and Tennessee the Confederacy’s independence was likely to be shortlived.
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Jefferson Davis’s solution to the problem of defining the South’s incipient nationalism involved two distinct themes. First, he attempted to ease the transfer of national loyalties from the old Union to the new Confederacy by invoking the founding spirits of 1776 and, perhaps a little more surprisingly,
of 1787. According to Davis’s explanation, the secession movement had been based upon the same constitutional principle as that underpinning the colonial separation from the British Empire nearly a century earlier. It illustrates, he said, in the familiar language of the revolutionary architect after whom he was named, the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established Southerners were, after all, exceedingly proud of their role in the Revolution, and Davis’s invocation was a persuasive ideological and emotional appeal to the patriotic instincts of a conservative and tradition-minded people. But it was also an attempt to sustain a much needed social unity in the South by reminding white southerners of all classes of their shared revolutionary heritage.
Similar motives also dictated an appeal to the wisdom of 1787, although here Davis’s logic was necessarily more circumspect. After all, the federal
Union had not only overseen the South’s political and material progress,
but it was also the source of the region’s greatest anxiety and the catalyst,
through takeover by hostile political forces, of the secession crisis itself.
The touchstone of Davis’s argument was the new Confederate constitution,
the provisional form of which had already been agreed prior to the inauguration. As Davis explained it, the new constitution was a faithful reflection of the original document, differing only from that of our fathers insofar as it is explanatory of their well-known intent Here again, as with the appeal to the southerner’s revolutionary heritage, Davis was attempting to reassure his people that the extraordinary steps that were now being taken implied no radical discontinuity with prior experience. The new Confederate government was to be the pure constitutional and political expression of
America’s founding wisdom, cleansed of the destructive ambitions which had forced the breakup of the old Union.
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Davis’s second appeal was if anything even more ambitious than his first:
it involved nothing less than an attempted fabrication of a Southern social identity. Although the new President admitted that the South’s actions, like those of the American colonists, had been taken out of necessity and not
“choice,” he was adamant that the Confederate nation would be based,
not upon some artificial division of sovereignty, but upon genuine social,
economic, and cultural differentiation between North and South. Unlike the manufacturing and navigating communities of the Northeastern United
States, Davis claimed, southerners were an agricultural people whose long-term interests would best be served through the establishment of an independent, unified nation. To increase the power, develop the resources,
and promote the happiness of the Confederacy, it is requisite that there should be so much of homogeneity that the welfare of every portion shall be the aim of the whole he insisted.
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As apiece of presidential exhortation at the founding of anew state Davis’s address had much to recommend it as an accurate representation of
Southern social reality, it left a good deal to be desired. Despite its undeniably agrarian character, the South by 1861 was afar more complex and diverse society than Davis was apparently willing to admit. Throughout the antebellum period, Southern capitalists had sought to liberate the region from its commercial dependence upon the North, and although the movement had largely failed—in great part because of the continuing success of cotton and the agrarian tenacity of the planter class—the initiatives did at least demonstrate that the forces of economic modernization had not completely bypassed the slave states A prominent member of the Southern planter establishment with strong trading links to urban centers such as New
Orleans, Davis was undoubtedly sensitive to the changes that his society was already experiencing and that in the long term would reduce the cultural divide between North and South, but in his early presidential rhetoric he gave few signs of articulating a dynamic nationalist vision within which such evolution could be accommodated. Nor—crucially for the new republic’s future—did Davis give any indication of how the communities of the upper South could successfully be incorporated into a Confederate nationalism whose cultural, economic, and political wellsprings were located so manifestly in the states of the lower South.
Yet Davis’s vision was unmistakably nationalist. Despite his constitutional sermonizing on the origins of secession, there is little indication, from the inaugural address at least, that the new President was about to preside over a government in which the rights of the individual states would be paramount. As Paul Escott has noted, the reassuring degree of social homogeneity that Davis recognized within the South undoubtedly led him to believe that an effective central government would be highly appropriate,
especially since the new constitution, like its Federal counterpart, made the laws of the Confederate government the supreme authority.
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A strict constructionist with strong nationalist tendencies, Jefferson Davis undoubtedly felt that here was areal opportunity to forge a workable relationship between the states and the central government in which the legitimate needs of both would be adequately protected. As it turned out,
this new federalism was only partially successful, and for four years an intense political rivalry developed between Davis and various of the state political leaders—notably governors Joseph E. Brown of Georgia and Zebulon Vance of North Carolina—which scholars such as Frank L. Owsley used to consider as the determining factor in the Confederacy’s defeat. However, as historians now acknowledge, the states rights controversy, strictly defined,
was less damaging to the South’s war effort than formerly conceived and that on few, if any, occasions did state obstructionism prevent Davis actually implementing Confederate military or civil authority.
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But, viewed in other, less narrowly legalistic, ways, the relationship between the central government and the people of the various states was afar from creative one, and overall the Confederate leadership, and Jefferson
Davis in particular, failed to articulate a credible national or federal vision,
comparable to that of Abraham Lincoln in the North, through which the cause of Southern independence, with all its implied sacrifices, could effectively be sustained. This deficiency embraced all aspects of Confederate policy and activity. Historians have noted, for example, the impressive strides taken by Southern entrepreneurs to narrow the gap with the industrializing North.
But, as Mary A. DeCredico and others have shown, efforts to achieve greater national coordination met strong resistance from those who feared that government encroachment would erode their sovereign rights. It was not until February, 1865, for example, that the Richmond government took steps to establish central authority over the Confederacy’s railroads—vital to the republic’s war effort—and by then it was too late The political arguments also affected popular morale in the Confederacy.
Already, by the second year of the war, their resentment fueled by the imposition of military conscription, many people in the South were beginning to regard Confederate nationalism as potentially destructive of the ends for which the conflict was being waged. After 1863 popular discontent increased throughout the Confederate states. Although such dissent rarely coalesced in any politically coherent form, the actions of men such as William W.
Holden, the Raleigh editor who saw threats to liberty around every corner,
undoubtedly contributed to the South’s loss of confidence in the independence struggle. As one disillusioned (and hungry) North Carolina soldier observed from his mud-spattered winter quarters near Petersburg on New
Year’s Eve, 1864, we have trampled our own Liberties under our feet in attempting to establish a Nationality that was not intended for us In an important study, Gary W. Gallagher has argued persuasively that by the midpoint of the war the principal agency for sustaining Confederate
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nationalism—and with it the military struggle—was not the Davis government but the Army of Northern Virginia. Gallagher concludes that, as faith in Jefferson Davis and the political structure weakened,“belief in Lee and his army grew, countering the divisive effects of politics, suffering, and defeatism.”
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In the final analysis, Jefferson Davis’s defensive nationalism was neither one thing nor the other too powerful an instrument in the eyes of states’
rights southerners, who were naturally fearful of a renewed onslaught on their freedom, it also proved inadequate to the task of resituating southerners larger patriotic instincts and obligations, with perhaps predictable consequences for the long-term establishment of Confederate independence. The root of Davis’s difficulty, and of the society he had been elected to govern, was its conservatism. As we have seen, in his inaugural address the President attempted to justify the secession movement and to facilitate the transfer of Southern loyalties from the old to the new union,
invoking, among other things, the founding spirit of 1776 and The right solemnly proclaimed at the birth of the United States,
and which has been solemnly affirmed and reaffirmed in the Bill of Rights of the States subsequently admitted into the Union of, undeniably recognizes in the people the power to resume the authority delegated for the purposes of government. Thus the sovereign States here represented have proceeded to form this
Confederacy.
At this point, however, Jefferson Davis appeared to undermine his own argument by specifically dissociating the secession movement from the radical tradition from which its legitimacy ostensibly derived, concluding,
“it is by abuse of language that their act has been denominated a revolution.”
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Throughout his founding address Davis had been particularly concerned to locate the South’s actions within the American revolutionary tradition,
even to the point of appropriating the language of the Declaration of
Independence itself. Yet within a few sentences he explicitly denies that a revolution was actually taking place. Such inverted logic, as Emory Thomas has noted, was probably disregarded by the mass of Davis’s audience;
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nevertheless, there can be no doubting the precise distinction that the
President was seeking to enforce. By denying the revolutionary character of the new nation the Confederate leader was attempting to ensure that the founding process was not accompanied by any alteration in the existing social, economic, and political fabric. By 1861 the word revolution had acquired dangerous insurrectionary overtones for conservatives in both
Europe and America, and Davis was bound to be concerned lest the radical
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enthusiasms of the secession winter should metamorphose into a genuine movement for change within Southern society. The Confederate president took the rhetorical point further in February, 1862, in his second inaugural address, observing that secession had been undertaken to save ourselves from a revolution which, in its silent but rapid progress, was about to place us under the despotism of numbers. . . .”
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