Reading, Writing, and History:Jeff Davis: The Man Behind The Image (June 1967 | Volume: 18, Issue: 4)

Reading, Writing, and History:Jeff Davis: The Man Behind The Image

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1967 | Volume 18, Issue 4

Jefferson Davis: Private Letters, 1823–1889 , selected and edited by Hudson Strode. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 580 pp. $7.50.

In its long gallery of memorable men, American history contains no figure quite like that of Jefferson Davis. Here is the tragic hero incarnate, the man who endured and lost a struggle more than life size, his own defeat embodying a defeat shared by many others, until at last his unwavering endurance is about all that is remembered of him. His ordinary human qualities get flaked away, we look at stoicism and courage until it begins to seem that there is nothing else to look at, and the man takes on a marble-statue quality that is essentially bloodless. Most of the time we look in vain for the warm, passionate man who existed somewhere behind the struggle. The resulting image is admirable but it seems to be without warmth.

This is not simply because Davis, as president of the Southern Confederacy and embodiment of the Lost Cause, was by the very nature of things destined to survive as an abstraction. After all, Robert E. Lee is a tragic hero from the same epoch, and although Lee has a certain graven-image quality of his own he is nevertheless remembered with abiding affection and has a warm place in America’s memory. Davis was different. He locked himself in behind a self-control so complete that it seemed to lock everyone else out. He could win deep devotion from others, as his relationship with Lee proves, and he could also win deep hatred, as in his relationship with General Joseph E. Johnston; yet we think of him as an iceberg, forgetting that neither love nor hate is ordinarily inspired by the frigid. Perhaps it is about time for us to take a longer look at him.

The means for doing this are at hand in an excellent and fascinating book, Jefferson Davis: Private Letters, 1823–1889, selected and edited by Hudson Strode. Culling through a vast stack of letters, most of which have never been made public before, Mr. Strode lets Davis speak for himself from his early youth to the final years of his life, and the man thus speaking and spoken for emerges as someone quite unlike the legendary person we usually see. The austere integrity and the aloof dignity are still there, but as we read these letters—most of them exchanged by Davis and his devoted wife, Varina Howell Davis—we suddenly realize that this man had both warmth and tenderness in an extraordinary degree. He had qualities, in short, that were rarely shown to outsiders, and it was simply his fate to become so completely a public man that most other people had to be and remain outsiders. His private life existed within an opaque barrier. Now the barrier comes down.

One of his problems apparently was the fact that during the eventful war years he was miscast.

As a planter and a spokesman for the