Circa1865

The impressive monument to American President Jefferson Davis was erected at the intersection of Monument and Davis Avenues in Richmond, designed by architect William C. Noland and noted sculptor Edward Valentine. It was unveiled, along with a monument to Gen. “Jeb” Stuart, to a vast crowd on the President’s birthdate, June 3, 1907. The article below was published in January 1893.

Honor for the South

“The impulse to build to Jefferson Davis a monument typical of the South in the war, was so universal when the great hero died that a general agreement was had in a few hours by telegraph. The movement was inaugurated by the Southern Press Association, and it is cooperated in by Confederate veterans everywhere. The Jefferson Davis Monument Association at Richmond, chartered under the laws of Virginia, has special charge of the work. The active cooperation of every newspaper and periodical in the South is sought on behalf of this Fund. It is very desirable to procure name and post office of every contributor of $1 or more.

Let every Southerner and friend of his people look at the situation, and he or she will want to do something. In our National Capital there is an equestrian bronze statue at every turn, to some hero or the war, but none of them represent our side. Proud patriots want for this final tribute not less than $250,000. Twice as much as this has been raised at the North for one individual monument. Shall we stop short of half as much for one symbolic of our cause?

Here are extracts from the thousands that have been published:

“C.A. Read, editor Lewisville, Texas Times: “Mr. Davis deserves a monument as lasting as our native hills, for the splendid record he made in the cause of liberty. As an exemplar his character should be held up to the youth of the country; as an embodiment of everything good in human nature.”

An ex-Union soldier, popular humorist and lecturer, said: “Think of that man’s integrity, of what he accomplished with the resources at hand – he was an American!”

A beautiful sensation occurred at a reunion of ex-Confederates of Tennessee at Winchester, Gen. G.W. Gordon, of Memphis, in an oration, said: “We cannot forget him who has left to his countrymen and to posterity one of the noblest examples of unfaltering devotion to truth and principle, of which the political history of the human race gives an account. I trust we will erect a monument so magnificent and imposing that it will have no equal upon the vast shores of America – a monument that will tell the world that he was a patriot and that cause for which we fought, and our comrades died was constitutional, right and just. Let the monument be built!

The men and women who fought for the Confederacy, and their descendants, must quarry this monument and out of their heart’s blood if need be.”

(Honor for the South. S.A. Cunnigham, Confederate Veteran, Vol. I, No. 1, January 1893, pg. 2)

Correcting the Record

“The Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion prints the following letter:

Beauvoir, Mississippi

June 20, 1885

Dear Sir, – Among the less-informed persons at the North there exists an opinion that the negro slave at the South was a mere chattel, having neither rights nor immunities protected by law or public opinion. Southern men knew such was not the case, and others desiring to know could readily learn the fact.

On that error the lauded story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was founded, but it is strange that a utilitarian and shrewd people did not ask why a slave, especially valuable, was the object of privation and abuse? Had it been a horse they would have been better able to judge and would most probably have rejected the story for its improbability. Many attempts have been made to evade and misrepresent the exhaustive opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the ‘Dred Scott’ case, but it remains unanswered.

From the statement in regard to Fort Sumter, a child might suppose that a foreign army had attacked the United States – [and] certainly could not learn that the State of South Carolina was merely seeking possession of a fort on her own soil and claiming that her grant of the site had become void.

The tyrant’s plea of necessity to excuse despotic usurpation is offered for the unconstitutional act of emancipation, and the poor resort to prejudice is invoked in the use of the epithet ’rebellion,’ a word inapplicable to the States generally, and most especially so to the sovereign members of a voluntary union. But alas for their former ancient prestige, the States have even lost the plural reference they had in the Constitution . . . such language would be appropriate to an imperial government, which in absorbing territories required the subject inhabitants to swear allegiance to it.”

(Letter from President Davis on States’ Rights. Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. XIV, January – December 1886, Rev. J. William Jones, D.D., pp. 408-409)

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

Gov. Orval Faubus’ Message to Arkansas:

“On Tuesday, September 24, 1957 . . . the cleverly conceived plans of the US Justice Department under Republican Herbert Brownell, were placed in execution. One thousand two hundred troops of the 101^st Airborne Division were flown in from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to occupy Little Rock’s Central High School.

At the same time, the entire Arkansas National Guard and Air guard were federalized and are now a part of the US Army and Air Force. We are now an occupied territory.

Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in the unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls – in the backs of students – and in the bloody face of a railroad worker, who was bayoneted and then felled by the butt of a rifle in the hands of a sergeant of the 101^st Airborne Division. This man, on private property, as a guest in a home two blocks from the school, has been hospitalized. Others have suffered bayonet wounds from the hands of the US Army soldiers. Your New York newspapers also show the scenes.

Up until the time the injunction was issued against me by the imported federal judge, the peace had been kept in Little Rock by as few as 30 National Guardsmen. Not a blow was struck, no injury inflicted on any person, and no property damage sustained. I wish to point out that no violence broke out in the city until after the injunction was issued by the imported federal judge, and the National Guardsmen were withdrawn. And I might add here, all we have ever asked for is a little time, patience and understanding, as so often expressed by President Eisenhower himself, in solving this problem.

In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish – what is happening in America? Is every right in the United States Constitution now lost? Does the will of the people, that basic precept of our republic, no longer matter? Must the will of the majority now yield, under federal force, to the will of the minority, regardless of the consequences?

If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative . . . we no longer have a union of States under a republican form of government. If this be true, then the States are mere subdivisions of an all-powerful federal government, these subdivisions being nothing more than districts for the operation of federal agents and federal military forces – forces which operate without any regard for the rights of a sovereign State or its elected officials, and without due regard for personal and property rights.

The imported federal comes from a State a thousand miles away with no understanding whatsoever of the difficulties of our problems in the field of race relations.”

(Another Tragic Era: Gov. Faubus Gives His Side of the Arkansas Story. US News & World Report, October 4, 1957, pp. 66-67)

Below, Alexander Stephens reviews the constitutional dilemma Abraham Lincoln faced when formulating his plan to resist the American South’s decision for political independence from the industrialized north.

Congress Alone Has the Power

“[Mr. Lincoln had] sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” and “faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States.” This oath imposed a solemn obligation on him not to violate the Constitution, or to exercise, under color of his office, any power not conferred upon him by that instrument. He was required to see to the faithful execution of the laws of the United States, as passed by the Congress of States, and as construed by the Judiciary.

He said in the first of these proclamations that he made a call for the militia “in virtue of the power vested in him by the Constitution and the laws.”

But no such power was vested in him by the Constitution, nor was there any law authorizing him “to set on foot” the naval blockade as he did in the second of these proclamations. He said he did this in pursuance of law, but there was no such law.

In reference to the first proclamation, Congress alone has power, under the Constitution, to declare war and raise armies. Congress alone has the power to provide by law, for calling out the militia of the several States.

The President under the Constitution has no power to call out [State] militia to suppress an insurrection in a State, except “on application of the Legislature or the Governor, when the Legislature cannot be convened.” This was one of the provisions of the United States Constitution which Mr. Lincoln swore to “preserve, protect and defend.”

That clause of the Constitution is amongst the mutual covenants between the States guaranteeing to each a “Republican Form of Government” and protection against invasion and domestic violence.” This contemplated and authorized no interference whatsoever on the part of the Federal authorities with the internal affairs of the several States, unless called upon for that purpose, unless specifically requested by a State.

On this point, Mr. Stephen Douglas, in his speech of March 15^th, in the U.S. Senate, in the policy of withdrawing Federal troops from the forts in seceded States, was so clear, conclusive and unanswerable. Mr. Douglas said:

“But we are told that the President is going to enforce the laws in the seceded States. How? By calling out the militia and using the army and navy!? These terms are used as freely and flippantly as if we were in a military government where martial law was the only rule of action, and the rule of the Monarch was the only law to the subject.

Sir, the President cannot use the Army or the Navy, or the militia, for any purpose not authorized by law; and then he must do it in the manner, and only in the manner, prescribed by law. It must be requested by the State’s legislature, or Governor.”

(A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, Vol. II. Alexander H. Stephens Sprinkle Publications, 1994 (original 1870), pp. 397-402)

Below, Alexander Stephens explains the original intent of citizenship of the United States being first State citizenship. Stephens wrote the following from a Fort Warren jail cell after his arrest in 1865 for an unknown crime.

Citizenship as Intended

“Eight weeks today [July 6, 1865] I have been a prisoner; six weeks in this place; all without the slightest intimation of the cause. Seized by an armed force, sent here by an armed force, kept in close confinement, guarded by an armed force, deprived of all means of appealing to judicial power for redress; and yet Eagle-orators and reverend rhetoricians scream and shout about the glorious freedom we Americans enjoy.

PM – [A newspaper] article on naturalization in the cyclopedia attracted my attention. It is strange what errors have crept into vogue and pass without scrutiny or question, especially on naturalization and its sequence, citizenship of the United States. The subject is treated as if Congress were empowered by the Constitution to confer upon aliens’ citizenship of the United States distinct from citizenship of particular States and Territories.

The truth is, Congress has no power to naturalize or to confer citizenship of the United States. Its only power is to establish a uniform rule to be pursued by the respective States and Territories on admitting aliens to their own citizenship.

Before the Constitution was adopted, each State possessed the right as an Independent Sovereign Power to admit to citizenship whom she pleased, and on such terms as she pleased. All that the States did on this point in accepting the Constitution was to delegate to Congress the power to establish a uniform rule so that an alien might not be permitted to become a citizen of one State on different terms from what might be required in another; especially, as in one part of the Constitution it is stipulated that the citizens of each State shall be entitled in all the rest to the rights and privileges of their citizens.

But no clause of the Constitution provides for or contemplates citizenship of the United States as distinct from citizenship of some particular State or Territory. When any person is a citizen of one of the States united, he thereby, and thereby only, becomes and can be considered a citizen of the United States.

Errors in the public mind on this question are radical and fundamental and have the same source as many others equally striking.

I was first struck with these on the annexation of Texas. How could her representatives, it was asked, take their seats in Congress, not having been citizens of the United States for the term of years required by the Constitution? The answer, upon the true principles of the Constitution and the only citizenship it contemplates, was plain: members and senators could not present themselves until the State was itself one of the United States; then, whoever might present himself as a member, having been seven years a citizen of Texas, would, in the terms and meaning of the Constitution, have been seven years a citizen of the United States, so constituted.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 312-313)

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Madison feared the Adam’s administration’s “Alien and Sedition Acts” and agreed that these should be attacked on the grounds of their unconstitutionality. A stern response should emanate from State legislatures, and those opposing the “Acts” had to do so anonymously to avoid arrest. To Jefferson especially, it was federal power that represented a clear and present danger as would be the case some 63 years later.

States Above Federal Authority  

“John Breckinridge, who would later become Thomas Jefferson’s Attorney General, authored resolutions in 1798 which opened with ‘the American States were not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their government.’ And there was nothing startling about at that time in his reference to the Constitution as a compact between States, for this view of it was widely held.

Jefferson, remaining in the background, did not say, as Calhoun did later, that sovereignty was indivisible and remained with the States. The abstract question of sovereignty probably did not greatly interest him. He took the position which Madison well-described a few months later: “The authority of constitutions over governments, and of the sovereignty of the people over constitutions, are truths which are at all times necessary to be kept in mind, and at no time, perhaps, more necessary than the present.” At this moment Jefferson would not have used the word “perhaps” . . . with him the essential truth was the sovereignty of the people, and the reality as he saw it was that the people lived in the several States and could express themselves more readily through State action.

Regarding constitutions as shields against arbitrary power, he was disposed to interpret all of them strictly. In construing the federal constitution strictly, however, he was pursuing no solitary course: he was quite in line with the Republican spokesmen in Congress.”

(Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty; Volume III. Dumas Malone. Little, Brown and Company, 1962, pp. 402-403)

The following is noted as “a summary of the report made by Tyler to Virginia Gov. Letcher on his return from Washington. The text of this report, with the letters passing between Tyler & Buchanan, was published in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, February 1861.”     The fortress was built to protect Virginia, not wage war upon it.

American Citizens Targeted

“Tyler left Washington on January 29 with the expectation of returning to the Washington Peace Convention, which was to assemble on February 4. On the day before leaving, he sent another letter to President James Buchanan, in lieu of a call which other engagements prevented. In this letter he expressed appreciation of the courtesies that had been shown him and pleasure at hearing the President’s message read in the Senate.

Tyler’s letter also spoke of a rumor that at Fortress Monroe the cannon had been put on the landward side and pointed inland. His comment of this report was “that when Virginia is making every possible effort to redeem and save the Union, it is seemingly ungenerous to cannon leveled at here bosom.”

To this letter Buchanan sent a very courteous reply, stating that he would inquire into the rumors with reference to Fortress Monroe’s cannon.”

(John Tyler, Champion of the Old South. Oliver Perry Chitwood. American Political Biography Press, 1939 – pg. 438)

Independence the Fulfillment of American Nationalism

“The nationalist movement with which the American Confederacy most frequently identified with was- paradoxically yet logically – the American War of Independence. A central contention of Confederate nationalism, as it emerged in 1861, was that the South’s effort represented a continuation of the struggle of 1776.

The South, Confederates insisted, was the legitimate heir of the American revolutionary tradition. Betrayed by Yankees who had perverted the true meaning of the Constitution, the revolutionary heritage could be preserved only by secession. Southerners portrayed their drive for independence as the fulfillment of American nationalism.

Evidence of this self-image abounded in the new nation. The figure of Virginian George Washington adorned the Confederacy’s national seal and one of the earliest postage stamps; Jefferson Davis chose to be inaugurated at the base of a statue of Washington on the latter’s birthday in 1862; a popular ballad hailed the new president as “our second Washington.”

Songsters used by soldiers and civilians alike were filled with evocations of past glories such as the battles of Cowpens and Yorktown – events, like the figure of Washington himself, at once American and Southern.

“Rebels before,

Our fathers of yore, Rebel’s the righteous name Washington bore.

Why, then, be ours the same.”   

(The Creation of Southern Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South. Drew Gilpin Faust. LSU Press, 1988. Pp. 14-15)

Robert E. Lee gained his fundamental understanding of the US Constitution while at West Point, that the States were superior to their federal agent in Washington. It is important to note that the word “union” first appears in the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union” (which 11 of the 13 States seceded from in 1787).  Two additional States seceded two years later. The 1789 Constitution’s text was prefaced with “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union . . .” The 1861 Constitution of the Confederate States of America began: “We the People of the Confederate States, each acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government . . .”

No Other Course but Dishonor

“Among Lee’s professors at West Point was the distinguished jurist William Rawle, a Pennsylvanian and author of A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (1829), a book that formed the basis of many of Rawle’s lectures. It is likely that cadet Lee became quite familiar with Rawle’s view that the Union was not a compact into which the States had entered irrevocably. Rawle wrote:

“It depends on [the State] itself whether it will continue a member of the Union. To deny this right would be inconsistent with the principle upon which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases the right to determine how they will be governed.”

The newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, had offered Lee, still only a colonel in rank, command of his army, comprised at the time of some 100,000 men. Had he accepted this, the appointment would have been the pinnacle of his career – everything that he had worked toward for more than 35 years as an officer. But he could not take up arms against his native State and all the complexities of consanguinity that she represented.

“I did only what my duty demanded,” Lee said after the war. “I could have taken no other course without dishonor.” [The final act of his command [of the Army of Northern Virginia], an honorable surrender, was his greatest demonstration of forbearance.”

(Excerpted from Remembering Robert E. Lee, Jack Trotter. Chronicles Magazine, June 2022, pp. 19-20)

Along with his family, Jefferson Davis was captured by northern troops in the Georgia pines on May 10, 1865, while enroute to join Southern forces in the trans-Mississippi. The military odds were now ten to one, and northern troops were armed with Spencer-magazine repeaters against the Southern muzzle loaders. This was turning the war into mass murder. Author Russell Quynn writes:

“During the four years of war the northern armies had been replenished with more than 720,000 immigrant males from Europe, who were promised bounties and pension that the South afterwards largely had to pay. (See Union Department of War Records). The armies of the South at peak strength never exceeded 700,000 men. Imported “Hessians” were thus used by Lincoln to crush Americans of the South whose fathers had served in the armies of Washington, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor, to make a nation, to found its renown!”

It was Lincoln Who “Made War”

Jefferson Davis chastised his accusers:

“. . . by reiteration of such inappropriate terms as “rebellion,” treason” and the asseveration of that the South was levying war against the United States, those ignorant of the nature of the Union and the reserved powers of the States, have been led to believe that the Confederate States [of America] were in the condition of revolted provinces, and that the United States were forced to resort to arms for the preservation of its existence . . .

The Union was formed for specific enumerated purposes, and the States had never surrendered their sovereignty . . . It was a palpable absurdity to apply to them, or to their citizens when obeying their mandates, the terms “rebellion” and “treason”; and, further, the Confederate States, so far from making war or seeking to destroy the United States, as soon as they had an official organ, strove earnestly by peaceful recognition to equitably adjust all questions growing out of the separation from their late associates.

It was Lincoln who “made war.” Still another perversion, Davis thought:

“Was the attempted arraignment of the men who participated in forming the Confederate States and bore arms in its defense, as “instigators of a controversy leading to disunion.” Of course, it was a palpable absurdity, but part of the unholy vengeance, which did not cease at the grave.”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts. Russell Hoover Quynn. Exposition Press, 1959, pp. 126-127)