New Liberal Rule: When in Doubt, Invoke Distant History You Don’t Understand

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U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, 1853

“A question settled by violence, or in disregard of law, must remain unsettled forever.”
— Jefferson Davis

What’s up with this trend, huh? A week ago, James Fallows decided to drag John C. Calhoun into the current argument, and this week we have another liberal foray into bizarre counterfactual rhetoric:

The Washington Post’s Colby King took another stab Saturday at impugning and discrediting the Tea Party as a bunch of racists who are little more than an extension of the Confederacy. In a column titled “The rise of the New Confederacy,” King, a regular on Inside Washington, argued: “Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.”
The former deputy editorial page editor, whose column appears every Saturday, paid a back-handed compliment to House conservatives as he charged: “The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.” . . .
He asserted “they respond, however, to the label ‘tea party.’ By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.”

What is this even supposed to mean? It seems to be just a cheap way of making an accusation Colbert King cannot justify (remember, there are five A’s in “RAAAAACIST!”) and, although no liberal today knows this, Jefferson Davis was an American hero long before he became the unfairly demonized President of the Confederacy.

A native of Kentucky — born, ironically, not far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln — he was raised in Mississippi and, at age 16, appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After graduation, Davis served as a young lieutenant at the frontier outpost Fort Crawford in present-day Wisconsin. There, Davis fell in love with Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of the fort’s commander, Col. Zachary Taylor. So in love was Davis, in fact, that he resigned from the army in order to marry Sarah (whose father wished to spare his daughter the difficult life of an Army officer’s wife), but tragedy soon struck: The newlyweds fell victim to an outbreak of malaria in 1835. Sarah died and her grief-stricken husband fell so ill that his survival was in doubt.

After recovering his health, Davis eventually entered politics, and campaigned for James K. Polk’s election as president in 1844. Davis was later elected to Congress, but when the Mexican-American War broke out in 1846, the West Point graduate and veteran officer resigned his House seat, raised a volunteer regiment, and became colonel of the famed “Mississippi Rifles.” His bravery at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista won Davis national distinction.

His commanding general in Mexico was his former father-in-law, now General Zachary Taylor. Recalling how he had opposed his late daughter’s marriage to the young officer, Taylor told Davis, “My daughter, sir, was a better judge of men than I was.”

Davis was appointed to the Senate in 1847, filling the seat of a senator who had died in office. He resigned that seat to run unsuccessfully for governor of Mississippi but, in 1853, was appointed Secretary of War by President Franklin Pierce. As Secretary, Davis supervised key work that helped prepare for the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Davis was then re-elected to the Senate, where he served until resigning after Mississippi seceded from the Union.

In his farewell speech to the Senate, Davis recalled when he had defended the right of secession — for Massachusetts:

I well remember an occasion when Massachusetts was arraigned before the bar of the Senate, and when then the doctrine of coercion was rife and to be applied against her because of the rescue of a fugitive slave in Boston. My opinion then was the same that it is now. Not in a spirit of egotism, but to show that I am not influenced in my opinion because the case is my own, I refer to that time and that occasion as containing the opinion which I then entertained, and on which my present conduct is based. I then said, if Massachusetts, following her through a stated line of conduct, chooses to take the last step which separates her from the Union, it is her right to go, and I will neither vote one dollar nor one man to coerce her back; but will say to her, God speed, in memory of the kind associations which once existed between her and the other States.

Such was his firmness of principle and, although his critics then and since have found fault with Davis, no man ever doubted his honesty or his courage. The name of this heroic American — a soldier and statesman, who earned praise for his service in war and in peace — deserves more honor than to be slung around ignorantly as a political epithet more than a century after his death.

Ah, but this silliness brings back memories of the 1990s when, as a young newspaperman in Georgia, I occasionally went out to cover the historical re-enactments of Civil War battles. Bill Clinton was president then, and lots of Republicans had bumper stickers on their cars saying, “Don’t Blame Us, We Voted for Bush.” But at the re-enactor encampments, the stickers sometimes displayed a slightly different wording: “Don’t Blame Us, We Voted for Jefferson Davis.”

He was a Democrat, you know.

 

147 comments

  1. This week the Democrats fulfilled a 120+ year old dream, finally driving Americans off the Gettysburg battlefield and taking Little Round top…

  2. The Democrats, they sound more than a bit nervous right now. I can’t imagine why, what with President Zero throwing his tantrums, and punishing everyone.

  3. I agree that accusing Republicans, the Tea Party, or the South of being the Confederacy is seriously un-intellectual. It’s ridiculous for sure.

    I will disagree with your defense of Jeff Davis to a degree. As the President of the Confederacy he was defending slavery. And he can be rightfully “demonized” for it.

    I think history and life are complex and Jeff Davis was a complex man, and I get that. He was a smart man with many accomplishments, but he’ll always be the only President of the Confederacy and he can’t not be criticized for that.

  4. The point is that the argument made by Colbert King is as irrelevant as it is ignorant. He invokes the Confederacy just for shock value. He doesn’t know a damned thing about Jefferson Davis.

  5. IMO a guy who fights for the right of any State, Nation, whatever to allow man to own man is pretty much in same class as Stalin, Hitler, Mao.

    Right to secede, fine, but the “man owning man” thing trumps that like an elephant squashing a mouse, in the grand scheme of things.

  8. The question at issue — and the long history that led to the crisis of 1860 — is more complex than Americans now, in our comfortable air-conditioned world of 2013, are generally prone to acknowledge.

    At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson heard the “fire bell in the night” and warned, “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”

    Thus spake the man who most famously wrote that “all men are created equal,” and his fears proved to be prophetic. Everything that followed was a consequence, and not a cause.

  9. Meh – I know the “not taking historical figures out of historical context” argument quite well, but it should also be noted that England, that bastion of anti-human monarchism that we’d rebelled against so effectively, had already abolished slavery by 1833.

  10. Serving as the President of the Confederate States of America is an indelible stain on his honor and years of service, much as a stain on a beautiful wedding dress ruins it forever.

  12. Exactly, and as Jefferson warned, the Missouri Compromise actually slowed the progress of emancipation.

  14. In the great Civil War aftermath, our nation was healed of its division and honor restored through oath and recoginition of faithful service.
    People like you would harden their hearts to even the most repentant and honorable of men.
    You have no soul, possess no compassion and are a disgrace to the name American.
    Piss off.

  15. In upstate NY, I’ve been told that there is a similar feeling towards Benedict Arnold. A mixed heritage, they remember his earlier heroic service as well as his eventual perfidy. It is a minority view, not much noted nationally and not loudly trumpeted. I put your qualified defense of Davis in a similar category. In both cases I learned something, even though I didn’t ultimately change my mind in either.

  17. I can’t speak for McCain but I do appreciate a fidelity to history. We may draw the lines crudely between hero and villain when we’re in a hurry, but we should always be able to drill down into the detail work.

    Ultimately, the information revolution allows us to have a much richer picture of history, something that we should be building up with more detail and nuance across the board. We should be doing this because it will allow us in future to do politics at a higher level of competence and to better effect. This is just filling in one of the cells.

  18. I detest his belief in racism and slavery. I also appreciate that during his lifetime views and beliefs in this area were in flux and I can understand his racism in that milieu but not endorse his views. There was much to laud him for and a huge block of stiff necked racism to despise him for.
    Interesting men are seldom 2 dimensional figures.

  19. Yes, it is a stain. What is the appropriate reaction to that stain? I am of the opinion that fidelity to the truth and accuracy are unforgiving masters and should rule our study of history. A nullity taking the post of President of the CSA versus a genuine statesman and war hero would have been a lesser fall, a shallower betrayal. How can you understand the ruin, if you don’t understand what has been ruined?

  20. Very few fought over the slavery, hell most did not own slaves. While slavery was and is still today an evil thing, it was not what the Civil war was fought over. Replace the slave issue with any other State right and we still would have had the civil war. Slavery was on the way out before the civil war started. Had the feds stayed out of it, those freed could have had a much easier time and I doubt the race bs would still be this strong.
    BTW England outlawed it but they did nothing to stop their citizens from making money off the slave trade. Much like we do with 3rd world countries , we turn a blind eye to the worse then slave like conditions of workers in countries we trade with…

  21. “My experience has taught me that a man who has no vices has damned few virtues.” — Abraham Lincoln

  24. And, Jeff Davis can not be rightfully demonized for anything. As Davis himself put it, “If slavery is what we are fighting for, we aren’t fighting for much.” The issues were far, far greater than that, as we can see now with what we are enduring out of Lincoln’s Washington.

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