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. The stain is Lincoln’s Not Davis’. Lincoln was a cunning politician who manufactured a casus belli and then proceeded to prosecute a war he had no legal right to prosecute. He threw men in jail in violation of the constitution, he took on debt Congress did not authorize, and raised troops to conquer another country. Lincoln stood foursquare against everything the country was founded upon, and we are now suffering the results of what Lincoln spawned.

    Lincoln, and the radical Republicans that supported him, were Jacobins who did nothing to build. They simply destroyed. They destroyed the Republicans the founders gave to posterity, and their posterity did not keep it.

  2. The underlying problems that caused the Civil War are often ignored in favor of something equally evil as overreach of the Federal government, but much more easily grasped by people: slavery.

    Slavery was the match that lit the fuze back in 1861. Or the straw that broke the camel’s back, depending on your inclination for metaphors.

    Lincoln just didn’t know that slavery was merely half the problem at the time. I’d like to think he’d crap his pants to see how his legacy is being pissed away today. And pissed on.

  3. A minor point of order: I believe that Stacy isn’t much as defending Jefferson Davis as he is pointing out what our resident Undead President points out: people are complicated. And the lefties are way oversimplifying history for the sake of scoring cheap political points.

  4. Jeff Davis was a smart guy, with an active mind, but he was the President of the Confederacy and the Confederacy was created to defend slavery.

  8. When somebody’s general reputation is at the Jefferson Davis level, what you described *is* a defense. It’s also pretty much my opinion what he’s doing so we agree on that.

  9. Let me point out a situation that some people are equally uncomfortable with: many of our army bases are named for Confederate officers. Famous bases, as well.

    Yet, somehow, we deal with it. You might consider that.

  11. Nope. Arguing by analogy is tricky, and I started this below, but I’ll say it here: Many Army bases are named for Confederate officers.

    Is that a “defense”, or is that an attempt by past generations to heal old wounds by acknowledging that there were honorable men who willingly served the Confederacy, even as it was being ground into the earth?

    Do consider that aspect.

  12. PS: I am not proposing that we should honor Davis. If naught else, those same past generations, who had direct, material contact with the Civil Way elected not to do so.

    But they did decide to move on. We need to do the same thing. Only the Democrats won’t let that happen. Even though the Democrats openly supported the Confederacy in the first place.

  13. Because Lincoln was flawed that means Davis was not flawed? How does that work?

    I’m not crazy about the suspension of habeas corpus in the Union but that is no moral reflection on Davis, pro or con.

  14. No, it’s not an oversimplification. And I’m definitely not in the same trap as Mr. King.

    The ordinances of secession, the Cornerstone Speech by Vice President Stephens, and myriad other speeches and documents explain that secession and the Confederacy were exactly about defending the institution of slavery.

    Secession doesn’t make sense, but for slavery.

  16. Secession makes sense for slavery because that was the hot button issue of the generation back when, and for good reason.

    But it was not the only reason, just the cause du jour that people could agree to rally around. And then, not all of them did. They found their own reasons, something that you brush over.

    And that’s why you fall into the same trap as King. It’s called “stereotyping”.

  18. But it does emphasize the problem with analyzing complicated people: the yin and yang that everyone lives with. Everyone has some balance of dark and light in themselves.

    Lincoln openly violated the Constitution with his suspension of habeas corpus (yang), but he saved the Union (yin).

    Davis had a long and honorable live serving the United States of America in thought and deed (yin) until that national took a turn that violated his principles, and he led the Confederacy (yang).

    This doesn’t absolve them of their dark deeds, but it does recognize
    that they may — may — have had honorable reasons
    for taking the path that they did, right, wrong, or indifferent.

  19. No, it’s not called “stereotyping”. It is called the truth, based on the facts and evidence.

    You need to go read the ordinances of secession and the Cornerstone speech man.

  24. Ultimately, you have to render judgment. Model for emulation or a case study in what to avoid is the question we ask regarding all historical figures. In Davis’ case, I have to say it’s the latter. The lessons learned are better for not being a cartoon caricature.

  25. And not always good Confederate officers, either. Fort Bragg? Braxton Bragg was an asshole, memorably denounced in nearly so many words by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  26. I have always been fascinated by the quote in James Webb’s Born Fighting (IIRC) in which a captured Rebel infantryman, poor, barefoot and without a penny to his name, is asked why, if he doesn’t have any slaves, is he fighting the Union? “Because you’re here,” he spat.

  28. My guess is they expected a shift towards them in the polls that didn’t happen. Stories about open air monuments being “closed” and Honor Flight vets being disrespected and turned away.

  29. Thomas Jefferson’s big fear was that the South had more slaves than it could safely let free. In the event, that was not the problem it was imagined.

    The South might have experimented in Missouri with paying its black workers for their work. And might have spent the 40 years from 1820 to 1860 on a program of gradual emancipation. Another failure of imagination.

    The South might have won a Civil War in 1820. By 1860 it had to face regiments from the additional states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.

  31. Why did Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas secede? they left over lincoln’s call for troops. Nothing to do with slavery at all

  32. Ah, the “cornerstone” speech by Stephens. Everyone who does not understand the complexity of issues, think tariffs and taxation, and defense of State sovereignty here, drags out the Stephens speech. Stephens was largely insignificant

  33. One of my favorite quotes, from Gen. Joe Johnston. President Davis has tried to do something even God could not do, he has tried to make a soldier of Braxton Bragg

  36. Precisely. I give a large portion of the Confederacy leadership the benefit of the doubt, because the issues were complex, and principles generally are not.

    That doesn’t mean I support the Confederacy, or wish for a new one. I simply acknowledge that the Confederacy had some legitimate reasons for secession. Slavery is assuredly not one of those reasons.

    In the end, they lost. Had they won, such as the Founding Fathers had won 80 odd years earlier, this would be a moot discussion.

  38. Abolished it, yes, but slaves still rode to the Americas in British hulls, or Portuguese and Spanish hulls financed by British interests.

  39. They seceded because of Lincoln’s call for troops and because Confederate representatives were pushing them to secede because of slavery.

    They also would have never seceded if the deep South states had seceded over slavery.

    Why did West Virginia secede from Virginia Doug?

  41. Davis was only elected the President of the Confederacy after secession.

    Secession happened because of slavery. What are you failing to understand about this?

  43. Don’t forget the Lee and Stuart tanks, or the Chinook, Cheyenne, Cayuse, Kiowa, Apache and Iroquois helicopters. The Army has a long tradition of naming things for honored enemies.

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