Montgomery, Ala., Feb. 18, 1861
Like a feckless college student with a term paper deadline looming, Jefferson Davis apparently hadn’t started seriously writing until the day before. Exhausted from a weeklong railway journey, he had stayed in bed in his suite at the Exchange Hotel until after 10 a.m., then buckled down to work. Now, barely 24 hours later, standing in front of the Alabama Statehouse’s portico under a wintry sky, he unfolded a thin sheaf of paper and began to read his inaugural address in a strong, clear baritone:
Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, friends, and fellow citizens: Called to the difficult and responsible station of chief magistrate of the provisional government which you have instituted, I approach the discharge of the duties assigned to me with humble distrust of my abilities, but with a sustaining confidence in the wisdom of those who are to guide and aid me in the administration of public affairs, and an abiding faith in the virtue and patriotism of the people.
Davis had indeed been “called” – not exactly elected – to the presidency. Just 10 days earlier, delegates from six Southern states,meeting here in the Alabama capitol, had chosen him as the new Confederate nation’s first chief executive. Like so many of the South’s actions that winter – the secession meetings and ratifications, the drafting of a constitution – the decision had been taken in haste. Though several other men wanted the post, there had been almost no campaigning or debate: Davis’s political and military experience were strong qualifications, certainly, but the most potent fact in his favor was probably that he had fewer enemies than his rivals.
Now he was not merely the Confederacy’s “chief magistrate,” but also its chief mouthpiece. Hitherto, most statements on secession had come from individual states. But today, it devolved upon him to explain to the world why the Deep South had announced its withdrawal from the Union. He said:
Our present political position has been achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of nations. It illustrates 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 at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established. … The impartial and enlightened verdict of mankind will vindicate the rectitude of our conduct; and He who knows the hearts of men will judge of the sincerity with which we have labored to preserve the government of our fathers in its spirit.
“Preserve the government of our fathers in its spirit”: this was characteristic of the conservative tenor that pervaded Davis’s address. By his lights, the Confederacy – though its manner of birth may have been unprecedented – was hardly novel in any significant respect. Its Constitution, he said, “differ[s] only from that of our fathers in so far as it is explanatory of their well-known intent, freed from sectional conflicts, which have interfered with the pursuit of the general welfare.”
Members of his audience might have been forgiven for scratching their heads at this last, somewhat tortuous, passage. But it was, in fact, a very delicate allusion to slavery: the founding fathers’ “well-known intent” in Philadelphia in 1787 had been to protect slavery, Davis hinted, even if they had not quite made it explicit. Indeed, the American Constitution did not contain the word slave, whereas the Confederate version defiantly repeated it 10 times, including in this crucial passage: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”
But unlike Davis’s farewell speech to the Senate a month earlier, his inaugural speech included no clarion call to defend slavery and white supremacy. Even the South’s favorite euphemism, “our domestic institutions,” was left unuttered. The closest he came was in attesting that the desire to form a new nation was “actuated solely by the desire to preserve our own rights, and promote our own welfare.” Rights and welfare, obviously, had very specific connotations in this context.
The closing lines were heavy with unintended irony. Davis read:
It is joyous in the midst of perilous times to look around upon a people united in heart, where one purpose of high resolve animates and actuates the whole; where the sacrifices to be made are not weighed in the balance against honor and right and liberty and equality. Obstacles may retard, but they cannot long prevent, the progress of a movement sanctified by its justice and sustained by a virtuous people. Reverently let us invoke the God of our fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles which by his blessing they were able to vindicate, establish and transmit to their posterity. With the continuance of his favor ever gratefully acknowledged, we may hopefully look forward to success, to peace and to prosperity.
And with that, having spoken for barely 15 minutes, he concluded. The inaugural address had contained not a single memorable phrase or idea. Even Davis’s admirers would rarely quote it.
The address was most notable for what it left out: any attempt to explain how a nation could possibly remain viable, let alone democratic, if it were founded on the principle that any constituent part might withdraw as soon as it found itself in the minority on an important political issue. This was the fundamental philosophical absurdity on which the whole Confederacy was constructed, like a grandiose classical edifice on a foundation of sand. The new president’s failure to address it did not bode well. Indeed, it was an early symptom of a fatal condition.
It is instructive to compare Davis’s inaugural address and its method of composition with Abraham Lincoln’s two weeks later. Lincoln had begun work on his speech not long after his election; by late January, he had buckled down in earnest, hiding out in a small room in a shop belonging to his brother-in-law, where he would not be disturbed. He had asked his law partner, William Herndon, to procure copies of Henry Clay’s 1850 address to the Senate; Daniel Webster’s debates with Sen. Robert Hayne of South Carolina; Andrew Jackson’s statement against nullification; George Washington’s farewell address; and the Constitution. Lincoln would continue working on the address over the course of six weeks, until the very morning of his swearing in.
The thinness of Davis’s speech, and of his preparation, cannot be blamed merely on haste or inattention. Rather, it betrayed an alarming void at the center of the self-proclaimed Confederate republic. The hard work that Lincoln had put into his message attested to his faith in the power and necessity of words, of arguments, of explanations, in a democratic system. By contrast, the lackluster, shop-worn rhetoric of Davis and other leaders was not merely a failure of aesthetics, but proof of the intellectual poverty and moral laziness undergirding their entire enterprise. It also revealed their lack of commitment to the essential democratic chores of persuasion and explanation.
The Confederacy was never truly much of a cause – lost or otherwise. In fact, it might better be called an effect: a reactive stratagem tarted up with ex post facto justifications. This would soon be borne out in the practices of the two national legislatures. Over the next four years, the Confederate Congress would transact nearly all its important business in secret, and even some of the most fervent secessionists would decry its lack of true accountability to the Southern public. (Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, a leading fire-eater in 1860 and 1861, would later blame the South’s loss on the absence of any informed public debate within the Confederacy that might have held the Davis administration’s policies up to scrutiny.) By contrast, the Congress of the United States – notwithstanding all the bitter infighting that lay ahead – would never once go into closed session during the course of the war.
In fact, the most revealing words in the two contrasting inaugural addresses may have been those that came at the very beginning. Davis had opened his with “Gentlemen of the Congress of the Confederate States of America, friends and fellow citizens” – a catalogue of castes. Lincoln – though addressing an equally august assemblage – would begin his speech much more simply and democratically: “Fellow citizens of the United States.”
Sources: William J. Cooper, “Jefferson Davis: American”; William C. Davis, “Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour”; Clement Eaton, “Jefferson Davis”; Hudson Strode, “Jefferson Davis”; Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”; Wilfred Buck Yearns, “The Confederate Congress.”
Adam Goodheart is the author of the forthcoming book “1861: The Civil War Awakening.” He lives in Washington, D.C., and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he is the Hodson Trust-Griswold Director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.
