Jefferson Davis Predicts the Ultimate Victory of the Principles of the Confederate Cause: Only They Will Preserve the Union Over Time

He hopes “at some future day justice may be done to our cause and to its brave defenders”, arguing that “the policy of the South” must be not appeasement and apologetics, but “the vindication of Southern men by telling the whole truth rather than by silence.”

By 1876, some 11 years after the end of the Civil War, many former Confederates had been elected to Congress and others intended to run. There was even talk that Jefferson Davis might return to the Senate. However, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, removed the right to hold federal and state offices of a group of about 750 former Confederate leaders who had not yet received amnesty. So the Democrats, who had a majority in the House, introduced an amnesty bill to grant amnesty to those 750. There was not expected to be much opposition to the amnesty; in fact numerous Republicans had gone on record favoring an amnesty, including the powerful former House Speaker James J. Blaine. Blaine had his eye on the presidency, and both sought to keep himself in the public eye and galvanize support on an issue that would appeal to the huge bloc of Union war veterans in the Grand Army of the Republic. So on January 10,1876, Blaine surprised the House (and nation) by offering an amendment to exclude from amnesty Jefferson Davis – and only Davis – whom he labeled as the “late president of the so-called Confederate States”.  There were other benefits to making Davis the issue: it might split the Northern Democrats from the Southern Democrats; and it would inflame the country’s passions over the war in order to divert attention from the claims of corruption surrounding the Republican administration of President Ulysses S. Grant.

During two days of debate on the House floor, Blaine went on the attack against Davis personally, laying the blame for the greatest crime of the war at his feet. Blaine’s biographers, in the “Life and Work of James G. Blaine”, described his speech as one “of extraordinary strength and audacity,” and of “vehemence almost amounting to fury.”  Blaine called Davis “the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.” Comparing that to other famous atrocities, he claimed “neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the Low Countries, nor the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, nor the thumb-screws and engines of torture of the Spanish Inquisition begin to compare in atrocity with the hideous crime of Andersonville.”  Davis could have stopped the atrocity, he said, “by a wink of his eye, by a wave of his hand, by a nod of his head.”  He stressed “with great deliberation” that “there is not a government, a civilized government on the face of the globe…that would not have arrested Mr. Davis, and when they had him in their power would not have tried him for maltreatment of prisoners of war and shot him within thirty days.”  Speaking for the soldiers who died at Andersonville, he said, “I here protest, against their calling him back and crowning with full honors of full American citizenship the man who organized that murder.”  It was wrong, he argued, “to allow Davis to go free and hang Wirz.”

Blaine was holding Davis responsible for the horrors of Andersonville Prison in Georgia.  At Andersonville, which opened in February 1864, some 13,000 of the 45,000 Union prisoners sent there died from scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery brought on by starvation, overcrowding, filthy conditions, and disease.  In a trial lasting nearly two months, the commandant of Andersonville, Major Henry Wirz, was convicted of 12 prison murders and of conspiring and acting with others “to injure the health and destroy the lives of soldiers in the military service of the United States.”  The hated Wirz was one of only two Confederates, and the only regular Army officer, to be hanged for war crimes.

Blaine had done precisely what Wirz had refused to do in order to save his own life.  The night before Wirz was hanged, his lawyer told him that a high Johnson Administration cabinet officer had assured him that Wirz’s sentence would be commuted to life in prison if Wirz would but implicate Davis in the Andersonville atrocities.  An adamant Wirz replied, “I have always told you that I do not know anything about Jefferson Davis.  He had no connection with me as to what was done at Andersonville.  If I knew anything about him, I would not become a traitor against him or anybody else even to save my life.”

Had Davis been in the Senate, he would have given one of his magisterial speeches on the floor to defend his name and section. But he was a private individual, and not even a citizen, so his reply to Blaine came instead through two letters. First, on January 22, 1876, he wrote Congressman J. Proctor Knott, a Democratic representative and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, taking himself out of the equation and sacrificing his own interest by urging passage of the bill with Blaine’s amendment intact – giving amnesty to everyone but Davis himself. This would guarantee passage of the bill. He said that “It may be proper to state that I have no claim to pardon, not having in any wise repented, or changed the convictions on which my political course was founded, as well before, as during, and since the war between the states.”  Second, on January 27, Davis wrote a supporter, former Confederate Congressman James Lyons of Virginia, who had written him three times urging him to respond to Blaine: “I have been so long the object of malignant slander and the subject of unscrupulous falsehood by partisans of the class of Mr. Blaine,” he said, “that, though I cannot say that it has become to me a matter of indifference, it has ceased to excite my surprise, even in this instance, when it reaches the extremity of accusing me of cruelty to prisoners.” He argued that through Wirz’s trial, the government had tried to prove Davis responsible but had been unable to do so.  Blaine’s speech, he said, was political, meant to further his own candidacy for the presidency. “The published fact of an attempt to suborn Wirz while under sentence of death, by promising him pardon if he would criminate me in regard to Andersonville prisoners, is conclusive as to the wish of the Government to make such a charge against me, and the failure to do so shows that nothing could be found to do so.”  Wirz’s prosecutors, “with their trained band of suborned witnesses, dared not make against me this charge, which Wirz, for his life, would not make,” he said, “but which Blaine, for the presidential nomination, has made.” He refused to ask for a pardon from “the skulkers of the fight, like Blaine, who display their flag on an untented field,” and he said that he had “no view of the future which makes it desirable to me to be included in an amnesty bill.” He argued that being pardoned for a great crime was the next thing to being punished for it, and he concluded by saying, “I am not willing to have it go over the earth, and down to posterity, that millions of my countrymen were pardoned traitors.”

Although the target of Blaine’s attack was ostensively Davis alone, many in the South considered it a barely-veiled attempt to delegitimize the Southern cause generally by conflating it with callousness and atrocities. It is with this background that South Carolinian Dr. J. W. Sanders wrote Davis, and whose signed note at the top of this letter puts it into context. This letter, Sanders writes, was Davis’s “answer to a letter thanking him for the reply to Blaine’s speech in Congress charging Davis with cruelty to U.S. prisoners of war – and a slander on the Southern people.” Davis responded with a defense not of himself this time, but of the Southern cause.

Autograph letter signed, on embossed stationery, two pages, Memphis, Tennessee, February 23, 1876. “Please accept my cordial thanks for your kind letter of the 20th inst. I hope at some future day justice may be done to our cause and to its brave defenders.  The necessities of party, have prevented the victorious section from allowing the passions of the war to subside, or the facts of the conflict to be fairly presented.  When the captured archives of the Confederacy shall be open to inspection, and when the policy of the South shall be the vindication of Southern men by telling the whole truth rather than by silence attempting to appease the prejudices of dupes, we shall be more likely to command the respect of others and to preserve our own together with that of our posterity. My life is far spent and will not probably endure long enough to permit me to see the wished for reaction; but truth is eternal, the principles for which we contended can alone perpetuate an Union of States, and thus we may expect that right will in due time prevail.  Again thanking you for your comforting assurances, I am yours…” This letter was in the possession of a descendant of Dr. Sanders until very recently.

This is an extraordinary letter and unlike any we have seen before, and goes way beyond his occasionally-seen defense of the constitutionality of the Confederate position. It looks both forward and behind, praising the bravery of the Confederates and validity of their cause, assessing why tensions remained between the sections, stating how Southerners ought to deal with their Confederate past, denouncing appeasement of those who hated the South, and boldly proclaiming that the Union itself –  apparently fought for and won – could only succeed over time if the principles of the Confederacy were adopted.