Did secession die with Jefferson Davis? Burial speech in Tallahassee praised new, unified country

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August 18, 2011

Despite the song, Jefferson Davis was never hanged on that sour apple tree.

But upon his death, his soul did go marching on and his ideas are alive today in political discussion, with the governor of Texas recently stating that Texas might consider secession from the Union.

How was Davis remembered in death?

The Yankees captured Davis about 120 miles north of Tallahassee, in Irwinville, with friends and family as they were fleeing toward Texas. He spent two years in Fortress Monroe, Virginia, where, at first, they placed him in leg irons. In the end, he became too politically controversial for Congress to hold much longer, and he was finally released on $100,000 bail by supporters, including famous editor Horace Greeley.

The president of the Confederate States of America spent the rest of his life trying to scrape a living together, selling insurance, vainly working to put together commercial agreements with Great Britain, writing, scraping to pay off debts.

Viewed as a traitor by many in the North, he was also blamed for the loss of the war by the South. As time passed, however, Jefferson Davis eventually metamorphosed into a martyr for the Confederacy. When he died 24 years after Appomatox, they pulled out all the stops to eulogize him.

In the days after he was buried (temporarily) in New Orleans, memorial ceremonies took place all over the South.

In Tallahassee, all businesses closed their doors, a few draped in mourning. Church bells tolled and a large crowd gathered at the local opera house, reported the The Weekly Floridian. Students paraded downtown, and local ministers a well as the chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, the orator for the occasion, joined in praise of Davis.

We can presume there were few if any black residents freely participating, although the now-famous photographer Alvin Harper did advertise in the newspaper. We see a host of well-known names in stories and ads: Lewis, Gamble, Betton, Hamlin and many others.

We are privileged to be holding the original and tattered yellow pages of the Dec. 17, 1889 issue, published every Tuesday, edited by N. M. Bowen. This broadsheet carried front page ads for Royal Baking powder, eyeglasses fitted by M. Lively Drug Store, a holiday present sale at J.R. Cohen’s Store, and Xmas Goods! at Schrader’s Drug Store.

The South mourned the unrepentant president of secession, who died at age 81, still believing in the rights of individual states to leave the union and who never asked for a pardon. It was not until 1978 that his citizenship was restored by Congress, the resolution signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.

Ceremonies here in 1889 opened with a chorus singing “Jesus Lover of My Soul.”

The Rev. H.E. Partridge of the M.E. Church South led an opening prayer, and a burial service was read by the Rev. W.H. Carter of St. Johns Episcopal Church. The entire congregation burst into “Nearer My God to Thee.” The orator for the occasion in Tallahassee was the Hon. Augustus Maxwell, former congressman and then chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court.

Why was Davis consigned to obloquy, to hatred, to fierce denunciation, asked Maxwell.

“Behold the man. He stood upright, a model of manly dignity, the expression of his face full of intellectual richness, his intelligence on general subjects, as well as on all subjects pertinent to his business marvelous, the manner of him in his ordinary bearing, kindly, considerate, propitiating, albeit on just occasion to his own mind, sometimes impatient and deterrent.”

“He stood worthily at the head of ranks who that marched with boldness, and with honest intent, to many now historic battle-fields to vindicate the cause which he and all of us believed to be a righteous one. If he was stained with guilt, so were all who followed him. If he was a traitor, so were we who confided in his leadership.”

Maxwell spoke of the new “centralization” of government. But, “if we still stand forth as strenuous advocates for that Union as a Confederacy of States, bound together by ties that leave them supreme in their proper constitutional spheres, we violate no obligation obnoxious to the chieftain of the Southern cause.”

Davis, he explained, had not applied for pardon. But it was not because of his belief in the right of secession. He did not apply for pardon because he disputed how the government treated the South after the war.

It was plain, however, that a new nation was emerging. The war ended disastrously for the South, said Maxwell, but the cause for which the South fought helped create national power and “greatness incomparable. . . the harbinger of a powerful nationality, the proudest and grandest on earth.”

As the speech came to a conclusion, Maxwell spoke of the need for the nation to stay united.

“A people united under such a government as ours, all now animated by a common impulse, stepping amicably together to the music of the Union, and heading to the same goal of liberty, cannot afford to stop by the wayside to wrangle over little questions of the hour. America, the accepted name to denote the primacy of these United States, on the western continent, our America, is today the great fact of the age.”

And so, it is fair to say those who promoted secession did not believe in it following the Civil War, and if it is spoken of with a kind of wishful thinking in today’s garrulous politics, it is certainly without the benefit of the hard lessons of the past and the wise words of those who tried it and found it wanting.