MR. JEFFERSON DAVIS.
THE generation which had the making of that tremendous chapter id American history, the War of the Secession, is swiftly passing away. Lincoln is gone, and Seward, and Andrew- Johnson, and on the other side, Jackson and Lee. It is remarkable that among a short-lived race the political leaders of the Confederacy still survive. Not long ago, Mr. Alexander Stephens, some-time the Vice-President of the Confederacy, was restored to a place in public life, and now we find that Ex-President Davis himself has emerged from his long retire- ment, and that his speeches are copiously reported and vigor; ously discussed in the newspapers of the United States. It is true that the American Press suffers from a scarcity of topics hardly less embarrassing than that which afflicts our own ; and that Mr. Davis has, for the most part, limited his public utterances to common-places, the same in kind though not in quality as those delicious pastorals which Mr. Disraeli now and then bestows on the farmers of Buckinghamshire. Mr. Davis is not, however, a master of phrases; he cannot dilate like his Eng- lish prototype on the succulent beauties of the " aftermath," or the verdant richness of the green-crops, but for simple unctuous- ness outside and distinct from the sacerdotal order of thought, we are inclined to think Mr. Davis's speech at the Fair of the Jefferson County Agricultural Society a few weeks ago a most creditable performance. The Ex-President of the Confederacy ex- tolled agriculture as we might expect a proprietor to do whose ground has been tilled by men and women whose labour he owned. The bard and ugly side of farming never was im- pressed on the slaveowner, and since Slavery fell Mr. Davis has been too closely wrapped in visionary grandeurs to spare any attention for the realities of the new social conditions under which he is compelled to live. He continues to see only the bright side of field-labour, which is as like the truth as the shep- herds of Guarini and Watteau are like the real peasants who tend the flocks of Lombardy or thd Landes. The slaves whom Mr. Davis laboured to keep in subjection for the good of their moral and intellectual natures will appreciate his assurance that agriculture, " as it was the first, is the highest occupation of man." " The last of creation was the agricultural man,
as the best was woman, who was to be a help-mate for the agricultural man." But a more permanent and larger interest attaches to the few words which, in the midst of his Georgics, the Ex-President of the Confederacy permitted himself to drop. The Chief of the Secession, the bitter enemy of the Free-soil principles, which, if they are rooted anywhere, are rooted in the great corn-producing States of the West, confesses or boasts—for we are not quite sure how his rhetoric is to be taken—that " whatever the views of policy and the designs of statecraft might desire to consummate in regard to the future, the people of the great Mississippi Valley are one, and must always remain one people, in interest, in destiny, and in social forces and material progress. No man, no course of policy, no deep designs of ambitious men could ever dissever them ; in all the future they would stand together." This is either an admission that the ends for which the South spent its life- blood so freely have been finally defeated, or that the move- ment of the West towards the Democratic party will accom- plish those ends, certainly, though indirectly. If the latter interpretation be true to the meaning of the speaker, he was wise to study ambiguity in his language, for nothing could be more ruinous to the cause with which Mr. Davis may be pre- sumed to be in alliance, than to have it suspected that its victory would bring back the dominance, however disguised or mitigated, of the Slave Power.
It is hardly possible even for an Englishman to read with patience the unctuous common-places of Mr. Jefferson Davis's after-dinner pastorals. To Americans, whether Northern or Southern, who really felt the iron of the Civil War enter into their souls, the complacency of the speaker must be almost maddening. The Yankee satirist whose sarcasm is so thoroughly molten with feeling wrote, when the long struggle of the Civil War was drawing to its close
I'd rather stand For judgment where your meanest slave is, Than at God's bar hold up a hand As dripping-red as yonrn, Jeff Davis."
But this exterior perception of the burden of failure does not correspond to Mr. Davis's internal feelings. It is true he led a fiery people to war ; he marched them through trials not often paralleled in the history of peoples that fought without compulsion, and he saw them decimated, beaten back, starved out, fainting under re- peated blows, and at length prostrate at the feet of their enemy. He saw everything that had been staked on the battle swept away, and he saw himself accused by the stoutest champions of the lost cause as responsible for the disaster. Yet Mr. Davis never seems to have faltered in his faith in his own infallibility. He never reproached himself for tempting his fellow-countrymen to a hopeless enterprise, he never took defeat to heart as even the gallant Lee did. He "came up smiling," in the jargon of the Prize-ring, but it was with assured confidence in his own luck, and with profound indifference to the thoughts as well as to the fate of all the rest of the world. This has always appeared to us the most amazing fact in President Davis's career ; he never seemed to apprehend the meaning of his disaster, so long as he got off with a whole skin. The training of a slaveowner, which sometimes, while making the passions fiercer, appears to make the feelings more susceptible, had apparently hardened this man's nature, and a want of imagination limited his possibilities of receiving im- pressions. Otherwise no man who had conceived and attempted to carry through an enterprise so great that Mr. Glad- stone described it as the making of a nation, could have borne its collapse with the jaunty nonchalance that Mr. Jefferson Davis displays now, and has ever displayed since he fled, disguised in his wife's petticoats, from the enemy who were determined to punish him with disdainful mercy. If Mr. Davis were capable of understanding what was meant by that pitiless struggle in which he engaged his people, and was at the same time capable of talking about its collapse as an ordinary politician might talk about the unfortunate result of an election, we might be moved to anger at such Mephisto- phelean callousness. But the truth is, that of all the moral and emotional aspects of the great conflict with which he was identified, whether those that wrung the heart of Lincoln or those that broke the heart of Lee, Mr. Davis was —as Mr. Kinglake says of Lord Cardigan—" as in' nocent as a horse."
This peculiarity of intellectual constitution is a curiosity in politics, for it makes it more difficult than ever to explain how the people of the Southern States came to choose such a leader ,
as Mr. Jefferson Davis. The popular notion—which to some extent is the true one—of the Southern character is that it is excitable, passionate, and generally distinguished by what we identify as the chivalric qualities. But there is another side of the Southern character which explains and squares with the history of Mr. Davis's political authority. The arro- gance of moral temperament, the contempt for all those civil usages of life which, as Burke says, are founded on " compromise and barter," the recklessness of loss and suffering, whether incurred or inflicted, which distinguishes some phases of society in the United States, were never com- pressed more admirably into concise literary form than in Colonel John Hay's ghastly and quaint poem " The Mystery of Gilgal." The triviality of the supposed point in dispute, the un- flinching determination of the disputants, the instant appeal to the most desperate remedies, the eagerness with which the by- standers take sides and fight to the death in a quarrel of which no one understands the rights,—these touches of a lawless and hard-grained state of society, drawn so vigorously and strik- ingly by the Western poet, were all reproduced on a large can- vas during the Civil War. It was the rancorous vehemence of Southern self-assertion that Mr. Jefferson Davis typified and represented, and that, in his own personal character, he ex- aggerated beyond the limits of the probable. Not "Colonel Blood of Pike" or "Judge Phinn" himself could have surpassed Mr. Davis in dogged assurance, or in resolution to fight to the death for his opinion. Neither could any of Bret Harte's or John Hay's heroes show a more unruffled demeanour when, the struggle ended with whatever result, " they piled the stiffs outside the door," and cleared the bar for " a drink." To people who have been brought up to feel for the sufferings of others or to respect the rights of others, this phase of savagery is only the more detestable when it is veneered with the phraseology of modern civilisation, and to a great many Americans we are sure it is as hateful as to any of ourselves. But there are enough yet left to appreciate and applaud the "Indian courage and Spartan immobility " of Mr. Jefferson Davis. It is well, perhaps, for those of his admirers who dwell north of Mason and Dixon's line, that they are compelled to admire the develop- ment of his character in adversity, and not in prosperity. The triumph of a nation which is indifferent to the ruin of defeat would be something appalling.
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