The Training Ground (12 page)
Weary from battle, Taylor’s army marched into Fort Texas.
Volunteers
M
AY 11, 1846
J
efferson Davis was chronically restless. As the freshman congressman from Mississippi, he had such great legislatorial potential that former U.S. president John Quincy Adams had predicted “he will make his mark, mind me,” after Davis gave an eloquent floor speech on the annexation of Oregon early in his term. Adams’s praise was the sort of career-making benediction that would inspire most young politicians to pursue their calling with greater diligence. But by May 1846, after Davis had spent just six months in office, Congress was beginning to bore the thirty-seven-year-old. For inspiration, he was setting his sights on a new ambition: war.
Not only was Davis prepared to vote in favor of a resolution that would send American troops into Mexico (and perhaps into Oregon to fight the British after the Mexicans had been dealt with), but Davis personally lusted to lead them into battle. Given his status and West Point education, the job was almost his for the taking. There was, however, a formidable obstacle between Davis and his first taste of combat: a rather determined woman by the name of Varina Davis — his young and sharp-tongued wife.
Long before entering Congress, and even before becoming a successful plantation owner, Davis had been an officer in the U.S. Army. The work had been challenging and the hardships many, but he had done well during his six years in uniform. He had resigned his commission in haste, in order to marry and settle down with the love of his life. In the eleven years of struggle and mourning since, he had come to regret that decision. Now, as a formal request from President James K. Polk for fifty thousand troops, ten million dollars in military appropriations, and a formal declaration of war with Mexico reached Congress, Davis saw his chance. He had long backed Polk’s pro-southern, pro-expansion, pro-slavery policies. When the issue was put to a vote, Davis was one of the 174 congressmen voting in favor. Only 14 voted against it (most notably the Monroe Doctrine author John Quincy Adams), while 20 members of Congress abstained.
Those numbers were misleading. The nation and the Congress were bitterly divided on the war. Leading members of Polk’s Democratic Party, such as John C. Calhoun, Thomas Hart Benton, and even Secretary of War William L. Marcy, counseled the president against the conflict. They argued that America was overextended militarily. Should Britain choose to commence hostilities in Oregon, the United States would be forced to wage war on two fronts — a disastrous policy, given the puny size of its army and the logistical impossibility of supplying forces separated by thousands of miles and a rugged, roadless continent.
But Polk — whom Varina Davis dismissed as “an insignificant looking little man” — saw the war as a means of unifying the country behind his policies. Polk cleverly bundled his war declaration with an appropriation request to provide funds for Taylor’s troops, already engaging the Mexican forces in Texas. At a time when Americans were cheering the victories of Taylor’s army, even as many of those same citizens were opposed to further hostilities, Polk’s careful wording transformed the measure into a referendum on patriotism. Thus, even antiwar northern Whigs ended up voting in favor of a conflict they did not want.
No matter where they stood, the Washington politicians risked little but their careers with a yes or no vote. Davis was the rare legislator willing to back up his stance by marching off to the front lines. His years at West Point had been the making of him, not just as a man but also as an American. “Those who have received their education at West Point, taken as a body, are more free from purely sectional prejudices, and more national in their feelings than the same number of persons to be found elsewhere in the country,” he later wrote. The irony in this statement would become apparent only years later.
Davis’s straight-backed posture was that of a man who had once been an officer of some distinction, but the truth was that his military service was bereft of glory. He was a lively man whose ego sometimes got the best of him, a character trait that resulted in his (unsuccessful) court-martial for insubordination in 1835 and hastened the end of his army career. For a man accustomed to success in all aspects of life, his lack of military commendation rankled. He ached to march into battle and make a name for himself. If nothing else, he would also advance his political fortunes, for the people of Mississippi were even more gung ho about the war than he was.
Varina adamantly opposed the idea of her husband’s running off to play soldier. After all, he was finally getting established in Congress after the middling success of his army days and the equally mediocre years he had spent as a plantation owner, which were lived largely in the shadow of his older and more successful brother Joseph. Politics, not war, seemed to be Davis’s calling. Indeed, with his strong jaw, piercing eyes, and powerful oratorical style, he seemed to have been born for the profession. Making the matter even more complicated was the fact that Varina, a sensuous beauty who had just celebrated her twentieth birthday, adored Washington, D.C. Though the nation’s capital was still a city in name only, with few monuments or majestic buildings to mark it as much more than a series of connected villages (the Capitol still lacked its rotunda, the Mall was partially swampland, and fund-raising efforts for a towering obelisk monument that would honor George Washington had churned sluggishly along for decades, with no end in sight), she was much taken with its social scene. To see her husband at the center of it all, meeting occasionally with the president and helping to plan a grand new museum with money bequeathed by the Englishman James Smithson, was to watch history being made. To leave it all and return to their bottomland plantation as Davis galloped off to war, perhaps never to return, made little sense to Varina.
Yet if ever there was a war that Jefferson Davis had been born to fight, the conflict in Mexico was it. After all, Davis was the namesake of America’s third president, the man who had pushed to expand the country. As an adolescent, Davis had spent a week at the home of Andrew Jackson, another strong advocate of American expansion. And after graduating from West Point in 1828, Davis had served nearly his entire six-year military career on the frontier, extending America’s borders westward. He had built forts in the Wisconsin wilderness, had fought briefly in the Black Hawk War of 1832, and had been selected to become one of America’s first cavalry officers when the First Dragoons were formed the following year, with the intention that they would protect settlers from Indian attack.
Davis was not insensitive to his wife’s concerns — at least to those more profound than the mere loss of a social life. Varina, after all, was not the first woman who had disrupted Davis’s military ambition.
Davis met Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of none other than General Zachary Taylor, shortly after completing his checkered career at West Point, where he was almost expelled three times for alcohol-related incidents and ultimately graduated with a poor class standing. After learning basic infantry skills at the Jefferson Barracks, he was posted to the wilds of what would later be known as Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, and Iowa. Taylor was Davis’s commanding officer at Fort Crawford, in the heart of the Wisconsin Territory, for a year, beginning in the spring of 1832. It was there that Davis met the then colonel’s eighteen-year-old daughter. Slender and witty, Knox, as she was known, was a pretty, petite woman with hazel eyes and long brown hair. She was known to be a splendid dancer. Davis fell for her gradually, but soon they were in love. When he asked Taylor for his daughter’s hand, however, the gruff senior officer refused. Taylor had often lamented the vagaries of military life, with its hard travel, dangerous duty, and months and years of enforced separation. Appalled by the fact that he barely knew his children, Taylor was firmly opposed to Knox’s marrying an officer. A schism developed between the two men. Taylor and Davis maintained their professional relationship, but the smitten young lieutenant was forbidden to court the colonel’s daughter.
The young lovers saw each other on the sly for the next three years. The charade might have gone on much longer had Davis not been brought before the court-martial for “conduct subversive of a good order and military discipline” on February 12, 1835. The trial was held at Fort Gibson, an outpost on the Arkansas River. Davis’s crime was that he had refused to rise for reveille on a cold and rainy Christmas Eve, 1834, even though he was wide awake and already dressed in full uniform. His commanding officer then placed him under arrest because he found Davis to be contemptuous and disrespectful when confronted about his actions.
Davis acted as his own defense attorney and won. Shortly afterward he requested leave, not intending to return. On June 17, 1835, Davis married Knox at her aunt’s home in Louisville. He wore a waistcoat and a stovepipe hat; she wore a dark dress and bonnet. Neither of her parents attended. That evening, the newlyweds boarded a paddle wheeler bound for Vicksburg.
On June 30, 1835, Davis formally resigned his commission. He and his new bride returned to the Mississippi Delta, the region in which he had grown up. His older brother Joseph, a prominent local landowner, lent Davis the money and the land to plant crops on property right next to his own plantation, Hurricane. The acreage was fertile bottomland, located on a curve in the Mississippi known, appropriately, as Davis Bend. The land still needed to be cleared of briars and trees, and Jefferson and Knox would have to build a home, but it was a fine start to a marriage delayed too long by the exigencies of the service. Their future seemed limitless.
Three months later, Knox was dead.
The summer heat and humidity of the Mississippi Delta was a haven for mosquitoes and tropical diseases. Davis and Knox were both struck down by malaria shortly after their arrival and took straight to bed. One day, in a state of delirium, Davis awoke to hear Knox in her room, singing a popular song known as “Fairy Bells.” He rose from bed and staggered to her. She died that day, with her heartbroken young husband at her bedside. Sarah Knox Taylor Davis was just twenty-one.
Davis was soon drowning in grief. He threw himself into clearing land for planting and read great works of philosophy. As a young man he had been anything but sober, a fun-loving partygoer with a rounded face and warm, bright eyes, a passion for life, and a habit of scoffing at authority. But after Knox’s death he slowly took on a severe look. He never totally gave up drinking or smoking — indeed, Davis almost died on a trip to Washington, D.C., in 1838, after falling face-first into a creek and striking his head on a rock during a drunken late night stroll — but in time his face assumed a gaunt, haunted appearance that would make him look malarial even when he was quite well.
In the midst of his loss, Davis thought he might find solace in the rigors of military life. The purpose of that 1838 visit to Washington was to apply for a new commission. There was talk that Congress might fund three new regiments, and he hoped to reenter the military as a member of one of them. However, just one new regiment was added to the army, and Davis did not receive an appointment. He returned home to Brierfield, his plantation, to continue life as a farmer. Soon after, Davis focused his attention on politics. His political inspiration was Thomas Jefferson, as his father’s had been. He strongly believed in states’ rights and in reducing the size of the federal government, just as Jefferson had. As a slave owner and as a man who had openly disdained his Yankee counterparts during his time at West Point (“you cannot know how pitiful they generally are,” he had written to Joseph), Davis was troubled by the growing antislavery movement in the northern states. He became active in Mississippi politics, learning firsthand the exhaustion of campaigning and the elation of a powerfully delivered stump speech. He ran for Congress in 1843 and lost handily. Two years later, having become deeply entrenched within the state Democratic Party’s hierarchy, he was elected easily. In between the initial loss and the subsequent victory, he met and married Varina Howell, younger than Davis by two decades. His tone in their letters was occasionally paternal, but on the whole, theirs was a loving and equitable marriage. Varina was jealous of the great demands that politics put on her “Jeffy” but was nevertheless thrilled with the rewards. Having a husband in the U.S. Congress was something she had never anticipated but grew to enjoy a great deal.
War with Mexico had the potential to change all that.
Davis had learned the importance of paying attention to his constituents. So when the Mississippi newspapers ran headlines screaming “To Arms To Arms” and some seventeen thousand men raced to Vicksburg to volunteer for military duty in Taylor’s army, Davis paid attention. Even before that, his desire to see battle had been getting the best of him. In a letter written on May 12, a day before Congress took a formal vote on the war, Davis confided to a friend that if the people of Mississippi asked him to go to war, he would do so. “If they wish it, I will join them as soon as possible, wherever they may be.”
If there were any doubts in Davis’s mind about the positive effects it might have on his career, a May 21 rally in New York City confirmed the war’s phenomenal popularity: fifty thousand people gathered in front of city hall to show their support for the conflict in Mexico. In Philadelphia, the
North American
wrote, “Upon the duties which the present crisis invoked, our country has but one heart.”
Davis and Varina fought bitterly when she learned of his intentions. She pleaded with him not to go, and Davis ultimately bent to her will. Concerned for his wife’s “weaknesses which spring from a sensitive and generous temper,” Davis promised Varina that he would not accept a commission. But back home in Mississippi, volunteer regiments were being formed. Two of those came from Warren County, in which Vicksburg and Davis Bend were both nestled. There was a growing public outcry that Davis command a Mississippi regiment. Davis kept it a secret from Varina, but in his heart he had already broken his promise: he had every intention of accepting a command, if offered, to lead the men of Mississippi into battle. He would go to Mexico.