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00:30When Mississippi seceded in January of 1861,
00:36Jefferson Davis left Washington, D.C. to resume his role as a Southern planter.
00:41History, though, would have a very different destiny for Davis,
00:44and within two months of his return home, he stood on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol
00:49and delivered his inaugural address as President of the Confederate States of America.
00:55For four years, he was the Chief Executive and Commander-in-Chief,
00:59trying desperately to preserve the Constitution in the midst of invasion.
01:05By late 1864, as the war is entering its final phase,
01:10arguably the greatest accomplishment of the Davis administration
01:14is simply the fact that the Confederacy was still alive in 1864.
01:19On paper, it shouldn't have been.
01:28The war between the states quickly became one of attrition,
01:38and the North's vastly greater resources finally overpowered the South.
01:42As Richmond fell and Confederate armies surrendered in the field,
01:47Davis conducted his government from horseback
01:49and even signed documents from the side of the road.
01:52But the Confederate States of America ended exactly 51 months after it began,
01:58when President Jefferson Davis was captured in the woods of South Georgia by Union troops.
02:03After Davis' capture in Irwinville, he was brought to Macon, Georgia,
02:23where a crowd that included future President Woodrow Wilson filled the streets.
02:27From there, Davis was reunited with his family, and they headed north by ship.
02:34He was held on the Clyde for a couple of days,
02:39while the U.S. government tried to figure out what to do with this man,
02:45whom they saw as the arch-villain,
02:47the man in persona who had caused this whole Civil War,
02:51or if he hadn't caused it, had not ended it more quickly.
02:56The Union military, under Secretary of War Edwin Stanton,
03:01took control of Jefferson Davis, declaring him a prisoner of state.
03:04Though privately, the United States government was completely unsure
03:08of what exactly to do with Davis.
03:10So, Stanton appointed Brigadier General Nelson Miles
03:14to handle the immediate task of imprisoning Jefferson Davis at Fortress Monroe.
03:20He was the most important prisoner ever held by the United States government.
03:25Miles, always looking to extend his authority a little bit more,
03:30requested perhaps the permission to put the prisoner in shackles, if it were necessary.
03:38On May 22nd, 1865, Davis was transferred from the Clyde and officially imprisoned at Fortress Monroe.
03:47It was also decided that this prisoner was of such importance that the guard level would be extraordinary.
03:54There would be a light burning constantly in his cell.
03:59There would be a sentinel who would be in his cell, standing in the cell.
04:04Outside the cell would be two more sentinels who were armed,
04:09plus an officer, who would observe Davis and his every movement, every 15 minutes.
04:16Davis had no privacy whatsoever.
04:18Miles, for no real apparent reason, one can only say to humiliate Davis,
04:24decided a couple of days after Davis is in Fort Monroe to put manacles on his feet.
04:46Davis strongly protested his shackling, just as he had the chaining of Blackhawks some 30 years before.
04:53From the start, General Miles and Jefferson Davis would be at great odds,
04:58the young general relentlessly proving his command,
05:01and Davis determined to preserve his dignity.
05:05Word of that got out very quickly.
05:08We don't really know how, but it went through some sort of a grapevine.
05:12And three days later, there was an article in the Philadelphia paper saying that Davis had been manacled.
05:18Two days later, it had reached the New York papers.
05:21And two days later, New York northern leaders were wiring the War Department saying,
05:29did you really manacle Jefferson Davis?
05:32Was it necessary to do so?
05:34Jefferson Davis, in part, became sort of a football with the internecine warfare within the Republican Party,
05:41growing out of the Republican break with President Andrew Johnson.
05:46Whatever President Johnson did, one eye was cast on Jefferson Davis.
05:51Now, within Johnson's own cabinet, there was a wide divergence of opinion about what to do.
05:55There were those who thought Davis shouldn't even be tried.
05:57There were those who thought Davis should be tried before a military tribunal.
06:00So there was a wide difference of opinion on what to do with Davis.
06:03And amongst the Congressional Republicans, who tended to be more sectionally radical,
06:08more involved with sectional issues than President Johnson was,
06:12people thought Davis ranged from everywhere he should be shot and never let out of jail.
06:16But President Andrew Johnson felt tremendous political pressure to move toward reunification and begin reconstructing the South.
06:25So in May of 1866, he proclaimed amnesty for all ex-Confederates except those who held highest rank,
06:31a group that included his old political enemy, Jefferson Davis.
06:36President Johnson, though, did welcome back Davis's Vice President, Alexander Stevens,
06:41and some Confederate cabinet members who all personally sought individual pardons.
06:46It would have been unthinkable for Jefferson Davis to ask for pardon,
06:50which was the first step to securing, once again, the full rights of citizenship,
06:55rights to vote, to hold office, and so on.
06:57The Southern states were not wrong in seceding.
06:59They were standing up for their rights in a lawful and constitutional way.
07:03Therefore, how can he apply for pardon for something that did not require pardon?
07:22So Jefferson Davis faced the charge of treason,
07:26under the Constitution, an act punishable by death.
07:31They were very concerned about bringing Davis to trial.
07:38He would be tried in Richmond, Virginia, because the Constitution says if you commit treason,
07:43you have to be tried where the treason is committed.
07:45Richmond was where he was.
07:46The federal government worried that if it brought Davis to trial in Richmond, it might lose.
07:51All it would take would be one juror who might be a Confederate sympathizer,
07:56who might be pressured or intimidated by Davis sympathizers,
08:00and if the whole case would be lost, and then that not only would lose with Davis,
08:06but for the federal government to lose a case about secession was treason
08:11was not something they wanted to contemplate,
08:14because that would break down the whole legal edifice about secession.
08:19Some Republicans believed that he should never have been charged with treason anyway,
08:23that he simply was following the dictates of his conscience,
08:27and some of them, in fact, believed that secession was authorized by the Constitution.
08:31So I saw the trial as a no-win situation, really.
08:34I mean, what would be gained by putting Davis on trial or even executing him?
08:38It would just make him a martyr, more of a martyr to the South,
08:41and the point was to try to get the Southerners back on board, not to alienate them even further.
08:46It just became such a hot political topic that I think they were more than willing to find a nice legalism
08:53to let him go and hopefully be seen no more.
08:57Unfortunately for the federal government, the gears of the legal system began grinding,
09:03and Federal Judge John Underwood was given the Jefferson Davis case.
09:07The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Solomon B. Chase was very concerned, though.
09:13They realized that a Davis victory in court would send the deeply wounded country back into unrest.
09:20Justice Chase knew that many Americans, both Northern and Southern, believed in the right of secession.
09:27He was never comfortable with the idea that the Civil War was just.
09:35He felt that in a court of law, a very capable attorney could win victory for Davis,
09:46which would be defeat for the Union. They would then be the aggressors.
09:51In trying to bring about a peaceful and uneventful reconciliation,
09:56the worst thing is to have to try the leaders of the now defeated rebellion on treason charges,
10:02and if they're convicted, to have to execute them, creating martyrs of them.
10:06As a result, it takes a while for Washington to decide what to do with Jefferson Davis,
10:11what charges to try him on, and then to deal with the issue of whether or not to try him, in fact.
10:17Refusing to allow Jefferson Davis to stand trial.
10:21Having had this man locked up for two years,
10:25to have the Pope at that time send to Jefferson Davis a crown of thorns
10:30for fearing that the arrest of Jefferson Davis was as unjust as the crucifixion of Christ.
10:37He demanded, put me on trial.
10:40Prove in a court of law that I have committed treason by declaring Southern independence.
10:47And, of course, Salmon B. Chase would not allow him to appear in court.
10:51He was petrified that Davis would win in court what he lost on the battlefield.
10:57Think about how that would have changed everything.
11:05Across the country and all over the world,
11:08the story of Davis' imprisonment was spread by the determined pen of his wife, Verena.
11:13By focusing on the deterioration of her husband's health,
11:17Verena marshaled what started as sympathy for his shackling into outcry for his release.
11:23Verena Davis is a politician.
11:26She knows how to use public relations.
11:30She outmaneuvers General Nelson Miles, the commandant.
11:35Miles knows what she's doing.
11:38He writes to Washington D.C. and says,
11:41Can't we get reporters in here?
11:43Can't we get people in here to tell us what's actually happening in Fort Monroe?
11:49They'd see that he's being treated fairly, that he's being treated well in their terms.
11:55No.
11:56The War Department said no.
11:57Nobody can go in.
11:58So there's no objective view of what was happening to Davis in prison.
12:04There was his wife's hysteria.
12:07And there was a book called The Prison Life of Jefferson Davis.
12:11The book was the brainchild of two men.
12:14Journalist Charles G. Halpine and Davis' physician at Fortress Monroe, Dr. John J. Craven.
12:20Both men were Democrats and ardent supporters of states' rights.
12:24And they also shared a concern that the Republican Party was concentrating too much power in the federal government.
12:30They saw an opportunity in Jefferson Davis' prison plight to garner sympathy and support for the Democrats in the 1866 election.
12:38Halpine didn't care a whit about Jefferson Davis.
12:42Jefferson Davis was just a convenience to use in describing how unfair, how barbaric the treatment of people could be by Republicans once they got in power.
12:55The prison life of Jefferson Davis made him the man he always wanted to be.
13:02The loving, gentle, kind soul.
13:05The man who had no hard feelings toward anyone.
13:10There were a lot of inaccuracies.
13:12So many inaccuracies that Jefferson, through 180 marks in his book, Marginalia, said this is fiction distorting fact.
13:22This isn't true.
13:23But the book had changed him.
13:25Now Southerners saw that their leader was suffering for their supposed sins.
13:32And that book then becomes an important part of who Davis is.
13:37Davis is the scapegoat of the South.
13:41He's the martyr to the cause.
13:43And consequently, Davis found himself cherished and celebrated by his people the way he had never felt them before the war.
13:54On May 11, 1867, almost two years to the day after his capture, Jefferson Davis left Fortress Monroe for Richmond, Virginia.
14:08He was held under guard at the Spotswood Hotel, the same hotel where he stayed in 1861 after arriving as Confederate president.
14:17He goes into prison somewhat in very bad odor with the Confederate people.
14:23Many, you know, it's easy to blame the president for losing.
14:27You have to blame somebody.
14:29You can't blame the heroes in gray.
14:32You can't blame all the generals, but you can blame the president.
14:39So he inherited, in a sense, all the sins of the Confederacy and bore them in prison.
14:49And if you want to give your religious bent to it, it's almost as though that was his cross.
14:59And he bore everything for the Confederate people.
15:02And when he came out, he was a hero.
15:05And remember, it was a surprise to him when he took that trip to Richmond up the river.
15:11He couldn't understand why all these people were standing on the riverside cheering him.
15:17The last thing he anticipated.
15:19He wasn't even sure people would speak to him, you know.
15:22On May 13, 1867, Jefferson Davis arrived in federal court in Richmond, Virginia.
15:29Judge Underwood set the bail for Jefferson Davis at $100,000.
15:34Bond, though, was immediately posted by Northerners.
15:38Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and abolitionist Garrett Smith.
15:45And finally, when it became politically possible,
15:48Johnson had nothing to lose.
15:51Grant was becoming president.
15:53People were losing interest in Jefferson Davis by 1869.
15:56And so the charges are quashed, not only against Davis,
15:59but against all remaining Confederates still facing Tregian charges.
16:03And Davis goes a free man.
16:13When Davis was released from prison,
16:16it was clear that the man who had started and led a country now had none to claim.
16:22He, Verena, and the children first moved to Canada,
16:25then to England in attempts to find a home and make a living.
16:29After trips back to New Orleans and Woodville, Mississippi in 1868,
16:33Davis reunited in Vicksburg with Brother Joseph.
16:37And for the first time since the last year of the war,
16:40he returned to Virginia and visited his greatest general, Robert E. Lee.
16:45In all of his traveling over the next two decades,
16:49Jefferson Davis would never see his beloved city of Washington, D.C. again.
16:54He would never see the completed capital expansion he fought so hard to guide.
16:58He would never see the Smithsonian,
17:01the bastion of knowledge he had hoped would unite the country.
17:05And his voice, the voice of the antebellum South,
17:08would never be heard in the Senate chamber again.
17:11Jefferson Davis comes out of that a much cherished figure,
17:23and a representation of the Southern position,
17:28the right of the Southern position in seceding.
17:33And in a way, this will burden him for life,
17:36because Davis is caught in his own myth.
17:39He cannot easily put that aside
17:43and perhaps go into a commercial endeavor that would make him a lot of money.
17:48He's no longer the leader of the South,
17:52the person who is going to take the South into this new position.
17:58He is the memory of the South,
18:00the collective memory of the cost of the Civil War on all Southern people.
18:06Other Confederates, though, would reintegrate into the United States,
18:09like Davis's former Vice President Alexander Stevens,
18:13who would go on and govern Georgia,
18:15and also become a member of the United States Congress.
18:18Robert E. Lee would head a prominent university,
18:21cementing an already secure reputation.
18:24But for Jefferson Davis,
18:26the war between the states linked him forever to a past that had no practical future.
18:31He had no country, no land, no home.
18:34Yet he did have the responsibility to reconstruct a life
18:38for his wife, Verena, and their four children.
18:42Davis really lost everything in the war.
18:44His plantation had been abandoned and then seized by the Union Army,
18:48which continued to occupy it and lease it.
18:51He had no means of livelihood.
18:53He had no savings account that he could draw on.
18:56What money he had had been Confederate money, which, of course, was worthless.
19:00He had to find a job to support himself and his family,
19:03relatively young family, all of whom needed to be educated, clothed, and fed.
19:07His whole life after the war was one long search for employment.
19:11But he was never wealthy after the war.
19:14Never. Just kind of got by.
19:17Taking his cue from successful Confederates abroad,
19:20such as Judah Benjamin, who prospered as Queen's Council in England,
19:24Davis and family sailed for Europe.
19:27But they had a terrible time keeping up socially when they were in England.
19:32They simply didn't have the money to buy the dresses and entertain and live in the nice places
19:37where they could mix as equals with the nobility of England or even the upper classes.
19:43So it was good and bad. Bittersweet experience, I would say, for the most part.
19:48In 1869, Jefferson Davis returned to the United States alone.
19:53Verena and the children remained in Europe.
19:57This began one of several extended separations that the couple imposed on their marriage.
20:02And he took a job as president of a company called the Carolina Life Insurance Company.
20:07What was called the Carolina Life Insurance Company, its headquarters were in Memphis.
20:11And he ran this company from 1869 to 1873.
20:15It was a regular insurance company.
20:17They had agents and such.
20:18Many of the agents were former Confederate soldiers.
20:20He got many Confederate soldiers to sign on to be agents.
20:23Of course, he was the Confederate president, commander-in-chief.
20:27And Davis worked hard at this.
20:29He had no experience in business, of course.
20:31And when he moved to Memphis, his wife Verena was back in England.
20:35He wrote to her and he told her, he says, I know you don't look forward to Memphis.
20:37And he says, you know, but times have changed.
20:40I don't have anything.
20:43It's not being a planter.
20:45It's not even being the leader of a defeated people.
20:48But it's something that I must do.
20:50In 1870, Jefferson Davis went to England to bring Verena and his family back to Memphis.
20:57Husband and wife, once again, took comfort in the other.
21:02As they were readying to sail, though, they received the news of Brother Joseph Davis's death.
21:09My heart refused to surrender hope.
21:12And I crossed the Atlantic, hopeful of being able again to embrace my mentor and benefactor.
21:19How bitter are the waters in which I am overwhelmed.
21:23Jefferson Davis, October 24th, 1870.
21:32In 1872, tragedy struck the Davises yet again.
21:38Their ten-year-old son, William, died in Memphis of diphtheria.
21:43This was the third son Jefferson Davis had buried.
21:48I thought of the bright boy I had at home, the hope and pride of my house.
21:54I have had more than the ordinary allotment of disappointment and sorrow.
22:00May God spare you all such sorrow as ours.
22:04Jefferson Davis, October 20th, 1872.
22:17Davis would have little time to grieve, though, because an economic downturn in the spring of 1873 jeopardized his new career.
22:26It failed in the panic of 1873.
22:29The panic, of course, is the word used in the 19th century for depression.
22:32There was a serious economic downturn.
22:34Many businesses went under in 1873.
22:36The Carolina Life Insurance Company went under in 1873.
22:39Davis lost his job, which was a well-paying job at that time.
22:43Davis also lost his investment in the company.
22:46The circumstances surrounding Jefferson Davis' departure from the Carolina Life Insurance Company made the transition even worse.
22:54The company wanted to restructure, but at the expense of all the current policyholders, Davis strongly objected and resigned out of principle, forfeiting any hope of ever seeing a dime from his tenure.
23:07I found everything I had destroyed or scattered.
23:12It was new to be in debt and new to be without resources.
23:17The tide of my fortune is at its lowest ebb.
23:20I am too sad, too deep in anguish.
23:25Jefferson Davis, August 1873.
23:29And he kind of bounces around.
23:31He can't find anything that provides him with enough money and also provides him with the dignity that he wants.
23:42You have to remember, in a Southern leadership eye, to go into capitalism or to go into banking or industrialism is an anathema.
23:52That's what they had criticized about the North.
23:55And this man, who is so proud and who was such a spokesman for the Southern view, was not ready to open a factory someplace and head that factory.
24:09In the 1870s, Jefferson Davis was approached on several occasions to seek public office in the South.
24:16In 1874, he was offered the United States Senate seat from the state of Mississippi.
24:22But Davis declined this and every other offer related to public service.
24:28All that he'd seen and all that he had suffered during the war had pretty much jaundiced him on American politics in general.
24:37He had seen how politics and how politicians had failed their country, the old Union.
24:44He was not alone in this.
24:45There are a number of others, including some other prominent Confederates, who stayed out of politics after the war because they had seen how badly it had gone wrong.
24:55I am living quietly and have no desire to return to the vulgar scramble of the present state of politics.
25:05Public life never had any other charm for me than the hope it offered of being useful.
25:11How futile that hope would be to me now.
25:14I do not desire nor intend to go to Washington.
25:19May God open the eyes of the people so that they may, before it's too late, preserve the liberty and local self-government their fathers of the revolution secured and left as a legacy to their posterity.
25:33Jefferson Davis stayed totally out of politics because I think he believed and rightfully, I mean he was correct in this, that he was looked upon as so controversial a person outside of the South.
25:47He was such a flashpoint that for him to get involved in any political activity overtly, that it would condemn automatically anything he wanted to do, any cause he was connected with, any party he was connected with, any office he was connected with.
26:02If he had let it be known to the people of Mississippi, he could have been elected senator or congressman or governor at any point after the end of Reconstruction.
26:11But he stayed totally out of that, and I think he was very wise to do it.
26:15By 1877, Jefferson Davis had crossed the Atlantic Ocean no fewer than eight times since his release from prison.
26:23He and his family had moved from Virginia to Canada to Europe to the States and back again.
26:28He started the new year of 1877 alone in New Orleans, a rapidly aging man, unsure of what to do.
26:37Dearest Verena, this evening of our anniversary, when families want to be united, ours is scattered far and wide.
26:46It is sad to me to realize an ocean rolls between me and my dear Verena.
26:52I am so weary of wandering.
26:56Jefferson Davis, January 1877.
27:00When Jefferson Davis, in the mid-70s, after the demise of the Carolina Life Insurance Company, is looking for a possible way to make a living to support his family, he thinks about Briarfield.
27:13He, of course, knew that Briarfield had been sold to some ex-slaves of Joseph E. Davis', and that they were trying to make a living from it.
27:21And, of course, they were supposed to pay for these plantations, and Davis would have supposedly reaped some financial benefit.
27:29But they were never able to really make a go of it on the plantations.
27:34And he often said that he could really sympathize with other Confederates who had lost everything.
27:41And he said that he, too, had lost everything and was willing to lose everything except for his wife and children for the cause.
27:49For the better part of the 1870s, Jefferson Davis battled to regain control of his plantation, Briarfield.
28:11In 1878, he received an early 70th birthday present by securing ownership of the land.
28:18Davis placed all hope in repeating his pre-war financial success at the only occupation other than politics in which he excelled, a planter.
28:28But Davis' life had one prevailing pattern.
28:31The highest highs were always cut by the lowest of lows.
28:37And five months after the victory of Briarfield, Jefferson Davis, Jr.,
28:43The last of his father's four sons died in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis, Tennessee.
28:51The last of my four sons has left me.
28:55I am crushed under such heavy and repeated blows.
29:00I presume not God to scorn, but the many and humble prayers offered before my boy was taken from me are hushed in the despair of bereavement.
29:14Jefferson Davis, September 1878.
29:23It's a family full of tragedies, and when I realized this I've never been able really to tackle that, I must admit.
29:39How do you get around those personal tragedies, plus the professional tragedy of the war and what that costs the South?
29:49And maybe the only way to deal with it is to say, if I had to do it all over again, I would live my life just as I did.
29:58A long-time family friend, Sarah Dorsey, invited the Davis family to live on her Mississippi Gulf Coast estate called Beauvoir.
30:11For Jefferson Davis, it would provide the peace and security he so desperately needed to reflect and write his memoir.
30:19By 1877, Davis is a man who is approaching 70 years old.
30:28It's not an age that most people can go out and start anew on something that's quite different in their lives.
30:36And also at that time, he decided that if he ever wanted to make his great statement about the war and the nobility of the Confederate cause, now is the time to do it.
30:48His last hope was writing his memoir.
30:50He had seen so many others write memoirs that appeared to be profitable.
30:54His old nemesis, Joseph E. Johnston, published a memoir.
30:57His other old nemesis, Beauregard, published a memoir.
31:01And so Davis thought perhaps he could provide for his family by telling his story.
31:08While trying to write his grand recollection of the Confederacy at Beauvoir, Davis still had to deal with his plantation, Briarfield.
31:17But the plantation that Davis remembered from before the war was definitely not the Briarfield he tried to farm in the 1880s.
31:24Jefferson Davis, in 1881, was passed 70 years old.
31:28He lived at Beauvoir on the Mississippi coast, which was a good little trip up to Mississippi.
31:33You could go by train in New Orleans and take the steamboat from New Orleans up there, but it was a good trip.
31:38His wife wanted no part of living at Briarfield.
31:41She didn't like it before the war and after the war.
31:43It was now desolate and dingy, not an agricultural show place.
31:47Plus the landing, you had to go five or six miles through swampy territory to get there, and she had no interest at all in being there.
31:55He envisioned the old slaves at Briarfield working for him again, but they didn't.
32:01Then there was the river.
32:04Briarfield was subject to floods.
32:06In the 80s, floods came in on several occasions and ruined his crop.
32:10So he never succeeded as a planter.
32:13And the fortunate thing is he managed to hang on.
32:16And his family had the land when he died.
32:32Back at Beauvoir, Mrs. Dorsey developed cancer and died very quickly.
32:37Any rift that existed between Sarah and Verena, though, disappeared because Verena took care of Sarah up until her death.
32:44But Mrs. Dorsey, in her will of 1879, bequeathed Beauvoir to Davis.
32:58And so he inherited the whole thing.
32:59Not only did she leave him Beauvoir, she left him everything she owned.
33:02Caused a great funeral in her family.
33:04They sued to break the will.
33:05That suit failed.
33:07And so Davis did own Beauvoir then.
33:10And he lived in Beauvoir.
33:11That was his home until the end of his life in 1889.
33:14Now while he was there, he went there to write his memoir.
33:17And he worked on that.
33:18And he worked on that with Walthall.
33:20And in 1881, it finally came out titled Rise and Follow the Confederate Government.
33:26Two quite lengthy tomes.
33:28There's a real industry after the war on war memoirs.
33:31They started almost immediately.
33:33And some of them were very good and some of them were not very good.
33:37Joseph E. Johnston was one of the first of the major Confederate leaders to write his narrative of the war.
33:43Robert E. Lee had planned to, but of course died in 1870 and never did write his own accounts,
33:48which would have been quite wonderful, I'm sure.
33:50U.S. Grant wrote his memoirs, which were fabulously successful.
33:56Not only because Grant was Grant, but because he also just turned out to be a born writer.
34:01The same terse and to-the-point orders that he had written during the war translated very well into a longer length study.
34:12And people bought them like hotcakes.
34:14And Davis, of course, observed this along with everyone else and thought,
34:17aha, here's a way to make some money because Grant's memoirs had been so successful.
34:21So he decided after long delay, people had urged him to write after the war.
34:26Almost immediately after he got out of prison, people urged him to write his history of the war.
34:30But what he ended up writing was a rather dry constitutional treatise.
34:38He did not really reveal much in the way of his own personal feelings, his own personal actions, his motivations, his goals.
34:47It simply was a very dry political monograph that did not prove terribly successful.
34:55They were well received by Southerners.
34:57I mean, reviews of it by Southerners were quite positive.
35:01Many Northern reviews looked upon it as, you know, as almost historical documents.
35:10This talks about something that's long gone and Davis' view of the Constitution was wrong to begin with and the Confederates weren't noble.
35:17I mean, there was a sectional response to it in that sense.
35:20And there's a hundred pages or so in there on the whole issue of secession,
35:25which I look at it as what would have been his legal defense had he ever gone to trial to defend himself against treason,
35:34secession as treason.
35:35And so if you read that hundred pages or so, I think that essentially would have been his case.
35:39In addition to writing at Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis hosted visitors, both friends and political acquaintances,
35:46even international celebrities like Oscar Wilde, who met with the former president while on a speaking tour of the South.
35:54When Oscar Wilde arrived at Beauvoir, I'm sure Davis found him just totally unbelievable.
35:59Probably like, where did this person come from?
36:02I mean, so totally unlike most of the other visitors who came there.
36:06And I'm sure also that he was very polite and courteous to Wilde, no matter how wild and crazy Oscar Wilde became.
36:14I think Verena undoubtedly was fascinated.
36:16She loved literary people and was very keen to be in their company and hear what they had to say and exchange conversation with them.
36:24Davis was too, really, in England.
36:27They both had a lot of very cultivated friends who were on the literary side.
36:31The visit left a lasting impression on Wilde, who felt that the South's struggle in the war was similar to his native Ireland's fight for independence.
36:42When later interviewed, he said,
36:44Jefferson Davis was a man of the keenest intellect, with a personality as simple as it was strong,
36:50and enthusiasm as fervent as it was faultless.
36:55He's popular in ways with the Southern people that he never was during the war or before it.
37:00He's constantly in demand, after his release from incarceration, for public speeches, to attend veterans' events.
37:07He's offered the presidencies of a host of different Southern companies to be a figurehead, of course,
37:12but also to be a badge of honor on the letterhead of those companies.
37:16He's asked to be involved in the lotteries.
37:18He's asked to lend the moral weight of his name to almost every charity going on in the South from the 1860s through the 1880s.
37:29And where he can, he'll participate. Where he can, he will endorse all the good works going on in the South,
37:36as it tries to rebuild itself, and as he tries to rebuild himself, because his martyr status doesn't end when he's released from prison.
37:43Davis, in his last years, will spend two decades trying unsuccessfully to rebuild himself financially,
37:50trying to make his plantation work, which he can't, trying to run an insurance company, which fails,
37:55trying to become involved in railroads and a host of other enterprises,
37:58finally writing his memoirs in the hopes of providing some kind of living for his family.
38:03All of these things fail, and all of his failures are rather public.
38:08Everyone knows that he's out there striving, trying to overcome what all the rest of them are trying to overcome
38:14as they rebuild their own lives and rebuild the South,
38:17with the result that Jefferson Davis will become a minor cultural god to Southerners,
38:22especially after Robert E. Lee, their greatest deity, dies in 1870.
38:28After the death of Lee, there will be no other Confederate who will have such a hold
38:32on the hearts of the people whom Davis once led, as Davis himself.
38:46In his later years, Jefferson Davis was seen more as an elder statesman
38:51and was asked to speak at various functions across the South.
38:55He delivered his last speech in Mississippi City in 1888 to a group of young men.
39:01Jefferson Davis was 80 years old and remarked that the reason for his attending was his hope for the country's youth.
39:08I feel no regret that I stand before you this afternoon, a man without a country.
39:21For my ambition lies buried in the grave of the Confederacy.
39:26The past is dead.
39:29Let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations.
39:35Before you lies the future, a future full of golden promise, a future of expanding national glory,
39:44before which all the world shall stand amazed.
39:49Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling,
39:56and to make your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished,
40:03a reunited country.
40:05He said these young people should be proud of their heritage, but he said they should not be entrapped by it.
40:22They should look to the future.
40:24They should be proud to be citizens of the United States.
40:26And he looked upon a bright and prosperous future of the United States.
40:30And these young people should participate fully, be proud of their Southern heritage, but not trapped by the past.
40:36So I think he did see that the future looked much brighter.
40:40And he wanted the Union to survive and to go forward and to flourish.
40:45So that's a very important one, the Mississippi City speech,
40:49where he urges everyone to work for a reunited country, not think of the past all the time.
40:55To remember the past, honor the people who died for their causes, but you had to go forward.
41:01Repeatedly in the 1870s and 80s, Jefferson Davis, when he spoke publicly at all,
41:07would speak of pride in the Confederate heritage and what Southern men and Southern women had done,
41:14but he would also call for reconciliation.
41:17And there are other evidences in Davis' behavior in those later years that suggest that he meant it.
41:22As in the case of his daughter, Winnie, who fell in love with a man who'd been a major in the Union Army,
41:29and the two became engaged.
41:31And Davis, though he would have preferred that his daughter fall in love with a former Confederate soldier,
41:36still did not withhold his permission from the marriage.
41:39The marriage never took place because the young man suffered severe financial reversal.
41:43But the fact that Davis would allow the daughter of the President of the Confederacy to marry a Yankee,
41:49suggests that when he spoke of reconciliation and reunification, he meant it.
41:54Despite age and brittle health, Davis visited Briarfield as often as possible.
42:00Every fall, without fail, he checked on crops and settled accounts.
42:05In November of 1889, he wrote his last words there in a letter to Joseph Davis' granddaughter.
42:12May all your paths be peaceful and pleasant, charged with the best fruit, the doing good to others.
42:20When he got to the landing on Davis Island, the captain wouldn't put him off.
42:24He said he was too ill. He took him on to Vicksburg, but Davis got better.
42:28And the steamboat captain, they brought him back down and put him off at the landing.
42:32He was at Briarfield. He became very ill again.
42:35He wrote a brief note to Verena that indicates the difficulty he was having
42:41because some of the words are jumbled and the language is not clear.
42:44They get him to the landing again. He gets on the steamboat.
42:47They also telegraphed Verena. She gets word that he's really ill.
42:52She boards the steamboat to go up to meet him.
42:55The two boats meet in the river, and they bring Davis to the shore in St. Francisville, Louisiana,
43:02which is just below the Mississippi Line.
43:04It's the first place town in Louisiana below the Mississippi Line.
43:10Doctors look at him there. They say he's sick.
43:13He's got serious bronchial troubles, which he's had since the beginning of time,
43:17and bad cold and all this kind of problem.
43:20They bring him to New Orleans, and in New Orleans he is taken to the home of a friend of his,
43:26and the newspapers have a daily watch on him, of course,
43:30and he's getting better and he's getting worse.
43:33Finally, he takes a turn for the worse, and all probability of pneumonia set in,
43:39and he died on December the 6th, 1889.
44:04After Davis's death in New Orleans, there, of course, is a tremendous outpouring,
44:08first in New Orleans itself, where Davis is given the largest funeral the city ever sees,
44:13but secondly, all across the South, especially in the press,
44:16as the newspapers pay homage to the dead leader of the Confederacy.
44:21Indeed, some of this is even seen in the North.
44:23Some of the conservative Democratic New York newspapers, for instance,
44:26actually publish a fair bit of praise of Davis the man,
44:30not for what he did leading the Confederacy,
44:32but of the manly virtues he had shown in the years after the war.
44:37Jefferson Davis's body lay in state in New Orleans Gallier Hall,
44:47where thousands paid their respects to their former president.
44:51He was temporarily laid to rest in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.
44:56In 1893, the family decided to move Davis's remains to Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery.
45:02En route, a funeral train stopped in the capitals of Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina,
45:08where the body once again lay in state.
45:11On May 31st, 1893, Verena, Margaret, and Winnie Davis,
45:16along with 75,000 Richmond citizens, finally lay Jefferson Davis to rest.
45:23And the Hollywood Cemetery offered to Mrs. Davis not only a space for Jefferson,
45:29but for her and for the family.
45:32And for a number of reasons, she chose to move his body to Richmond,
45:36rather than to leave it in Metairie or put it in Mississippi.
45:40And not only is Jefferson buried there, all his children are buried there,
45:43his wife is buried there.
45:44After Jefferson Davis died, his wife Verena moved to New York City and became a writer.
45:58She published her own two-volume memoir of Jefferson Davis in 1890.
46:03Winnie joined her in New York City the following year, but died at the age of only 34 in 1898.
46:10Verena lived until 1905, only survived by her daughter Margaret, who died in 1909.
46:17It's through Margaret Davis' marriage to Joel Addison Hayes and their four children
46:22that the Jefferson Davis lineage carries on strong today.
46:31In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that reinstated Jefferson Davis
46:37to full United States citizenship.
46:40Jefferson Davis never asked for his citizenship to be restored
46:43because he never believed he had lost it.
46:45He never applied for a pardon.
46:48He didn't want anyone to apply for a pardon in his name.
46:51I think he would have thought it was not necessary to reinstall it.
46:56He had taken his oath to the Confederate States, and that's where it was.
47:01In western Kentucky, on a rural stretch of road stands a 351-foot concrete obelisk,
47:12strikingly similar to the one in the nation's capital.
47:15The structure is a monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis,
47:19who, like George Washington, was his country's first leader.
47:22But unlike Washington, Davis was also his country's last.
47:27Over the years, Jefferson Davis has been marginalized and mostly misunderstood.
47:32The heroes of the war, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,
47:36Ulysses S. Grant, and William Tecumseh Sherman,
47:40have taken center stage alongside the great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln,
47:45while Jefferson Davis has been saddled with the lost cause and slavery.
47:50Well, I think, again, you can't escape the whole how Jackson and Lee are not scarred by the issue of slavery
47:59and how it just completely engulfs Jefferson Davis.
48:03And because today we find slavery so morally reprehensible,
48:09and I don't see Davis ever coming out from underneath of that rock.
48:13I mean, it's always going to be there.
48:16Jefferson Davis believed in and represented the Southern aristocracy that built an empire fueled by the work of slaves.
48:25What Jefferson Davis stood for, though, what his principles were based on,
48:30was the Framers' original Constitution and the rights of the individual states who entered the Union.
48:36What most people don't understand is that the government of the United States is formed by two sovereignties,
48:42state sovereignty and national sovereignty.
48:45In our own lifetime, the 21st century, there's very little of state sovereignty left.
48:50Indeed, it's hard almost to come up with an example of something that is not overseen by the national government.
48:59But in the mid-19th century, that wasn't the case.
49:11In the years following his death, Jefferson Davis was a hero to the Southern people.
49:16But unlike Robert E. Lee, time has challenged Davis' place in history.
49:22In the same state where his monument stands,
49:25the Davis statue in the Kentucky State Capitol Rotunda is under pressure for removal.
49:31The damage that is done when you start being selective about history
49:37is that you are amputating yourself from a significant aspect of your ancestry,
49:45and you're only choosing to tell the part of the story that you want told.
49:50And a historian is at his worst when he reads into the past the prejudices of the present.
49:59And that is not history.
50:01I'm not quite sure what it is.
50:03Maybe it's journalism, but it's not history.
50:05Because our job is to tell the story as completely and as accurately as we possibly can.
50:15If it offends some people or upsets them,
50:18makes them feel uncomfortable when they learn certain things,
50:22well, I'm sorry.
50:23That is a part of the story.
50:25And our job is to tell the story as completely as we possibly can.
50:30Jefferson Davis leaves the modern world with a simultaneously simple and complicated legacy.
50:37He stood for freedom and rights.
50:39But like his namesake, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote
50:42All Men Are Created Equal in the Declaration of Independence,
50:46those rights did not apply to everyone.
50:49Jefferson Davis was a man of unconquerable principles and devotion to his country.
50:56But most of all, Jefferson Davis was a loyal American.
51:01And he was an American president.
51:03Jefferson Davis' life spanned the 19th century.
51:06He was in public life for most of his life, had public trust, offices of public trust.
51:13What he did and thought had a lot to do with what this nation did in the years right before the Civil War.
51:20And I think his life as a person is almost as interesting,
51:26because he was so devoted to the ideas of duty and honor and integrity and honesty in public life.
51:35He's a good role model for just about any politician, whether you believe his principles or not.
51:42But the way he went about living his life and saying what he believed and believing what he said,
51:48I think are a good example to just about anybody, any time.
51:52You see a person who had a deep commitment to what he believed in.
52:00He struggled to do his best by those principles he believed in.
52:06And the idea of commitment in the man was powerful.
52:11I think also he was a man who made every effort to overcome really serious and terrible emotional and physical disabilities.
52:22He never felt sorry for himself.
52:24He never became a victim.
52:26He showed an example of someone who risked all and sacrificed all for honor as he perceived it,
52:34for the right as he perceived it,
52:37for constitutional democratic government in America as he and his class perceived it.
52:44Again, whether they're right or wrong is another case.
52:47We don't necessarily have to approve of the cause in order to pay some homage to the dedication with which he and others pursued it.
52:57He was an example of a man who never gave up.
53:01In some ways, that's the essence of the American spirit.
53:05He faced obstacle after obstacle.
53:07He was beaten down time and time again.
53:09He is a man who went from the top to see the very bottom of his life.
53:13And he never quit.
53:15And he died, I think, at peace with himself.
53:18If you wanted a model person of honor, devotion to duty, courage, and courtesy, you have it in Jefferson Davis.
53:37Happy ever, David Davis is a 다니ler.
53:49He lived in his own way.