Dixie Betrayed by David J. Eicher Read Free Book Online

administration. What more could the Confederate
     president want?
    When journalist William Howard Russell passed through Montgomery, he sought out Davis and met him, describing his impressions
     of the Confederate leader in his journal. Russell found Davis a “slight, light figure,” presented “erect and straight,” but
     also “anxious,” with a “very haggard, careworn, and pain-drawn look, though no trace of anything but the utmost confidence
     and the greatest decision could be detected in conversation.” 1
    Amid the tornado of creating a government, the new president had his comforts. He was both relieved and distracted by the
     arrival of his family from Mississippi. In March Varina Howell Davis, now the president’s wife of sixteen years, arrived at
     the Exchange Hotel along with their children, the mainstay and focus of Davis’s life. The children were Margaret Howell (“Maggie”),
     age six; Jefferson Davis Jr., age four; and Joseph E. Davis, age two. A fourth child, Samuel E. Davis, had died in 1854, at
     age two. Two more children would arrive during the war and be christened “babies of the Confederacy.”
    The Davises all lived in the Exchange Hotel for the next few weeks. Then, in mid-April, they moved to a house two blocks away
     from their first Montgomery address. Celebrated as the “First White House of the Confederacy,” this two-story clapboard, Federal-style
     structure, the Edmund S. Harrison House, was leased by the Confederate Congress for use as an Executive Mansion. Varina would
     quickly put her stamp on the place, decorating it and arranging things to be just the way she wanted them, suitable for the
     household of the leader of a nation.
    In the weeks that followed the Confederacy’s birth, Davis did his best to incite a national feeling of unity from the people
     of the South, as well as to justify the South’s political stand. In Montgomery in late April, he told the Congress:
    All these carefully worded clauses proved unavailing to prevent the rise and growth in the Northern States of a political
     school which has persistently claimed that the government thus formed was not a compact
between
States, but was in effect a national government, set up
above
and
over
the States.
    An organization created by the States to secure the blessings of liberty and independence against
foreign
aggression has been gradually perverted into a machine for their control in their
domestic
affairs.
    After relating how slavery did not work economically in the North, Davis wrote that African slaves had “augmented from 600,000”
     at the constitutional compact to “upward of 4,000,000.” “In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal
     savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers,” he claimed, “and supplied not only with bodily comforts
     but with careful religious instruction.”
    “Under the supervision of a superior race,” the Confederate leader asserted, “their labor had been so directed as not only
     to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of
     wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people.” 2 As far as President Davis was concerned, slavery worked well for all parties involved.
    U NLIKE the purely festive mood of Montgomery, tension plagued the Yankee capital as Illinois attorney Abraham Lincoln stood before
     the Capitol and was inaugurated. Sharpshooters roamed the rooftops of buildings on Capitol Hill. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s inauguration
     drew throngs. Some twenty-five thousand people came to the nation’s capital to see what would happen on this most uncertain
     of days. Early in the day the early March weather was cool but pleasant; later it turned “bleak and chilly.” 3 Such was the national forecast, too: both sections of the country knew they were headed for war, but few knew how fast it
     might come.
    Only the day before