The Case For The Confederacy by Joseph Sobran
As the Civil War ended in May 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was captured by Union troops. He was put in painful shackles and held in prison for two years, in solitary confinement, on charges of treason and conspiring to kill Abraham Lincoln.
Davis was never brought to trial. The absurd charge of plotting Lincoln's death was soon thrown out. Eventually the charge of treason was dropped too, because Davis' enemies knew that his defense would probably deal a powerful blow to Union propaganda. So he was denied the day in court he passionately craved.
What would Davis have said in court? Two Southern partisans of the Confederacy, James Ronald Kennedy and his brother Walter Donald Kennedy, answer the question in their recent book, "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" (Pelican, $16.95). It will come as a revelation to anyone, Northerner or Southerner, who has been raised on the Union version of events.
In Davis' time, even many Northerners agreed that a sovereign state had the right to withdraw from the Union. A large body of people in the North were willing to accept a peaceful separation from the South Lincoln had thousands arrested without trial for expressing such views, including several Maryland legislators who, while remaining in the Union, opposed using force to keep other states from seceding.
Davis himself advised against secession on grounds of prudence, but when his home state of Mississippi pulled out of the Union, he sadly resigned from the U.S. Senate and reluctantly accepted the Confederate presidency. Like Robert E. Lee, he believed that his primary loyalty was to his state, not to the Union, and that the defense of his state couldn't be treason.
Davis explained his position in 1881 in his two-volume memoir, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" (republished by William Mayes Coats in Nashville). The Declaration of Independence had proclaimed that "these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states" -- that is, 13 separate sovereignties, not, as Lincoln said, a single, monolithic "new nation." When these sovereign states ratified the Constitution, Davis argued, they did not surrender their sovereignty; several of them, in their acts of ratification, reserved the right to secede, and the other states, by accepting these acts as valid, recognized that right.
Lincoln was forced to take the ahistorical position that "the Union is much older than the Constitution" and that no state could ever withdraw from it. As the historian Pauline Maier puts it, Lincoln's understanding of the Declaration of Independence was based on "wishful suppositions." He was guided by Daniel Webster's famous nationalist slogan, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable" -- an illogical credo that leads to dangerous nonsense. If liberty was "inseparable" from Union, why did the framers adopt constitutional safeguards to prevent the possibility of federal tyranny?
After Lincoln's death, a vindictive Republican Congress required the Confederate states to adopt two constitutional amendments as a condition of "readmission" to the Union -- which Lincoln had insisted they had never left! This coerced ratification remains a disgrace to the Constitution.
In his memoir, Davis addressed these and other issues with iron logic. It's a pity Lincoln did not live to face a more profound debater than Stephen Douglas.
Davis had many warm friends in the North, including President Franklin Pierce (under whom he had served as secretary of state) and Lincoln's own secretary of state, William Seward. While in prison he received messages of sympathy from thousands, including Pope Pius IX. Even some abolitionists protested the cruel treatment he received. Such wealthy Northerners as Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt put up $100,000 for his bail. Even his former slaves honored him at his death in 1889.
But like so many great controversies, the debate between North and South was settled not by reason but by force. And in the history books, as usual, the victors' rhetoric prevailed over the losers' logic. Today few Americans, even in the South, understand the case for the Confederacy. Any talk of "sovereign" states -- the vital question of 1861 -- sounds archaic.
In the end, both sides lost the war. A country out of touch with its own ancestors is truly impoverished -- and uneducated.