Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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was appalled at her husband’s plans to volunteer for a distant war. He had not discussed with her the idea of putting on a uniform nearly ten years after he had taken it off. She tried arguing him out of it, but even her frantic and copious tears failed to dissuade him: “I have cried until I am stupid,” she told her mother.
Her concern was not necessarily that Davis would be killed on the battlefield. She worried that he might not even make it to Texas before expiring from one of the medical conditions he already had. She worried about recurring bouts of malaria, which had almost killed him ten years earlier. She worried about him eating. She had enough trouble making Davis take his meals when she would see him at home, once commenting that he “ate no more than a child.” She worried about his left eye. That eye was continually infected and inflamed from what was probably herpes simplex, the same virus that causes fever blisters. She worried about his neuralgia, which could cause him immobilizing pain when he suffered attacks. He was a sickly man, although he would admit it to no one. Varina had written her mother when they first came to Washington that she worried about her husband exhausting himself without telling her how seriously ill he felt: “You know how patiently Jeffy always bears suffering.”
If the afflictions common to Jefferson Davis had belonged to any other man, he would have been under the constant care of a doctor. But they were part of who Jefferson Davis was, and he did not listen to man or woman. He certainly was not going to allow any physical infirmity to keep him from leading his Mississippians against Mexico, which had attacked his country.
Before he left Congress for his volunteer assignment, Davis made a speechifying mistake on the House floor, one that would come back to haunt him in 1865. Several pacifist congressmen had previously made speeches decrying the need for West Point and professionally trained officers. When Davis rose to praise some victories won by his father-in-law Taylor, he asked, jokingly, if such victories could have been won by a blacksmith or a tailor.
Davis meant no harm in the statement, only to emphasize that professional military training was necessary to win military victories. But at least one former blacksmith and one former tailor who were now high and mighty congressmen took offense at the implication that their previous professions were not honorable. The tailor was Tennessee’s representative Andrew Johnson, who now had an instant reason to take an intense dislike to his Mississippi colleague. On the House floor, Johnson denounced a bewildered, then increasingly irritated, Davis for being part of an aristocracy that looked down on the working class.
Davis and Johnson would have more differences with each other in about twenty years.
When Davis received his appointment of colonel of volunteers, he immediately asked the United States government to supply his 1,000 men with the latest in military technology. He wanted the same type of percussion cap rifles he had suggested for the regular army in 1846. Percussion rifles were a tremendous leap in technology from the antiquated, smoothbore, flintlock muskets the regular army was still using because of decades of congressional resistance to creating a modern army. President James Polk agreed with Davis, although General Winfield Scott suggested that the massed firepower of muskets was still preferable to the rifles.
Before he left his Mississippi plantation, Davis assigned its care to his oldest, best, and most trusted friend, James Pemberton, a slave highly skilled in managing large numbers of acres and the people it took to farm them.
On February 22, 1847, Davis and his regiment, commonly known as the Mississippi Rifles after the new weapons he had demanded for them, won fame at the Battle of Buena Vista, though they also suffered more than a third killed and wounded. Davis himself was wounded in the right foot, but he stayed in the saddle until the battle was over. The stand of the Mississippians led by their brave volunteer congressman who refused to leave the field even after he was wounded was too big a newspaper story to ignore. Davis slowly recovered from his wound, unaware that newspapers across the nation, North and South, were making him into a national hero.
When Davis returned to Mississippi, he discovered men were already planning his future for him. Without much debate, he was appointed U.S. senator, replacing one who had conveniently died at almost the same moment Davis had returned home.
Davis served less than a year as a senator before resigning to run for Mississippi governor, a race he lost to a bitter political enemy, Senator Henry Foote. Foote would later serve in the Confederate Congress where he would continue his enmity toward Davis. Though now without political office himself, Davis stayed interested in politics, campaigning for New Hampshire native Franklin Pierce for president in 1852. Pierce rewarded Davis’s work by appointing him secretary of war.
Davis made the most of a post that allowed him to play politics, but in which he did not have to campaign in front of the public, a necessity with which he never got comfortable. He pushed for enlarging the army in total regiments, as well as equipping them with the rifles that his own Mississippi regiment had proved highly accurate.
Though he would never admit it, Davis did make some mistakes in his post. He insisted on importing a few dozen camels from Africa that he believed would replace horses in the western deserts. The soldiers hated the smelly, cantankerous, spitting beasts, and they were never fully tested when Davis left office in 1857. The new administration of James Buchanan ignored Davis’s camel corps.
While Pierce failed to get renominated for the presidency, Davis did win the election to the United States Senate in 1858, where he became one of the nation’s most famous, respected, and experienced politicians. He had served his country fighting Indians and Mexicans in the House, in the Senate, as secretary of war, and, now again, in the Senate. He had won and lost elections and had been appointed to high office by men who trusted him. Varina, who had sometimes felt abandoned by her husband early in their marriage when he was campaigning for office or campaigning on the battlefield, thought that he had finally found a home in the Senate.
It would be a home that Davis would experience for only two years.
WITH THE ELECTION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN in November 1860, Varina joined in the South’s view that Lincoln was “elected with the express understanding that he would rule in hostility over the minority, while ostensibly acting as the guardian of the whole country.”
She did not sleep the night before her husband stood to give his farewell address to the Senate early in 1861. She wondered from her seat if the senators and other spectators “saw beyond the cold exterior of the orator—his deep depression, his desire for reconciliation, and his overweening love of the Union in whose cause he had bled, and to maintain which he was ready to sacrifice all but liberty and equality.”
Within a few days, the Davis family left Washington for Mississippi. It would be only a few more days before Davis would receive that unwelcome telegram calling on him to report to Montgomery.
After Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery, the early leaders of the new nation decided that the Alabama city was too far removed from Washington. Without thinking of the military advantages Montgomery had by being so deep in the South, the fire-eaters of the Confederacy voted to move the Confederate capital to Richmond, just one hundred miles south of Washington. Davis did not have much say in the matter. The Confederates who had elected him wanted to be close to the U.S. capital so they could negotiate peace terms after they won any single battle that they were certain would settle the issue of secession for the last time.
While Varina had been just another Senate wife in the U.S. capital, she found herself in the spotlight in Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital. It was not necessarily a welcoming light. At the fancy ball that was supposed to welcome the new power couple to the elite of Richmond society, the wife of a Confederate colonel up for promotion to general whispered around to her friends that the pregnant Varina looked like an “Indian squaw.” Varina heard the remark being spread among the ladies, passed it along to her husband, and Colonel Abraham Myers remained a colonel for the rest of his Confederate career. It would not be the first time that Varina intentionally or unintentionally influenced the president. She knew she could never win any arguments with him, but she could sometimes mold his opinion.
As First Lady of the Confederacy, Varina was in a unique position as a civilian to learn things that normally would have