A History of the American People

kind of corporal punishment, and the boy was cosseted by big sisters, and taught riding by his
adoring big brothers, three of whom were old enough to have fought in the 1812 War. Jeff Davis
was brought up to a simple, absolutist patriotism of a kind we would now find incomprehensible.
When his father died, Davis' elder brother Joseph, a successful Mississippi cotton planter, took
over the role of mentor and guardian. After an education under the Roman Catholic Dominican
friars at Wilkinson County Academy and at the famous Transylvania University in Lexington,
Kentucky, Davis went to West Point on the nomination of the War Secretary, Calhoun, thereafter
his political model and leader. As a frontier officer, he fought the Indians and personally took the
surrender of Black Hawk, made peace among the miners and war against his superiors. Stiff-
necked and bellicose, he admitted: In my youth I was over-willing to fight.' His career was checkered with rows, courts-martial, and frustration at slow promotion. When he married the daughter of General Zachary Taylor, he left the army and Brother Joseph set him up as a planter. This too was frustrating. Joseph owned 11,000 acres and was a wealthy man, but the 800-acre Hurricane Estate helent' or half-gave to Davis was small by Mississippi standards and he
remained his brother's dependant.
It is important to grasp that, when Davis spoke of the benevolence of the slave-system in the
South, he believed what he said totally and spoke from experience. Joseph, as a planter, was
enlightened. None of his slaves was ever flogged. The slaves judged and punished themselves.
Families were kept together. One testified: We had good grub and good clothes and nobody worked hard.' Another: 'Dem Davises never let nobody touch one of their niggers.' The community at Davis Bend on the river, said General Taylor, wasa little paradise.' Davis shared
to the full his brother's attitudes and was anti-blood sports to boot. He treated his black body-
servant, James Pemberton, with exquisite courtesy and put him in charge of his plantation when
he was away. He made a point of returning any salute from a black with an elaborate bow: `I
cannot allow any negro to outdo me in courtesy.' Not for him the swaggering society of New
Orleans or Charleston. His only genuflection to Southern male habits was a propensity to
challenge critics to duels, though he never actually fought any. To sleep with one of his slaves
would have been to him an abomination. When his beloved wife Sarah Taylor died of malaria, he
acquired a sadness that never left him, though he eventually married again, a beautiful girl,
Varina, half his age. His melancholy was aggravated by poor health, including terrifying facial
pains and chronic hepatitis which eventually left him blind in one eye. He suffered from
insomnia and his chief pleasure was reading-Virgil, Byron, Burns, and Scott.
The overriding weakness of this seemingly civilized and well-meaning man was lack of
imagination, compounded by ignorance. America in the 1840s and 1850s was already an
immense country, but travel was still difficult, especially in the South, and expensive. It is hard
for us to grasp how little Americans knew of the societies outside their region or indeed locality.
Davis paid only one visit to New England and was surprised to find the people friendly. Until he
became president of the Confederation he knew little of the South beyond his own part of
Mississippi. He assumed that the treatment of slaves at Davis Bend was typical and refused to
believe stories of cruelty: that was simply Northern malice and abolitionist invention. He was,
like so many other well-read and well-meaning people in the South, the victim of its own policy
of concentrating its limited media and publishing resources on indoctrinating its own people, and
telling the rest of the world to go to hell. Davis was self-indoctrinated too; he had a passion for
certitude.
On this narrowness of vision he built up a political philosophy which did not admit of
argument. Blacks, he insisted, were better off as slaves in the South than as tribesmen in Africa: