Inaugurations of a Rebel President

ED: Lincoln wasn’t the only president inaugurated during the civil war years. There was also Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi who quit the Senate in January of 1861. The very next month, he was appointed provisional president of the Confederate States of America and boarded a train for Montgomery, Alabama. Along the way, he was greeted by massive, cheering crowds.

WILLIAM COOPER: The inauguration was very much like inaugurations in Washington. They had a parade, they had bands, they had militia companies, they had cannon firring. It was just like an American inauguration.

ED: This is William Cooper, a Jefferson Davis biographer at Louisiana State University.

WILLIAM COOPER: In his speech he talked about the peaceful method of secession, that nobody was hurt, that nothing was overturned. There was no quote, “revolution,” unquote. He said the Confederacy had no intention to be an aggressive nation in any way, shape, or form. And I think the people who heard this talk, they liked what he had to say. It was not a somber talk.

ED: Did he talk about slavery in his inaugural speech?

GEORGE RABLE: He never used the word slavery. But what he talked about was homogeneity of the population, of one purpose, and loyalty to domestic institutions, never used the word slavery. But there’s several instances in there where there’s no doubt what he’s talking about.

ED: Why would he not actually say the S-word?

WILLIAM COOPER: I can’t answer that, Ed. I just really don’t know why. My assumption has always been that everybody there understood what it was about. When they said domestic institutions and when they said homogeneity– they knew what they were talking about when he said, for example, that nobody is going to be attacking us, we can protect ourselves. And he meant nobody was going to be attacking their institutions, chiefly, slavery.

ED: So Jefferson Davis is appointed provisional president in early 1861. But then there is an election in November of 1861. And so he gets to be inaugurated, in some ways, a second time in February of ’62.

JOANNE FREEMAN: That’s right. He does.

ED: And he is inaugurated in my adopted home of Richmond, Virginia.

GEORGE RABLE: Well, the day of the inauguration was a terrible day, raining and cold, dark. It’s a terrible day. But Davis determines that he’s going to stay outside. An umbrella was held up over his head for him.

Even so, there was a great crowd and one of the newspaper account said it looked like a plantation of mushrooms because of all the umbrellas that were up out there. But his speech was quite interesting because in this address he emphasized the connection with the American Revolution. And he said that the Confederacy was going through difficult times.

And he said there would be more difficult times. This was not going to be any bed of roses. But he said our forebears went through difficult times in the revolution, that Washington went through difficult times. But our forbears prevailed. And he said, we’re going to prevail as well.

ED: Now, he’s inaugurated on February 22.

GEORGE RABLE: Absolutely.

ED: Why that date?

GEORGE RABLE: Because that was George Washington’s birthday. He was also inaugurated right under the greater question statue of Washington that sits right by the Virginia capital, which was, of course, where the Confederate Congress sat. It was intentional. The Confederates thought they were maintaining the true legacy of the revolution. They thought they were, in many ways, the true United States, that the United States they left had somehow gone astray.

ED: Now, you’ve written very interestingly about a third inauguration that Jefferson Davis experienced. Can you tell us about that?

GEORGE RABLE: Well, yes. In 1886, of course, Davis was an elderly gentleman and in bad health. He was living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But a delegation from Montgomery, Alabama went down and invited him to come be an honored guest for laying the cornerstone for a monument for Alabama soldiers, Confederate soldiers. He got on the train with them and they went back to Montgomery.

And the whole way back, from the Mississippi Gulf Coast up to Montgomery, it was a triumphal tour. It was like his trip from Mississippi to Montgomery the first time. Every time the train stopped, the people would bring flowers.

There were crowds out along the railway. And when he got to Montgomery, even though the weather was bad– he connected with bad weather all the time, Ed. Even though the weather was bad, there was a great throng to meet him. And he went to the same hotel he stayed in when he became the Confederate provisional president. He even stayed in the same room in that hotel.

ED: Wow.

GEORGE RABLE: And he went up to the state capital, which would have been the Confederate capital. There were great crowds of people. Some of the witnesses said folks were almost fainting when they touched him, when they saw him.

And in his remarks he simply talked about the glories of the Confederacy. And he said the Confederates had done the right thing, secession was right, and they had fought a virtuous war. He called it the only war that Christianity would sanction because it was a defensive war against an aggressive, evil enemy.

ED: Did he talk about the domestic institutions?

GEORGE RABLE: No, never did mention that.

ED: At all?

GEORGE RABLE: Not at all.

ED: So this is a kind of inauguration turned around. It’s an inauguration of looking back and sort of sanctifying what had happened–

GEORGE RABLE: Absolutely.

ED: –rather than hoping for what’s going to happen, right?

GEORGE RABLE: That’s right. And of course, Davis, by this time has become a great hero of the white south. Davis had been the leader and more terribly important, he’d been put in prison for two years. And most Southerners didn’t think they had done anything wrong when they seceded. So if Davis had been put in prison, they should have been put in prison. Thus, he had suffered for them.

ED: A sort of a Christ like figure, right?

GEORGE RABLE: Almost. And he was an old man with white hair, frail. And he was revered. And I think that this second inaugural in Montgomery, this sort of peon to the lost cause had more lasting impact than his first one because, as you well know, this lost cause idea of the confederacy had a powerfully long life. It’s even still with us. And it fought, transcended the bounds of the formal Confederate states.

ED: And you think that there was something about this ceremony, the reenacting of the first inauguration that kind of gave this weight and sanction.

GEORGE RABLE: I think it did and the way the crowd reacted to him.

ED: And in the same way that you don’t really see much evidence of foreboding in the first inauguration, you don’t see much evidence of regret or of repentance in the third one.

GEORGE RABLE: Oh, no. No regret whatever.

ED: And it has always struck me that the story Jefferson Davis told in all three inaugurals was still the story the South was telling itself throughout the war and for generations afterwards, that because we had followed the forms of great nations, of Christian nations, we were a legitimate nation and that, therefore, the motives of the Confederacy really could not be challenged. And there was no reason to look beneath anything they said because they had announced in these great ceremonies exactly who they were, and they expected to be taken at their word.

GEORGE RABLE: You’re absolutely correct. I agree with everything you said.

ED: All right. Will, thank you so much. That was really fascinating.

GEORGE RABLE: Well, thank you. I enjoyed talking with you.

ED: William Cooper is a professor of history at Louisiana State University. He’s the author of We Have The War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War.