Remember Jeff Davis? Many say forget it

One man's legacy, a family's struggle
For the most part, if Davis is mentioned at all this year outside the classroom or a Southern museum exhibit, it will be in the context of symposia like "The Contested Legacy of Jefferson Davis," a scholarly discussion being hosted this June by the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History in Frankfort, at which Cooper is scheduled to be the keynote speaker.

The Davis family thinks it's a shame that all most people know about him was that he fought to preserve slavery.

"It's as if he created the entire institution and was solely responsible for it," says Hayes-Davis, a 59-year-old banker from Colorado Springs, Colo. "And we struggle with that."

Most people don't know that Davis was a West Point graduate who fought in the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor and married the future president's daughter, Hayes-Davis says. As a U.S. senator from Mississippi, he had a hand in building the Smithsonian Institution. He bolstered the nation's defenses as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce.

"The history books, which are basically written in New York and Boston and whatever, have one sentence: 'Jefferson Davis elected president of the Confederacy,'" his descendant complains.

A 'bitter-ender'
Historian James M. McPherson concedes that Davis' antebellum career was "very illustrious." But he says his achievements as a soldier, senator and secretary of war were "largely eclipsed" by his role in setting the stage for and then waging the bloodiest war in this nation's history.

Davis, who disparagingly referred to his fellow Kentuckian as "His Majesty Abraham the First," was what McPherson calls a "bitter-ender." When Lincoln allowed a journalist and a minister through Union lines in July 1864 under a flag of truce to offer peace and amnesty to Davis, the Confederate president was outraged.

"Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals," he told the envoys. "We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war ... We are fighting for Independence — and that, or extermination, we will have ... You may emancipate every Negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves ... if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames."

McPherson, a Lincoln biographer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War epic, "Battle Cry of Freedom," says some former Confederates, like Gen. Robert E. Lee, are palatable to modern Americans.

"Because Lee not only emerged as the foremost icon and hero of the Civil War in the South, I think he also emerged in the postwar North and is seen even today as somebody with more admirable qualities than Jefferson Davis," he says.

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