Remember Jeff Davis? Many say forget it

Davis comes across, McPherson says, as an "unreconstructed rebel who never really accepted with anything like good grace the defeat of the Confederacy and continued for the rest of his life to write and speak in a way that basically said, 'We were right. We lost this war, not because we were wrong, but because the enemy was more powerful and more ruthless.'"

Indeed, the last paragraph of Davis's two-volume "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" — penned at Beauvoir and often called "the Bible of the Lost Cause" — can hardly be seen as an apology.

"In asserting the right of secession," Davis wrote, "it has not been my wish to incite to its exercise: I recognize the fact that the war showed it to be impracticable, but this did not prove it to be wrong; and, now that it may not be again attempted, and that the Union may promote the general welfare, it is needful that the truth, the whole truth, should be known, so that crimination and recrimination may for ever cease, and then, on the basis of fraternity and faithful regard for the rights of the States, there may be written on the arch of the Union, Esto perpetua."

Translation: "May it persevere."

Wrong perspective, says descendant
Hayes-Davis says his ancestor is a victim of political correctness and of people's insistence on looking at historical events from today's perspective.

He believes, as Davis did, that the Southern states had a constitutional right to secede. When asked if he thinks secession is viable or legal today, he is noncommittal.

"I think the issue is not so much the country splitting. I think the issue is federal control over the states. And I think that you see that even today, when federal mandates come from Washington that, `You will do this, whether you want to or not...,'" says Hayes-Davis, who has represented Davis' family at more than 100 functions over the years.

As for events this year in connection with the bicentennial, biographer Cooper says he has no problem with descendants re-enacting Davis' inauguration and the like.

"The Civil War is the central event in our nation's history, and Davis had a critical part to play in that," Cooper says. "And not to study it makes no sense to me."

Just as long, he adds, as commemoration does not become celebration.

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