To Go in Peace and Be Left Alone

Selected Quotes for Understanding the Civil War

Selected Quotes from Confederate President Jefferson Davis

I owe the title of this essay to my mentor, Kenneth Bachand (1931-2021), who was a teacher of both English and history, writer, author, and avid researcher of Civil War history. He was my mentor during my blessed decade in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He was a graduate of Stetson University and taught in the Florida school system for 25 years. Nearly blind in later life, he still managed by modern devices to research, write, and edit. Following the death of his beloved wife, Mary Marguerite Bachand, he moved nearer his two daughters and nine grandchildren near Columbia, South Carolina.

His title actually comes from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who in an address to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, said,

“ We feel that our cause is just and holy…We seek no conquest… All we ask is to be left alone.”

Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 but spent most of his life in Mississippi. Kentucky and Missouri, by the way, are two of the 13 stars in the Confederate Battle Flag and supplied thousands of soldiers and cavalry to the Confederate armies—40,000 from Kentucky and 40,000 from Missouri, plus thousands of pro-Southern Missouri Partisan cavalry. My own great grandfather and a brother, who were born in South Carolina and raised in Alabama served in the Confederate 2^nd Kentucky Cavalry under John Hunt Morgan.

Davis graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1829 and served six years as a lieutenant, including combat in the Black Hawk war in 1832, before leaving the Army and marrying the daughter of his commander and future President Zachry Taylor in 1835. Sarah Knox Taylor died just three months later of malaria. In 1845. Davis became a successful cotton planter on his elder brother Joseph’s land and owned as many as 113 slaves. That same year he married 18-year-old Varina Howell and was elected to the U.S. House, where he served until 1847. While a member of Congress he was elected Colonel of a volunteer Mississippi regiment and distinguished himself as a leader and war hero in the Mexican War.

The Mississippi Legislature elected Davis to the U.S. Senate in 1847, and he served until 1851. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed Davis Secretary of War. He served until 1857, when the Mississippi Legislature again appointed him to the U.S. Senate, where he became the most prominent and articulate spokesman for the South. In February 1861, he was elected Provisional President of the Confederacy by Constitutional Convention, and President in February 1862. He served until the end of the Civil War, when he was captured and imprisoned. He was released from prison in 1867 and never went to trial.  All charges were eventually dropped because the charges were false in regards to Davis and instead implicated Federal government tyranny. While in prison, although Davis was an Episcopalian, Pope Pius IX sympathized with Davis’s case and befriended him. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson granted him a full pardon, and Davis eventually worked towards national reconciliation by speaking out against sectionalism.

Davis thereafter had an active public life. He died on December 6, 1889, at the age of 81.

Jefferson Davis was known for his honesty, high principles, and devotion to strict constitutional government. Joseph and Jefferson Davis developed an enlightened and humane and incentivized form of plantation management, treating slaves as valued individuals entitled to means of  disciplinary review and fairness. However, Davis was critical of slavery in general. He supported the South’s right to own slaves because it was critical to the Southern economy, and in fact much of the Northern economy. He believed eliminating slavery abruptly would be an economic disaster for the South and the slaves. Jefferson and Varina Davis maintained warm feelings for African Americans. In fact, they adopted a mulatto boy in distressed circumstances during the war and treated him as a son and brother to their children. Yet like Robert E. Lee, Davis has been viciously misrepresented and demonized by mainstream media, corrupted internet propagandists, and academia in the last decade.

At Lee’s memorial service in Richmond, on November 3, 1870, Jefferson Davis gave this appraisal of Lee:

“This good citizen, this gallant soldier, this great general, this true patriot, had yet a higher praise than this or these; he was a true Christian.”

Robert E. Lee’s 211^th birthday is January 19.  See my January 7 article in the Times Examiner: Robert E. Lee—A noble legacy under attack.

Reading the real facts about the life of Jefferson Davis, we can also say that this great and highly principled Southern political leader, defender of constitutional government, gallant soldier, and true patriot was also a true Christian and worthy example to all Americans.

Selected Quotes for Understanding the Civil war

In his multi-volume History of the American people, President Woodrow Wilson explained how the role of slavery in the Civil war became so exaggerated and distorted:

“It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their independence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery…”

Two days before Lincoln’s election in November of 1860, an editorial in the Charleston Mercury summed up the feeling of South Carolina on the impending national crisis:

“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government, from a confederated republic to a national sectional despotism.”

Writing in December of 1861 in a London weekly publication, the famous English author, Charles Dickens, who was a strong opponent of slavery, said these things about the war going on in America:

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.”

Karl Marx, like most European socialists of the time, favored the North.  In an 1861 article published in England, he articulated very well what the major British newspapers, the Times, the Economist, and Saturday Review, had been saying:

“The war between the North and South is a tariff war.  The war, is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.”

 Five years after the end of the War, prominent Northern abolitionist, attorney and legal scholar, Lysander Spooner, put it this way:

“All these cries of having ‘abolished slavery,’ of having ‘saved the country,’ of having ‘preserved the Union,’ of establishing a ‘government of consent,’ and of ‘maintaining the national honor’ are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive no one.”

Yet apparently many today are still deceived and even prefer to be deceived.

On June 27, 1863, near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania--just days before the momentous Battle of Gettysburg--Confederate General Robert E. Lee issued a general order to the Army of Northern Virginia, praising them for their honorable conduct thus far in their march into Union territory, but cautioning them on their continuing responsibility to respect all private property and the lives of all noncombatants.

“The commanding general considers no greater disgrace could befall the army, and through it our whole people, than the perpetration of the barbarous outrages upon the unarmed and defenseless and the wanton destruction of private property, that have marked the course of the enemy in our own country…It must be remembered that we make war only upon armed men, and that we cannot take vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered…without offending against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain.”

 The Cherokee Declaration of Independence October 28, 1861

Comparing the relatively limited objectives and defensive nature of the Southern cause in contrast to the aggressive actions of the North,  the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma declared its independence from the Union and allied with the Confederate States:

“Disclaiming any intention to invade the Northern States, they sought only to repel the invaders from their own soil and to secure the right of governing themselves.  They claimed only the privilege asserted in the Declaration of American Independence, and on which the right of Northern States themselves to self-government is formed, and altering their form of government when it  became no longer tolerable and establishing new forms for the security of their  liberties.”

Selected Quotes from Confederate President Jefferson Davis

“We feel that our cause is just and holy; we protest solemnly in the face of mankind that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honor and independence.” [April 29, 1861]

“The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and another form.”

“The contest is not between power and liberty; the contest is between power on the one hand and limited and defined authority on the other.”

“The love of liberty is inseparable from the love of country.”

“The principles and institutions under which we have grown prosperous are now assailed with a fury and persistence that would seem to indicate an implacable determination to destroy them.”

“Our Confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with the Constitution of the United States of America.”

“Peace is the virtue of civilization; war is its crime.”

“War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.”  [Union General W.T. Sherman told a group of cadets something similar after the war.]

“Our cause is just, our principles are firm, our rectitude of purpose immutable.”

“History will vindicate the right and condemn the wrong; and we who are now the defenders and custodians of the truth must, in no future day, have cause to confess, with contrition and anguish, that we have been false to our manhood and the names we wear.”

“A law that violates the Constitution of the United States is no law and ought not to be obeyed.”

A Southern Rejection of Civil War False Narratives

The Reverend James Power Smith, the last surviving member of Stonewall Jackson’s staff had this to say in 1907:

“No cowardice on any battlefield could be as base and shameful as the silent acquiescence in the scheme which was teaching the children in their homes and schools that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war, that prisoners of war held in the South were starved and treated with barbarous inhumanity, that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country and false to their oaths, that the young men who left everything to resist invasion, and climbed the slopes of Gettysburg and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government.”