Because of his legal situation, Davis had refused the presidency of Ran-dolph-Macon College, as he had refused offers amounting to charity. His lawyers suggested that he travel abroad and investigate business connections, but Canada, England, and France provided no openings, in spite of the fact that, especially in England, Davis was received with hospitality in certain aristocratic circles—a hospitality of which he could not avail himself, because his wife’s pride would not allow her to appear in her church-mouse poverty. Returning to America, where he encountered other disappointments, including the project of a railroad to California, he finally became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company, with headquarters at Memphis, but this project failed, costing Davis his capital of fifteen thousand dollars. To compound his desperate situation, his ownership of Brierfield came into litigation (with kinspeople), because Joseph, now dead, had not technically transferred ownership to his brother. The property did finally come to Davis, but the war had left it drastically devalued.

  Nor had the dogged political persecutors quite given up. The old indictment was now revised by the federal government to place him in a group of presumptive conspirators, including Robert E. Lee, the hope being that Lee (how little they could have understood his old-fashioned sense of decency! ) would try to exculpate himself by what would amount to turning state’s evidence against his superior. The whole indictment was based on the assumption that, as Lincoln had originally declared, the war was merely a “domestic insurrection”—not a civil war. Davis, as before, was eager for a trial.

  In a tragicomic sequel, however, the new indictment was quashed by a provision of the Fourteenth Amendment which imposed perpetual disenfran-chisement on anyone who aided in rebellion after having taken the oath of certain offices. Unquestionably, Davis, who had twice been inducted into the Senate, was already “suffering” under just such a disability, and to demand further punishment would involve double jeopardy, forbidden by the Constitution. On this ground, an action to quash the indictment against Davis was heard on December 3, 1868, in the United States Circuit Court of Virginia, with Chief Justice Chase on the bench with Justice John Curtiss Underwood. When Justice Underwood refused to quash the indictment, the Chief Justice entered a dissent, and the case was dropped as of December 5, 1868.

  Poor Davis was never to have the day in court that he yearned for in order to justify his public career. What was left was a protracted and increasingly bitter quarrel with his old enemy General Joseph E. Johnston, C.S.A., and others, and his struggle to survive. He wanted to survive to write his book on the Confederacy. There seemed a widespread willingness to provide him with information and documents, but leisure and a quiet place to work were lacking. Fortunately, a widow by the name of Mrs. Sarah A. Dorsey, who held Confederate views and had preserved some wealth, offered Davis a cottage on her estate, Beauvoir, on the Mississippi coast near Biloxi, at just enough rent to salve his pride. But Varina, though she had been a childhood friend of Mrs. Dorsey, now jealously loathed the lady, who not only urged her husband on with his book but devoted herself to him as a secretary; the loathing was so great that for many months Varina would not even visit her husband at the cottage, preferring to stay in Memphis. Only after Davis had agreed to go with her away from Beauvoir did she, with female prerogative, change her mind and join him there. By her husband’s offer, she had, we may surmise, made good the priority of claim to his company. Davis proceeded with “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,” and it appeared in 1881—a work primarily of legalistic and constitutional apologetics, and not at all the narrative that the title promised and the world expected. Abstract concerns had swallowed the tragic drama. The book was, in short, a failure—practically and otherwise. To further depress the author, the son who was his namesake, born in 1857, failed to pass his examinations at the Virginia Military Institute and was dismissed.

  The only comfort that came to Davis after the failure of the book was the fact that Mrs. Dorsey, aware of Varina’s jealousy, sold him, cheaply and on long terms, Beauvoir itself, so that the husband and wife could be reunited. This kindness was compounded—or perhaps complicated—when, shortly afterward, Mrs. Dorsey died and her will was opened. It named Davis not only as her executor but as her heir. It would be interesting to know all the psychological ins and outs of this situation. But in any case Davis now had a home.

  He was also soon to have a home in the hearts of his people. The rancor, blame, charges of tyranny, and criticism (justified and unjustified) directed at him as a natural consequence of defeat were dying away. In 1886, he was invited to Montgomery to be the guest of honor at the unveiling of a monument to the Confederate dead, near the old capitol, where Davis had been designated President of the new nation. At first, he declined, but in the end he went, with wildly enthusiastic crowds greeting his special railroad car all along the route—crowds far greater than on that other trip, in 1861, when he had left Brierfield to assume his tragic role at Montgomery. Now, again at Montgomery, he was conducted, under a drizzle, through an undeterred throng of fifteen thousand enraptured spectators, to the same hotel as in 1861—the Exchange Hotel (now operated by a Bostonian, with decorations overseen by a wounded Union veteran)—and, under a barrage of flowers, to the same quarters he had originally occupied there, Room 101, where the walls to each side of the door were draped with the national flag but with a portrait of Lee hung above. The quilt on the bed was one under which Lafayette had once slept. After Montgomery, other cities claimed the ritual presence. The story was repeated. As a symbol of irrepressible principle, as the vicarious sufferer for his people, as the image of honor, Davis entered the hearts of his countrymen, to be called from city to city the eternal President of the City of the Soul into which the human disorder of the Confederate States of America had been mystically converted.

  There was one poor casualty in the midst of the glory. Davis’s daughter Winnie (Varina Anne Jefferson Davis), now with her own burden of symbolism as “the Daughter of the Confederacy,” fell in love with a young man named Alfred Wilkinson. A successful lawyer in Syracuse, New York, he was refined, well educated, a gentleman with every virtue, every grace. He was a grandson of the Reverend Mr. Samuel J. May, an abolitionist, but now Wilkinson was visiting Beauvoir, where he was received with the utmost hospitality. He had come to ask for Winnie’s hand, but how could Davis accept him as a son-in-law? How could the Daughter of the Confederacy betray her constituency ? Winnie bowed to her father’s wishes. Davis, forgetting the passion that he and little Knox Taylor had known—and the passion that he and Varina had shared, and all the illusions of love that surpass reality—entered his world of private abstraction. He died shortly thereafter, on December 6, 1889. Winnie fell into a decline, never knew love again, took to writing novels and biographies, and died on September 18, 1898, at the age of thirty-four, perhaps the last casualty of the Civil War.

  WHEN Davis was in his last illness, a movement was initiated in Congress to revoke the civil disabilities that his career had earned him, but a combination of old rancor and political timidity prevailed, even though a poll among Union veterans who had heard the rebel yell and survived showed that they, at least, were beyond rancor or political calculation. In 1975, citizenship was finally restored to Lee. The following year, on January 25th, Senator Mark Hatfield, of Oregon, introduced Senate Joint Resolution 16, to return citizenship to Jefferson Davis, in order to right, as he put it, a “glaring injustice in the history of the United States.” Hatfield quoted the words of Chief Justice Chase: “If you bring these leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution secession is not rebellion. We cannot convict him of treason.” And the Senator continued with a quotation from Davis, saying, “In his memoirs, Davis declared it his purpose to ‘keep the memory of our Southern heroes green, for they belong not to us alone: they belong to the whole country: they belong to America. ‘ “ Hatfield added, “I seek to keep his memory green, and to restore to him the rights due an outstanding American.” The resolution passed unanimously, by voice vote, and, on October 17, 1978, was signed into law by President Carter.

  It cannot be said that enthusiasm for keeping the memory of the “outstanding American” green swept the country. The event made at best a brief news note on a back page—except, that is, in Todd County, Kentucky, where Davis was born. And even there, no doubt, the enthusiasm, in the face of inflation and gasoline prices and the struggle for daily bread, was generally confined to the local historical society, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Jefferson Davis Birthplace Association, and a hard core of civic-minded citizens.

  The little park, of course, had already been established, and in 1924 the obelisk had been completed and, on June 7th, dedicated. The replica of the partly clapboarded log cabin of Samuel Davis had been dedicated October 1 7th of that year. The dedication of the monument had apparently given occasion for a rural festival, scarcely noticed in the press, but when, not long afterward, I revisited the site, bearing with me some vestiges of the near-forgotten puzzlement provoked by the old man under the cedar tree, it was a deserted spot with a struggling greensward, marked here and there by thistle and mullein, facing a street of rather unpretentious and sometimes decrepit houses.

  This was the picture I had carried in my head over half a dozen years of absence. On returning to the region, I remember, I was able to see to the north, from certain points on the highway between my home town and Hopkinsville, the seat of Christian County, a faint white finger pointing skyward. Occasionally, I wondered, with some sort of embarrassed irony, what Jefferson Davis would have thought if he had known that in December of 1923, as the monument was nearing completion, the Ku Klux Klan had been allowed to burn a great cross above the structure being reared in his honor. In justice, I should add that that was the only activity in Todd County of the Klan in my memory, though in the violent period after the Civil War the region around Fair-view had been rather notable for the strength of the organization. And I never knew of any Klan performances in my natal section, the two lynchings I can think of that took place there being of a more informal order,

  THE celebration of the restoration of Jefferson Davis’s citizenship was set for May 31, 1979, and the first three days of June, June 3rd being the birthday of the county’s most famous citizen. In Todd County, the atmosphere of celebration was thickened by the fact that June 2nd was the centennial of the official founding of the town of Guthrie. So there was both competition and fusion in the festivities of the week.

  The preface to the main event concerning Davis—the celebration of his birthday on June 3rd—was in the form of a drama presenting the more significant events of the life of the subject, from childhood to the release from prison. The script was prepared by Rebecca Williams and Mary Helen Adams, citizens of Hopkinsville with dramatic ambition and gifts, and presented by the Pennyrile Players (Pennyroyal being the name of that region of the state). Interspersed between scenes of immediate dramatic interest were lyrics and ballads to give atmosphere or provide information not suitable for direct handling. The stage was set up on an asphalt parking area some distance behind the monument, in an area with enough slope to afford good visibility for spectators. The stage itself was in three sections, the first (stage right) and the third (stage left) being four or five feet from ground level, and the middle amost at ground level—an arrangement that worked well to provide a fluid continuity of action when that was desirable. The back wall of the first section was painted to resemble masonry (as for the Cell in Fortress Monroe)} the second was backed by a dark-red fabric of no particular definition; and the third was furnished as a kind of drawing room, with period portraits on the walls, and windows painted on to give an impression of distance beyond. Before each of the performances (on three successive nights), eight young men, four in Confederate gray and four in Union blue, bearing arms, marched back and forth across the rear of the area of seating in the open-air theatre.

  The presentations went forward against certain difficulties. Rain had interfered with rehearsals; in fact, the opening of the play was the first dress rehearsal. As for costumes, marks of military rank were sometimes a hodgepodge; for instance, the rating on the sleeve of Davis as a cadet at West Point was the same as that on the sleeve of his instructor. More important—though this problem was to an extent ingeniously remedied by the Pennyrile Players—was the State Department of Parks’ failure (or so it was reported) to make good on the promise of a stage with proper lighting and sound equipment. There was an excess of sound in a few respects: in non-battle scenes an almost constant effect of musketry was achieved by a busy machine for popping corn; in addition, certain members of the Pennyrile Players who were not in the present production entered into enthusiastic discussion of one in which they were to participate—”Oklahoma!” There was, of course, the usual quota of young children crunching bags of potato chips, giggling, punching each other, dragging chairs about, and otherwise delighting their parents.

  On the first night, in spite of the valiant and not untalented work of the cast—especially of Paul Meier, who played the character of Jefferson Davis—the reception was, though not tepid, short of an ovation. That night, the audience totalled about a hundred, including twenty-odd grade-school children (probably dragged there against their will), a few teen-agers, and forty-odd spectators well into middle age, with the remainder between twenty-five and forty. To judge from the license plates in the parking lot, a considerable majority of the audience was from Christian County, the home of the Pennyrile Players, and there was only one person identifiably from Guthrie (which was no doubt bemused by its own celebration). In general, the audience seemed to be middle-class, with a generous sprinkling of professional people. As might have been expected from the subject, there were no blacks in the audience—though there was one on the stage.

  The second performance, on June 1st, drew a somewhat larger audience, although children, like the hero of the play, seemed to have been vigorous in asserting their constitutional rights and had stayed at home, and teenagers, few the night before, had almost reached the vanishing point, too. But citizens of Guthrie had increased by a hundred per cent: there were two. The audience, now predominantly middle-aged, did make effective protest about the offstage musketry, but when this was quieted some brass-bellied bullfrogs took over, like drunken brigadiers giving incoherent orders from a dugout—an occurrence not unknown to the Civil War. There was also an increase in appreciation the second night—in fact, an ovation.

  But the commemoration of the valor and steadfastness of Jefferson Davis did not end with that. Once the not large audience had cleared away, there was a celebration more to the public taste—and one that might have been more to the taste of the young lieutenant who once swirled the lissome squaw into a waltz. A square dance began on the blacktop to the left of the monument. The dancers, generally clothed in jeans and tank tops, were the young set who had been absent from the play that night, and who would also be absent from the more serious celebration of the birthday. And why not? Had Jefferson Davis earlier been more than a name to most of them—if that? Mixed with the young were a few elderly couples, seeming out of place, whether they knew about Jefferson Davis or not. But they did know about the calls and the figures; probably they were square-dance buffs, drawn to any event that might provide dancing.

  The third night was a disaster. The audience, probably because of word-of-mouth advertising, had increased to about two hundred, the majority now with raincoats or umbrellas, for the sky was lowering. The most Spartan and patriotic stayed on after rain began, among them an elderly couple with a black poodle that sat on its master’s lap and paid close attention. The rain grew worse. Last-ditchers huddled under plastic or under a quilt snatched from an early scene. But they, too, were forced to retreat, and the play was called. In the protection of one of the improvised shelters, a stocky twenty-year-old—why there to begin with, God knows—kept wishing he was home with TV and a case of beer handy. Put yourself in his place, and be not one to cast the first stone when the rain beats down on Kentucky. On this third night, after the downpour had passed, the Jefferson Davis Ball took place at the Todd County Central High School, in Elkton, the county seat (a rather charming old town, not yet undone by time and progress). The inclement weather had its effect. Only twenty-five couples turned up (maintaining their courage, no doubt, from brown paper sacks containing bottles). The dancers scarcely outnumbered the orchestra provided for the occasion.

  Another celebration—of the centennial of the founding of Guthrie—had occurred earlier in the day. It included, among various events, one from near-pioneer days—a demonstration of old-fashioned soapmaking. Above this activity hung a copy of a handed-down “re-ceet” giving full information for “clothes bilin”:

  1. Bild fire in backyard to het kettle of rain water.

  2. Set tubs so smoke won’t blow in eyes if wind is pert.

  3. Shave 1 hole cake of lie sope in bilin water.

  4. Sort things. Make three piles, 1 pile white, 1 pile cullord, 1 pile britches and rags.

  5. Stur flour in cold water to smooth, then thin down with bilin water.

  6. Rub dirty spots on board. Scrub hard. Then bile. Rub cullord but don’t bile. Just rench and starch.