AN INTERVIEW WITH JEFFERSON DAVIS

[JMadonna]

(08-26-2013 06:55 PM)L Verge Wrote:  I think we have to give consideration to the fact that Davis specifically was clinging to his moral principles of upholding the values of the Confederacy to the end. Booth had written, "Right or wrong, God judge me." However, I think that many in the "Lost Cause" would have accepted that as their motto too.

IMO Davis was demented at the end of the war. With Lincoln re-elected he had no hope. In February of 1865 Lincoln had been ready to offer the southern states not only universal amnesty but four hundred million dollars in cash in return for their laying down their arms and ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment.

Davis was willing to put slaves into the fight at that point even though the Congress was not. Put simply then, Jefferson Davis’s primary objective at the conference was to secure the survival of the Confederacy as an independent nation.

His address at the African Church contained an unusually candid statement that assured his weary countrymen of his desire for peace and imparted to them how modest his demands at the conference had been. “Anything honorable, and recognizing our independence as a basis,” he told the crowd, “would have been gladly accepted.”

But if Confederate independence was his only demand, what did an “independent Confederacy” mean to Davis in February 1865?

In his interview with Blair, Davis acknowledged that a return of all Confederate territory lost during the war was out of the question - All that was left of the Confederacy was the territory Lee's army was starving on.

He was so committed to an abstract principle that he didn't realize it was already lost.

There is a consensus among historians that no one could have kept the Confederacy going as long as Jeff Davis. That may be true but a lot more people would have been alive at the end.