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Chapter 76: unwillingness to ask Pardon.—Mississippi anxious to send him to the Senate.
The policy of reconstruction devised by the victors of the
North, was that the men of the
Confederacy should pursue no vocation until a pardon had been asked of the
President of the
United States and granted by him. Our men considered it a form instituted merely for their humiliation, and as such complied with it as the means of feeding their helpless families, already spent with the hardships they had endured.
Necessitas non hzabet legem is a maxim acceded to by mankind, and he felt that the men who asked pardon did it for a holy and legitimate end. My husband, even in his letters from prison, combated the idea of our people expatriating themselves, and since they could not en masse move out of the country, and the pillar of cloud compassed but did not lead them by day or night, they must do the only thing left for them, try to forget in toil and the care of their families the misery which had settled over them and their people.
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Throughout all this period
Mr. Davis had endeavored to preserve silence about everything political, though letters came by hundreds asking his opinions on all political subjects.
As he had not asked pardon for an offence he had not committed, he was disfranchised, and as he could not be held responsible for acts in which he was forbidden by law to participate, his opinion, if given, would be perfunctory.
He therefore either declined to answer at all, or gave this reason for not doing so. So far, however, from being wounded by his disfranchisement, he felt rather proud that Congress had testified to the steady faith he had kept with his own people.
He had not changed his beliefs in the least degree, and had it been necessary, he would have taken the same course at any time of his life when his people had called him to cleave only unto them.
He therefore could not honestly express the contrition he did not feel.
So to the end, he who had served his country in tented field, and in the halls of legislation, and merited and received the acclaim of soldiers and the esteem of statesmen and legislators throughout the
United States, kept the dignified tenor of his way, unheeding the sectional clamor when his own conscience approved.
His asking for pardon
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as the leader of the
Confederacy would have been more significant than the petition of one who had held a less high position, and he would not sacrifice his convictions to expediency, even in seeming.
The people of
Mississippi, kind and trusting as of old to the man they had honored with their confidence, wished
Mr. Davis to allow his name to be used for the Senate.
They said, “The franchise is yours here, and the
Congress can but refuse you admission, and your exclusion will be a test question.”
Mr. Davis responded, “I remained in prison two years and hoped in vain for a trial, and now scenes of insult and violence, producing alienation between the sections, would be the only result of attempting another test.
I am too old to serve you as I once did, and too much enfeebled by suffering to maintain your cause.”
