HOME (1843) vessel helped free slaves on Underground Railroad

 

Shipwrecked Great Lakes schooner 'Home'

Great Lakes vessels helped free slaves on Underground Railroad 

 Wisconsin Maritime Museum

Abigail DiazFor USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

In 1843, a two-masted schooner was built in Sandusky, Ohio. Unbeknownst to its builder or Chicagoan owners, this vessel was fated to impact the Great Lakes maritime landscape for more than a century to come. Built to carry grain and lumber around the Great Lakes, Home soon took on a different role.

In the mid-1800s, Sandusky was a bustling port with ships coming and going often, heading to destinations throughout the U.S. and Canada; these maritime connections made the city an ideal place for an Underground Railroad hub. The Maritime Museum of Sandusky estimates that 30 to 50 enslaved people arrived in Sandusky daily.

Despite the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which made assisting enslaved people to freedom illegal, there were brave men and women, both white and Black, who continued to fight for the end of slavery. The captain of the schooner Home was one such man.

As an abolitionist, Captain James Nugent was active in the Underground Railroad. Though his activities aboard Home were never confirmed, various historical records tell of these daring escapades to sneak enslaved people across the border. His name is listed as an operator in "The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom." In 1852, Captain Nugent’s role as a conductor was documented when he aided runaways from Detroit to Canada.

Captain Nugent wasn’t alone in his convictions. Many Wisconsinites felt compelled to help. Separated from Canada by the Great Lakes, schooners and steamers were used to expedite escape. Joshua Glover fled to Wisconsin in 1852. He was discovered and jailed in Milwaukee, but abolitionists broke down the doors to free him. After hiding in Waukesha, he boarded a steamer in Racine and lived out his life in Canada as a free man.

More than ships were involved in the maritime Underground Railroad. As freedom-seekers raced the border, they followed the waterways. Lighthouses, like the Grand River Light, were safe harbors for runaways.

The passenger steamers like Niagara, operated by General Charles Reed, were also known as a safe refuge for those seeking to escape slavery. Reed employed Black people on his vessels, which enabled those escaping to pass for workers until they reached Canada. He would dock in Racine, Wisconsin, to pick up fugitives, allowing free passage north. Captain Appleby, using his vessel Sultana, was another famed abolitionist.

Though white citizens helped with the Underground Railroad, it was largely organized and operated by Black people, either free people living in the North or formerly enslaved people like Harriet Tubman. Joel Stone, in his book on passenger steamships, discusses notable examples from the Great Lakes region. George DeBaptiste, a free Black man in Detroit, was a leader of this movement. He purchased the steamer T. Whitney to better help move people to freedom. William Wells Brown was employed as a porter on various streamers and claims to have helped 69 runaways reach Canada.

The Sultana

The Niagra

According to research from underwater archaeologists Keith Meverden and Tamara Thomsen, Great Lakes vessels like Arrow, United States, Mayflower and Bay City were known to be involved in the Underground Railroad because they were caught. It’s almost impossible to know which vessels were involved in the network if they were successful. Today, we read through personal accounts of escapees and abolitionists to better understand the ways in which the Great Lakes maritime community aided enslaved people.

Fairport Lighthouse 

 Fairport Lighthouse was a vital part of the underground railroad.

FDA approves genetically engineered pigs for food and transplants

 

  By Rachael Rettner - Senior Writer

  Pigs that have been genetically engineered to be free of a molecule that triggers meat allergies have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

On Monday (Dec. 14), the agency approved these swine, known as GalSafe pigs, for both human food consumption and potential therapeutic purposes, such as use in xenotransplantation (or transplants of pig tissues to people). It's the first time that a genetically engineered animal has been approved for both food and medical uses, the FDA said.

"Today's first ever approval of an animal biotechnology product for both food and as a potential source for biomedical use represents a tremendous milestone for scientific innovation," FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, said in a statement.

Scientists have genetically altered the GalSafe pigs so they lack a sugar molecule called alpha-gal, which is normally found in the tissue of some mammals, including pigs, cows and sheep. People with a meat allergy known as alpha-gal syndrome can develop serious, life-threatening reactions if they are exposed to this molecule. It's thought that people develop this meat allergy after being bitten by certain ticks, which have alpha-gal in their saliva.

This genetic alteration could also make the GalSafe pigs useful for xenotransplants, because alpha-gal is thought to cause tissue and organ rejection in people who receive these transplants, the agency said.

The FDA determined that GalSafe pigs were safe to eat and that they did not have detectable levels of alpha-gal in their tissues. However, the agency didn't evaluate whether they actually prevent meat allergies. In addition, the agency noted that any companies that want to use these pigs in medical products would need to gain separate approval from the FDA for those medical uses.

The company that makes GalSafe pigs, Revivicor Inc., said that they initially plan to sell meat from GalSafe pigs by mail order, rather than in supermarkets, according to the FDA statement.

GalSafe pigs are not the first genetically engineered animals approved for human consumption. In 2015, the FDA approved a type of salmon, known as AquAdvantage, which was genetically engineered to have a faster growth rate, according to STAT News. But in that case, the approval was for food use only, and not medical uses.

Originally published on Live Science.

Hurricane and Brierfield Plantations

Hurricane Plantation located near Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the home of Joseph Emory Davis (1784–1870), the oldest brother of Jefferson Davis. Located on a peninsula of the Mississippi River in Warren County, Mississippi, called Davis Bend after its owner, Hurricane Plantation at its peak in the antebellum era comprised more than 5,000 acres (20 km2) with approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) of river frontage worked by hundreds of slaves. Joseph Davis owned 346 slaves and had a personal worth of more than $600,000 in the 1860 U.S. Census, making him one of the wealthiest men in the state of Mississippi.

The mansion at Hurricane was a three-story main house with two large semi-detached wings for entertaining, and a detached library. It contained indoor plumbing and an early form of air conditioning. There were also numerous outbuildings typical of a plantation of that scale. The residence was described in detail by Varina Davis (Jefferson Davis's second wife), in a memoir of her husband.{Davis, Varina (1890). "Jefferson Davis, A Memoir". New York: Belford Company. Retrieved June 21, 2012.}

Jefferson Davis

Joseph Davis had served as surrogate father and de facto guardian for his brother Jefferson Davis, who was 23 years younger. In the 1830s, Joseph Davis gave Jefferson the full use of more than 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) adjoining Hurricane. Jefferson Davis developed a plantation here, naming it Brierfield. Specific details of the arrangement are uncertain, as Joseph Davis retained ownership of the land. Jefferson Davis, and later his second wife and children with him, occupied Brierfield until the beginning of the Civil War in 1861.

Brierfield

After the fall of New Orleans to Federal troops and the increasing military presence near Vicksburg, Davis relocated from Hurricane Plantation with members of his family and some of his slaves to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The main house of Hurricane Plantation was burned by Federal troops in 1862, and the plantation looted numerous times by both armies during the campaign of Vicksburg. Only the library, a building independent of the main house, survived the war.

After the war Joseph Davis sold the property to Ben Montgomery, a former slave whom he had promoted before the war as manager of his plantation, and a group of freedmen. They financed the sale by a long-term note. Davis died in 1870. He was buried in the Davis Family cemetery on Davis Island, but his gravestone has been damaged.

He had several legally acknowledged illegitimate daughters, but no legitimate children. His heirs foreclosed on the note with Montgomery & Sons, after they were unable to make payments due to declining cotton prices and losses because of years of floods (1867, 1868, 1871, and 1874) that damaged the property. Montgomery died in 1877.

Confusion as to the titles of the Hurricane and Brierfield properties led to lawsuits for control between Jefferson Davis and his brother's heirs. Jefferson ultimately gained title to the Brierfield property in 1878 but never lived there again. Joseph Davis's grandchildren (from one of his legally acknowledged illegitimate daughters) received Hurricane.

A canal had been cut across the peninsula for flood control. It was claimed by the Mississippi River in 1867 as the main channel when a major flood changed its route. The former peninsula was renamed as Davis Island.

The main buildings of Brierfield Plantation {Brierfield Plantation was a large forced-labor cotton farm in Davis Bend, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg and the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The use of the plantation, with more than 1,000 acres, was given to Davis by his much older brother, Joseph E. Davis (1784-1870); it had previously been a part of Joseph Davis's much larger Hurricane plantation which it adjoined on a bend of the Mississippi River twenty miles from Vicksburg. With his brother's financial assistance and the forced labor of enslaved people, Jefferson Davis became a successful planter on the acreage following his brief first marriage to Sarah Knox Taylor ; after his second marriage to Varina Banks Howell in 1845, Davis erected a large comfortable frame house on the property that was home to himself, his wife, their children, as well as Davis's widowed sister and other relatives.} burned down in 1931. Despite increasing damage from floods, the Davis family retained the properties until 1953. It was sold and quickly flipped to a lawyer from Vidalia, Louisiana, who reserved it for hunting. He and his family established the Brierfield Hunting Club, so private that it has people come by invitation only.

Jefferson Davis (1808-1889)

by Lynda Lasswell Crist

Jefferson Davis, born in Kentucky on June 3, 1808, always considered Mississippi his true home. He represented Mississippi in Washington and in the Mexican War over a period of fifteen years, and spent another four years as president of the Confederate States of America, of which Mississippi was a part.

Davis and Mississippi grew up together. He arrived as a small child before Mississippi’s statehood in 1817, his memories beginning at Rosemont, a modest plantation in Wilkinson County near Woodville. At age eight, he left to attend boarding school at St. Thomas College near Springfield, Kentucky, returned to Mississippi two years later to enter Jefferson College in Adams County, and, in 1823, Davis enrolled at Transylvania University in Kentucky.

In 1824 two important events occurred in his life: his father died, and he entered the United States Military Academy in West Point at the urging of his much-older brother, Joseph E. Davis, whose political connections had secured the appointment. Joseph immediately assumed their father’s role in Jefferson’s life and became his mentor and most loyal supporter, in many ways shaping his destiny.

Early military career

At West Point Davis forged enduring friendships with men who became his fellow officers in the Mexican War and became generals on both sides in the American Civil War. Far from being the serious public servant of his adulthood, Davis was a carefree, fun-loving student. He racked up quite a record of demerits – firing his musket from his window, having long hair at inspection, skipping class and chapel, and other misconduct. Davis finished in the bottom third of his class. He was arrested once for being at a local tavern, and narrowly escaped dismissal from West Point for participating in the notorious “eggnog riot” in which inebriated cadets became riotous at a holiday party in Davis’s barracks. Despite his misdeeds, he graduated in 1828 as a second lieutenant of infantry and was posted to various frontier stations in Missouri, Illinois, and in Iowa and Wisconsin territories.

Another watershed year came in 1835 for the twenty-seven-year-old Mississippian. He had not yet decided on a career and strongly considered pursuing legal studies, but instead he married and left the army. His bride was Sarah Knox Taylor, the comely, youngest daughter of Zachary Taylor, one of his superior officers and a future United States president. The Taylors opposed the marriage, knowing military family life was beset with difficulties, but they soon realized that their daughter and Davis were determined to marry. After a June wedding, the newlyweds planned to begin life together on land provided by his brother Joseph. Then, tragedy struck. Sarah Davis died of malaria in September at Locust Grove plantation near Bayou Sara, Louisiana. Davis himself was desperately ill and was so devastated by sorrow that he became a virtual hermit at his plantation.

Named for the tangled wilderness it was in 1835, Brierfield was about 800 acres, located on Davis Bend on the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg, Mississippi. For eight years Davis worked alongside his slaves to improve the place, relying mainly on them and his brother Joseph, his closest neighbor, for companionship. In 1838, the young widower traveled to Washington, D. C., for a few months, thinking he might return to the army, but he soon returned to Brierfield. On the adjoining Hurricane plantation, Joseph Davis maintained a luxurious lifestyle, had an excellent library, and was always in touch with local and national politics. He had extensive connections with important people and was a worthy partner in debating events of the day. Five years later, prompted by his brother, Jefferson Davis entered politics for the first time.

Congressional career

Davis ran unsuccessfully for the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat in a predominantly Whig county. Nevertheless, he gained valuable experience on the campaign trail and the following year traveled and spoke for the Democratic slate. In 1845 he was rewarded with election to the U. S. Congress and took his new wife with him to Washington.

Joseph Davis had engineered his brother’s match to Varina Banks Howell (1826-1906), the well-educated and vivacious daughter of a Natchez businessman. Her mother was only two years older than the groom, and once again, the bride’s parents were less than enthusiastic. Eventually they agreed to the match and the two wed at The Briars, the Howell family home. It was a marriage destined to last over forty tumultuous years. The Davises had four sons and two daughters, born between 1852 and 1864.

Jefferson Davis was a conscientious congressman and an avid participant in House debates, but was only in Washington for seven months before duty to his state led him to a position he did not seek. He was elected colonel of the First Mississippi Regiment, which was headed to the war with Mexico. By subjecting his men to strict discipline and military rules, he molded them into an effective fighting unit that distinguished itself in the battles of Monterrey (September 1846) and Buena Vista (February 1847), both victories against a numerically superior foe. Davis was wounded at Buena Vista but refused to leave the battlefield until success was assured.

He returned to Mississippi, and as a wounded war hero was a popular choice to fill a vacancy in the U. S. Senate in the summer of 1847. When Congress was not in session, Davis traveled the length and breadth of Mississippi on speaking tours. He worked dawn to dusk, at home and in Washington, until 1851. At the last minute of a crucial governor’s contest, the Democratic State Rights candidate John A. Quitman withdrew from the race, and Davis was asked to become the Democratic candidate. Davis accepted the nomination and resigned his seat in the Senate, but lost in the November election to Henry Stuart Foote, the Union Party candidate. It was the last time he ever lost a bid for office and he seemed glad to relinquish public life for awhile. He resumed planting at Brierfield and was surprised when a Mexican War friend, president-elect Franklin Pierce, asked him to head the War Department, now called the Department of Defense.

Once more, in 1853, the Davises moved to Washington, residing there more or less full-time until January 1861. While Davis was busy at work, Varina Davis enjoyed the social life and educational possibilities of the nation’s capital. As secretary of war, Davis took a personal interest in a myriad of projects: enlarging and raising pay for the army; improvement of the West Point curriculum; surveying routes for a railroad to the Pacific; expanding and moving westward the “chain of forts” to protect settlers; enlarging the Capitol; construction of the Washington aqueduct; improvement of national defenses, especially rivers and harbors; importing camels for army transportation in the West; developing scientific advances in weaponry; sending the first-ever military commission abroad to observe European armies in the Crimean War; and, all the while, serving as one of the president’s closest advisers on domestic policies.

At the end of President Pierce’s term in 1857, Davis was re-elected to his favorite spot, a seat in the U. S. Senate where he advocated a strict interpretation of the Constitution. In the period leading up to the American Civil War, Davis was a prominent spokesman for the South, but a moderate one, never calling for war and laboring to keep the Union together until Mississippi seceded from the Union in January 1861. Davis resigned his Senate seat and returned home, sick at heart. He accepted the position of major general to command the state’s army and prepare the state for defense. Never one to think that the United States would allow the seceded states to leave in peace, he foresaw a terrible conflict – as he phrased it, “troubles and thorns innumerable.”

President of Confederate States

Inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1861. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints & Photograph Division, LC-USZC4-1498

The major general was tending his garden at Brierfield when the news came of his election as president of the Confederate States of America. Varina Davis would later write that she thought surely some family member had died when she saw his reaction to the telegram. Duty-bound, he left the next day for Montgomery, Alabama, to accept the presidency. Davis was chosen as president because no other southerner had a military and political record equal to his.

As the only president of the Confederacy, Davis was in a unique situation as he struggled to run a war and, simultaneously, to mold a new country. Like his northern counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, Davis had epic struggles with his army commanders, the state governors, and Congress. Unlike Lincoln, he lacked the essential resources to ensure success. During the four-year war, he mourned Confederate losses, especially the deaths of many friends and family members in military service. After Robert E. Lee surrendered the main Confederate army on April 9, 1865, Davis was captured in May while trying to make his way across the Mississippi River to lead southern forces that had not yet surrendered.

Indicted for treason and imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, Virginia, Davis endured solitary confinement and limited contact with the world beyond the fort, his health and morale declining until his release in May 1867. He was now a man without a country, had no salary or savings, and had no home because Brierfield had been seized by Union troops in 1862 and sold in 1866. Along with thousands of others, he had gambled all and lost all on the Confederacy. With a wife and four children age three to twelve to provide for (two sons had died), he lived in Canada and England, hoping to find a suitable job. Finally, in 1869 he agreed to be president of a Memphis, Tennessee, life insurance company and lived there until the mid-1870s.

Beauvoir

His fortunes changed in 1876. A longtime admirer, Sarah Ellis Dorsey, offered him a cottage on her seaside estate near Biloxi, Mississippi, as a place to write his memoirs of the war. There, Jefferson Davis was home at last. He loved Beauvoir, a property that provided welcome peace and quiet. The property became his when Dorsey bequeathed it to him in her will. During the 1880s he penned his two-volume memoir of the war, along with another book and several magazine articles. He and Varina Davis, who helped him with writing, entertained rafts of visitors, and they regained ownership of Brierfield after a long legal battle. Davis resumed extensive traveling, speaking mainly at Confederate veterans’ events.

In November 1889 he fell ill at Brierfield and died in New Orleans on December 6, most likely of pneumonia. Before an estimated crowd of 200,000 people – the South’s largest funeral – he was interred in Metairie Cemetery in Louisiana, and in 1893, re-interred in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital identified with his most famous political years.

Lynda Lasswell Crist is editor and project director, The Papers of Jefferson Davis at Rice University.

Posted April 2008

Selected bibliography:

Cooper Jr., William J. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Davis, Jefferson. Essential Writings. Edited by William J. Cooper Jr. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

____ . Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches. Edited by Dunbar Rowland. 10 vols. Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923.

____ . The Papers of Jefferson Davis. Edited by Haskell M. Monroe et al. 11 vols. to date. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

____ . The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1881.

Davis, Varina Howell. Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife. 2 vols. New York: Belford, 1890.

Davis, William C. Jefferson Davis, the Man and His Hour. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Vandiver, Frank E. Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1970.

Related website:

http://www.beauvoir.org

Sources

 Davis, Varina (1890). "Jefferson Davis, A Memoir". New York: Belford Company. Retrieved June 21, 2012.

 Brian Hamilton, "Davis Island: A Confederate Shrine, Submerged", Edge Effects, 9 October 2014, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 "Historical Markers Placed By MSSDAR". Daughters of the American Revolution. Archived from the original on 2013-03-27. Retrieved 2013-08-07.

Jefferson Davis

 

Jefferson Davis (1808-1889)

by Lynda Lasswell Crist

Jefferson Davis, born in Kentucky on June 3, 1808, always considered Mississippi his true home. He represented Mississippi in Washington and in the Mexican War over a period of fifteen years, and spent another four years as president of the Confederate States of America, of which Mississippi was a part.

Davis and Mississippi grew up together. He arrived as a small child before Mississippi’s statehood in 1817, his memories beginning at Rosemont, a modest plantation in Wilkinson County near Woodville. At age eight, he left to attend boarding school at St. Thomas College near Springfield, Kentucky, returned to Mississippi two years later to enter Jefferson College in Adams County, and, in 1823, Davis enrolled at Transylvania University in Kentucky.

In 1824 two important events occurred in his life: his father died, and he entered the United States Military Academy in West Point at the urging of his much-older brother, Joseph E. Davis, whose political connections had secured the appointment. Joseph immediately assumed their father’s role in Jefferson’s life and became his mentor and most loyal supporter, in many ways shaping his destiny.

Early military career

At West Point Davis forged enduring friendships with men who became his fellow officers in the Mexican War and became generals on both sides in the American Civil War. Far from being the serious public servant of his adulthood, Davis was a carefree, fun-loving student. He racked up quite a record of demerits – firing his musket from his window, having long hair at inspection, skipping class and chapel, and other misconduct. Davis finished in the bottom third of his class. He was arrested once for being at a local tavern, and narrowly escaped dismissal from West Point for participating in the notorious “eggnog riot” in which inebriated cadets became riotous at a holiday party in Davis’s barracks. Despite his misdeeds, he graduated in 1828 as a second lieutenant of infantry and was posted to various frontier stations in Missouri, Illinois, and in Iowa and Wisconsin territories.

Another watershed year came in 1835 for the twenty-seven-year-old Mississippian. He had not yet decided on a career and strongly considered pursuing legal studies, but instead he married and left the army. His bride was Sarah Knox Taylor, the comely, youngest daughter of Zachary Taylor, one of his superior officers and a future United States president. The Taylors opposed the marriage, knowing military family life was beset with difficulties, but they soon realized that their daughter and Davis were determined to marry. After a June wedding, the newlyweds planned to begin life together on land provided by his brother Joseph. Then, tragedy struck. Sarah Davis died of malaria in September at Locust Grove plantation near Bayou Sara, Louisiana. Davis himself was desperately ill and was so devastated by sorrow that he became a virtual hermit at his plantation.

Named for the tangled wilderness it was in 1835, Brierfield was about 800 acres, located on Davis Bend on the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg, Mississippi. For eight years Davis worked alongside his slaves to improve the place, relying mainly on them and his brother Joseph, his closest neighbor, for companionship. In 1838, the young widower traveled to Washington, D. C., for a few months, thinking he might return to the army, but he soon returned to Brierfield. On the adjoining Hurricane plantation, Joseph Davis maintained a luxurious lifestyle, had an excellent library, and was always in touch with local and national politics. He had extensive connections with important people and was a worthy partner in debating events of the day. Five years later, prompted by his brother, Jefferson Davis entered politics for the first time.

Congressional career

Davis ran unsuccessfully for the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat in a predominantly Whig county. Nevertheless, he gained valuable experience on the campaign trail and the following year traveled and spoke for the Democratic slate. In 1845 he was rewarded with election to the U. S. Congress and took his new wife with him to Washington.

Joseph Davis had engineered his brother’s match to Varina Banks Howell (1826-1906), the well-educated and vivacious daughter of a Natchez businessman. Her mother was only two years older than the groom, and once again, the bride’s parents were less than enthusiastic. Eventually they agreed to the match and the two wed at The Briars, the Howell family home. It was a marriage destined to last over forty tumultuous years. The Davises had four sons and two daughters, born between 1852 and 1864.

Jefferson Davis was a conscientious congressman and an avid participant in House debates, but was only in Washington for seven months before duty to his state led him to a position he did not seek. He was elected colonel of the First Mississippi Regiment, which was headed to the war with Mexico. By subjecting his men to strict discipline and military rules, he molded them into an effective fighting unit that distinguished itself in the battles of Monterrey (September 1846) and Buena Vista (February 1847), both victories against a numerically superior foe. Davis was wounded at Buena Vista but refused to leave the battlefield until success was assured.

He returned to Mississippi, and as a wounded war hero was a popular choice to fill a vacancy in the U. S. Senate in the summer of 1847. When Congress was not in session, Davis traveled the length and breadth of Mississippi on speaking tours. He worked dawn to dusk, at home and in Washington, until 1851. At the last minute of a crucial governor’s contest, the Democratic State Rights candidate John A. Quitman withdrew from the race, and Davis was asked to become the Democratic candidate. Davis accepted the nomination and resigned his seat in the Senate, but lost in the November election to Henry Stuart Foote, the Union Party candidate. It was the last time he ever lost a bid for office and he seemed glad to relinquish public life for awhile. He resumed planting at Brierfield and was surprised when a Mexican War friend, president-elect Franklin Pierce, asked him to head the War Department, now called the Department of Defense.

Once more, in 1853, the Davises moved to Washington, residing there more or less full-time until January 1861. While Davis was busy at work, Varina Davis enjoyed the social life and educational possibilities of the nation’s capital. As secretary of war, Davis took a personal interest in a myriad of projects: enlarging and raising pay for the army; improvement of the West Point curriculum; surveying routes for a railroad to the Pacific; expanding and moving westward the “chain of forts” to protect settlers; enlarging the Capitol; construction of the Washington aqueduct; improvement of national defenses, especially rivers and harbors; importing camels for army transportation in the West; developing scientific advances in weaponry; sending the first-ever military commission abroad to observe European armies in the Crimean War; and, all the while, serving as one of the president’s closest advisers on domestic policies.

At the end of President Pierce’s term in 1857, Davis was re-elected to his favorite spot, a seat in the U. S. Senate where he advocated a strict interpretation of the Constitution. In the period leading up to the American Civil War, Davis was a prominent spokesman for the South, but a moderate one, never calling for war and laboring to keep the Union together until Mississippi seceded from the Union in January 1861. Davis resigned his Senate seat and returned home, sick at heart. He accepted the position of major general to command the state’s army and prepare the state for defense. Never one to think that the United States would allow the seceded states to leave in peace, he foresaw a terrible conflict – as he phrased it, “troubles and thorns innumerable.”

President of Confederate States

The major general was tending his garden at Brierfield when the news came of his election as president of the Confederate States of America. Varina Davis would later write that she thought surely some family member had died when she saw his reaction to the telegram. Duty-bound, he left the next day for Montgomery, Alabama, to accept the presidency. Davis was chosen as president because no other southerner had a military and political record equal to his.

As the only president of the Confederacy, Davis was in a unique situation as he struggled to run a war and, simultaneously, to mold a new country. Like his northern counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, Davis had epic struggles with his army commanders, the state governors, and Congress. Unlike Lincoln, he lacked the essential resources to ensure success. During the four-year war, he mourned Confederate losses, especially the deaths of many friends and family members in military service. After Robert E. Lee surrendered the main Confederate army on April 9, 1865, Davis was captured in May while trying to make his way across the Mississippi River to lead southern forces that had not yet surrendered.

Indicted for treason and imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, Virginia, Davis endured solitary confinement and limited contact with the world beyond the fort, his health and morale declining until his release in May 1867. He was now a man without a country, had no salary or savings, and had no home because Brierfield had been seized by Union troops in 1862 and sold in 1866. Along with thousands of others, he had gambled all and lost all on the Confederacy. With a wife and four children age three to twelve to provide for (two sons had died), he lived in Canada and England, hoping to find a suitable job. Finally, in 1869 he agreed to be president of a Memphis, Tennessee, life insurance company and lived there until the mid-1870s.

Beauvoir

His fortunes changed in 1876. A longtime admirer, Sarah Ellis Dorsey, offered him a cottage on her seaside estate near Biloxi, Mississippi, as a place to write his memoirs of the war. There, Jefferson Davis was home at last. He loved Beauvoir, a property that provided welcome peace and quiet. The property became his when Dorsey bequeathed it to him in her will. During the 1880s he penned his two-volume memoir of the war, along with another book and several magazine articles. He and Varina Davis, who helped him with writing, entertained rafts of visitors, and they regained ownership of Brierfield after a long legal battle. Davis resumed extensive traveling, speaking mainly at Confederate veterans’ events.

In November 1889 he fell ill at Brierfield and died in New Orleans on December 6, most likely of pneumonia. Before an estimated crowd of 200,000 people – the South’s largest funeral – he was interred in Metairie Cemetery in Louisiana, and in 1893, re-interred in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital identified with his most famous political years.

Lynda Lasswell Crist is editor and project director, The Papers of Jefferson Davis at Rice University.

Posted April 2008

Selected bibliography:

Cooper Jr., William J. Jefferson Davis, American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Davis, Jefferson. Essential Writings. Edited by William J. Cooper Jr. New York: Modern Library, 2003.

____ . Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches. Edited by Dunbar Rowland. 10 vols. Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923.

____ . The Papers of Jefferson Davis. Edited by Haskell M. Monroe et al. 11 vols. to date. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

____ . The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1881.

Davis, Varina Howell. Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife. 2 vols. New York: Belford, 1890.

Davis, William C. Jefferson Davis, the Man and His Hour. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Vandiver, Frank E. Their Tattered Flags: The Epic of the Confederacy. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1970.

Related website:

http://www.beauvoir.org

Ben Montgomery aka Benjamin Thornton Montgomery

 

Benjamin Thornton Montgomery (1819–1877) was an influential African-American inventor, landowner, and freedman in Mississippi. He was taught to read and write, and became manager of supply and shipping for Joseph Emory Davis at Hurricane Plantation at Davis Bend.

Ben Montgomery was born into slavery in 1819 in Loudoun County, Virginia. In 1837, he was sold south, and purchased in Natchez, Mississippi, by Joseph Emory Davis. The planter's much younger brother, Jefferson Davis, later became the President of the Confederate States of America.[1] Montgomery escaped but was recaptured. Davis reportedly "inquired closely into the cause of his dissatisfaction", whereby the two men reached a "mutual understanding" about Montgomery's situation.

Davis assigned Montgomery to run the general store of his plantation at Davis Bend. It was unusual for a slave to serve in this position.

Impressed with his knowledge and abilities to run the store, Davis placed Montgomery in charge of overseeing the entirety of his purchasing and shipping operations on the plantation.

On May 21, 1847, Montgomery's son, Isaiah Montgomery, was born to him and his wife. Due to Ben's favored position among the Davis Bend slaves, Isaiah was also given the opportunity of receiving an education. Montgomery maintained a close relationship with his son up until his death.

Montgomery learned a variety of skills, including reading, writing, land surveying, flood control, architectural design, machine repair, and steamboat navigation. Montgomery developed proficiencies in many areas; he became a skilled mechanic, not only repairing the advanced agricultural machinery acquired by the Davis brothers, but eventually applied for a patent for his design of a steam-operated propeller to provide propulsion to boats in shallow water.

The propeller could cut into the water at different angles, thus allowing the boat to navigate more easily through shallow water. This was not a new invention, but an improvement on similar designs invented by John Stevens in 1804 and John Ericsson in 1838.(U.S. Patent 588) On June 10, 1858, on the basis that Ben, as a slave, was not a citizen of the United States, and thus could not apply for a patent in his name, he was denied this patent application in a ruling by the United States Attorney General's office. It ruled that neither slaves nor their owners could receive patents on inventions devised by slaves.[citation needed] Later, both Joseph and Jefferson Davis attempted to patent the device in their names but were denied because they were not the "true inventor." After Jefferson Davis later was selected as President of the Confederacy, he signed into law the legislation that would allow slaves to receive patent protection for their inventions. On June 28, 1864, Montgomery, no longer a slave, filed a patent application for his device, but the patent office again rejected his application.

Joseph Davis allowed captive Africans on his plantation to retain money earned commercially, so long as they paid him for the labor they would have done as farmworkers. Thus, Montgomery was able to accumulate wealth, run a business, and create a personal library.

The Davis family left Davis Bend in 1862, ahead of oncoming troops from the Union Army. Montgomery assumed control of the plantation. Farming continued despite difficulties created by the war, such as attacks from the military forces of both sides.

Following the end of the American Civil War, Joseph Davis sold his plantation and property to Montgomery, in 1866, for the sum of $300,000 as part of a long-term loan.

In September 1867, Montgomery became the first Afro-American official elected in Mississippi, when he was elected justice of the peace of Davis Bend. Under his supervision, the plantation produced cotton judged to be the best in the world at an International Exposition in 1870.

With his son Isaiah, Montgomery established a general store known as Montgomery & Sons. Montgomery worked toward his lifelong dream of establishing a community for freed slaves. He never lived to see his dream come to fruition. Catastrophic floods ruined the crops and cut a channel across the peninsula, turning Davis Bend into an island. This added to the expenses of getting supplies to the plantation and crops to market. When Montgomery failed to make a payment on the loan in 1876, Davis Bend automatically reverted to the Davis family as per the terms of the original contract. Heartbroken, Montgomery died the next year.

After his father's death, Isaiah Montgomery worked to realize his dream. He purchased 840 acres (3.4 km2) between the Vicksburg and Memphis railroad lines in northwest Mississippi for the purpose of establishing the community of freed slaves his father dreamed of. Along with other former slaves, Isaiah Montgomery established the town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi; in 1887 and developed it as a majority African-American community.

 

Will Trump Burn the Evidence?

How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.

By Jill Lepore  November 16, 2020

Donald Trump is not much of a note-taker, and he does not like his staff to take notes. He has a habit of tearing up documents at the close of meetings. (Records analysts, armed with Scotch Tape, have tried to put the pieces back together.) No real record exists for five meetings Trump had with Vladimir Putin during the first two years of his Presidency. Members of his staff have routinely used apps that automatically erase text messages, and Trump often deletes his own tweets, notwithstanding a warning from the National Archives and Records Administration that doing so contravenes the Presidential Records Act.

Trump cannot abide documentation for fear of disclosure, and cannot abide disclosure for fear of disparagement. For decades, in private life, he required people who worked with him, and with the Trump Organization, to sign nondisclosure agreements, pledging never to say a bad word about him, his family, or his businesses. He also extracted nondisclosure agreements from women with whom he had or is alleged to have had sex, including both of his ex-wives. In 2015 and 2016, he required these contracts from people involved in his campaign, including a distributor of his “Make America Great Again” hats. (Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign required N.D.A.s from some employees, too. In 2020, Joe Biden called on Michael Bloomberg to release his former employees from such agreements.) In 2017, Trump, unable to distinguish between private life and public service, carried his practice of requiring nondisclosure agreements into the Presidency, demanding that senior White House staff sign N.D.A.s. According to the Washington Post, at least one of them, in draft form, included this language: “I understand that the United States Government or, upon completion of the term(s) of Mr. Donald J. Trump, an authorized representative of Mr. Trump, may seek any remedy available to enforce this Agreement including, but not limited to, application for a court order prohibiting disclosure of information in breach of this Agreement.” Aides warned him that, for White House employees, such agreements are likely not legally enforceable. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, refused to distribute them; eventually, he relented, and the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, pressured employees to sign them.

Those N.D.A.s haven’t stopped a small village’s worth of ex-Trump Cabinet members and staffers from blabbing about him, much to the President’s dismay. “When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don’t like that,” he told the Washington Post. In 2019, he tweeted, “I am currently suing various people for violating their confidentiality agreements.” Last year, a former campaign worker filed a class-action lawsuit that, if successful, would render void all campaign N.D.A.s. Trump has only stepped up the fight. Earlier suits were filed by Trump personally, or by his campaign, but, last month, the Department of Justice filed suit against Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for publishing a book, “Melania and Me,” about her time volunteering for the First Lady, arguing, astonishingly, that Wolkoff’s N.D.A. is “a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States.” (Unlike the suit against Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, relating to the publication of his book, “The Room Where It Happened,” there is no claim that anything in Wolkoff’s book is or was ever classified.) And Trump hasn’t stopped: last year, he required doctors and staff who treated him at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to sign N.D.A.s.

Hardly a day passes that Trump does not attempt to suppress evidence, as if all the world were in violation of an N.D.A. never to speak ill of him. He has sought to discredit publications and broadcasts that question him, investigations that expose him, crowds that protest him, polls that fail to favor him, and, down to the bitter end, ballots cast against him. None of this bodes well for the historical record and for the scheduled transfer of materials from the White House to the National Archives, on January 20, 2021. That morning, even as President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr., is ascending the steps of the Capitol, staffers from the archives will presumably be in the White House, unlocking doors, opening desks, packing boxes, and removing hard drives. What might be missing, that day, from file drawers and computer servers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is difficult to say. But records that were never kept, were later destroyed, or are being destroyed right now chronicle the day-to-day doings of one of the most consequential Presidencies in American history and might well include evidence of crimes, violations of the Constitution, and human-rights abuses. It took a very long time to establish rules governing the fate of Presidential records. Trump does not mind breaking rules and, in the course of a long life, has regularly done so with impunity. The Presidential Records Act isn’t easily enforceable. The Trump Presidency nearly destroyed the United States. Will what went on in the darker corners of his White House ever be known?

“The truth behind a President’s actions can be found only in his official papers,” Harry S. Truman said in 1949, “and every Presidential paper is official.” Truman became an advocate of archival preservation after learning about the fate of his predecessors’ papers. When George Washington left office, in 1797, he brought his papers back to Mount Vernon, but, loaned out, they were “extensively mutilated by rats and otherwise injured by damp”; eventually, they were carried by the historian Jared Sparks to Massachusetts, where Sparks threw out anything he didn’t like, scrapped what he found worthless, gave away much of the rest, and, beginning in 1837, published what he liked best as “The Writings of George Washington.”

For many years, there was no alternative for a departing President but to take his papers home with him; there wasn’t really any place to put them. Thomas Jefferson, “having no confidence that the office of the private secretary of the President of the U.S. will ever be a regular and safe deposit for public papers,” took pains to deposit many of his papers with his Cabinet departments. In 1810, Congress established a Committee on Ancient Public Records and Archives of the United States. It reported that the records of the federal government were “in a state of great disorder and exposure; and in a situation neither safe nor convenient nor honorable to the nation.” Congress took little action. In 1814, the congressional library burned to the ground.

Most of the papers of William Henry Harrison, the log-cabin candidate, succumbed to flames when that log cabin burned down. Those of both John Tyler and Zachary Taylor were largely destroyed during the Civil War. In 1853, when Millard Fillmore left the White House, he had his papers shipped to a mansion in Buffalo. He died in 1874, having made no provisions for the papers. When Fillmore’s only son died, in 1889, his will ordered his executors to “burn or otherwise effectively destroy all correspondence or letters to or from my father.” Only by the merest miracle were forty-four volumes of Fillmore’s Presidential-letter books found in an attic of a house, in 1908, and only because it was on the verge of being demolished.

Chester Arthur’s son had most of his father’s Presidential papers burned in three garbage cans. “The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk,” Ulysses S. Grant once said. For years after Grant’s Administration, scholars were able to locate hardly any of his Presidential papers. In 1888, Congress urged the Library of Congress to collect the papers of the Presidents. In the eighteen-nineties, the library established a Manuscript Division, and a historian who later became its chief began lobbying for the establishment of a National Archives; meanwhile, the American Historical Association formed a Public Archives Commission. In 1910, after the commission reported that “many of the records of the Government have in the past been lost or destroyed,” the A.H.A. petitioned Congress to build a depository. Congress authorized the funds, but no plan was undertaken until after the close of the First World War.

Grover Cleveland, during his two terms, preferred to communicate in person, leaving no paper trail. He insisted that the records of his Presidency were his personal property and, in 1886, refused to turn over papers that the Senate had demanded: “if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain.” (That is what, during the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, came to be called “executive privilege.”) Cleveland’s contention became a convention: the President’s papers belong to the President, who can deny requests for disclosure not only from the public but from other branches of the federal government. William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; his secretary held on to his papers until 1935, when he donated them to the Library of Congress, where they remained under his, and later his son’s, tight control until 1954. In 1924, a raft of papers from the Taft, Wilson, and Harding Administrations were found in the attic of the White House. Warren Harding’s Presidency was riven by scandal; after his death, his wife told the chief of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress that she had destroyed all his papers, although she had burned only those she thought “would harm his memory.” Most of the rest she left to the Harding Memorial Association. The Library of Congress acquired a cache of those and other papers in 1972, on the condition that they be closed to the public until 2014. (They turned out to include a thousand pages of love letters between Harding and his mistress. “Won’t you please destroy?” he wrote her in one letter. She did not destroy.) Calvin Coolidge instructed his private secretary to destroy all his personal files; on Coolidge’s death, the secretary said, “There would have been nothing preserved if I had not taken some things out on my own responsibility.”

In 1933, Herbert Hoover laid the cornerstone of the National Archives Building. “This temple of our history will appropriately be one of the most beautiful buildings in America, an expression of the American soul,” he said. A granite, marble, and limestone monument with two forty-foot bronze doors behind seventy-two Corinthian columns, it was built at the height of the Depression, a massive public-works project. In 1941, with Hitler in power in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke at its dedication:

To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women living in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgements in creating their own future.

Americans used to believe in those three things. Do they still?

Archives are ancient, but national archives, the official repositories of the records of a nation-state, date to the French Revolution: France established its Archives Nationales in 1790. Britain established what became a pillar of its National Archives in 1838. Newly independent nations have established national archives as part of the project of declaring independence: Argentina established what would become its national archive in 1821, Mexico in 1823, Brazil in 1838.

National archives uphold a particular vision of a nation and of its power, and, during transitions of power in nations that are not democratic, archives are not infrequently attacked. Most attacks involve the destruction of the evidence of atrocity. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888. Two years later, after a military coup, a minister of the new republic ordered the destruction of every document in any archive in the country which related to its history of slavery.

Richard Ovenden’s new book, “Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge,” is a litany of this sort of tragedy. “The preservation of information continues to be a key tool in the defense of open societies,” Ovenden, who runs the Bodleian Libraries, at Oxford, writes. unesco’s report “Lost Memory” is an inventory of inventories: a list of libraries and archives that were destroyed in the twentieth century, including the widespread devastations of the First and Second World Wars, the burning of some of the collections in the National Library in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, and the destruction of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, by the Bosnian Serb Army, in 1992. Libraries house books: copies. Archives store documents: originals. Archives cannot be replaced. As unesco’s report puts it, “The loss of archives is as serious as the loss of memory in a human being.”

All is not always lost. Officials of the British Empire set fire to entire archives as they left the colonies. In 1961, in Uganda, the objectives of what came to be known as Operation Legacy included the elimination of all documents that might “embarrass” Her Majesty’s government. Decades later, some three hundred boxes from Kenya and nearly nine thousand files from more than thirty other former British colonies, including Malta, Malaya, and the Bahamas, were discovered in a top-secret government fortress north of London. In 1992, guards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia burned to the ground the Central Archive of Abkhazia. But many of its documents had been microfilmed or photocopied, and these records were stored in other buildings. In 2005, Guatemalan officials conducting a safety inspection of a munitions depot came across the long-hidden records of the brutal force that was the National Police—an estimated eighty million pages, described by my Harvard colleague Kirsten Weld as “papers spilling forth from rusted file cabinets, heaped on dirt floors, in trash bags and grain sacks, shoved into every conceivable nook and cranny, moldy and rotting.” People have spent more than a decade preserving and organizing them.

Governments that commit atrocities against their own citizens regularly destroy their own archives. After the end of apartheid, South Africa’s new government organized a Truth and Reconciliation Commission because, as its report stated, “the former government deliberately and systematically destroyed a huge body of state records and documentation in an attempt to remove incriminating evidence and thereby sanitise the history of oppressive rule.” Unfortunately, the records of the commission have fared little better: the archive was restricted and shipped to the National Archives in Pretoria, where it remains to this day, largely uncatalogued and unprocessed; for ordinary South Africans, it’s almost entirely unusable. In the aftermath of the Trump Administration, the most elusive records won’t be those in the White House. If they exist, they’ll be far away, in and around detention centers, and will involve the least powerful: the families separated at the border, whose suffering federal officials inflicted, and proved so brutally indifferent to that they have lost track of what children belong to which parents, and how to find them.

In 1950, Truman signed the Federal Records Act, which required federal agencies to preserve their records. It did not require Presidents to save their papers, which remained, as ever, their personal property. In 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act, encouraging Presidents to deposit their papers in privately erected institutions—something that every President has done since F.D.R., who was also the first President to install a tape recorder in the White House, a method of record-keeping that was used by every President down to Richard M. Nixon.

The Presidential libraries are overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration. They were intended to be research centers, and include museums; and they serve, too, as monuments. The Barack Obama Presidential Library is the first Presidential library whose collections will be entirely digital—they will be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But the Presidential library, which started with F.D.R., may well end with Obama.

Donald Trump, if he decides that he wants a Presidential library, is far more likely to build a Presidential museum, or even a theme park, and would most likely build it in Florida. “I have a lot of locations, actually,” Trump said on NBC last year. Last month, an anonymous group from New York published its own plans for a Trump library at djtrumplibrary.com. Its exhibits include a Criminal Records Room and a Covid Memorial, just off the Alt-Right Auditorium. But, long before Trump gets around to designing an actual Trump Library, he is likely to run afoul of a struggle over Presidential records that began with Watergate and Nixon’s tapes.

In 1974, a special prosecutor subpoenaed the Nixon Administration for the Watergate tapes. The White House refused to comply. The case went to the Supreme Court. In United States v. Nixon, the Court devised a balancing test that measured the argument for executive privilege against the judiciary’s interest in criminal justice, and ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes on July 24, 1974. Fifteen days later, Nixon resigned, and proceeded to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration that would have allowed him to destroy the records of his Presidency. Congress then passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, which prohibited Nixon from destroying the tapes. Nixon sued but, in 1977, in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, he lost. Still, his legal battles continued into the nineteen-nineties.

To avoid all this happening all over again with another President, Congress in 1978 passed the Presidential Records Act. It puts Presidential records in the public domain; the public can see those records five years after the President leaves office, though a President can ask to extend those five years to twelve for material deemed sensitive. No longer are Presidential papers the private property of the President. The act also directs every White House to “take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are preserved and maintained as Presidential records.” What counts as “such records” has been much contested. The archivist of the United States is appointed by the President; the archivist cannot tell the President what to do or what to save but can only provide advice, which the President can simply ignore.

The Presidential Records Act was scheduled to go into effect on January 20, 1981, with the Inauguration of the next President, who turned out to be Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, decided to help Nixon, who was still fighting in court for control of the archives of his Presidency. The Reagan Administration aided the efforts of Nixon’s lawyers, who argued that the archivist of the United States has no discretion in evaluating claims of executive privilege but must, instead, defer to them without review. In 1988, in Public Citizen v. Burke, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled against Nixon and the Administration. The next year, Reagan left office, and his staff packed up his papers.