It hasn't been easy
getting people excited about celebrating the 200th birthday of that tall, gaunt, bearded, Kentucky-bred president who was
born in a log cabin and went on to lead his people through a bloody civil war.
No, not Abraham Lincoln. Last week, President
Bush himself helped kick off a two-year celebration of the Great Emancipator's Feb. 12, 2009, bicentennial that will include
dozens of events in Kentucky, Illinois, Washington and beyond.
It's that other tall, log cabin-born Kentuckian,
Jefferson Davis, whose 200th has turned out to be something of a lost cause.
"The response to date has been timid,"
acknowledges Bertram Hayes-Davis, head of the Davis Family Association and great-great-grandson of the only president of the
short-lived Confederate States of America. "Nobody has said no. Many haven't said yes."
Because Davis
was a former secretary of war, Hayes-Davis wrote to the Department of Defense to see if it was interested in participating
in some activity "to educate the public about the real Jefferson Davis." The agency didn't reply.
Even
Mississippi, the state where Davis made his plantation fortune and to which he retired after the war, gave the idea of commemorating
Davis a lukewarm reception. A bill to establish a commission "for the purpose of organizing and planning a celebration
in recognition of Jefferson Davis' 200th birthday" easily passed the House, only to die in the Senate appropriations
committee.
Oh, there will be a "Miss Confederacy" crowned during the June 7-8 festival at the Jefferson Davis
State Historic Site in Fairview, Ky., where a 351-foot concrete obelisk stands near the site of Davis' cabin birthplace.
But that's an annual event.
And on June 3, Davis' actual birthdate, the family will gather in Biloxi for the
rededication of Beauvoir House, the hip-roofed, Gulf-front mansion where Davis spent the last 12 years of his life and which
was nearly swept away by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
But the calendar of events is, well, a bit anemic — especially
compared to the hoopla surrounding the 16th president.
That's to be expected, says William J. Cooper, a professor
of history at Louisiana State University and author of Jefferson Davis, American.
Lincoln "saved the Union.
He emancipated the slaves. I mean, he won the war," Cooper says. "Fighting against Lincoln is, you know, fighting
against motherhood."
Forgotten history
Last week, Hayes-Davis stood on the Corinthian-columned portico of
the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery to re-enact the inaugural ceremony with which his ancestor formally severed the Southern
states from the federal government.
Hayes-Davis placed his right hand on the Alabama State Bible used in the original
swearing-in 147 years earlier.
He did not recite the oath but kissed the Bible as his ancestor did, turned to the crowd
and said: "So help me God."
The Davis family thinks it's a shame that all that most people know about
him was that he fought to preserve slavery.
"It's as if he created the entire institution and was solely responsible
for it," says Hayes-Davis, a 59-year-old banker from Colorado Springs, Colo. "And we struggle with that."
Most
people don't know that Davis was a West Point graduate who fought in the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor and married
the future president's daughter, Hayes-Davis says. As a U.S. senator from Mississippi, he had a hand in building the Smithsonian
Institution. He bolstered the nation's defenses as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce.
"The history
books, which are basically written in New York and Boston and whatever, have one sentence: 'Jefferson Davis elected president
of the Confederacy,' " his descendant complains.
Lee seen as more palatable
Historian James M. McPherson
concedes that Davis' antebellum career was "very illustrious." But he says his achievements as a soldier, senator
and secretary of war were "largely eclipsed" by his role in setting the stage for and then waging the bloodiest
war in this nation's history.
Davis, who disparagingly referred to his fellow Kentuckian as "His Majesty
Abraham the First," was what McPherson calls a "bitter-ender." When Lincoln allowed a journalist and a minister
through Union lines in July 1864 under a flag of truce to offer peace and amnesty to Davis, the Confederate president was
outraged.
McPherson, a Lincoln biographer who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War epic, Battle Cry of Freedom,
says some former Confederates, like Gen. Robert E. Lee, are palatable to modern Americans.
"Because Lee not only
emerged as the foremost icon and hero of the Civil War in the South, I think he also emerged in the postwar North and is seen
even today as somebody with more admirable qualities than Jefferson Davis," he says.
Davis comes across, McPherson
says, as an "unreconstructed rebel who never really accepted with anything like good grace the defeat of the Confederacy
and continued for the rest of his life to write and speak in a way that basically said, 'We were right. We lost this war,
not because we were wrong, but because the enemy was more powerful and more ruthless.' "
As for events this
year in connection with the bicentennial, biographer Cooper says he has no problem with descendants re-enacting Davis'
inauguration and the like.
"The Civil War is the central event in our nation's history, and Davis had a critical
part to play in that," Cooper says. "And not to study it makes no sense to me."
Just as long, he adds,
as commemoration does not become celebration.
