"Jefferson Davis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to be cheated of half his scanty earnings by the nation for which he dies. The Rebels may be induced to concede the negro the rights of war, when we grant him the ordinary rights of peace, namely, to be paid the price agreed upon. Jefferson Davis and the London "Times"—one-half whose stock-in-trade is "the inveterate meanness of the Yankee"—will hardly be converted to sound morals by the rebukes of an administration which allows its Secretary of War to promise a black soldier ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... company. This man was Abraham Lincoln. Other men whose names loom large in American history were with the little army also. The commander of the regulars was Colonel Zachary Taylor. Among his lieutenants were Jefferson Davis and Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert Anderson, the defender of Fort Sumter in 1860, was a colonel of Illinois volunteers. It is said that the oath of allegiance was administered to young Lincoln by Lieutenant ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... which overleaps itself, rashness which hazards all on chances it cannot control, vast abilities not great enough to achieve the impossible. The plunge of Icarus into the sea, the murder of Caesar, the imprisonment of Coeur de Lion, the abdication of Napoleon, the apprehension as a criminal of Jefferson Davis, each was a startling and impressive contrast to the glory which it followed, yet each was the natural result of causes which lay in the character and life of the sufferer, and made his story a consistent whole. But the pathos of Bacon's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Carolinas. Immediately upon his arrival, losing the stimulus which had kept him going so long, he fell dangerously ill, and remained so for nearly two months. Early in May, just as he was convalescing, General Wilson captured Macon, and Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier House, whence they were to start on their way as prisoners to Fortress Monroe. Clifford Lanier reached home May 19. He had, after the blockade was closed at Wilmington, gone to Cuba. From there he sailed ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... play a conspicuous part. Direction on the part of Johnston or Grant was not conspicuously seen, but the latter, whose troops were surprised and driven back some distance, was intensely determined. In the course of that afternoon Albert Johnston was killed. Rightly or wrongly Jefferson Davis and his other friends regarded his death as the greatest of calamities to the South. After the manner of many battles, more especially in this war, the battle of Shiloh was the subject of long subsequent dispute between friends of Grant and of Buell, and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... of antiseptics. That was Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward the steel-engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... dispersed by Colonel Sumner. General P.F. Smith supersedes Sumner. Governor Shannon Removed. Missouri River Blockaded. Jefferson Davis's Instructions on Rebellion. Acting-Governor Woodson Proclaims the Territory in Insurrection. Report of General Smith. John W. Geary Appointed Governor. Inaugural Address. His Military Proclamations ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... United States Constitution, and the protection of congress against the injustice of State law, we are fighting the same battle as Jefferson and Hamilton fought in 1776, as Calhoun and Clay in 1828, as Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in 1860, namely, the limit of State rights and federal power. The enfranchisement of woman involves the same vital principle of our government that is dividing and distracting the two great political ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... in different ways: the radicals received it as a complete surrender of the demand for civil and political equality; the conservatives, as a generously conceived working basis for mutual understanding. So both approved it, and to-day its author is certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis, and the one with ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Folger; my part in the latter; its effect on my relations with Folger. Closer acquaintance with General Grant. Visit to Dr. Henry Field at Stockbridge; Burton Harrison's account of the collapse of the Confederacy and the flight of Jefferson Davis. Story told me by William Preston Johnston throwing light on the Confederacy in its last hours. Delegacy to the State Republican Convention of 1870. Am named as Commissioner to Santo Domingo. First meeting with Senator Charles Sumner. My acquaintance ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... he was given no authority to speak or act for the Government, nor was I informed of anything he would say or do on his own account or otherwise. Afterwards Mr. Blair told me that he had been to Richmond and had seen Mr. Jefferson Davis; and he (Mr. B.) at the same time left with me a manuscript letter, as follows, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... Confederate Army was much better off and more fortunate than the Union Army. Its generals, although not without fault, were much more careful in the management of their military details than ours were. Jefferson Davis was himself an educated soldier of great capacity, and selected none but educated and experienced military men for high command. While Lee's staff was far from faultless in organization, he had supreme authority in the field, with no army or independent ...
— Heroes of the Great Conflict; Life and Services of William Farrar - Smith, Major General, United States Volunteer in the Civil War • James Harrison Wilson
... February seven of the Southern States—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas—had seceded from the Union and formed "the Confederate States of America," with Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as President, and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia ...
— Life of Abraham Lincoln - Little Blue Book Ten Cent Pocket Series No. 324 • John Hugh Bowers
... was a great haircloth sofa, somewhat the worse for wear, and a well-filled bookcase. The screen standing before the fireplace was covered with Confederate bank-notes of various denominations and designs, in which the heads of Jefferson Davis and other ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... duty in the dark days of the South from 1861 to 1865. When Jefferson Davis had called for troops until he had well-nigh decimated the fair Southland, and even boys, in their devotion to the cause they loved dearly, were willing to go to the front, my young master came to my old mistress ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... developed, there were many efforts at still another great compromise. Among the friends of the outgoing President, Buchanan, whose term of office would not expire until March 4, 1861, there were still some Southern leaders, like Jefferson Davis, seeking either a complete surrender to Southern will, or advantages for Southern security in case secession was accomplished. Buchanan appealed hysterically to the old-time love of the Union and to the spirit of compromise. Great congressional committees of both Senate and House ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... revolvers was one of the best in the country. When Fleming was found dead on the floor of his locked gunroom, a Confederate-made Colt-type percussion .36 revolver in his hand, the coroner's verdict was "death by accident." But Gladys Fleming had her doubts. Enough at any rate to engage Colonel Jefferson Davis Rand—better known just as Jeff—private detective and a pistol-collector himself, to catalogue, appraise, and negotiate the sale ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... pillar of the Southern Confederacy was crushed," says Jefferson Davis in his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, "and beneath its fragments the best hope ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... the first gun in that war. They, together with a great part of the people of ten other southern states, resolved to leave the Union.[16] They set up an independent government called the Confederate States of America, and made Jefferson Davis ...
— The Beginner's American History • D. H. Montgomery
... the eighteen Southern Senators who voted against this bill, are now in the rebel service. Among these eighteen nays, are Jefferson Davis, Bragg, Mason, Hunter, Mallory, Chesnut, Yulee, Wigfall, Fitzpatrick, Iveson, Johnson of Arkansas, Hemphill, and Sebastian. Now, then, when Irish and Germans in the South are asked to fight for the pro-slavery rebellion, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Apache Indian. He was finally killed in battle with some Union troops about the last of October, 1864. When killed there was found on his person a commission as Colonel in the Confederate army, signed by Jefferson Davis, and the brow-band of his horse's bridle was decorated with two human scalps. (See "The Civil War on the Border," by Wiley Britton, Vol. 2, p. 546.) He was of that class of men of which Quantrell and the James and the Younger boys were fitting types, and who were a disgrace ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... was the scene of our first failure has ceased to exist. He has completed the blockade of Charleston, which was almost daily violated before he brought his batteries into play. We have the high authority of no less a personage than Mr. Jefferson Davis himself,—a gentleman who never "speaks out" when anything is to be made by reticence,—that Wilmington is now the only port left to the Confederacy; and this is the highest possible compliment that could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... painting of a Confederate soldier after Appomattox, and it reminded him vaguely of some one whom he had half forgotten. He followed the trail for a moment and gave it up. Higher still was an engraving of Mr. Jefferson Davis, with the well-remembered Puritan cast of feature and the severe chin beard. Beneath the pictures a trivial ornament stood on the mantel and beside it a white rose in water breathed a fading fragrance. A child who had come to feed ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... earth Had given him birth, And medals and swords, Inscribed with fine words, It never for Winfield had voted. Besides, you must know that our First of Commanders Had sworn, quite as hard as the Army in Flanders, With his finest of armies and proudest of navies, To wreak his old grudge against Jefferson Davis. Then "forward the column," he said to McDowell; And the Zouaves, with a shout, Most fiercely cried out, "To Richmond or h—ll" (I omit here the vowel), And Winfield, he ordered his carriage and four, A dashing turn-out, to be brought to the door, For a pleasant excursion ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... within the Kaiser's dominions would speedily comprise only the very aged, the mentally afflicted or the maimed wreckage from the battlefields of France and Poland, and that if this attractive Sovereign proposed to continue hostilities he must ere long, as Lincoln said of Jefferson Davis, "rob the cradle and the grave." Even Lord Kitchener displayed some interest in these mathematical exercises, and was not wholly unimpressed when figures established the gratifying fact that the German legions were a vanishing proposition. I was always in this matter graded ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... famous names on the white man's roll. Among the regulars were General Scott, later the commander in the war with Mexico; Colonel Zachary Taylor, who had defended Fort Harrison from Tecumseh—and probably Black-hawk—in the war of 1812, and who was to be President; Lieutenant Jefferson Davis, who became president of the Confederate States; Lieutenant Albert Sydney Johnston, who became a Confederate general; Lieutenant Robert Anderson, who commanded Fort Sumter in 1861; and among the volunteers ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... refuses today to treat it as past history but grows excited in discussing it is not likely to be successful in his business or profession. The men of the New South spend little time in discussing the relative wisdom of Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs or the reasons for the failure of the Confederacy. The Southerners accept the results of the War, and all except a negligible minority are convinced that the preservation of the Union was for the best. To be sure they believe, partly through knowledge but more largely ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... their enthusiasm, their bravery. Before these practical revolutionists, those "moral suasion" agitators, the Northern Abolitionists, made no great show. Garrison with his logic, Burritt with his languages, Douglas with his magnificent eloquence, were as naught to Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and that soldier of the fine old Cromwellian type—Stonewall Jackson. The "institution" was pronounced in Parliament "not so bad a thing, after all," and the pathetic "Am-I-not-a-Man-and-a-Brother" of Clarkson, became the Sambo of Christie and the "Quashee" of Carlyle. In ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... Georgia. Wayside Notes. The Masses Willing but Unprepared. Where were the Leaders? The First Capital. A New Flag. Hotels and their Patrons. Jefferson Davis. The Man and the Government. Social Matters. The Curbstone Congress. Early Views of the Struggle. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... sunshine during summer. It was flowered for the first time in England in 1883, and although not what we should call an attractive plant, in America it is described as being "a well-marked and pretty species." It is named after Jefferson Davis, ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... misrepresent the North, to be pleased at its defeats and annoyed by its successes, partly from commercial and partly from pro-slavery considerations. The America which he remembered, and regretted that he could not still be proud of, was the America where Pierce and Buchanan were Presidents, where Jefferson Davis and John B. Floyd were Secretaries of War. He had, in short, become a Tory; for Toryism is regard for usages at the expense of men. He and the English Tory desired the triumph of Slavery, because it was the best thing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... return to Lexington, he writes to Mrs. Jefferson Davis. In this letter he expresses such noble sentiments, and is so moderate and sensible in his views of those who were harassing him and the South, that all who read ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... at Chatwold there was a gathering of the Pulitzer family— Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer, a cousin of Jefferson Davis and a belle of Washington in her day, who married Mr. Pulitzer years before his success in life had been made and when the fight for his place in journalism was still in its early stages; Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Pulitzer and their ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... in the eyes of the world," said the Judge. "Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire" (he pronounced this name with infinite scorn) "managed by Jefferson Davis of Mississippi!" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of Abraham Lincoln? Jefferson Davis? Booker Washington? Any other prominent white man or Negro you have known ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration
... powerful and wealthy community of twenty millions of people gave a sigh of relief when they had been permitted to install the Chief Magistrate of their choice in their own National Capital. Even after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, it was confidently announced that Jefferson Davis, the Burr of the Southern conspiracy, would be in Washington before the month was out; and so great was the Northern despondency, that the chances of such an event were seriously discussed. While the nation was falling to pieces, there were newspapers and "distinguished statesmen" of the party so ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Juxtaposition of thought. ADAMS Suggestion by sound. Fall Juxtaposition by thought. Failure Fall and failure. Deficit Upon a failure there is usually a deficit. Date word (1801.) Debt The consequence of a deficit. Bonds Debt and bonds. Confederate bonds Suggestion by meaning. Jefferson Davis Juxtaposition ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... 20th of December South Carolina seceded, and her course was followed within the next six weeks by the other cotton States. In February, 1861, delegates from these States met in convention at Montgomery, Alabama, adopted a constitution, and elected Jefferson Davis to be president of their confederation. On the 18th he was inaugurated, and the new government ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... he rode to a new hill, from which he made another long and careful examination. Then he rode a mile or two to the rear and stopped at a small improvised telegraph station, whence he sent three brief telegrams. The first was to President Jefferson Davis of the Southern Confederacy in Richmond; the others, somewhat different in nature, were for two great banking houses—one in London, the other in Paris—and these two despatches were to be forwarded from a seaport by the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... subsequently became President of the United States. Another was Robert Anderson, who, at the beginning of the war of the Rebellion, in 1861, commanded the Union forces in Fort Sumter when it was first fired upon. Another was Jefferson Davis, who, in the course of human events, became President of the Southern Confederacy. A fourth man, destined to be more famous than any of the others, was Abraham Lincoln. The first three of these were officers in the army of the United States. Lincoln was at first a private soldier, ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... reports covering this period afford several strong hints of a Confederate plan for the recapture of New Orleans. With this object, apparently, Richard Taylor, a prominent and wealthy Louisianian, closely allied to Jefferson Davis by his first marriage with the daughter of Zachary Taylor, was made a major-general in the Confederate army, and on the 1st of August was assigned to command the Confederate forces in Western Louisiana. It seems likely that ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... speech in our State a couple of years ago, and I wish you could have seen the horror of my people! My Aunt Nannie—she's Bishop Chilton's wife—thought it was the most dreadful thing that had happened since Jefferson Davis was put in irons. She talked about it for days, and at last she went upstairs and shut herself in the attic. The younger children came home from school, and wanted to know where mamma was. Nobody knew. Bye and bye, the cook ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... he said, "I make you—I appoint you, by the authority of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate States of Ameriky, as commissary-gineral of the Army ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... the English Government obtained permission of the then Secretary of War—Jefferson Davis—to make draughts of this entire establishment for the purpose of obtaining duplicate machinery for the works at Enfield, and copies of the most novel and important parts of the machinery were manufactured for them in the neighboring town of Chicopee; an American machinist ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... in the evening, the late quarters of General Hill, a small white house with green shutters, and also the famous "Nelson House," a roomy mansion where, of old, Cornwallis slept, and where, a few days past, Jefferson Davis and General Lee had held with Magruder, and his associates, a council of war. It had been also used for hospital purposes, but some negroes were now the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... as regarded the "rights of man" and constitutional construction, with its original and permanent principles—it lost morale and power. As a result of the contest over Kansas it became fatally divided, and in 1860 put forward two presidential tickets: one representing the doctrine of Jefferson Davis that the constitution recognized slave-property, and therefore the national government must protect slavery in the territories; the other representing Douglas's doctrine that the inhabitants of a territory ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... of the fight a son of Henry Clay was killed, and Jefferson Davis, afterward President of the Confederate States of America, was wounded. At one stage of the battle Lieutenant Crittenden was sent to demand the surrender of a Mexican force that had been cut off; but the Mexican officer in ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... Jefferson Davis, the fearless soldier and upright citizen—the man who by reason of his supreme fitness was a little later, chosen President of the Confederacy, said in his last speech before the ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Union,' and 'on the night of January 5, 1861,... framed the scheme of revolution which was implicitly and promptly followed at the South.' In other words, that Southern Senators (and, chief among them, Jefferson Davis), then and there, instigated and induced the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... to the committee the contents, as nearly as you can, of a letter which you have in your possession, written by Andrew Johnson, some time in the early part of 1864, to a Southern man, giving information as to the troops about the Capitol and elsewhere, and advice to Jefferson Davis. State where that letter is, and give the contents as nearly as you can, the ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... should dislike the Republican party for its ruthless imposition of a system which governed them without their consent and which placed them at the mercy of the incompetent and unscrupulous. A system which made a negro the successor of Jefferson Davis in the United States Senate could scarcely fail to throw the majority of southern whites into the ranks of the enemies ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... Virginia the Ehrenbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would have anchored under the guns of these suddenly alienated fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at their peaks. "Old Ironsides" herself would have perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a wooden Jefferson Davis shaped for her figure-head at Norfolk,—for Andrew Jackson was a hater of secession, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of the red-handed conspiracy. With all the great fortresses, with half the ships and warlike ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... then removed to the East, and settled at Morristown, New Jersey. From Morristown, he entered West Point Academy. When twenty years of age, he graduated with the highest honors, and, strange to say, it was through the offices of Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, that he was at once assigned to a cavalry regiment as second lieutenant. His subsequent career, so full of brilliance and the true spirit of heroism, is better known to ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens |
