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Lot 67
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Delightful Vintage Sepia Print Depicting Jefferson Davis Captured Wearing a Dress!
Delightful Vintage Sepia Print Depicting Jefferson Davis Captured Wearing a Dress!
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Davis Jefferson

 

Delightful Vintage Sepia Print Depicting Jefferson Davis Captured Wearing a Dress!

 

Single card measuring 2.25" x 4", containing a vintage sepia print adhered to card stock with the typescript notation along the bottom margin of "Entered according to act of Congress, by C.H. Anderson in the year 1865, in the clerk's office of the District Court for the District of Columbia."

 

A fantastic piece of historical memorabilia! A lovely vintage sepia card depicting the infamous flight of Jefferson Davis, captured wearing a dress. Within the photo is the text: "I thought your Government was more magnanimous than to hunt down women and children".

 

The details of Davis's capture has been a subject of controversy since the story first broke. On May 14, 1865, an accounting by Benjamin Brown French, Commissioner of Public Buildings for the District of Columbia, left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he wrote in his journal, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Jeff Davis’ in letters two inches long. Thank God we have got the arch traitor at last.” Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles also noted the Confederate president’s capture in his diary: “Intelligence was received this morning of the capture of Jefferson Davis in southern Georgia. I met [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton this Sunday P.M. at Seward’s, who says Davis was taken disguised in women’s clothes. A tame and ignoble letting-down of the traitor.”

 

The story of Jefferson Davis’s capture in a dress took on a life of its own, as one Northern cartoonist after another used his imagination to depict the event. Printmakers published more than 20 different lithographs of merciless caricatures depicting Davis in a frilly bonnet and voluminous skirt, clutching a knife and bags of gold as he fled Union troopers. These cartoons were accompanied with mocking captions, many of them delighting in sexual puns and innuendoes, and many putting shameful words in Davis’s mouth. Over the generations, fact and myth have co-mingled concerning the details of Davis’s final capture. Had he borrowed his wife’s dress to evade the Union cavalry? How much of the unflattering post-capture cartoons, news reports, and song lyrics sprang from the deep bitterness Northerners held for the man who symbolized the Confederacy?

 

Lincoln had received the word the night before that Lee and his army had surrendered to Grant. The early morning salute “was Secretary of War Stanton’s way of telling the people that the Army of North Virginia had at last laid down its arms, and that peace had come again,” Brooks wrote. “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering; all, all are jubilant.” The whereabouts of the Confederate president, who had fled the capital of Richmond eight days earlier, was unknown. “It is doubtful whether Jeff Davis will ever be captured,” noted the New York Times. “He is, probably, already in direct flight for Mexico.” That day found Davis preparing to leave Danville, Virginia, which had served as the final capital of the Confederacy during the previous week. He would be on the run for six weeks, an epic journey through four states by railroad, ferry boat, horse, cart, and wagon. By May 10 he would be a prisoner. Others, including his aides, would wonder for years why Davis hadn’t placed his own welfare first and escaped to Texas, Mexico, Cuba, or Europe. The Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin and Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge did so and had escaped abroad.

 

The comical story is described that on May 5, after more than a month on the run and three weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, Davis and the men still traveling with him reunited with his wife, Varina. On May 9 Davis decided to make camp for the night with Varina’s wagon train near Irwinville. While inside Varina’s tent, Davis heard the gunfire and the horses in the camp and assumed these were the same Confederate stragglers or deserters who had been planning to rob Mrs. Davis’s wagon train for several days. “Those men have attacked us at last,” he warned his wife. “I will go out and see if I cannot stop the firing; surely I still have some authority with the Confederates.” He opened the tent flap, saw the blue coats, and turned to Varina: “The Federal cavalry are upon us.

 

Here the story gets blurry. Some say Davis was still wearing his gray frock coat, trousers, riding boots, and spurs, but that he was unarmed. His pistols and saddled horse were within sight of the tent. He was a superb equestrian and certain that he could outrace any Yankee cavalryman half his age if he could just get to a horse. Others note that Varina asked him to wear an unadorned raglan overcoat, also known as a “waterproof.” She hoped the raglan might camouflage his fine suit of clothes, which resembled a Confederate officer’s uniform. “Knowing he would be recognized,” Varina later explained, “I pleaded with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer as a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. And he strode off with a little black shawl over his head hoping he would pass unobserved.”

 

Whatever the case may be upon his capture, the news spread to P. T. Barnum who knew at once that the garment would make a sensational exhibit for his fabled American Museum of spectacular treasures and curiosities in downtown New York City. He wanted the hoop skirt Davis had supposedly worn and was prepared to pay handsomely. Barnum wrote to Secretary of War Stanton, offering to make a $500 donation to one of two worthy wartime causes, the welfare of wounded soldiers or the care of freed slaves.

 

It was a hefty sum—a Union army private’s pay was only $13 a month—and that $500 could have fed and clothed a lot of soldiers and slaves. Still, Stanton declined the offer. The secretary had other plans for these treasures. He earmarked the captured garments for his own collection and ordered that they be brought to his office, where he planned to keep them in his personal safe along with other historical curiosities from Lincoln’s autopsy, John Wilkes Booth’s death, and Davis’s capture. The arrival in Washington of the so-called petticoats proved to be a big letdown. When Stanton saw the clothes, he knew instantly that Davis had not disguised himself in a woman’s hoop skirt and bonnet. The “dress” was nothing more than a loose-fitting, waterproof raglan or overcoat, a garment as suited for a man as a woman. The “bonnet” was a rectangular shawl, a type of wrap President Lincoln himself had worn on chilly evenings. Stanton dared not allow Barnum to exhibit these relics in his museum. Public viewing would expose the lie that Davis had worn one of his wife’s dresses. Instead Stanton sequestered the disappointing textiles to perpetuate the myth that the cowardly “rebel chief” had tried to run away in his wife’s clothes.

 

The image of the Confederate president masquerading as a woman titillated Northerners but outraged Southerners. Although he devoted the rest of his life to preserving the memory of the Confederacy, its honored dead, and the Lost Cause, Jefferson Davis could never dispel the myth of his capture dressed as a Southern belle. The legend has endured to this day.

 

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

 

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