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Lot 63
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Jefferson Davis, Acceptance as President of Confederate States, His Most Important Letter in Private Hands and One of the Most Significant Letters of the Civil War
Jefferson Davis, Acceptance as President of Confederate States, His Most Important Letter in Private Hands and One of the Most Significant Letters of the Civil War
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Davis Jefferson



Important Jefferson Davis, Acceptance Letter as Provisional President of Confederate States

 

 

Letter Signed, 7.75" x 9.75". Dated "April 18, 1861", and signed by Jefferson Davis as "Jeffn Davis". Penned on recto and verso. Expected folds. Near fine with a sliver of restoration to paper loss not affecting the signature. Davis writes to D.F. Jamison, president of the South Carolina Convention.

 

On November 6, 1861, Jefferson Davis was elected president, not of the United States of America but of the Confederate States of America. He ran unopposed and was elected to serve for a six-year term. Davis had already been serving as the temporary president for almost a year. He ran without opposition, and the election simply confirmed the decision that had been made by the Confederate Congress earlier in the year. The letter offered here reflects that period of when the Southern states began seceding after the election of Abraham Lincoln in the winter of 1860 and 1861. Davis had suspected that he might be the choice of his fellow Southerners for their interim president. When the newly seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama in February 1861, they decided just that. Davis expressed great fear about what lay ahead having said. “Upon my weary heart was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers, but beyond them I saw troubles and thorns innumerable."

 

 

This letter is the defining moment when Davis formally accepted this position, and humbly writes "… The approval of a body, so distinguished for its talents and patriotism encourages me in the effort to fulfill the requirements of a position, accepted with much distrust of my ability…" 

 

 

Simply the finest content example we have seen of this important moment in history!

 

 

The letter is shown in full below:



" have the pleasure to receive your letter of the 9th inst[ant] enclosing a copy of a Resolution, passed by the Convention of the people of South Carolina. For this kind expression of their confidence in me as the Provisional President of the Confederate States, permit me to return through you, my profound and grateful acknowledgments. The approval of a body, so distinguished for its talents and patriotism encourages me in the effort to fulfill the requirements of a position, accepted with much distrust of my ability. With thanks to yourself, personally, for the friendly manner in which you have done me the honor to communicate the Resolution of the Convention."

 



Six days before this letter, on April 12, the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter. On April 18, the day Davis wrote the present letter, Robert E. Lee refused Lincoln's offer to be field commander of the U.S. Army and decided to accept the command of the Virginia forces. On April 19 Lincoln issued a proclamation declaring parts of the Southern Confederacy in a state of blockade and denounced any molestation of Federal vessels on the high seas as piracy. In retrospect, Jefferson Davis's letter reflects a great irony.  The support by the seceded states for the President of the Confederacy would erode as the war became protracted. The very issue on which the great struggle centered, self-government for the individual Southern states, became a divisive factor that contributed to the defeat of the Confederacy.



When South Carolina withdrew from the Union in December 1860, Davis still opposed secession, though he believed that the Constitution gave a state the right to withdraw from the original compact of states. Twelve days after Mississippi seceded, Davis made a moving farewell speech in the U.S. Senate and pleaded eloquently for peace between brothers. He had hardly returned to his Brierfield plantation (in Davis Bend, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg) when the Confederate Convention in Montgomery, Alabama, chose him provisional president.

Inaugurated on February 18, 1861, his first act was to send a peace commission to Washington to prevent an armed conflict. Lincoln refused to see his emissaries and made secret preparations to send armed ships to relieve Fort Sumter. When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, four more states, including Virginia, promptly seceded. Davis faced a dire crisis. A president without precedent, he had to mold a brand-new nation in the midst of a war. With few resources except cotton and courage, with a white population only one-quarter that of the North, and with a small fraction of the North's industrial power, with inferior railroads, no powder mill, no navy, and no shipyard, the agricultural South was in no condition to fight a war.



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