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Lot 69
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Jefferson Davis Declines Invitation to Speak on Rare "Beauvoir" Stationery
Jefferson Davis Declines Invitation to Speak on Rare "Beauvoir" Stationery
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Description:

Davis Jefferson

 

Jefferson Davis Declines Invitation to Speak on Rare Beauvoir Stationery

 

Jefferson Davis. Autograph letter signed, to Juliette Blanche Underwood Western, March 1, 1877, Beauvoir, Mississippi. 2 pp., 4.875" x 7.25". On “Beauvoir” stationery. Expected folds; tape repair to one fold.

 

Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis declines an invitation to speak in Kentucky from Juliette Underwood Western. She was the widow of a Confederate cavalry officer, the daughter of a Unionist Kentucky Congressman, and the niece of a U.S. Senator. Jefferson Davis served in Congress with both her father and her uncle in the 1850s.

 

Complete Transcript:

                                                                        "March 1st 1877.

My Dear Mrs Western

            Your very kind letter, after having been twice forwarded, has reached me here. My engagements, as well as the condition of my health, do not permit me to undertake the welcome task to which you invite me. To meet the friends whose kind recognition you promise me, to oblige the daughter & niece of men remembered with so much regard and respect, the adding to these claims, that of being the wife of a Confederate soldier, and all this in the neighbourhood dear to me, as being the place of my nativity, would render the task not less than welcome were it to be performed in a cause less blessed than that for which you invite me to labour. The expression of my regret upon a former occasion was not merely formal, this I pray you to believe, is quite real. With sincere thanks for your most gratifying expressions of esteem I entreat you to believe me yours faithfully

                                                                        Jefferson Davis".

 

When General Ulysses S. Grant’s forces completed the envelopment of Petersburg in early April 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet fled to Danville, Virginia, where they remained for a week. Around April 12, Davis received word that General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia, and Davis continued to flee southward. Union forces captured Davis, his wife Varina Davis, and their children in southern Georgia. They had traveled more than 600 miles from Richmond in their attempt to reach Florida and flee abroad.

 

By May 19, 1865, Davis was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe on the coast of Virginia. After two years of imprisonment, Davis was released on bail of $100,000, posted by such prominent citizens as publisher Horace Greeley, shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Davis went to Quebec, then Cuba and Europe, but returned to the United States in 1869.

 

Davis served as president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company from 1869 to 1873. He began to accept speaking invitations in the mid-1870s, and spoke at 17 agricultural fairs in the Midwest in the summer of 1875. That October, he visited Hopkinsville, and his birthplace of Fairview, Kentucky, where he received a gift of a gold-headed cane.

 

In 1877, the widowed novelist and biographer Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey (1829-1879) invited Davis to stay at her estate, Beauvoir, facing the Gulf of Mexico in Biloxi, Mississippi. She provided him a cabin for his use in writing his memoirs. Davis insisted on purchasing Beauvoir, for the modest price of $5,500 (payable over three years). Before her death, Dorsey willed her three Louisiana plantations and other assets to Davis. Although her relatives contested the will, a court dismissed their lawsuit in 1880. Davis continued to live at Beauvoir until his death in New Orleans while returning from a trip to his reclaimed Brierfield plantation in Mississippi.

 

Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) was born in Kentucky and graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1828. After service under Zachary Taylor in the Black Hawk War, Davis married the future president’s daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, in 1835, but she died three months after their wedding. Davis established a plantation in Mississippi and became a Democratic politician. In 1845, he married Varina Howell and won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Davis soon resigned his seat in Congress and raised a volunteer regiment for the Mexican War. He returned to politics after the war and served as a U.S. Senator (1845-1852, 1857-1860), and as Secretary of War (1853-1857). A moderate, he initially opposed secession, but when Mississippi seceded in January 1861, Davis resigned from the Senate and returned to Mississippi to raise troops. A month later, the Montgomery Convention named him as provisional president of the Confederacy, until he was elected to a six-year term as president in November 1861, and inaugurated on February 22, 1862. Davis took a direct role in the management of military affairs and worked with the Confederate Congress to expand the powers of the Confederate government, including conscription, impressment, and suspension of habeas corpus, which prompted some states’ rights opposition to his administration. After the fall of Richmond, Union troops captured a fleeing Davis in Georgia. He was imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, Virginia, charged with treason. He was never brought to trial and was eventually released. He published his two-volume memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, in 1881.

 

Juliette “Jupe” Blanche Underwood Western Long (1835-1909)was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the daughter of Warner L. Underwood (1808-1872), who was a Congressman for Kentucky from 1855 to 1859, and the U.S. Consul to Glasgow, Scotland, from 1862 to 1864. Her uncle Joseph R. Underwood (1791-1876) was a Democratic Congressman for Kentucky from 1835 to 1843, and a U.S. Senator for Kentucky from 1847 to 1853. Both her father and her uncle were Unionists during the Civil War. She married William Wallace Western Jr. (1834-1870) in June 1859, and they moved to Memphis, Tennessee. When the Civil War began, he left his law practice to serve as a captain in the Confederate cavalry. In a later memoir, when asked which side she supported in the Civil War, she insisted that she was “for both, and against neither.” After the Union occupation of Memphis, Juliette returned to Bowling Green to live with her sister and give birth to a son. The Confederate government appointed her husband as an emissary to Great Britain, and she accompanied him. After the war, they returned to Bowling Green and had a daughter before he died. In 1885, Juliette married Frederick H. Long (ca. 1845-1896) of San Francisco, but after his death, she lived with her daughter in Kansas City, Missouri.

 

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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