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Lot 382
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Jefferson Davis On Prohibition: "Drunkenness is a great evil…", Penned by His Wife Varina Davis
Jefferson Davis On Prohibition: "Drunkenness is a great evil…", Penned by His Wife Varina Davis
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Description:

Jefferson Davis
Beauvoir, MS, July 29, 1888
Jefferson Davis On Prohibition: "Drunkenness is a great evil…", Penned by His Wife Varina Davis
ALS
A fine content letter believed to be in the hand of Jefferson Davis' wife Varina Davis due to the late date, and marked "Personal" at top. It measures four pages, 5.75" x 9", Beauvoir, Mississippi, July 29, 1888. Varina writes on behalf of Davis to prominent Southern Baptist Reverend J. William Jones on the polarizing subject of prohibition. Final page is trimmed at the bottom, otherwise very good to fine condition.

In part: "…Please accept my thanks for your kind letter of the 25th inst. I did not answer Dr. [Reverend James Bruton] Gambrell's letter because in addition to my general rule to avoid complications with political controversies there is this time a special reason on account of the pending presidential campaign & a tendency to misrepresent & misapply anything said by me. The Prohibitionists are a 3rd party & therefore whatever was said on the subject would be food for political canvassers. In my conversation with you on the subject of local option I, of course, intended to adhere to the principle of self-government & to reject any proposition which would lead to interference with the freedom of the Citizen so far as it can be engaged without injury to others. In this view the first thing to define is the locality, so as to insure homogeneity. Take for instance as illustration, the Co. of Warren in which a large part of my life was passed. Vicksburg is a commercial city & its condition very different from the rural district in which I resided, the Island of Davis Bend. If the question of the sale of spirituous liquors were presented for an election, the voters of the city would be under different influences & might require a different polity from that of the District. Self government therefore in its best sense would indicate that the voters of each should be left to decide for themselves. The decision whatever it might be would in any case be of little value unless sustained by a large majority, such as would prevent agitation, to reverse the decision by another election. Drunkenness is a great evil, I would say a crime, but, degrading as it is, it is hardly more injurious to the morality of the people, than the hypocrisy, evasion & falsehood which usually follows the attempt to enforce an unpopular law regulating the private habits of individuals. Local option limited so as to secure homogeneity & adopted by such preponderance of the persons to be affected as to make the law, but the voice of the People, will, I think, be desirable but if abused, as when extended beyond the narrow limits I have indicated, it certainly would be. I would consider its adoption most unfortunate. The refining influences of education, the purifying power of Christianity & the closer dependence of men upon each other in the advanced state of Society, have done much & I pray that the wheel of progress shall not be reversed…".

Jefferson Davis knew better than anyone about the pitfalls of attempting to legislate common sense, moderation and individual ideas of morality, so it stands to reason that he was vehemently anti-Prohibition. He considered a national law on prohibition tantamount to an attack on personal sovereignty and liberty, preferring the option outlined in this letter in which each community would decide the question for itself.

Davis went as far as to suggest, in a letter to Bishop Charles B. Galloway, that Prohibition itself would be the cause of moral decay. Echoing the words of our letter, he wrote: "Why not trust to religion and education…to prevent the formation of habits of intemperance, rather than at the sacrifice of liberty and moral responsibility to undertake, by coercive means, the reformation of the drunkards?" Davis eerily predicted the failure the "noble experiment" of Prohibition in an 1887 letter to Texas Gov. F. R. Lubbock, writing: "I adhere to the maxim that the world is governed too much. To destroy indi­vidual liberty and moral responsibility would be to eradicate one evil by the substitution of another. The abuse, and not the use, of stimulants, it must be confessed, is the evil to be remedied".

Davis' correspondent is Rev. J. William Jones (1836-1909) a Southern Baptist preacher known as "the fighting parson." Jones was a Confederate chaplain during the Civil War whose invigorating sermons delivered on the battlefield would be memorialized in his wartime memoir "Christ in the Camp; or, Religion in Lee's Army" (1886). Jones has been dubbed "the evangelist of The Lost Cause" for his devotion to the durable negationist narrative about the godly causes for the Civil War. Jones' own version of "The Lost Cause" wedded his conservative religious convictions with a profound belief in the heroic values and institutions of the South. Post-bellum, his writings served as a balm to the smarting, defeated South; a soothing ideological reframing that the war they had waged against a barbaric and invading foe had been virtuous and just. Davis himself was a lifelong member of The Southern Historical Society and a devotee of The Lost Cause narrative, of course.

James Bruton Gambrell (1841-1921) was another Southern Baptist preacher and Confederate Veteran, later the president of Mercer College. Gambrell was a die-hard Prohibitionist whose son, a journalist and prohibitionist, was assassinated on a street in Jackson, Mississippi.

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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  • Dimensions: 5.75" x 9"
  • Medium: ALS

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