The accounts of the capture of Jeff Davis, in his wife's clothes, which
have been published ever since the war, have caused many to laugh,
and has surrounded the last days of the confederacy with a halo of
ludicrousness that has caused much hard feeling between Mr. Davis and
the American people. His friends would have been much better pleased if
he had bared his breast to the cavalryman who captured him, and been run
through with a sabre, and died with some proud last words on his lips,
such as, “Who will care for mother now,” or “The cause is lost. Send out
a search warrant to find it.”
It was a terribly ridiculous ending to a great struggle, the way we have
been in the habit of reading the story, but now we have a new light on
the subject. Mr. Davis has written a book on the war, and in it he gives
the following particulars of his capture and the bravery he displayed.
Instead of sneaking off in his wife's petticoat, after a pail of
spring water, Mr. Davis describes that escape as being almost a bloody
encounter. He says:
“I had gone perhaps fifteen or twenty yards when a trooper galloped up
and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer,
and, dropping the shawl and raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward
him. He leveled his carbine at me, but I expected if he fired he would
miss me, and my intention was, in that event, to put my hand under
his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into his saddle and
attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching, when she saw the
soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around
me. Success depended on instantaneous action, and, recognizing that the
opportunity had been lost, I turned back, and, the morning being damp
and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent.”
This puts an entirely different face on the affair, and instead of
being a childish coward, he represents himself to have been an arch
conspirator, who disguised himself as a female to get a good chance to
throw a boy off his horse and steal the horse. We can only admire the
calm determination of the man, as he stood there waiting for the boy to
shoot, so he could rush up, unarmed, put his hand under the soldier's
foot, tip him off the horse, get on himself, without receipting to the
government for the horse, and skedaddle.
It is not necessary to inquire what the boy would have been doing all
the time Jeff was pulling him off the horse. We all know how easy it is
for an unarmed old man to spill a healthy soldier off a horse. We can
readily see that the soldier could not have whacked the old fellow over
the head with the empty carbine, or drawn his sabre and run him through,
or given him a few shots out of a revolver.
Jeff had, no doubt, arranged in his own mind to chloroform the bold
Michigan cavalryman, but his wife broke it all up by throwing her arms
around him at an inopportune moment, thus pinioning the President of the
Confederacy so he could not whip the Union army. And so, like Adam, Jeff
lays the whole business to the woman. What would we do without women to
lay everything to?
And while Jeff must ever doubt the judgment of his wife in breaking up
his plans at that trying moment, when so much was at stake, how that
soldier, whose life was saved by her act, must revere her, memory!
Had the woman not held Jeff the soldier must have been pitched off his
horse, and striking on his head, he must have been killed.
Mr. Davis does not say so, but we have no doubt his plan was to have the
soldier strike on his head on a projecting root or stone, so he would be
killed. If there should be another war, we should never join the cavalry
branch of the service unless there was an understanding that no old men,
armed with petticoats and tin water pails, should be allowed to charge
on cavalrymen and throw them off their horses.
It is said that during the late war no man ever saw a dead cavalryman,
but if the tactics of Mr. Davis had been adopted early in the war, the
mortality must have been fearful, and perhaps the result of the war
would have been different. We cannot be too thankful that Jeff didn't
think of that way of demoralizing cavalry before.