Jeff. Davis’ Inaugural

The Inaugural Address of Jefferson Davis, upon his installment in the office of President of the Confederate States for the ensuing six years, reads like a funeral service, or the dying speech of a convicted criminal protesting his innocence on the gallows.  Washington’s Birthday was desecrated by the solemn farce of inauguration.  A year hence he will be hung or in exile.

It does not appear that there was any enthusiasm manifested by the crowd.  Every one must have felt in his bones that secession was well nigh played out.  Col. Lee, an exchanged prisoner, who was in Richmond, on the day of the inauguration, states that Davis received a dispatch announcing the fall of Nashville, while he was reading his inaugural to the gloomy crowd before him.  The Richmond Whig says; “In view of the past, the present, and probably the future, the pageant was a bitter mockery and a miserable compensation for the ruin of a free people.  A child with a bauble, and old man with a young wife are partial illustrations of the deplorable folly.

In the course of his traitorous harangue, Davis admits that the rebel arms are suffering sad reverses just now, but he relies upon the expectation that the North must ultimately sink under the heavy public debt incurred in maintaining the war.  He claims that the land of Secessia has grown during the past year for six to thirteen States.  But he forgets to deduct Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee, embraced in this count.  Discussing the causes of the war, he names the rule of the majority as one of them.  The “proud” slaveholders would not submit, to what he terms “the despotism of numbers.”  They therefore determined to sever the bonds of the Union and set up a confederacy for themselves that would be “homogeneous,” that is, all salve States, and the absolute rule of the oligarchy.  Davis admits plainly enough that it is a slaveholder’s rebellion in which he is engaged and that slavery is at the bottom of the war.  He substitutes the usual cant phrases, “Southern rights,” “our system of Government,” &c.; but it all comes to the same thing – Slavery; for the aggrandizement of that they have waged war on the Republic.  Slavery must rule or the Union must perish is the alternative.  Davis rests his chief reliance apart from the “patriotism” and “self reliance” of the rebels – on the greatness of the National debt, and the special intervention of Providence in behalf of secession.  But he will find Uncle Sam has good credit and considerable means of his own, and that Providence will be on the side of the heaviest artillery, largest battalions and iron clad gunboats. – Chicago Trib.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Monday Morning, March 3, 1862, p. 2