washington, D. C,
January 13, 1861.
Governor F. W. Pickens,
My dear sir: A serious and sudden attack of neuralgia
has prevented me from fulfilling my promise to communicate more fully by mail than
could safely be done by telegraph. I need hardly say to you that a request for
a conference on questions of defense had to me the force of a command; it,
however, found me under a proposition from the Governor of Mississippi, to send
me as a commissioner to Virginia, and another to employ me in the organization
of the State militia. But more than all, I was endeavoring to secure the defeat
of the nomination of a foreign collector for the port of Charleston, and at
that time it was deemed possible that in the Senate we could arrest all hostile
legislation such as might be designed either for the immediate or future
coercion of the South. It now appears that we shall lack one or two votes to
effect the legislative object just mentioned, and it was decided last evening,
in a conference which I was not able to attend, that the Senators of the
seceded States should promptly withdraw upon the telegraphic information
already received. I am still confined to my bed, but hope soon to be up again,
and, at as early a day as practicable, to see you. I cannot place any
confidence in the adherence of the administration to a fixed line of policy.
The general tendency is to hostile measures, and against these it is needful
for you to prepare. I take it for granted that the time allowed to the garrison
of Fort Sumter has been diligently employed by yourselves, so that before you
could be driven out of your earthworks you will be able to capture the fort
which commands them. I have not sufficiently learned your policy in relation to
the garrison at Fort Sumter, to understand whether the expectation is to compel
them to capitulate for want of supplies, or whether it is only to prevent the
transmission of reports and the receipt of orders. To shut them up with a view
to starve them into submission would create a sympathetic action much greater
than any which could be obtained on the present issue. I doubt very much the
loyalty of the garrison, and it has occurred to me that if they could receive
no reinforcements—and I suppose you sufficiently command the entrance to the
harbor to prevent it — that there could be no danger of the freest intercouse
between the garrison and the city. We have to-day news of the approach of a
mixed commission from Fort Sumter and Charleston, but nothing further than the
bare fact. We are probably soon to be involved in that fiercest of human
strifes, a civil war. The temper of the Black Republicans is not to give us our
rights in the Union, or allow us to go peaceably out of it. If we had no other
cause, this would be enough to justify secession, at whatever hazard. When I am
better I will write again, if I do not soon see you.
Very sincerely yours,
Jefferson Davis.*
_______________
* From original letter.
SOURCE: Samuel Wylie Crawford, The Genesis of the
Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860-1861, p. 265-6
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