Warren County Mi., 24th July 1840.
"I long hae thought my honored friend
A something to ha'e sent ye," and though I have nothing now more than my thanks for your kind
recollection of me and these in my heart I have often returned to you. I take
the occasion of your return from the sphere of your public duties to break
perhaps you will say the only repose which those duties leave you to enjoy—well,
I bring my offering of thanks, the sacrifice of a pure spirit would always
burn. I am willing that mine should be adjudged by that test. I received your
speech of Feby. eleventh on the assumption of State debts and could but illy
express to you the gratification it gave me as your friend and as such I
candidly tell you, I consider it the best English sample of the Demosthenean
style. I recollect you saw in Mr. Calhoun's speech on the independent Treasy.
an especial likeness to the Grecian orator. I thought he was too sententious,
nor indeed could any one opening a question of expediency or dwelling on
details of finances speak as Demosthenes did when he addressed men nearly as
well informed as himself on the subject of which he spoke and addressed them
not to argue but to lay bare before them the true issue and excite them to
action—but perhaps, like the Vicar of Wakefield said to the lecturer on
Cosmogony you may say to me—however with this difference that instead of once
you may have heard all this a dozen times before and that instead of the second
it is the first time you have heard it from me. Before I quit the subject of
speeches I must tell you of an old democratic friend of mine who lives some
distance back in the hills and who notwithstanding the great increase of post
offices is quite out of striking distance of a mail line. He came to see me in
the spring of '38. I handed him your speech on the independent Treasy. Bill
after reading it. He asked me to let him take it home and show it to some of
his neighbors. I have seen him frequently since but his "neighbors"
have not yet gotten through with it. When Lord Byron saw an American edition of
his works he said it seemed like to posthumous fame. Recurring to my old friend
of the hills, he states it as a political maxim that "no honest sensible whig
can read Allen's and Benton's speeches without turning their politics."
I am living as
retired as a man on the great thoroughfare of the Mississippi can be, and just
now the little society which exists hereabout has been driven away by the
presence of the summer's heat and the fear of the summer's disease.
Our staple, cotton, is
distressingly low and I fear likely to remain so until there is a diminished
production of it, an event which the embarassed condition of cotton planters in
this section will not allow them to consider. If our Yankee friends and their
coadjutors should get up a scheme for bounties to particular branches of
industry I think the cotton growers may come in with the old plea of the
manufacturers "not able at present to progress without it."
With assurances of
sincere regard and of the pleasure it will always give me to hear from you and
to mark your success
I am yr. friend
JEFFN. DAVIS
To W. Allen
At home
SOURCE: Dunbar
Rowland, Editor, Jefferson Davis,
Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches, Volume 1, p. 4-5
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