In 2017, New Orleans removed a statue of Jefferson Davis (born 1808), president of the Confederate States of America and a symbol of the “lost cause” of Southern slavery. Despite protests and death threats, the city planned to remove three more Civil War monuments, including statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard, that New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu called “symbols of injustice.” The statues will be placed in museums or other educational institutions. New Orleans was a key slave trading port.
“We must always remember our history and learn from it,” Mayor Landrieu said. “But that doesn’t mean we must valorize the ugliest chapters, as we do when we put the Confederacy on a pedestal, literally, in our most prominent public places.”
The only president of the Confederacy, Davis maintained a long time friendship with the only United States president from New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce. The two men had served in the Senate and the Mexican War. Elected president in 1852, Pierce appointed Davis as his Secretary of War. Technically opposed to slavery, Pierce was more concerned with keeping the Union together and blamed northern abolitionists for pushing the nation towards war. Pierce remained friendly with Davis even during and after the bloody Civil War that split the nation.
Pierce (born 1804) cut his teeth as a young lawyer under Judge Levi Woodbury in an office in Market Square in Portsmouth, NH. Pierce stopped in Portsmouth for a quick visit in the waning months of his not-very-successful presidency in 1856, and stayed at the Rockingham Hotel. He later returned to the Rockingham as a tourist with his wife and stayed for at least two months in 1857. When his wife Jane was out of sight, Pierce reportedly engaged in “epic drinking bouts” with local friends.
Pierce was also fond of the Isles of Shoals, having stayed at the Appledore House with his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne the summer before he moved to the White House in 1853. A year after his wife died of tuberculosis in 1863, the devastated ex-president took a trip to the White Mountains with his literary friend Hawthorne. They were staying in adjoining rooms when, the following morning, Pierce discovered that his friend had died in the night.
In 1865, Pierce purchased 80 acres in North Hampton, NH and built a cottage. From there, in his declining years, the ex-president offered to act as attorney for his old friend Jefferson Davis, should he be tried for war crimes. The offer was rejected. When Davis was released from prison two years later and given amnesty, Pierce offered his seacoast home to Davis and his wife.
“September is unusually delightful here, “Pierce wrote to Davis, who wisely declined the offer to move to New Hampshire, fearing the scandal that it would inevitably bring. Franklin Pierce died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869. Jefferson Davis went on to run an insurance company, wrote a history book, and continued to claim that blacks were inferior to whites. He died in 1889.
Copyright by J. Dennis Robinson.
A Mast for Every Day in the Week
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