Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back

by Robert Penn Warren

In 1979 Robert Penn Warren returned to his native Todd Country, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress. From that nostalgic journey grew this reflective essay on the tragic career of Jefferson Davis―"not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution." Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is also a meditation by one of our most respected men of letters on the ironies of American history and the paradoxes of the modern South.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Civil War, Biography

120 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This meditation on the life of Jefferson Davis is probably the best short work about the American Civil War. Both Davis and author Robert Penn Warren were born in Todd County, Kentucky, where today there is a white obelisk commemorating the life of the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. (And, only about a hundred miles away, in a poor white's cabin, was born Abraham Lincoln.) As Warren wrote, "More than a contrast between Lincoln and Davis is involved. The contrast lay in the two societies -- one embracing antique values, the other in the process of developing new ones."

Why did the South lose the Civil War? Warren's explanation puts it as follows:

Once face to face with Lee, unconquerable at the chessboard of war, he fought a war of swap-out, knowing that only the balance sheet of blood could ensure victory. He [Grant] had an incalculable amount of blood to swap. And, to make certain that the swap system worked to the utmost, he refused after a battle any truce for the burial of the dead and the succor of the wounded. By the same token, he refused exchanges of prisoners, his theory was that a man could as well serve the country starving the Andersonville [the Confederate prison] as standing in the battle line. Unremitting pressure, at any cost, was the policy of a man who loathed the sight of blood but had come face to face with reality. He was purely logical, and after the war he stated the theory he had developed: "The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving."

At battles such as Cold Harbor, not a single wounded Confederate soldier survived.

So much of what has been written about the Civil War and its political and military leaders has been from the Yankee point of view. It is refreshing to read a thoughtful southerner such as Robert Penn Warren or Shelby Foote cover the same ground.

Jefferson Davis was a tragic figure who was foredoomed to lose the war and his reputation. After the war, what he wanted more than anything else was his day in court, to defend his decisions from start to finish. But he never received that opportunity.

[Sean Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short meditation on the Lost Cause, the life of Davis (with particular attention paid to his imprisonment), and the easy restoration of Davis' citizenship in 1976. Warren's work represents an older time, when Southerners grappled with mixed feelings on history, and novelists in particular understood the tragic sensibility. In our age the sentiment is mostly lost; we seek "enemies" to destroy, and Davis has become one of the arch-villains of our history. Perhaps he was. Reading a book like this reminds me that interpretation and memory is never, despite the efforts of the day, total nor complete. Warren himself grasps that memory is troubled and ephemeral; until the last man dies we will always be searching in vain for "the last word."

[Drew Norwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

RPW remembers Jefferson Davis’s legacy, as memorialized by an obelisk in Todd County, KY near Warren’s hometown; he considers the competing values and persons involved in the Civil War; he remembers his own Grandpa Penn and his connection to the Civil War; and he contemplates the nature of history and memory. Worth a read.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found Warren's portrait of Jefferson Davis--and our country's complicated relationship to him--very interesting. However, at the heart of this essay is a nostalgia for great men doing great things. Even though he clearly is no apologist for racism and slavery, Warren's essay is a meditation by a white man about other white men. The impact of the decisions and actions of these men on the enslaved population of the United States and the lasting wound of slavery is virtually absent.

This year, I'm trying to pair nonfiction books with novels. I'm pairing this one with Varina, Charles Frazier's novel about Jefferson Davis's wife.

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written piece about Jefferson Davis, within the context of a lost way of life. Warren writes in a way that reminds me of Wendell Berry, with a matter-of-fact appreciation for the past and tradition.

It was very interesting for me to find out how many unlikely people supported Davis' cause at the end of his life. It felt like poetic justice for him to be given that honor and respect. Also interesting was the fact that this piece originally appeared in "The New Yorker" in 1980. I wonder what the audience at the time thought of it?!

Thanks to my son Nigel for sharing this book with me.

[Nigel Ewan · Rating 5 out of 5]

put it straight into my veins

[Ellen Moth · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Oh my god. How is it about William James."

[Cathy Houston · Rating 5 out of 5]

part memoir, part biography, part history but all southern to the core