Beschreibung:

DAVIS, Jefferson (1808-1889), President, C.S.A. . Letter signed ("Jefferson Davis"), WITH A ONE-PAGE AUTOGRAPH POSTSCRIPT SIGNED ("J.D."), to Crafts J. Wright ("Dear Friend"), a former West Point classmate, Beauvoir, Harrison Co , Miss., 8 April 1878. 5 pages, 4to, slight fold tears . DAVIS'S RECOUNTS HIS CAPTURE BY UNION TROOPS IN 1865 AND VEHEMENTLY DENIES THAT HE ATTEMPTED TO ESCAPE IN WOMEN'S CLOTHING Davis attempts to set the record straight regarding his attire when he was captured by troops of the 4th Michigan Cavalry at a remote encampment near Irwinsville, Georgia in the early morning darkness of 10 May 1865. He has just received from Wright a copy of the Chicago Tribune, which carried an erroneous and slanderous account of Davis's capture, by a Union officer, Col. Pritchard. In reply, Davis details the famous incident at the end of the war. Davis recounts that "our little encampment was surprised by the firing across the Creek... a combat of the one Federal brigade with the other. It was then so dark that the troops did not recognize one another. My coachman waked me up & told me there was firing; as I had lain down fully dressed, I immediately arose, stepped out and saw some cavalry...advancing upon the Camp. It was not light enough to distinguish anything distinctly but the manner of the movement convinced me that it was not by the marauders which were expected, but by Troopers [Union army regulars] and I stepped back so to inform my wife--she urged me to leave, believing that I would be in danger by remaining. She threw over my shoulders her own waterproof cloak and a shawl also and sent her servant girl, a colored woman with me as if going to the Branch for water. There were no sentinels around the tents, but a horseman advanced towards me, ordered me to halt & dropped his carbine on me. I instantly threw the shawl and cloak off, so as to be unencumbered & answering his demand for a surrender with a defiance advanced toward him. My wife seeing this ran after me and threw her arms around my neck; I then turned back, led her to the tent, and passed around to the rear of it to a fire which was burning there. The colored woman picked up the cloak and shawl & returned them to the tent. All statements not in keeping with this, are false !" "The pillage of the camp commenced immediately," he recounts, and food being cooked for his children was taken from the cooks by the Federal troops. "I noticed this & remarked 'you are an excellent set of thieves.' One of the men with admirable curtness laughingly replied 'You think so! D'you?'..." He disputes Pritchard's justification that food was seized from the party to feed a brigade of cavalry, and adds that, "as to his report of a conversation with me, in which he said the garments worn by me when captured were not particularly adapted to rapid locomotion or the use of fire-arms, I can only regard it as an attempt to bolster up the falsehood...and will only add that if he had perpetrated such insolence he would have received and answer he could not have forgotten...." In conclusion, he excoriates Pritchard for "meanness and dishonesty," and tells Wright that "it must be a mortification to know that your countrymen have behaved so meanly. So far as I know never in the annals of civilized war did a commanding officer [Pritchard] treat a prisoner of high rank...in a manner so little in accordance with the usages of a soldier and the instincts of a gentleman...." Many of the telling details Davis supplies agree with the account of this highly controversial incident by William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour , New York 1991, pp.635-637 and fn. See also Julian G. Dickinson, The Capture of Jeff. Davis (Detroit 1888) for a Union account and Chester Bradley, "Was Jefferson Davis Disguised as a Woman When Captured?" in Journal of Mississippi History , 36 (August 1974), pp.243ff. Davis wrote another letter on the matter at about the same time, to the Rev. W. M. Greene