Dixie Betrayed Read Free Page B

studies went well at Transylvania
     until June 1824, when he learned his father had died. This shock rattled Davis badly. His melancholy worsened when Jefferson
     discovered that his father’s financial success had reversed itself over his last few years. Jefferson’s oldest brother, Joseph,
     now became a father figure. To further Jefferson’s education his older brother secured an appointment for him to the United
     States Military Academy at West Point through the help of the great political champion of the South, John C. Calhoun. (Calhoun,
     celebrated U.S. senator from South Carolina, was revered as the author of the most sacred principle of Southern politics:
     that secession, if desired, could be justified within the bounds of the Constitution.) Jefferson traveled to the Point and
     commenced his schooling in the autumn of 1824.
    Davis performed adequately in his studies at West Point—as well as compiling substantial numbers of demerits—and graduated
     twenty-third out of thirty-three in the class of July 1, 1828. Commissioned a brevet second lieutenant, he spent seven years
     in the U.S. Army as an infantry officer. Frontier duty and occasional clashes with Indians marked the period. He was commissioned
     a first lieutenant of dragoons before resigning, in 1835. That year, he also married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary
     Taylor, and the couple moved to Mississippi to commence farming. Plantation life on the Davis’s eight-hundred-acre estate
     seemed a reasonable dream, but shortly after their marriage, the newlyweds contracted a fever, and on September 15, 1835,
     Sarah Taylor Davis died. Ill and depressed, Davis went to Cuba to recover. He eventually returned to Mississippi, to his Brierfield
     plantation, but stayed in seclusion.
    Davis spent the next ten years mostly locked away from the world. When he returned to public life, he turned to politics in
     Mississippi and the companionship of a very young girl from Natchez, Varina Howell. When they were married in early 1845,
     Varina was nineteen, Jefferson thirty-six. Independent and volatile, Varina irked her new husband at intervals but eventually
     transformed herself into an engine of support and encouragement for him. Soon after their marriage Jefferson was elected to
     Congress as a representative from Mississippi. But Davis’s term in Congress was cut short by war clouds looming to the southwest,
     and he was commissioned colonel of the First Mississippi Rifles, joining his former father-in-law’s army in Mexico.
    Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War career was wholly successful. His regiment, raised in the little town of Vicksburg, was assigned
     to Maj. Gen. Taylor’s army, while much of the army accompanied Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the army, as
     he marched from Veracruz to Mexico City. As Taylor’s force moved against Monterrey, Mexican Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna
     attacked Taylor’s force, hoping to demolish it and then turn toward Scott. Davis heroically aided the United States’ victory,
     was wounded in the foot, and returned home. In 1847 he was appointed to be a brigadier general in the U.S. Army but was never
     commissioned as such; instead, Davis was elected U.S. senator from Mississippi.
    Throughout the 1850s Jefferson Davis was transformed into the leading proponent of Southern rights in Congress, succeeding
     John C. Calhoun, who had died in 1850. In that year Davis resigned from the Senate and entered the race for governor of Mississippi,
     an act designed to help the Democratic Party by keeping his eccentric opponent out of office. Davis joined the race late and
     faced the irascible, reckless Henry Stuart Foote. Foote had been born a Virginian, in 1804, but settled in Alabama by age
     nineteen, becoming an attorney and newspaperman. Foote “called ’em as he saw ’em,” and soon this shoot-from-the-hip style
     led to duels with politicians he had called out in the paper. By 1850 Foote was a