Frank Alfriend - The Life of Jefferson Davis

“In this, the last contest of the day, my regiment equaled – it was impossible to exceed – my expectations. Though worn down by many hours of fatigue and thirst, the ranks thinned by our heavy loss in the morning, they yet advanced upon the enemy with the alacrity and eagerness of men fresh to the combat. In every approbatory sense of these remarks I wish to be included a party of Colonel Bowles’ Indiana regiment, which served with us during the greater part of the day, under the immediate command of an officer from that regiment, whose gallantry attracted my particular attention, but whose name, I regret, is unknown to me. When hostile demonstrations had ceased, I retired to a tent upon the field for surgical aid, having been wounded by a musket ball when we first went into action… Every part of the action having been fought under the eye of the commanding General, the importance and manner of any service it was our fortune to render, will be best estimated by him. But in view of my own responsibility, it may be permitted me to say, in relation to our first attack upon the enemy, that I considered the necessity absolute and immediate. No one could have failed to perceive the hazard. The enemy, in greatly disproportionate numbers, was rapidly advancing. We saw no friendly troops coming to our support, and probably none except myself expected reinforcement. Under such circumstances, the men cheerfully, ardently entered into the conflict; and though we lost, in that single engagement, more than thirty killed and forty wounded, the regiment never faltered nor moved, except as it was ordered. Had the expected reinforcement arrived, we could have prevented the enemy’s cavalry from passing to our rear, results more decisive might have been obtained, and a part of our loss have been avoided…

“I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant.

The reputation earned by Colonel Davis at Buena Vista could not fail to provoke the assaults of envy. An effort, equally unwarranted and unsuccessful, has since been made to deprive him of a portion of his merited fame of having conceived and executed a movement decisive of the battle. It has been pretended, in disparagement of the strategy of Colonel Davis, that his celebrated V movement (for so it is, and will always be known) had not the merit of originality, and besides was forced upon him by the circumstances in which he was placed, and especially by the conformation of the ground, which would not admit of a different disposition of his troops. Such a judgment is merely hypercritical. There is no account in military history, from the campaigns of Cæsar to those of Napoleon, of such a tactical conception, unless we include a slightly-analogous case at Waterloo. The movement in the latter engagement, however, differs essentially from that executed by Davis at Buena Vista. A party of Hanoverian cavalry, assailed by French huzzars, at the intersection of two roads, by forming a salient, repulsed their assailants almost as effectually as did the reëntrant angle of the Mississippians at Buena Vista. As to the second criticism, it is certainly a novel accusation against an officer, that he should, by a quick appreciation of his situation, avail himself of the only possible means by which he could not only extricate his own command from imminent peril of destruction, but also avert a blow delivered at the safety of the entire army.

In a lecture on “The Expatriated Irish in Europe and America,” delivered in Boston, February 11, 1858, the Hon. Caleb Cushing thus alludes to this subject: “In another of the dramatic incidents of that field, a man of Celtic race (Jefferson Davis) at the head of the Rifles of Mississippi, had ventured to do that of which there is, perhaps, but one other example in the military history of modern times. In the desperate conflicts of the Crimea, at the battle of Inkermann, in one of those desperate charges, there was a British officer who ventured to receive the charge of the enemy without the precaution of having his men formed in a hollow square. They were drawn up in two lines, meeting at a point like an open fan, and received the charge of the Russians at the muzzle of their guns, and repelled it. Sir Colin Campbell, for this feat of arms, among others, was selected as the man to retrieve the fallen fortunes of England in India. He did, however, but imitate what Jefferson Davis had previously done in Mexico, who, in that trying hour, when, with one last desperate effort to break the line of the American army, the cavalry of Mexico was concentrated in one charge against the American line; then, I say, Jefferson Davis commanded his men to form in two lines, extended as I have shown, and receive that charge of the Mexican horse, with a plunging fire from the right and left from the Mississippi Rifles, which repelled, and repelled for the last time, the charge of the hosts of Mexico.”

These puerile criticisms, however, were unavailing against the concurrent testimony of Taylor, Quitman, and Lane, and the grateful plaudits of the army, to shake the popular judgment, which rarely fails, in the end, to discriminate between the false glare of cheaply-earned glory and the just renown of true heroism.

The term of enlistment of his regiment having expired, Colonel Davis, in July, 1847, just twelve months after the resignation of his seat in the House of Representatives, returned to the United States. His progress toward his home was attended by a series of congratulatory receptions, the people every-where assembling en masse to do honor to the “Hero of Buena Vista.” Mississippi extended a triumphant greeting to her soldier-statesman, who, resigning the civic trust which she had confided to his keeping, had carried her flag in triumph amid the thunders of battle and the wastes of carnage, carving the name of Mississippi in an inscription of enduring renown.

During his journey homeward, there occurred a most impressive illustration of that strict devotion to principle which, above all other considerations, is the real solution of every act of his life, public and private. While in New Orleans, Colonel Davis was offered, by President Polk, a commission as Brigadier-General of Volunteers, an honor which he unhesitatingly declined, on the ground that no such commission could be conferred by Federal authority, either by appointment of the President or by act of Congress. As an advocate of States’ Rights, he could not countenance, even for the gratification of his own ambition, a plain infraction of the rights of the States, to which respectively, the Constitution reserves the appointment of officers of the militia. 9 9 This Constitutional question was again raised by Mr. Davis, while President of the Confederacy, and his action with reference to similar legislation by the Confederate Congress, was in entire accordance with the reason assigned for declining Mr. Polk’s appointment. The soldier’s pride in deserved promotion for distinguished services, could not induce the statesman to forego his convictions of Constitutional right. The declination of this high distinction was entirely consistent with his opinions previously entertained and expressed. Before he resigned his seat in the House of Representatives, the bill authorizing such appointments by the President was introduced, and rapidly pressed to its passage. Mr. Davis detected the Constitutional infraction which it involved, and opposed it. He designed to address the House, but was suddenly called away from Washington, and before leaving had an understanding with the Chairman of the Committee from which the bill had come, that it would not be called up before the ensuing Monday. On his return, however, he found that the friends of the measure had forced its passage on the previous Saturday.