Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Davis has had many critics to this day, but no one in modern times criticizes him for crushing dissent and diminishing civil liberties. His own martyrdom as a political prisoner after the Civil War did much- as even the dyspeptic Pollard had to admit- to rescue his reputation. Davis was imprisoned by Union authorities at Fortress Monroe for two years. Pollard set the agenda for the anti-Davis literature to come, and that proved important on the score of civil liberties. Davis' modern critics followed Pollard in focusing on other issues.

To this day, one cannot find in the text of any of the works on habeas corpus in the Confederacy the name of a single individual civilian actually arrested by military authority during the war. Just as there is no Confederate Bastille , there is likewise no equivalent for the Confederacy of Frank L. Klement book, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham & the Civil War , for there is no similarly famous "martyr" to Confederate tyranny. Most of the Southerners arrested were obscure men, but there were some genuine candidates for martyr status: William G. "Parson" Brownlow, of Tennessee, and John Minor Botts, of Virginia. Brownlow even enjoyed a brief career as a celebrity, after Jefferson Davis allowed him to cross the lines into Union controlled Nashville, lecturing all over the North and finding his image reproduced in popular prints, sheet music, and carte-de-visite photographs. Both Botts and Brownlow later wrote books, and Brownlow's sold well, 100,000 copies in the summer of 1862 alone. But in the end, neither Brownlow nor Botts gained memorable martyr status. The Tennessee parson's name does not appear in the index to the standard modern survey of Confederate history, Emory M. Thomas ' The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865 , and neither man is ever mentioned in works examining Lincoln's record on habeas corpus by way of suggesting that the Confederate president used the same methods that the Union president did.

In fact if one looks closely there were some astonishing wrongful arrests in the Confederacy, which in different circumstances might have dogged Jefferson Davis ' reputation forever. The postmaster general John Reagan was wrongfully arrested. The attorney general of the Confederacy George Davis was wrongfully arrested.

First, the number of civilians arrested by military authority in the Confederacy, when adjusted for population differences, appears to be about the same as the number arrested in the North. The absolute number in the Confederacy was much smaller, but then Confederate population was much smaller. And the number that can be verified today is much smaller yet because the records appear to be even more incomplete than those kept in the North. One should keep in mind as well that the Confederacy never occupied much Union territory, and the names of civilian residents of conquered Southern territory sent north to Union military prisons often swelled the number of civilian arrestees there.