Sunday, May 17, 2015

May 22, 1865---The Imprisonment of Jefferson Davis



MAY 22, 1865:            

Jefferson Davis is imprisoned at Fortress Monroe in Virginia. By a “discretionary Order” of Edwin M. Stanton, the former Confederate President is held in irons and shackled to a wall. It takes seven men to subdue Davis and force him into chains. Davis is subjected to all kinds of petty tortures --- kept in darkness (though not hooded), awakened at strange hours, kept on a miserable diet of beans and coffee, denied letters, and not allowed to use the privy as needed.*

He is kept under such conditions for five days, until Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy and an old friend, visits him. Davis is pathetically happy to see Welles, who returns to Washington in high dudgeon. He warns Johnson and Stanton that to abuse Davis is to make a martyr of him and that if he dies his name will become a rallying cry for the now-demoralized and all-but-defeated Confederates. 

Logic penetrates the torturous minds of Johnson and Stanton, and the worst restrictions against Davis are relaxed.   


*Humiliating prisoners by forcing them to soil themselves seemed to be a favorite tactic of Stanton’s. When added to the fact that Stanton was largely responsible for the spread of the “dirty diaper” version of Davis’ capture, a Freudian psychoanalyst could infer much about Stanton’s upbringing and overall psychological functioning, especially since  Stanton was both obsessively neat and rigidly authoritarian. 

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