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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