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On
the morning of December 6, 1889,
Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America, died
quietly in New Orleans at the age of eighty-one. The end came without drama. He
had caught a cold while traveling by steamboat from his plantation, Brierfield,
to Beauvoir, his Gulf Coast retreat. Bronchitis deepened into pneumonia,
complicated by malaria he had carried since the Mexican War. At 4:30 a.m., in
the Garden District home of his friend Judge Charles E. Fenner, Davis slipped
away with his wife Varina at his bedside and his daughter Winnie praying
nearby.
The
news spread like a shock wave across the South. For many white Southerners,
Davis remained the living embodiment of the Lost Cause. Though often criticized
in life—even by fellow Confederates—for stubbornness and poor political
judgment, in death he became a martyr. Within hours, black-draped flags
appeared from Richmond to San Antonio. Newspapers that had once mocked him now
called him “the uncrowned king of our people.”
Davis’s
body was embalmed and dressed in a plain black suit—no Confederate gray
uniform, at Varina’s insistence. On 7 December he lay in state beneath the
portico of New Orleans City Hall An estimated 80,000 mourners filed past in a
single day. Former Confederate generals, aged and stooped, stood vigil: Pierre
Gustave Toutant Beauregard, now nearly blind; Jubal Early, gaunt and bitter;
and John B. Gordon, the one-armed hero of Georgia. Black crepe shrouded the
marble columns; gas jets burned day and night.
The
crowds were extraordinary for the era. Poor whites from the bayous, veiled
society ladies, Confederate veterans in threadbare gray, and thousands of
African Americans came to pay respects.
Varina
Davis, after anguished deliberation, decided her husband should be buried in
the city he loved most: Richmond, the former Confederate capital in Virginia.
At
noon on 11 December, an immense funeral cortege—said to be the largest ever
seen in the South—moved from City Hall down St. Charles Avenue to the Illinois
Central depot. Six black-plumed horses drew the hearse. Behind marched 5,000
veterans, 200 carriages, and brass bands playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and
the forbidden “Dixie.” Cannon boomed every minute from Jackson Square.
A
special six-car train, draped in black and silver, left New Orleans that
evening. The locomotive, No. 81, bore a portrait of Davis framed in crepe.
Along the 900-mile route, the train slowed at every station. At night bonfires
blazed beside the tracks; by day entire towns turned out. In Mobile, 20,000
people waited in the rain. In Montgomery, where Davis had taken the oath of
office in 1861, schoolchildren scattered flowers on the coffin when the casket
was carried into the old capitol for a midnight ceremony.
The
train reached Richmond at dawn on 12 December. A gray mist hung over the James
River as church bells tolled across the city.
At
the Virginia State Capitol, Davis lay in state beneath the great rotunda where
he had once addressed the Confederate Congress.
On
31 December 1889—after a deliberate delay to allow maximum attendance—the final
rites were held. The weather was bitter, with sleet whipping across the hills.
At 2:00 p.m., thirty-six pallbearers, carried the casket from the Capitol to a
caisson. Ten thousand veterans formed the procession; another 50,000 civilians
lined the route to Hollywood Cemetery.
The
Episcopal service was brief. Bishop Alfred Magill Randolph read the burial
office. A choir sang “Rock of Ages.” Three volleys crashed over the grave,
followed by taps played by a lone bugler. Then silence fell across the
hillside. Jefferson Davis was home.
Varina
Davis stood wrapped in black veils as the earth closed over the mahogany
coffin. Four years later, in 1893, she authorized the erection of a life-sized
bronze statue at the grave, the work of Richmond sculptor Edward Virginius
Valentine.
