Confederate president portrayed at battlefield

Bill Robinson
Register News Writer

KINGSTON May 12, 2008 08:22 am

— June 3 will mark the 200th anniversary of an American president born in Kentucky.
It is not Abraham Lincoln. The 200th anniversary of his birth is Feb. 12, 2009. A two-year national celebration of his bicentennial began this year.
June is the birth month of that “other” native-Kentuckian who headed a national government, Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
A more subdued commemoration of his birth will take place Sunday, June 8, in Fairview, where a 351-foot concrete obelisk, taller than a football field is long, rises above the Todd County countryside.
The Davis birth place is less than 100 miles from Lincoln’s near Hodgenville.
Two former Frankfort schoolteachers who portray Davis and his wife Varina will be among those in Fairview on June 8. On Saturday, they appeared as the Davises during a living-history weekend at Madison County’s Battlefield Park
Cliff Howard held up a large portrait of Davis, to which he bears a striking resemblance. However, the tall, bearded Howard began his living-history career by portraying Lincoln.
“We found that men portraying Lincoln outnumber those presenting Davis by about 100 to 1, said Howard’s wife Joan, who portrays Davis’ second wife.
“I was trained to be a professor, not a president,” said Howard as Davis,
“Before I could be admitted to Transylvania University in Lexington, I had to demonstrate that I could translate from the Greek New Testament.”
The school had only recently begun to accept non-ministerial students when Davis enrolled in 1822, but it still retained the Greek-language admission requirement.
Davis knew the ancient language because his father had earlier dispatched him from their Mississippi home to study at the St. Thomas Aquinas School in Springfield.
After his 1824 appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., Davis almost was denied admission because he was deficient in math.
“They didn’t want me, because I couldn’t do arithmetic,” said Davis. “I may not know arithmetic, I told them, but I can translate the New Testament from Greek. I guess they figured if I could master Greek, I could learn arithmetic.”
Howard began his portrayal of Davis almost apologetically, because the Confederate president’s leadership was harshly criticized during and after the Civil War. As chief executive of a nation based on a weak central government, Davis was chosen for his collegial, consensus-building style, Howard said.
Although he proposed gradual emancipation of slaves, Davis also is inextricably linked to the Confederacy’s attempt to prolong slavery.
“Judge us by the standards of our day, not today,” said Joan Howard as Varina Davis.
“My husband and his family treated their slaves humanely,” she said. “He even tried to reunite separated families.”
Several of the Davises’ former slaves remained with them as hired servants after emancipation.
Prior to the Howards’ portrayals of the Davises, members of Madison County’s five Masonic lodges and the Order of the Eastern Star dedicated a monument to Masonic veterans of the 1862 Battle of Richmond.
They assembled in the lawn of the Battlefield Visitor’s Center as Madison County Historic Properties Director Phillip Seyfrit and battle historian Robert Moody unveiled the stone memorial.
“Bob Moody and I got the idea for this monument during a visit to Gettysburg, where we saw what we believe to be the only Masonic memorial on a Civil War battlefield,” Seyfrit said. “This one is the second.”
“Numerous officers on both sides of the battle were master Masons,” Moody said. Some were lodge founders. The enlisted men, many in their teens, would have been too young to be Masons.
Union Gen. Malon Manson had founded a lodge in Crawfordsville, Ind.
After he was wounded, Confederate Gen. Patrick Cleburne, who was founder of an Arkansas lodge, convalesced in the home of the Kingston lodge’s master.
After the war, Masonic leaders worked to dispel the bitterness felt by some fellow Masons who had fought on opposing sides, said Robert Davenport, a past grand master of Kentucky’s grand lodge.
Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@richmondregister.com or at 623-1669, Ext. 267.