1858 (7 page)

Davis was not gone for long. His friend Franklin Pierce was elected president in 1852 and asked Davis to be his secretary of war. Who better? Davis had been a genuine hero in two wars and served on Congressional and Senate military committees. He was probably the most qualified person in the country for the position.

And he did a fine job. He authorized the issue of brand-new rifles to soldiers, obtained pay raises for officers and enlisted men, streamlined the military’s cumbersome chain of command, founded the first Army Medical Corps, won approval to permit the Army Corps of Engineers to build two wings for the Capitol building, had new maps drawn of the western territories, and worked with large railroads in planning routes through the Southwest. He even pioneered the use of camels instead of horses to transport soldiers. One of the accomplishments of which he was most proud was working with the new superintendent at West Point, Robert E. Lee, the gifted colonel who had also won renown in the Mexican War, in making the military academy a more comprehensive training facility for the army.

Davis returned to politics in 1857, winning election to the Senate again, but by a narrow margin. He arrived just in time for the acrimonious debates on the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas, debates that affected him so profoundly that he once again became vulnerable to herpes, which had caused him untold pain throughout his adult life and now threatened to kill him.

The herpes that brought him down in 1858 was his nemesis. It flared up frequently in the form of a neuralgia that incapacitated his left eye, made his face swollen, drained his strength, and left him unable to function for weeks at a time. Sometime in the middle of that cold February, physically frail from the vigors of the lengthy and heated debates and always susceptible to illness, he caught a bad cold that quickly turned into laryngitis. Once his system was weakened by the cold and laryngitis, he was again vulnerable to neuralgia of the eye. It struck again—and hard.

Neuralgia is a condition of the eye clinically known as herpes simplex; it can be debilitating. Herpes simplex usually strikes men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five following sexual relations with women who have it. Davis probably contracted herpes when he was in the army or just afterward. The condition causes hundreds of tiny black growths to appear around the eye, inflaming and infecting the eyelids and cornea. It then creates a liquid film that covers the eye and cornea and causes temporary blindness. The disease drains the muscular system of its victim, causing him to remain bedridden for weeks at a time. Neuralgia usually attacks for between four and six weeks and then gradually disappears. It can be activated at any time by high fever, winds that hit the cornea, prolonged exposure to sunlight, or severe emotional stress.

To alleviate the condition, doctors would scrape the cornea to bring back some eyesight until the inflammations decreased. The whole area was then constantly bathed with a solution of mercury chloride and iodine ointment. For Davis, a flare-up would occur when he worked too long in the sun on his plantation fields in Mississippi or when he was under any kind of stress, personal or public, such as political campaigns or spirited congressional debates such as the one over the Lecompton Constitution.
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The senator from Mississippi came down with neuralgia four or five times each year. It always wreaked havoc in his life, sending him to bed for lengthy periods of time when he was needed on his plantation or in public life. Sometimes he simply refused to follow his doctors’ orders and appeared in public anyway, coping with his condition the best he could. His wife wrote her mother about it when they first arrived in Washington and he started to work hard. “He has not been well since we arrived here. He sits up until two or three at night, until his eyes lose their beauty even to me. They look so red and painful.”
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In his 1851 Mississippi governor’s race his neuralgia immediately flared up, yet he campaigned throughout the state, giving speeches on the steps of public buildings and mingling with voters at large outdoor barbecue parties. He was an odd sight to the voters. Blind in his left eye, Davis could barely see where he was going and had to wear thick goggles with tinted green glass to navigate his way through crowds and across lawns. He also covered his hideous looking eye and face with large bandages that wrapped around his head. To stay mobile and continue the campaign, he had a doctor who traveled with him treat his faulty eye with chloroform sponge baths each day and administer liberal doses of quinine and opium, plus several teaspoons of castor oil. When his neuralgia became intolerable, he asked the doctor to cut open the film that covered his eye, but that did little good. And even with all that medical attention he had to stop campaigning for weeks at a time to recover in bed.

That experience in 1851 was not uncommon for the senator. Again and again, when under stress, Davis’s neuralgia returned. He contracted a bad case of the illness in the hot summer of 1852 after spending too much time in the fields. That attack forced him to sleep all day, with the curtains of his room drawn. Once awake, he was up all night, pacing back and forth through his plantation home, half blind. His condition deteriorated so badly that summer that friends who saw him make a feeble appearance at the state’s Democratic Convention thought he was going to die.
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So did Franklin Pierce. Pierce, who would be elected president two months later, wrote him a letter of relief that he had survived his latest attack.
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In the fall of 1857, Davis embarked on a series of campaign stump speeches for fellow Democratic candidates in Mississippi, but had to stop when his neuralgia took away his sight and crippled him yet again. He admitted to friends that during many attacks over the years he had gone blind for weeks at a time.
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His home hospitalizations over the years not only prevented him from achieving political goals, but were genuine setbacks for the men in his party, who saw him as one of their most gifted leaders. Writing him that the Southerners saw the world through his eyes, one politician, E. M. Hitchcock, wrote to Davis, “We look to you to sustain the South and you can’t see through any eyes but your own.”
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The latest neuralgia attack, which came toward the end of the Lecompton debates in February 1858, crippled Davis. On the day of the crucial vote itself, the Mississippi senator, his eye bandaged, was too weak to walk and a friend had to carry him into the Senate chamber so he could cast his ballot. He was then carried out of the chamber to the dismay of the senators, placed gingerly in his carriage, and taken home. He nearly died.

At his Washington, DC, home, he had to remain in the darkness: all the drapes closed during the day and both eyes perpetually covered with a blindfold, because they were so overly sensitive to light. Even the dull flicker of a single lighted candle in the corner of a room caused his cornea pain. This time he not only had his usual eye troubles and weakness, but he lost all power of speech, which alarmed him. And he could barely move. Unable to speak, he had to write his words with a thick piece of white chalk on a black slate his wife purchased. A week after he was stricken by the attack, he went blind in his left eye and remained unable to see out of it for an entire month.
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The longtime Davis family doctor, Thomas Miller, rushed to his side and visited him every day. Davis’s wife Varina brought in a number of doctors from around the United States to treat him, including Dr. Robert Stone, an ophthalmologist from Washington, and Dr. Isaac Hayes, generally acknowledged as the nation’s top ophthalmologist, who traveled from Philadelphia to treat him on many occasions during his near-fatal illness that winter.
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They all wanted him to eat more because his time in bed had caused him to lose weight. His appearance was deplorable. His wife tried to feed him, but he was often physically unable to eat. “His anguish was intense. No one but I knew how much he suffered, and I only because one day I begged him to try to take nourishment, and he gave only one smothered scream.” He gasped to her, “I am in anguish. I cannot.”
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No one could help him. Dr. Hayes said, “I do not see why his eye has not burst.” The Philadelphia specialist could not believe the courage Davis showed in the face of the intense pain the neuralgia brought on. The physician, who had seen numerous cases of the disease, was dumfounded and told the senator’s wife that “such patience is God-like.”

He relied on his wife’s care, physically and emotionally, throughout the calamity. Varina bathed him, changed his bandages, treated his eye with drops and ointments, and cooked all of his meals and brought them to his bedroom. She sat with him for hours, reading books and newspapers, plus letters from friends and political associates. Sometimes she just sat next to him and held his hand.

At the same time that she cared for her husband, she continued to raise their two children, Maggie and Jeff Jr., maintain the home, shop for food, and keep up the family correspondence.

Her husband appreciated her attention and love. At one point, when the neuralgia had made it impossible for him to talk any longer, a doctor asked him how he kept his eye functioning. With a small smile on his face, he scribbled on a piece of paper, “My wife saved it.”
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Ironically, this horrific case of neuralgia and the brush with death in the winter of 1858 brought the Davises, who had been quarreling, together on a very deep emotional level. Often holding hands, they spent hours with each other as Davis lingered near death in his darkened bedroom. The bond between them became very strong and the love they knew in the early years of their marriage returned. Their lives as man and wife would never be fractured again. The Davises would become a strong and resourceful couple, able to withstand anything. His wife’s love and support—and advice—would serve him well when the nation was plunged into Civil War, and their marriage would give him strength.

Among the men who visited him regularly during his convalescence were not only senators and congressmen from the Southern states, but legislators from the Northern states, too. Lord Napier, the cheerful British minister, visited him as often as he could in an effort to pick up his spirits. Senator Clement Clay of Alabama dropped in on many evenings and read books, newspapers, and magazines to him, giving Varina some free time to simply rest. Davis was kept informed about activities in his party by his friend Alexander Stephens, the Democratic senator from Georgia, who stopped by frequently to discuss legislation and give him copies of bills.
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Perhaps his most unlikely visitor was Senator William Seward of New York, the fire-breathing Republican. If Davis was the champion of states’ rights, then the radical Seward was the standard-bearer for the antislavery forces in the North.

The New Yorker was one of the most intriguing men in the Senate. He was a slight man, just five feet six inches tall, with large ears, sandy hair, penetrating eyes, bushy eyebrows, and a sharp, hawklike nose. He was a garrulous personality, loud and bombastic at times, the center of attention wherever he went. Seward read everything he could get his hands on, whether newspapers or novels, and was one of the capital’s most ardent theatergoers. He was in the middle of one of the most accomplished political careers in U.S. history. Seward, who turned fifty-seven that winter, had been the governor of New York as a Whig from 1839–1842. He was later elected to the U.S. Senate as a Whig, but changed to the Republican Party in 1856, after the Whigs collapsed over the slavery issue. Seward, the leader of the antislavery cause and one of the nation’s most polished orators, was the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1860.

On the surface, the two men had little in common. Seward never understood Davis’s ownership of slaves and Davis had often publicly cast Seward as the symbol of Northern aggression, once asking an audience who had been “more industrious, patient, and skillful as a sapper and miner against the foundations of the Constitution” than the New Yorker? Yet they had become close friends.
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