Jefferson Davis: Farewell Address to the U.S. Senate

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The sectional conflicts that faced the nation for much of the 1850s culminated in the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on November 6, 1860. The clouds of dissent that gathered over the North and the South as a result of slavery, its expansion, and states' rights cast a long shadow that portended secession and civil war. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina formally seceded from the Union. Although Davis, a moderate on the issue of secession, hoped to test it in the courts or through some constitutional means, on January 5, 1861, he joined senators from other slaveholding states in a resolution stating that as soon as possible their states should set up the necessary convention to organize a confederacy of the seceding states. On January 9, 1861, the Mississippi legislature voted to secede from the Union. Davis received notice of the act of secession while he was on his sickbed suffering from dyspepsia and neuralgia. His condition was so serious that doctors thought that he would be unable to speak.

On his final walk to the Senate, Davis knew that he was entering for the last time the chamber that he loved and had worked in for more than a decade. With the effects of his illness clearly visible to the crowded Senate gallery, Davis bid farewell to the U.S. Senate. The act of the Mississippi legislature had forced him to make a choice between loyalty to his state and loyalty to the Union. To Davis the choice was plain. Holding back tears, Davis made it clear that he was not hostile or bitter. In choosing his state, he recognized that his desire to preserve the Union was no longer viable, that reconciliation between North and South was impossible.

In the third paragraph of the speech he draws the distinction between nullification and secession, pointing out that the two are incompatible. By invoking the doctrine of nullification, a state declares null and void particular laws passed by the federal government but stays within the Union. But, Davis argues, when the national government violates the constitutional rights of the citizens of the individual states, specifically their constitutional right to maintain their property rights in their slaves and carry that property into the territories, it becomes impossible for the states to remain within the Union, and secession is the only recourse.

With carefully chosen words, Davis states that his functions in the Senate are terminated. He closes by offering an apology for any wrongs that he may have done and bids a final adieu. At the close of his speech Davis sat down to thunderous applause from both northerners and southerners and to the tears of many in the audience.