Free Bloody Crimes by James L. Swanson Page A

leaders resented the accusation that slavery was a moral evil and not a positive good, and they interpreted the rising antislavery movement in the North as part of a conspiracy to outnumber the slave states with new free states to strip the South of its political power in Congress, especially in the Senate.
    Despite their differences, Davis and Lincoln had many things in common. They possessed striking physical similarities. Both were tall, thin—even cadaverous-looking—men. At six feet, four inches, Lincoln was the bigger man, but Davis’s erect military bearing, a disciplined posture drilled into him at West Point and that he maintained into old age, made him appear taller than his five feet, eleven inches. Both had angular, craggy faces, and both men looked underfed. Lincoln and Davis were sparse eaters and indifferent to the pleasures of the table.
    Both men had lean builds, but they had been strong as youngmen. When Davis was a boy, he learned to wrestle with slaves, and as a young man he possessed quickness and strength, gaining the better of several men in fights. Lincoln was a spectacular wrestler, contending in legendary matches with the Clary’s Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois. Years of manual labor with the axe and the maul had given him prodigious strength. In their later years, both men displayed astonishing moments of physical power.
    Neither man was distracted by luxuries. Yes, Davis cherished his fine and extensive library—it was one of his proudest possessions—but, like Lincoln, he had no taste for fine antiques, furniture, or artworks. Neither man was a Beau Brummell, but Lincoln’s indifference to his personal appearance—wrinkled, ill-fitting shirts and suits and wild, uncombed hair—outdid Davis’s, who had at least learned during military service how to dress. Each man possessed an inner confidence, a belief that he was, somehow, different from other men. Both men shared memorable appearances. When Davis or Lincoln appeared in public, people noticed them and talked about it. Frozen nineteenth-century photographic daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, albumens, or tintypes failed to capture it, but in person Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were charismatic, captivating, and unforgettable.
    In youth, Davis and Lincoln could be fun-loving, high-spirited, and undisciplined. More than once, Davis was almost expelled from West Point for carousing, drinking, and other forbidden behavior. Lincoln was not a drinker, but he possessed a natural talent for jokes and storytelling, many of them dirty. They were also young men of mirth and love, and sorrow and longing.
    Davis met her in August 1832, when she was eighteen years old and he twenty-four. Sarah Knox Taylor was the daughter of General Zachary Taylor. Jefferson and Knox, the name she went by, fell in love, but her parents, seeking to protect her from the hard life of an army officer’s wife, and due to a possible misunderstanding between Davis and the general, denied permission to marry. Undeterred, the young lovers persisted for more than two years until Jeff won the Taylors over. They married on June 17, 1835, and journeyed by steamboat to Davis Bend, the site of brother Joseph Davis’s plantation on the Mississippi River. In August, Jefferson and Knox traveled south to visit his sister Anna Smith at Locust Grove, in Louisiana. There, just three months later, Jefferson endured an unspeakable loss that nearly killed him and changed his life forever.
    It was the hot season, when the mosquitoes reigned over the plantation fields of the Deep South. They spread a dangerous form of malaria that the first generations of slaves had brought over from Africa almost two centuries earlier. Jeff and Knox contracted the disease. He almost died, but then, after suffering days of fever, chills, delirium, and nausea, he rallied to live. But Knox, her new husband beside her, succumbed. On September 15, 1835, Jefferson Davis surrendered to the grave the body of his