Jefferson Davis: ‘The Principle for Which We Contend Is Bound to Reassert Itself’

“The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.”

— attributed to President Jefferson Davis

What Davis Meant

This quote is widely attributed to Jefferson Davis, though its exact original source remains unconfirmed by historians. Its meaning, however, matches what Davis said again and again after the war. To him, the war was not fought over a single issue but over a principle: that the states had created the federal government, and that the people of each state kept the right to govern themselves.

Davis believed that even though the Confederacy had been defeated, that principle could not be destroyed. In his view, any time Americans felt the central government had grown too powerful, the old debate over states’ rights and local self-government would return.

A Debate That Never Ended

In many ways, Davis was right that the question would come up again. Arguments over the powers of the states and the federal government have continued throughout American history, in debates over the Tenth Amendment, education, gun rights, health care, marijuana laws and more. People on all sides of politics have appealed to states’ rights when it suited their cause.

The Tenth Amendment, ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, still says that powers not given to the federal government by the Constitution “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Davis’s Legacy

Davis spent his final years at Beauvoir, his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, writing and defending the Southern cause. He never asked for a pardon. When he died in 1889, tens of thousands of mourners filed past his casket in New Orleans.

Read more in The Civil War Was About the 10th Amendment and Jefferson Davis on the Defense of Our Inheritance, and browse our Confederate flag collection.

Thanks for reading. Please share our posts with your friends and family so they too can learn more about Southern Heritage and History.

Brought to you by: Ultimate Flags