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Northerner works to restore Davis' citizenship
BY DAVID TEPPS
MEDILL NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON ? Jimmy Carter?s residency in the White House already has added considerable gloss 10 the South's Image. Now, a Northern, liberal senator has acted to reassert the respectability of the president who belonged solely to Dixie.
After reading a biography of Jefferson Davis during a recent hospital stay, Sen. Mark Hatfield, R-Ore., introduced a resolution to restore citizenship for the leader of the Confederacy.
The Senate Judiciary Committee approved without objection the resolution which Hatfield said would ?right a glaring injustice In (U.S.) history.?
The Senate resolution was passed last week, getting a healthy push from Sen. James 0. Eastland, D-Miss., who chairs the Judiciary Committee and is long-known as a proponent of states? rights.
Judiciary Committee staffer Britt Singletary explains that Hatfield became interested in improving Davis? official image after reading the biography, which was recommended by Sen. James B. Allen, D-Ala. ?Hatfield read the book ("Jefferson Davis," by Hudson Strode) and was really impressed with the man," Singletary
said. A member of Hatfield's office says the bill was well received "because its sponsor is a Yankee with no political ax to grind."
In Senate testimony, Hatfield said restoring Davis'citi-zenship is appropriate after President Carter's pardon for Vietnam era draft evaders.
??This resolution may give us some historical perspective on (the pardon), and perhaps a greater understanding of its meaning and purpose,"
Hatfield said.
Davis, who lived in Biloxi at Beauvior immediately before his death in 1889, was specifically excluded from the general amnesty bill of 1876. Singletary says the Southern
leader was persecuted JEFFERSON DAVIS
because he would never renounce the legitimacy of seceding from the Union, contending it was a matter of states? rights.
If the resolution should clear the House, Singletary hopes President Carter will sign it at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.
Enthusiastic about the bill?s chance for passage, Singletary riffled through a file of letters supporting the resolution, many from the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
As Hatfield pointed out in committee testimony, 'Davis (believed) he had committed no crime..was never convicted of one and never asked for a pardon."
Before Confederate leaders declared Davis their president, he served as a U.S. congressman and as a senator from Mississippi. Davis gained fame as a colonel of the First Mississippi Infantry in the Mexican War, serving with two men destined for the presidency, Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant.
After the Civil War, Davis was captured in Georgia by Union troops and jailed at Ft. Monroe in Virginia. He was imprisoned there for two years under what historians have called "appalling conditions."
Vol. 4, No. 151
Monday Morning, May 2, 1977
Biloxi-Gulfport-Ocean Springs-Pascagoula