To Go in Peace and Be Left Alone
Selected Quotes from Confederate President Jefferson Davis
I owe the title of this essay to my mentor, Kenneth Bachand (1931-2021), who was a teacher of both English and history, writer, author, and avid researcher of Civil War history. He was my mentor during my blessed decade in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He was a graduate of Stetson University and taught in the Florida school system for 25 years. Nearly blind in later life, he still managed by modern devices to research, write, and edit. Following the death of his beloved wife, Mary Marguerite Bachand, he moved nearer his two daughters and nine grandchildren near Columbia, South Carolina.
His title actually comes from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who in an address to the Confederate Congress on April 29, 1861, said,
“ We feel that our cause is just and holy…We seek no conquest… All we ask is to be left alone.”
Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 but spent most of his life in Mississippi. Kentucky and Missouri, by the way, are two of the 13 stars in the Confederate Battle Flag and supplied thousands of soldiers and cavalry to the Confederate armies—40,000 from Kentucky and 40,000 from Missouri, plus thousands of pro-Southern Missouri Partisan cavalry. My own great grandfather and a brother, who were born in South Carolina and raised in Alabama served in the Confederate 2nd Kentucky Cavalry under John Hunt Morgan.
Davis graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1829 and served six years as a lieutenant, including combat in the Black Hawk war in 1832, before leaving the Army and marrying the daughter of his commander and…