nixon presidential library. for more information and the complete schedule, go to c-span.org/americanhistory. this is american history tv all weekend on c-span 3. each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits historic places. during the civil war, president jefferson davis and his family lived in this mansion in richmond, virginia. now referred to as the white house of the confederacy. the residence was saved from demolition in 1896. since 1988 has been restored to its war-time appearance. american history tv visited the house to learn about the mexican war veteran and u.s. senator who became leader of the confederate states of america. this is part one of a two-part program. this house was built in 1818, the private residence for john brokenbraw, a doctor and the president of the bank of virgina. he lived here with his family

until 1844. the house passed through several more private owners after that. in 1857, it was purchased by lewis crenshaw, a wealthy flour mill owner. crenshaw did a lot with the house. he added the third floor, put in a bathroom on the second floor and completely refurnished the house with all the latest mid-victorian styles. in 1861, when he learned that the confederate government was moving from montgomery, alabama, here to richmond, he sold the house with everything in it to the city of richmond. then the city rented it to the confederate government. in august of 1861, jefferson davis moved into the house from august of 1861 until april of 1865. today, the house is restored to its wartime appearance or as close as we can come. we have a lot of the original furnishings, the things that were here when jefferson davis lived here.

the other furnishings are period antiques. the only reproductions in the house are textiles, carp pets, wallpapers, draperies, and upholstries, the kind of things that don't last 150 years. so come inside. this is the entrance hall. visitors in the 1860s would have come in through these doors and stopped here to wipe their boots off. the streets were filthy, unpaved garbage dumps and what we have here is a cotton covering on the floor. it's a heavy cotton canvas. this one is painted to look like tile. people would wipe their boots off on to it before going on and walking on the nice, fancy, expensive carpets in the rest of the house. it is a practical thing. it is also a decorative object, a false surface. that was very popular in this time period.

things designed to look like other things. very simply put, all around us, we have wallpaper designed to look like blocks of marble. on either side of the room, we have comedy and tragedy. they are painted to look like bronze, but they're actually made of plaster. they've been here since the 1820s and have never left the house. now, where a visitor went once they got here depended on who they were, why they were here, where jefferson davis was, if davis was receiving visitors, if a visitor was here to see davis specifically, they'd probably be shown upstairs into the waiting room. if davis wasn't here, the visitor might leave their calling card for him over here. if the visitor was here for a more social event, party, reception, they might be shown through those doors into the central parlor. if the visitor was here for a formal meal or maybe a military meeting, they might be shown around this corner into the state dining room.

the white house of the confederacy or confederate white house is mostly a post-war name. i think there are one or two 1860s references to it being called that. it is really more of a museum period name. during the war, it was called many different things, the broken bra house after the first owner, the executive mansion, called jeff davis' house, generally not the white house of the confederacy. one point to make about that. this house wasn't meant to be the direct counterpart of the white house in washington. the white house in washington is a residence and office for the u.s. president. this house was really meant to be just the residence for the confederate president and his family. davis did do a great deal of work hirereby, but it was intend to be just the residence. his executive office was in a different building. mrs. davis referred to this room as the state dining room,

partially to distinguish it from the family dining room down in the basement below where i am standing right now. the davises took most of their ordinary meals down there. this would have been reserved for special occasions. dinners with important guests, holiday meals with the family, parties, banquets, and sometimes military meetings. we have the table, which is an original piece, set up for a military meeting. we happen to know a number of details about one particular meeting that took place here around this table on april 14th of 1862. the topic of discussion was the union army siege of yorktown, virginia. the men present at the discussion were president jefferson davis, george wythe randolph, the confederate secretary of war, at this point in the war. randolph was also a grandson of jefferson. davis and randolph were meeting with four confederate generals. robert e. lee, joseph johnson,

james longstreet, and augusta smith. union general george mcclelland had an army at yorktown. the confederate was john mcgruder, prince john. he was quite clever, an interesting, flamboyant, theatrical man. all qualities that served him very well during the siege of yorktown. magruder put on a show for george mcclelland. he marched his men in a circle around and around in front of a gap in the forest that separated the two armies. he told those men as they were marching around to be as noisy as they possibly could. he told them to shout out orders to nonexistent units. he had men in the back of the lines chop down trees, strip from branches, paint them black and set them up horizontally on hillsides so they looked like cannons.

all this stuff worked. george and his spies were apparently fooled by these tricks being played on them by general magruder. they didn't move for a month, due in large part to these tricks. davis and his advisers were pleased that magruder was holding mcclelland off but at some point, they knew they would probably have to face this threat to richmond. they were discussing overall strategy, what to do about this enormous army that posed an imminent threat to richmond and really the confederacy itself. they discussed all sorts of options, whether they should hold at yorktown as long as possible or withdraw all forces here to the gates of richmond or attack north into philadelphia or even new york city. all these things discussed that evening, april 14th, 1862, from about 7:00 p.m. to 1:00 in the morning around this table. you will notice a portrait of

george washington. the confederates tried hard throughout the war to draw connections between themselves and the revolutionaries, especially george washington. washington's image was in the center of the great seal of the confederacy. it was on confederate currency and confederate postage stamp, letterheads, envelope, and anything else they could think of. the confederates inaugurated jefferson davis for his term as confederate president on george washington's birthday, february 2nd, 1862, in front of the statue of george washington in virginia's capital square just blocks from where we are. they felt they were fighting the second american revolution, the second war for independence. they felt that washington was something like the grandfather of the confederacy. they felt he would have been on

their side if he had been alive in 1861. that's a theme that the confederate, political, and to some extent military leaders hit upon throughout the war, especially jefferson davis. davis never lost sight of this concept that he and his fellow confederates were fighting a war much like the one that washington and his fellow revolutionaries had fought 80 some years earlier. back here is a mirror. that is an original and a small bust of thomas jonathan jackson, better known as stone wall jackson. general jackson died after being accidentally wounded by his own men at the battle of chancellorsville. he died a week later of pneumonia. his body was brought here to richmond. a sculptor took a death mask of jackson's face and used that as a guide for creating the bust of jackson. the bust sat there throughout the rest of the war. in this room, we have a lot of original pieces. this table is an original.

the gasalear is an original. the mirror is an original. the side board over here. this sofa and both of these tables. those are just bigger pieces. a lot of the smaller pieces around here are original too. several of those decanters, even the shot glasses are original. over here, the berry bowl and tripod to the right side is original. if you see the red goblets and the red decanter, those are original. those little demitasse cups are original and the white punch bowl. a lot of pieces were here when jefferson davis lived here. also, the draperies in this room are exact reproductions of what was here. in fact, we at the museum own one of the drapes that hung in this room. it looks just like this. we're not going to hang that in this room, of course, but we used that to make exact reproductions. to go even further, in this room the wallpaper, we know, was this

color. we did find a small scrap of the original, enough to see the colors. we're not sure about the pattern. but these are the appropriate colors. i think, by and large, davis would recognize this room. i think it looks a great deal like what it looked like when he lived here. very large house. probably a large staff to serve a big dinner like this. tell us about the people who had worked here and how many of them would have been slaves and what do you know about them? >> first of all, we don't know as much as we would like to. the information about the slaves and the servants here is fragmentary at best in some cases. an overview would be at any one point in the war, they would have about 10 or 12 slaves and servants working here. to break that down, the people working here fell into four categories. there would be davis slaves, meaning slaves owned by jefferson davis brought here from his home in mississippi.

those numbered as far as we can tell just two. davis owned over 100 slaves back home in mississippi. he only brought two of them here. davis hired slaves from owners in this area. that was a practice more common in the upper south and more common in cities in the upper south. so richmond, it certainly happened in richmond a fair amount. that, of course, means owners of slaves would rent them out to other people and davis, we know, did that. he also employed free black servants. in the census of 1860, there were 2,500 free black people in the city of richmond and he employed white servants, the whites were typically european immigrants, especially from ireland. many of these people didn't live here on the grounds. many of them lived probably not very far from here. they would come here, do their work and go home to wherever home was. the ones that did live here -- and again, this is somewhat of a speculation. there were out buildings along the east side of the house.

we think that the ones that did live here slept on the second floors of those buildings. there is at least one exception to that. the nurse slept in the nursery, which is directly above us. this is the central parlor. the davises had a lot of parties and receptions in this room. one typical arrangement for a reception would be to have a receiving line down the center of the room with jefferson davis himself here at the head of the line. visitors coming in from the street into the entrance hall then into here and shaking hands down the receiving line. in times like these, the windows would be opened up. these windows are triple hung. they are three sashes that go down to the floor. the lower two would have been slid all the way up level with the top one. the shutters would swing out open on hinges like doors. these rear windows are also rear doors. visitors coming through during one of these events would see a lot of the things that we have here today.

roughly half, more than half of the furnishings in these two parlors are originals. also, in these two rooms, the upholstery, the draperies and the red flocked wallpaper are exact reproductions of what was here. notice also this. it's called border paper, or architectural paper, use the to simulate fluted columns. another very good false surface in this room. this is jefferson davis. this is the only wartime portrait of jefferson davis. it was done in this house from life in august of 1863 when he was 55 years old. we believe that this portrait hung in the house somewhere. we are not sure where, after it was finished. we do know davis took it with him when he left richmond in april of 1862 and eventually gave it to someone in south

carolina when he was passing through that state, and the museum got it back later and we have displayed it ever since. jefferson davis was born in kentucky, the same state that abraham lincoln was born in actually. both men were born in kentucky. neither of them stayed there that long. davis' family moved south soon after davis' birth. they moved to louisiana and then over to mississippi. davis grew up mostly in mississippi. although, he returned to kentucky a couple times both for educational reasons. he went to boarding school in kentucky and then later to transylvania university in kentucky before going off to the u.s. military academy at west point. lincoln, by contrast, spent about the first seven years of his life in kentucky until his parents moved to indiana, which is where lincoln grew up. he didn't move to illinois until he was 21. below davis, on the mantle, are various things that were made by confederate prisoners of war in union prison camps, out of anything they could find, shells, wood, bones, glass, whatever they could pick up in

those northern prison camps. throughout roughly the middle two years of the war, there was a regular prisoner exchange system in place between the union and the confederacy. many confederate prisoners who had been exchanged for union prisoners would come through richmond and give the davises things like this that they made in the camps and the davises displayed them like this in these twin parlors. these two flags are replicas of the first and second national flag of the confederacy. this was the first called the stars and bars, adopted in march of 1861 as the national flag of the confederacy. that's before the war started. when the war did start, they used this on the battlefield. that proved to be pretty confusing. on a battlefield with smoke and fire and other confusion, it looked like the u.s. flag. so after the first big battle of the war at manassas, virginia, they stopped using this on the battlefield. however, they kept it as the

national flag for almost two more years. in the wake of the failure of this one on the battlefield, they came up with other designs specifically for battlefield use. by may, 1863, however, they completely did away with this one and came up with this one to replace it. this is the second national flag of the confederacy. this was created by taking one of the battle flags, this square by itself was the battle flag of the army of northern virginia. they put this on a field of white. this became the second, the new national flag of the confederacy. it is sometimes called the stainless banner. also, no good for a battlefield. they kept it off the field but kept it as their national flag until march, 1865, very late in the war when they created a third national flag by essentially taking this flag but then putting a red bar down one

side of that flag to take away a lot of that white. so that flag was the third national flag of the confederacy. this is the second national and this is the first national. >> how is it that the flag that everyone thinks of as the confederate flag is part of that? >> that has more to do with what's happened since the war. this design and really more often today we see it in a rectangular design, just caught on as caught on as the emblem of the confederacy. we can get into speculation as to why. one of them is this is robert e. lee army's flag. lee's army was by far one of the most successful of the confederate armies. it is a striking design and it certainly achieved the stated goal of being difference from this flag and also from the u.s. flag. now, i mentioned that we usually today see a rectangular design.

that is the battle flag of the army of tennessee or the confederate naval jack. technically speaking, during the war, the square pattern was the battle flag of the army of northern virginia. another thing to comment about that is that sometimes that's called the stars and bars. that's not correct at least in terms of the terminology the confederates used. the confederates called this the stars and bars. the next room is the west parlor which looks a lot like this room actually. this is the west parlor, also known as the ladies parlor or mrs. davis' parlor or the drawing room. as you can tell, decoratively, it's quite similar to the center parlor. the two rooms were often used together as one big room with the pocket doors open and they could shut the pocket doors for more privacy. that would typically be done with a group of people splint by

gender. for instance, during one of these receptions, most of the guests would file through and go outside. mrs. davis and the female vip guests, you might say, would withdrawal into this room, whereas mr. davis and the plmen would stay in the center parlor or stay in the dining room for cigars and brandy, that kind of thing. behind me is another image of mr. davis. when he was preparing to evacuate richmond, he was worried about this bust. he didn't want to leave it here for the union army to find. he also didn't want to take it with him. he knew he would be moving around a bit and he wanted to travel light. so he left this bust in town with a friend of his who wrapped it up in cloth and buried it in some ashes in his yard and left it there for years until he thought it was safe enough to dig it back up. so here it is. we have had it since 1907. davis himself when he left

richard on april 2nd, 1865, at about 11:00 p.m., was not running away, not fleeing. he was in his mind moving the confederate government to a different location. that is what he did. he evacuated richmond and established the confederate capital at danville, virginia. it last as the third confederate capital for one week. davis kept moving. he went into north carolina, south carolina and then georgia. by the time he got to georgia, he seems as though he was looking west as though he was trying to cross the mississippi river and get out into texas there was still a confederate army in texas. davis, it seems, was hoping to link up with that army and presumably start a new capital in texas, but he was captured by the union army in georgia on may 10th of 1865. so that ended the war for jefferson davis. over here are several original

pieces, among the many original pieces in this room, the mirror is an original. the clock, which had is made of a baster and from france, is an original. perhaps most interestingly, the fire place is an original. that's one of the older pieces in this house, installed by the first owner and made of italian marble. mrs. davis wrote about this fire place in her memoirs. she said her young boys would shower these ladies with kisses. this cribbage board belonged to a fascinating man named judah benjamin. benjamin was attorney general for the confederacy at the very beginning. he served briefly as secretary of war for the conconfederacy, for most of the war, he was secretary of state. benjamin worked very closely with president davis. he was also very friendly with mrs. davis. when he left richmond, he left this cribbage board in the house he stayed in. we acquired it and thought it

might be appropriate to have something of his in this house since he was a frequent visitor to this house. jefferson davis and judah benjamin first became acquainted in the united states senate in the heated days of the late 1850s. jefferson davis was a senator from mississippi and a mexican war veteran. judah benjamin was a senator from louisiana with no military experience. they were discussing a military appropriations bill on the floor of the senate and things got a little heated, and jefferson davis apparently made a sneering reply to something that judah benjamin said, and benjamin asked davis if, indeed, he had made that remark, and davis replied that, yes, indeed, he had. there are some records that suggest that jefferson davis said that he was not expecting to be met with the arguments of a paid attorney in the senate chambers.

this was a very serious insult. obviously, not only is davis suggesting strongly that benjamin was bought and sold by outside interests, but perhaps also with a slap at his jewish heritage. 30 pieces of silver or something like that. so benjamin challenged davis to a dual. davis, what uncharacteristically, backed down immediately. he ripped up the dual challenge and said i have been all wrong in this and went out on the senate floor and apologized publicly to benjamin and the entire u.s. senate. that, as best as we can tell, is how the two became acquainted. obviously during the war, they worked very closely together throughout all four years of the war. benjamin was here a lot. unfortunately, benjamin burned all of his papers. i think one of his biographers said that he left six pieces of

paper when he died, meaning only six pieces of paper. he was a pretty secretive guy about many things, especially about his service during the war but it seems clear from other sources that benjamin was here a lot. both working with mr. davis but also it seems socializing with mrs. davis. it seems the two of them were pretty friendly. benjamin was clearly well-suited for a diplomat's role. he was very sauve and elegant and very well-spoken, charming, and had a way with men and women. well, we call this the library. the davises called it the snuggery, a warm, private, snug little room used mainly by the family for private affairs. jefferson davis would do work in here. it seems especially more often later in the war.

we know he met with general robert e. lee at least once in this room to discuss military strategy. it seems pretty clear he met with other people in this room as well. mrs. davis probably used it to have breakfast, meet with a friend. the children had some of their tutoring sessions in this room. we know a fair amount about the meeting that he had with lee. mrs. davis wrote about it in her memoirs. mrs. davis wrote that one day, late in the war, general lee came to this house and through the front doors and apparently walked directly into this room without wiping his boots off sufficiently. in her words, this is almost an exact quote, with a bow and excuse for walking on the white carpet in his splashed boots, general lee sat down and plunged into discussion of the military situation with president davis, who was reclining quite ill on a

divan. later, lee noticed a sauce pan in front of the fireplace. this is the original fireplace, by the way. he said to mrs. davis, that's a comfortable and pretty little thing. what do you use it for? mrs. davis took it as a hint that general lee was thirsty and she heated up the coffee that was in that sauce pan and served it to him. from that little anecdote, we have done a lot. we picked a white base for the carpet, for instance. this is the only clue to the carpet patterns we have in the house. we know they had carpets. we know they had russell style wool wall to wall carpets throughout the house. we have no idea what they looked like with this one partial exception. we have had so make lots of guesses. we have selected a divan, because he was reclining quite ill on a divan. this is the original fire place. this one is another false surface because it's painted to look like marble, but it's actually made of cast iron.

another famous visitor to this room is abraham lincoln. he was here april 4th of 1865. jefferson davis had left town april 2, 1862 -- 1865. the union army took over the city and this house on the morning of april 3rd. abraham lincoln was here april 4th. he came in through the front doors and walked all around this floor much as we have just done. he had lunch somewhere on this floor. we don't really know where. it seems safe to say he saw every room on the first floor and spent most of his time here in this room. here, he met with union general godfrey weitzel. the head of an all black 25th corps of the union army of the james. lincoln met with general weitzel in this room. he also met with john campbell in this room. campbell was a former justice of the u.s. supreme court and the

assistant secretary of war for the congress fed -- confederacy. he was the only high ranking general left when lincoln got here. when he got word that campbell wanted to speak with him, he was hoping that campbell would speak to him on authority from jefferson davis to discuss a surrender or possible end to the war that was not the case. it was clear, he was speaking for himself trying to get virginia back into the union as quickly and painlessly as possible. lincoln listened to him. i think he was a bit disappointed he wasn't here it to talk about a surrender of the confederate government or an end to the wall. campbell, unlike davis, saw the writing on the wall and knew the war was almost over. >> that was part one of a two-part look at the white house of the confederacy. american artifacts airs every sunday at 8:00 a.m., 7:00 p.m.