From N. O., La., Picayune, December 6, 1908.
THE REAL JEFFERSON DAVIS IN PRIVATE
AND PUBLIC LIFE.
Some Facts Never Before Printed Concerning the Confederate
President and His Lineage, Family
and Descendants.
Physical Likeness to His Great Antagonist Abraham Lincoln, They
Were Born in Adjoining Kentucky Counties—Both Were of
Welsh Parentage; Both Fought in the Black Hawk War.
By T. C. DeLEON.
On the anniversary of the great Southern leader's death, at New Orleans, Dee. 6, 1889, and at the ending of the centennial year of his birth—it is fitting that the remnant of the people he wrought and struggled for should teach their children what manner of man he really was. And it is with regret that some of us see the year closing and the loving and practical suggestion of Mrs. Cornelia Branch Stone, U. D. C, unfulfilled and almost unheeded.
Engaged, at the opening centenary year of Jefferson Davis, upon a somewhat important work of Confederate chronicle, I was absolutely amazed at the dense and very generous ignorance of polite and well-bred people of the South regarding the most patent details of the Southern President's career.
In one of his piquante and meaty addresses Hon. Champ Clark, of Missouri, paralleled the manner in which noted Northerners and Southerners were treated in the histories, cyclopedias and biographical dictionaries of the last half century. He instanced among many that Robert Toombs—an important national factor on both sides of the supposititious "line" of Mason and Dixon—received a quarter-column comment and William H. Seward three columns; that Abraham Lincoln in several books averaged five columns, while Jefferson Davis—soldier, Senator, Cabinet minister and leader of a new nation—has one column.
