Inauguration of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States of America, February 18, 1861

Photograph of State Capitol Building in Montgomery, Alabama on February 18, the occasion of Jefferson Davis' Inauguration

Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederate States of America on the portico of the Alabama capitol. Davis, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi, lived in Montgomery until April, when the Confederate government was moved from Montgomery to its new capital of Richmond, Virginia. 

Star marking the spot
 where Jefferson Davis stood during Inauguration

"Today I have stood where Jefferson Davis stood and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom. . . . In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"

~ George Wallace,1962 Governor's Inaugural Address, Montgomery, Alabama

Celebration of Confederate Inaguration, February 19, 2011

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/summer/scv-celebrates-confederate-inaugurati

SCV Celebrates Confederate Inauguration in Montgomery

Feb. 19, 2011

Hundreds of neo-Confederates, reenactors and others joined a march and rally organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), a Southern heritage group, to unapologetically "CELEBRATE THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFEDERACY."

The gathering, which included the reenactment of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as the president of the Confederate States of America, came as part of a series of events to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and was meant to ensure that the war "is remembered and portrayed in the right way." What was meant by the "right way" was evidenced by the SCV website promoting the event, which insisted that "the South was right!" and claimed that "there is no difference between the invasion of France by Hitler and the invasion of the Southern states by Lincoln."

Although the marchers took the end of the same route as the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965, no mention whatsoever was made of slavery, which SCV members claim had nothing to do with the Civil War — an assertion that has been repeatedly debunked by virtually all serious historians of the period.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/us/21davis.html

Marking Davis’s Confederate Inauguration

New York Times

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Published: February 20, 2011

Before a cheering crowd of several hundred men and women, some in period costume and others in crisp suits, an amateur actor playing Jefferson Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy on the steps of the Alabama Capitol on Saturday, an event framed by the firing of artillery, the delivery of defiant speeches and the singing of “Dixie.”

The participants far outnumbered the spectators, but it was to be the largest event of the year organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans and one in a series of commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Confederacy and the War for Southern Independence. (Referring to the Civil War as anything other than an act of unwarranted Northern aggression upon a sovereign republic was rather frowned upon.)

The Sons’ principal message was that the Confederacy was a just exercise in self-determination that had been maligned by “the politically correct crowd” through years of historical distortions. It is the right of secession that they emphasize, not the cause, which they often describe as a complicated mix of tariff and tax disputes and Northern attempts to politically subjugate the South.

The other matter of subjugation — that is, slavery — went unmentioned on Saturday. (Davis himself did not refer to it in his inaugural address, but he emphasized the maintenance of African slavery as a cause for secession in other high-profile settings). And the issue of slavery was largely brushed aside in interviews as a mere function of the time, and not a defining feature of the Confederacy.

Though the swearing-in was a re-enactment down to the antique buttons, there were contemporary political overtones. More than one speaker, insisting that “the South was indeed right,” extolled the Confederacy as an example of limited government that should be followed now, and said vaguely that the Southern cause was vindicated by a glance at the headlines every day.

But even the politics on Saturday were tied up in a larger sense of grievance, a feeling of being marginalized and willfully misunderstood. Expressions of this feeling led to some rather unexpected analogies, like when Kelley Barrow, a teacher from Georgia, declared that people of Confederate heritage “have been forced to go to the back of the bus.”