Jefferson Davis

June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889

Mississippi planter-statesman who became provisional president of the Confederate States of America.

confederacypolitician

Jefferson Davis was born on June 3, 1808, in Kentucky, less than a year before and fewer than a hundred miles from Abraham Lincoln's birthplace, and grew up on a Mississippi cotton plantation worked by enslaved people. He graduated from West Point in 1828, served on the frontier, and married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of his commander Zachary Taylor, only to lose her to malaria three months after the wedding. He spent the next decade as a planter at Brierfield, where he eventually held more than a hundred people in slavery, then returned to public life as a congressman, a Mexican War hero who was wounded leading his regiment at Buena Vista, a U.S. senator, and secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, one of the ablest the department had known. In the Senate he became the leading voice of the slaveholding South, arguing that slavery was constitutional, moral, and essential, and that the federal government had no power to keep it out of the western territories. When Mississippi seceded he gave a farewell speech on January 21, 1861, and went home hoping for a military command. Instead the new Confederate convention at Montgomery chose him as provisional president, and he was inaugurated on February 18, 1861. His government ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter two months later. As president Davis worked himself to exhaustion, quarreled with governors who guarded their states' rights against his central government, and feuded with generals other than Robert E. Lee, whom he trusted completely. He never solved the Confederacy's shortages of money, food, and men, and by 1865 he was arguing for arming enslaved men to save the cause built to keep them enslaved. He fled Richmond on April 2, 1865, still hoping to fight on, and was captured near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10. He spent two years in a cell at Fort Monroe, was indicted for treason but never tried, and lived out his life in Mississippi writing a two-volume defense of secession. He died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889, unrepentant, insisting to the end that the Confederacy had been right. His story is the other side of the Civil War journey, and of the sectional crisis that produced it.

Jefferson Davis

Further reading

Jefferson Davis

Further reading