Jefferson Davis

Biography

Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808 and grew up in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. After schooling that included a spell at Transylvania University, he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1824 and then served as an army lieutenant on the northwestern frontier until he resigned in 1835. He became a cotton planter at Brierfield in Mississippi, on land owned by his elder brother Joseph, and came to hold more than a hundred enslaved people.

Elected to the U.S. House as a Democrat in 1845, he left to command the 1st Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican–American War, then sat in the Senate from 1847. There he became a leading Southern voice, arguing against the measures that formed the Compromise of 1850 and for extending slavery into the western territories. As secretary of war under Franklin Pierce from 1853 to 1857 he oversaw the Pacific Railroad Surveys, backed the Gadsden Purchase and modernised army weapons, before returning to the Senate.

He resigned when Mississippi seceded in January 1861 and was chosen president of the Confederate States the following month. He directed Confederate policy and strategy through the Civil War, often clashing with generals and state governors, and in early 1865 sent commissioners to the failed peace talks at Hampton Roads. Captured in Georgia in May 1865, he was held at Fort Monroe for two years and released on bail without ever being tried.

In later life he lived at Beauvoir on the Mississippi coast and wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in 1881. He died in New Orleans in 1889 and became a central figure of the Lost Cause movement; his legacy as a defender of slavery and secession is now widely criticised.