Jefferson Finis Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, was a Southern Planter, Democratic politician and Mexican War hero who had represented Mississippi in the United States House of Representatives and Senate and had been US Secretary of War (1853 -57). He was chosen to serve as President of the Confederation (CSA) in 1861 and he held the post until the end of the Civil War in 1865.
Youth
Born in Kentucky in 1808 and raised in Mississippi, Davis was the 10th and youngest child in his family. His parents gave him the middle name Finis, which means “final” in Latin. Davis was greatly influenced by his older brother, Joseph, a wealthy lawyer and planter who served as a father figure, especially after their father’s death in 1824. Davis left his studies at the University of Transylvania in Kentucky this that year to enter the US Military Academy at West Point, where Joseph’s connection had secured him a date.
Davis graduated four years later, finishing in the bottom third of his class; he was assigned to an infantry regiment in Wisconsin. After serving only briefly in the Black Hawk War in 1832, he fell in love with Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor. The couple contracted malaria just months after their marriage in 1835, and Sarah died. After resigning from his military commission, Davis retired to his cotton plantation, Brierfield, built on land provided by his brother Joseph in Davis Bend, Mississippi.
Launch of political career and Mexican war service
After eight years of immersion in plantation life, Davis emerged to begin a career in politics. A strong supporter of state rights and slavery, he was delegated to the Democratic state convention in 1840 and 1842 and unsuccessfully ran for the state legislature in 1843.
In 1845 Davis married his second wife, Varina Howell, the young girl of a prominent local family. The couple are said to have four sons and two daughters, although only their daughters lived to adulthood. That same year, Davis won election to the United States House of Representatives from Mississippi. It was the only electoral success of his career; all his subsequent posts would be appointed.
When the Mexican-American War broke out in 1846, Davis resigned his seat in Congress to serve as colonel of the First Mississippi Rifle Regiment. As part of a force commanded by his former stepfather, Davis distinguished himself in combat at Monterrey and Buena Vista. General Taylor’s praise for his heroism won Davis national recognition, and in August 1847 the governor of Mississippi selected him to fill a vacant seat in the United States Senate.
Davis as Senator and Secretary of War
As a senator, Davis fiercely defended the interests of the South in the growing sectoral battle against slavery that would put the nation on the path to civil war. He led a generation of Southern Democrats who joined the pro-slavery crusade launched by John C. Calhoun, and continued it after Calhoun’s death in 1850.
A strong supporter of Manifest Destiny, Davis advocated for the extension of slavery into the New Western Territories and the protection of the property rights of slave owners. He opposed the Oregon Territory outlawing slavery and fought against the Compromise of 1850, specifically California’s admission to the Union as a Free State.
In 1851, Davis resigned from the Senate to run unsuccessfully for governor of Mississippi. Two years later, President Franklin Pierce appointed Davis Secretary of War. During his tenure, Davis focused on increasing the size of the military and improving national defenses and weapon technology, as well as protecting settlers in the Western Territories.
From the US Senate to Confederation
Davis returned to the Senate in 1857. He frequently clashed with fellow Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, arguing that Douglas’s doctrine of popular sovereignty was not doing enough to protect the rights of slave owners.
With the Democratic Party divided between North and South, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860. Davis resigned from the Senate in January 1861, after Mississippi seceded from the Union. When Confederate Congress met in Montgomery, Alabama the following month, it unanimously chose Davis – arguably the Southern leader with the most impressive political and military record – as President of Confederation.
Over the next four years, Davis struggled to balance his role as a leader in the Civil War with the difficult domestic duties of running a country. Like Lincoln, he faced epic clashes with his generals, state lawmakers, and Congress, but lacked the economic and military resources of his northern counterpart. Critics of Davis have accused him of neglecting the rights of the state in his efforts to form a more effective central government, favoring certain military leaders (like Braxton Bragg) despite their shortcomings, and sidelining those who do not disagreed with him, including Joseph E. Johnston.
Postwar imprisonment and later life
On April 2, 1865, Davis and the rest of the CSA government fled Richmond as the Union Army advanced on the Confederate capital. Union soldiers captured Davis near Irwinville, Georgia on May 10, and he was imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Charged but never tried for treason, Davis was released on bail in May 1867.
Davis’ emotional and physical health had deteriorated during his time in prison. After two years of traveling in Europe, he and his family returned to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked for a life insurance company. In 1876, they returned to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where an admirer named Sarah Dorsey let them use a cottage on her seaside plantation near Biloxi. Upon Dorsey’s death, she bequeathed the Beauvoir estate to Davis and his family. He would live there for the rest of his life, publishing his account of the war in a two-volume memoir titled The rise and fall of the Confederate government in 1881.
In December 1889 Davis died of acute bronchitis in New Orleans. Some 200,000 people lined the streets of this town for his funeral, which took place in Metairie cemetery. In 1893 Davis’s body was moved and reburied in Hollywood Cemetery, located in the former Confederate capital of Richmond.
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Civil War: Biography: Jefferson Davis. American Battlefield Trust.
Lynda Lasswell Crist. Jefferson Davis (1808-1889). Mississippi History Now, April 2008.
Michael E. Woods, Fighting to the End of the World: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis and the Struggle for American Democracy (University of North Carolina Press, 2020)
