Jefferson Davis
Jefferson F. Davis was born on the 3rd of June, 1808, in a village his father had established in Kentucky, and he died in a borrowed New Orleans home on the 6th of December, 1889, at the age of 81, holding his wife Varina's hand. In the eighty-one years between those two moments, he served the United States as a soldier, a congressman, a senator, and a secretary of war. Then he led a rebellion against it. He held the only presidency the Confederate States of America ever produced, presiding over four years of catastrophic civil war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. How did a man shaped so entirely by American institutions come to command the forces trying to destroy them? And what becomes of a legacy that is simultaneously decorated with statues and toppled by protesters more than a century after his death?
Samuel Davis, Jefferson's father, had served in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War and received a land grant near present-day Washington, Georgia, for his service. He married Jane Cook, a woman of Scotch-Irish descent he had met in South Carolina, in 1783. Around 1793, the couple moved to Kentucky. Jefferson, the youngest of their ten children, was named after then-President Thomas Jefferson.
The family did not stay long in any one place. By 1811, they had moved to the vicinity of Bayou Teche in what is now Louisiana, and less than a year later to Wilkinson County, Mississippi, where Samuel cultivated cotton, acquired twelve slaves, and built a house Jane called Rosemont. Jefferson was around five years old when he first attended a schoolhouse near Woodville.
When Jefferson was about eight, his father sent him northeast along the Natchez Trace, escorted by a planter and militia officer named Thomas Hinds, to attend Saint Thomas College, a Catholic preparatory school run by Dominicans near Springfield, Kentucky. Davis later attended Jefferson College, the Wilkinson Academy, and Transylvania University in Lexington. While he was still in college in 1824, word reached him that his father Samuel had died in debt, having sold Rosemont and most of his slaves to his eldest son Joseph Emory Davis, who owned a large estate at Davis Bend, about fifteen miles south of Vicksburg. Joseph, twenty-three years older than Jefferson, informally became his surrogate father, a role that would shape the younger man's entire life.
Joseph Davis got his younger brother appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where Jefferson arrived on the 1st of September, 1824. He made friends there with Albert Sidney Johnston and Leonidas Polk, names that would reappear decades later on Civil War battlefields. He also found trouble. In his first year he was court-martialed for drinking at the nearby tavern of Benny Havens. He was found guilty but pardoned. The following Christmas, he was placed under house arrest for his role in an eggnog riot. He was not dismissed. He graduated 23rd in a class of 33.
Assigned to the 1st Infantry Regiment as a second lieutenant, Davis brought with him James Pemberton, an enslaved African American he had inherited from his father. In early 1829, Davis was stationed at Forts Crawford and Winnebago in Michigan Territory under Colonel Zachary Taylor, whose daughter Sarah he would later pursue over her father's objections.
In the Mexican-American War, Davis led the First Mississippi Regiment, a volunteer unit he armed with percussion rifles instead of the smoothbore muskets given to other regiments. The weapon became known as the Mississippi rifle. He distinguished himself at the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846, leading a charge that took the fort of La Teneria. At the Battle of Buena Vista on the 22nd of February, 1847, he was wounded in the heel but stopped a Mexican attack that threatened to collapse the American line. President Polk offered him a brigadier generalship afterward; Davis declined on constitutional grounds, arguing that the power to appoint militia officers belonged to the states, not the federal government.
After leaving the army in 1835, Davis returned to Mississippi and built Brierfield Plantation on land his brother Joseph provided. The land title stayed in Joseph's name. Davis named James Pemberton, the enslaved man who had accompanied him since West Point, as Brierfield's effective overseer, a role Pemberton held until his death around 1850. In 1836, Davis possessed 23 slaves; by 1840-40; and by 1860, 113.
His first marriage to Sarah Knox Taylor, Zachary Taylor's daughter, ended in tragedy. They married on the 17th of June, 1835, at Beechland. In August, both traveled to his sister's Louisiana plantation, where both contracted malaria. Sarah died on the 15th of September, 1835, at the age of 21, after only three months of marriage.
On his way to a Democratic convention in January 1844, Davis delivered an invitation from Joseph and met Varina Banks Howell, the eighteen-year-old daughter of William Burr Howell and Margaret Kempe Howell. Within a month, the thirty-five-year-old Davis and Varina were engaged over her parents' concerns about his age. They married on the 26th of February, 1845. They had six children; four of the six died before reaching adulthood, from disease and accident.
Davis's Senate career placed him at the center of every great sectional dispute of the 1850s. He tried to amend the Oregon Bill to allow slave owners to bring their slaves into Oregon Territory. He opposed the Compromise of 1850, arguing it disadvantaged the South. He served as Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce from 1853 to 1857, championing a transcontinental railroad along a southern route and overseeing the Gadsden Purchase of what is now southern Arizona in December 1853. When the Democratic Party split in 1860 and Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, Davis counseled moderation. On what he called the saddest day of his life, he delivered his farewell address to the Senate and returned to Mississippi.
On the 9th of February, 1861, a constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama, unanimously elected Davis to the provisional presidency of the Confederacy. Delegates chose him for his political prominence, his military reputation, and his moderate tone on secession, which Confederate leaders hoped might win over undecided Southerners. Davis had wanted a military command. He committed himself to the presidency instead and was inaugurated on the 18th of February.
He formed his cabinet by choosing one representative from each Confederate state: Robert Toombs of Georgia, Christopher Memminger of South Carolina, LeRoy Walker of Alabama, John Reagan of Texas, Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, and Stephen Mallory of Florida. Over the course of his presidency, the cabinet turned over constantly; there were six secretaries of war alone.
The war's first shot came after Davis sent a commission to Washington to negotiate the evacuation of Fort Sumter. Lincoln refused to meet with it. When Lincoln informed Davis he intended to reprovision the fort, Davis ordered its surrender or capture. After more than thirty hours of bombardment beginning on the 12th of April, 1861, the fort surrendered. Lincoln called for 75,000 militiamen to suppress the rebellion; Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas promptly joined the Confederacy.
Davis's military decisions were a source of constant controversy. In 1862, he instituted the first conscription in American history when volunteer soldiers proved unwilling to re-enlist. He appointed General Robert E. Lee as his military advisor in March 1862, and the two formed a close partnership that lasted until the end of the war. But Davis also retained generals past their usefulness and replaced capable ones with men who failed: John B. Hood's battles around Atlanta in the summer of 1864 failed to save the city, and its fall on the 2nd of September, 1864, assured Lincoln's reelection.
Union forces broke through the Confederate trench lines at the end of March 1865. Davis evacuated his family on the 29th of March, and on the 2nd of April he and his cabinet escaped by rail to Danville, Virginia. His family included Jim Limber, a free Black orphan they had briefly adopted. Davis issued a proclamation on the 4th of April urging continued resistance, but Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse five days later.
When Lincoln was assassinated on the 14th of April, the Union government implicated Davis in the plot and placed a bounty of $100,000 on his head. On the 9th of May, Union soldiers found his encampment near Irwinville, Georgia. He tried to evade them but was captured wearing a loose-sleeved cloak and covering his head with a black shawl, which gave rise to political cartoons depicting him fleeing in women's clothes.
Davis was imprisoned at Fort Monroe, Virginia, on the 22nd of May, 1865, under the watch of Major General Nelson A. Miles. He was confined to a casemate, forced to wear fetters on his ankles, forbidden contact with his family, and given only a Bible and a prayerbook. Public outcry led to the fetters being removed after five days. In December of that year, Pope Pius IX sent Davis a photograph of himself. In April 1866, Varina was permitted to visit regularly.
The federal government could not find reliable evidence directly linking Davis to Lincoln's assassination or to the mistreatment of prisoners at Andersonville Prison. In June 1866, the House of Representatives voted 105 to 19 to put him on trial for treason, but Union prosecutors worried that a Richmond jury might acquit him in an act of nullification that would validate secession's constitutionality. Davis was released at Richmond on the 13th of May, 1867, on bail of $100,000, posted by prominent citizens including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Gerrit Smith. His case never went to trial.
After his release, Davis refused positions he felt were beneath his standing. He turned down the presidency of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia while still under indictment, worried about damaging the school's reputation. The presidency of the University of the South was also declined because the salary was insufficient. He eventually became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Tennessee in 1869, but resigned in August 1873 when its directors merged the company over his objections.
In January 1877, the author Sarah Dorsey invited Davis to live on her estate at Beauvoir, Mississippi, and work on his memoirs. Varina, who initially refused to come because of Davis's close relationship with Dorsey, relented in the summer of 1878 and took over as his assistant. Dorsey died in July 1879 and left Beauvoir to Davis in her will.
His first book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, was published in 1881. It argued for the righteousness of secession while downplaying slavery's role as a cause of the war. An 1886 tour, organized by Henry W. Grady, took Davis to Montgomery, Savannah, and Atlanta, where large crowds came out to cheer him. His 1873 speech to the Virginia Historical Society had revealed the harder edge of his politics: he stated that the South would not have surrendered had it known what to expect from Reconstruction, particularly the enfranchisement of African Americans.
Davis died in the New Orleans home of Charles Erasmus Fenner, the son-in-law of his friend J. M. Payne, at 12:45 in the morning on the 6th of December, 1889. His body lay in state at New Orleans City Hall from the 7th to the 11th of December. Estimates placed attendance at his funeral at over 200,000 mourners. He was eventually reburied at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond at Varina's direction, and when Varina died in 1906, she was buried beside him.
Davis's birthday was made a legal holiday in six Southern states. Around 200,000 people attended the unveiling of the Jefferson Davis Memorial at Richmond, Virginia, in 1907. Mississippi officials placed a life-size likeness of him in the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in 1931. In 1961, a centennial celebration reenacted his inauguration in Montgomery with fireworks and a cast of thousands in period costumes.
On the 17th of October, 1978, his U.S. citizenship was posthumously restored after the Senate passed Joint Resolution 16. President Jimmy Carter described the act as one of reconciliation and an expression of the nation's founding principles.
The celebration and the controversy ran in parallel. Most historians in the 21st century agree that Davis's participation in the Confederacy constituted treason. His speeches in the Senate show how little ambiguity he himself felt: in his February 1850 address, he declared that slavery did not need to be justified because it was sanctioned by religion and history, and he argued that African Americans were destined for bondage. In his 1863 address to the Confederate Congress, he called African Americans an inferior race.
Statues of Davis have been removed from the University of Texas at Austin, New Orleans, Memphis, and the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, protesters toppled the statue on his Richmond monument. The Richmond City Council funded removal of the pedestal, completed in February 2022, and transferred ownership of its artifacts to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. In the early 21st century, at least 144 Confederate memorials commemorating Davis remained throughout the United States, each one a point of ongoing dispute about what the country chooses to honor and what it finally decides to put down.
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Common questions
Who was Jefferson Davis and what did he do?
Jefferson Davis was the only president of the Confederate States of America, serving from 1861 to 1865 during the American Civil War. Before the war, he served Mississippi in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, and as the 23rd U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce.
Where and when was Jefferson Davis born?
Jefferson Davis was born on the 3rd of June, 1808, in Davisburg, a village his father Samuel established that later became Fairview, Kentucky. He was named after then-President Thomas Jefferson.
How was Jefferson Davis captured at the end of the Civil War?
Davis was captured on the 9th of May, 1865, when Union soldiers found his encampment near Irwinville, Georgia. He was wearing a loose-sleeved cloak and had covered his head with a black shawl when he tried to evade them, which led to political cartoons depicting him fleeing in women's clothing.
Was Jefferson Davis ever tried for treason?
Jefferson Davis was never tried for treason despite being charged. He was imprisoned at Fort Monroe for two years starting in May 1865, released on bail of $100,000 in May 1867, and in February 1869 the federal government formally dropped all charges against him without bringing the case to trial.
What did Jefferson Davis write after the Civil War?
Davis published The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government in 1881, a two-volume work arguing for the righteousness of secession while downplaying slavery's role as a cause of the war. He also began A Short History of the Confederate States of America and dictated personal memoirs that were never finished.
What happened to Jefferson Davis memorials in the 21st century?
Many memorials to Jefferson Davis have been removed. His statues were taken down in New Orleans, Memphis, at the University of Texas at Austin, and at the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, protesters toppled his Richmond statue; the city council funded removal of its pedestal, completed in February 2022, and transferred the artifacts to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.
All sources
113 references cited across the entry
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- 24bookThe Davis Family (Davies and David) in Wales and America; Genealogy of Morgan David of PennsylvaniaHarry A. Davis — Washington, D. C., H. A. Davis, 1927. — 1927
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- 27bookThe Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Davis in the Mexican War, 1846–1848Martin Dugard — University of Nebraska Press — 2009
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- 29bookJefferson DavisClement Eaton — Free Press — 1977
- 30book"Fiction Distorting Fact": Prison Life, Annotated by Jefferson DavisEdward K. Eckert — Mercer University Press — 1987
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- 32bookAfter Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate NationalismPaul D. Escott — Louisiana State University Press — 1978
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- 40bookThe Pursuit of a DreamJanet Sharp Hermann — Oxford University Press — 1981
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- 49bookEmbattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in ChiefJames M. McPherson — Penguin Press — 2014
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- 66bookPanting For Glory: The Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican WarRichard B. Winders — Texas A & M University — 2016
- 67bookArguing Until Doomsday: Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and the Struggle for American DemocracyMichael E. Woods — University of North Carolina Press — 2020
- 68bookJefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the WestSteven E. Woodworth — University Press of Kansas — 1990
- 69journalBlack Lives Matter and the removal of racist statues: Perspective of an AfricanCaesar Alimsinya Atuire — 2020
- 71journalThe Marriage of Varina Howell and Jefferson Davis: 'I gave the best and all my life to a girdled tree.'Carol K. Bleser — 1999
- 72journalThrough the looking-glass: the Confederate Constitution in Congress, 1861–1865David P. Currie — 2004
- 73journalThe Early Life of Jefferson DavisWalter L. Fleming — April 1917
- 74journalThe Jefferson Davis Highway: Contesting the Confederacy in the Pacific NorthwestEuan Hague et al. — 2011
- 75journalReview: Jefferson Davis: The Man and his Hour by William C. DavisHerman Hattaway — December 1992
- 76journalProperty rights in slavery and the coming of the Civil WarJames L. Huston — 1999
- 77journalFort Sumter and Confederate diplomacyLudwell H. Johnson — 1960
- 78journalReconstruction in the Wake of Vietnam: The Pardoning of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson DavisFrancis MacDonnell — June 1994
- 79journalJefferson Davis: The postwar yearsJohn Muldowny — 1969
- 80journalThe military record of Jefferson Davis in WisconsinP. L. Scanlan — 1940
- 81journalCult of the "lost cause"John A. Simpson — 1975
- 82journalForever faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate historical memoryRichard D. Starnes — 1996
- 83journalC. G. Memminger and the Confederate Treasury DepartmentRichard C. Todd — 1958
- 84journalJefferson Davis and proslavery visions of empire in the Far WestKevin Waite — 2016
- 85journalSlavery, the Civil War, and Jefferson Davis: An interview with William J. Cooper Jr. and Charles P. RolandKenneth H. Williams et al. — 2003
- 86journalJefferson Davis—Leader without legendFrank E. Vandiver — 1977
- 87webAbout Jefferson DavisThe Papers of Jefferson Davis
- 88newsGOP lawmakers complain about Davis statue removal processPiper H. Blackburn — July 14, 2020
- 89webJefferson Davis StatueArchitect of the Capitol
- 90webJoseph Evan DavisThe Papers of Jefferson Davis
- 91webMargaret Howell Davis HayesThe Papers of Jefferson Davis
- 92newsConfederate statues removed after Memphis sells public parksJonathan Matisse — December 21, 2017
- 93webPreventing Diplomatic Recognition of the Confederacy, 1861–1865United States Department of State: Office of the Historian
- 94newsRaw: Confederate statue removed amid controversyMay 11, 2017
- 95newsRichmond starts removal of Confederate monument pedestalsFebruary 2, 2020
- 96reportWhose Heritage? Public Symbols of the ConfederacySouthern Poverty Law Center — Southern Poverty Law Center — 2022
- 99webVarina Anne DavisThe Papers of Jefferson Davis
- 100webWilliam Howell DavisThe Papers of Jefferson Davis
- 101newsWorkers removing Davis monument pedestal find box in stoneFebruary 16, 2020
- 102webRestoration of Citizenship Rights to Jefferson F. Davis Statement on Signing S. J. Res. 16 into LawJimmy Carter — American Presidency Project — 1978
- 103bookPermanent Constitution of the Confederate States of AmericaConfederate Congress — James H. Goody — 1861
- 104bookSpeech of Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, on the Oregon bill. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, July 12, 1848Jefferson Davis — Towers — 1848
- 106bookJefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and SpeechesJefferson Davis — Mississippi department of Archives and History — 1923
- 107webJefferson Davis's Farewell Address: Senate Chamber, U.S. Capitol, January 21, 1861Jefferson Davis — 1861a
- 108webJefferson Davis' First Inaugural Address: Alabama Capitol, Montgomery, February 18, 1861Jefferson Davis — 1861b
- 109webMessage to Congress April 29, 1861 (Ratification of the Confederate Constitution)Jefferson Davis — The Avalon Project—Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy; Yale Law School: Lillian Goldman Law Library — 1861c
- 110webJefferson Davis' Second Inaugural Address, Virginia Capitol, Richmond, February 22, 1862Jefferson Davis — The Papers of Jefferson Davis — 1862
- 111bookA Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, Including the Diplomatic Correspondence, 1861–1865Jefferson Davis — United States Publishing — 1906
- 112webTo the People of the Confederate States of America. Danville, Va., April 4, 1865.Jefferson Davis — The Papers of Jefferson Davis — 1865
- 113newsReminiscences of Maj. Gen. Thomas HindsJ. G. Jones — April 28, 1886
- 114webDecember 25, 1868.- Granting Full Pardon and Amnesty to All Persons Engaged in the Late Rebellion.Andrew Johnson — Library of Congress — 1868
- 115bookA Handbook of Politics for 1868Edward McPherson — Philp & Solomons — 1868