Davis, Jefferson, 1808-1889

Jefferson Davis was a Mississippi politician and military officer who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, in the U.S. Senate, as U.S. Secretary of War, and finally as president of the Confederate States of America.

Born on June 3, 1808, in Fairview Kentucky, Davis moved to Louisiana and then Mississippi as a child with his family. He attended various schools in Mississippi and Kentucky before attending Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He transferred to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1826. He served in the U.S. Army for nine years, participating in the Black Hawk War and seeing assignments at various western outposts. He resigned in 1835 and returned to Mississippi to become a cotton planter with money and land loaned to him by an older brother.

Davis married Sarah Taylor, daughter of General (and future president) Zachary Taylor, in 1835. However, the couple contracted malaria and Sarah died three months after their wedding. Davis focused on developing his plantation in Mississippi over the next few years, purchasing additional slaves, and expanding his planting operations. By 1840 he owned 40 people, and over the next twenty years he nearly tripled the number of slaves on his property, owning 113 slaves by 1860.

In 1840 Davis became active in Democratic politics in Mississippi. He served as a delegate to various state conventions, and was selected to be a Democratic elector for the 1844 presidential election. That same year, the 35-year old Davis met 18-year old Varina Banks Howell, the daughter of another Mississippi planter. They married in 1845 and ultimately had six children. In 1845, Davis also won his first election to political office, a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for Mississippi. The next year, he voted for the United States to go to war against Mexico, and left Congress to raise a regiment of Mississippians for the Mexican-American War. Davis and his First Mississippi Regiment, nicknamed the “Mississippi Rifles,” served under his former father-in-law, General Taylor, in Mexico, seeing action in several battles.

In 1847, before the Mexican-American War ended, Davis accepted an appointment to the U.S. Senate, to fill a vacancy created by the death of Mississippian Jesse Speight. He used his position within the Senate to advocate the expansion of slavery into the western territories. By the time famed South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun passed away in 1850, Davis was among the most prominent defenders of southern interests in Washington, D.C., and he argued against policies and legislation that limited or restricted slavery. He resigned from his Senate seat in 1851 to run for governor of Mississippi, but lost a narrow election to Henry S. Foote. Instead of returning to the Senate, Davis resumed life on his plantation in Mississippi, but remained in touch with his Democratic colleagues.

In 1853, Davis received an appointment as Secretary of War by newly elected president Franklin Pierce. In that position, he advocated for greater westward expansion and railroad development. Davis also supported the annexation of Cuba, in part for its strategic value in protecting American interests in the Gulf of Mexico, but also as a potential new slave state. That effort failed, but Davis continued to advocate for additional slave states in the west, particularly in 1854 with his support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which struck down the Missouri Compromise’s limitation of slavery in the northern half of the federal territories. With President Pierce’s presidential term ending, Davis again ran for, and won, a seat in the U.S. Senate. He was absent from his duties in the Capitol for several months due to recurring health problems, but continued to influence southern politics through letters and speeches in Mississippi.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Davis cautioned against extreme action by southern secessionists. He was still in Washington, D.C., when Mississippi formally declared its separation from the Union in January 1861, and he resigned his seat and gave a farewell address lamenting the sadness of the situation. Less than a month later, a Confederate constitutional convention in Alabama unanimously elected Davis as president of the Confederate States of America due to his military and political experience, and his steadfast defense of slavery. Additionally, many Confederate delegates believed Davis’s reputation as a moderate, compared to the more extreme secessionists, would appeal to southerners who had not yet embraced disunion.

Davis was selection as president was widely hailed during the first months of the Confederacy. However, his popularity declined as the Civil War progressed, in part due to the unavoidable hardships that the south faced while carrying out a war against a larger and better equipped Union military, and because of the strong states rights sentiment within the south that denounced federal authority—even when it was the Confederate national government. Davis also proved to be less skilled than his Union counterpart, Abraham Lincoln, in resolving personal disputes and handling prickly political and military officials. He was loyal to friends or those he admired, assigning them key positions even when their performances were questionable, and he was accused of rejecting promotions or appointments for individuals he disliked.

In March 1865, when Union forces broke through Confederate lines outside of the Confederacy’s capital of Richmond, Virginia, Davis fled southward. He remained on the run over the next few weeks, desperately trying to maintain a war effort while Confederate armies were crumbling under the weight of federal military forces. In early May 1865, after Robert E. Lee and most other Confederates had surrendered, Davis dissolved the Confederate government. He tried to flee westward toward Texas, where the last Confederate troops held out, but he was captured on May 10, 1865, in Georgia. Federal authorities imprisoned Davis in Fort Monroe, Virginia, for two years. The U.S. government released him in 1867, having never formally tried him, but after President Andrew Johnson had already paroled other Confederate officials.

Davis and his family traveled to Europe shortly after his release, but eventually returned to the United States and settled down in a large manor along Mississippi’s southern coast. Despite some offers to return to the U.S. Senate, Davis did not hold political office again. He was legally disqualified since he had never received—nor asked for—an official pardon. Instead, Davis remained retired, writing a book about the Civil War. He passed away in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 6, 1889. He is buried in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. (Wikipedia; American Battlefield Trust; United States Senate; FindaGrave)