Jefferson Davis

Davis was the youngest of ten children on a Mississippi cotton plantation, and it was his eldest brother Joseph, twenty-three years older, who raised him nearly as much as their father did and paid for West Point. He graduated near the bottom of his class in 1828 and, seven years later, married Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of his commanding officer Zachary Taylor, over Taylor's objection that no daughter of his would live an army wife's life. She was dead of malaria within three months, and Davis spent most of the next decade alone on Joseph's land at Brierfield, reading law, history and economics and speaking to almost no one. He remarried in 1845, to Varina Howell, seventeen years his junior, and ran for Congress the same year.

Congress lasted one term. War with Mexico, a Senate seat and four years as Franklin Pierce's secretary of war followed, and by 1861 Davis was among the most experienced men in Washington — which is why Mississippi made him a general and the new Confederacy made him president days later, a post he told friends he had not wanted and would rather have traded for a field command. BriefHistory covers the four years that followed and what they did to the country. This page is about what they cost the man who held the office.

Captured near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 9, 1865, with a shawl thrown over his shoulders against the morning cold, he was drawn instantly in Northern cartoons as a coward fleeing in his wife's dress — a lie that outlived every correction of it. Fort Monroe held him first in leg irons under constant light, then, after protest, in an apartment with Varina. He was never tried for treason. Every prominent Confederate who wanted a pardon generally got one by asking. Davis never applied. He held to the end that secession had been lawful and that he owed no apology, and it took Sarah Dorsey, the widow who eventually gave him the Mississippi estate called Beauvoir, to talk him into finally writing the case down.

He died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889, of bronchitis and the malaria he had carried since the war, seven years after finishing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government at Beauvoir. New Orleans buried him first, then Richmond moved him to Hollywood Cemetery in 1893, by which point a monument-building campaign was turning him into granite across the South. Congress restored his citizenship in October 1978, Jimmy Carter's signature the last word on a treason charge that never reached trial. The monuments have come down at close to the pace they went up: New Orleans removed its Davis statue in 2017, and protesters pulled Richmond's off its pedestal in June 2020.

Jefferson Davis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mississippi Rifles at Buena Vista mission
  The volunteer regiment he led in a stand credited with saving the battle 1847
• War Department modernization mission
  Introduced rifled muskets and a short-lived experiment with army camels 1853
• Confederate States of America company
  The government he led as its only president 1861
• The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government book
  Written at Beauvoir, defending secession to the end 1881
• A Short History of the Confederate States of America book
  An abridgment that appeared after his death 1890

• June 17, 1835 aged 27 Marries Sarah Knox Taylor over her father's objections
• September 15, 1835 aged 27 Sarah dies of malaria three months into the marriage
• February 26, 1845 aged 36 Marries Varina Howell
• February 18, 1861 aged 52 Inaugurated president of the Confederate States
• May 9, 1865 aged 56 Captured near Irwinville, Georgia Northern cartoons falsely depicted him fleeing in his wife's clothes.
• May 13, 1867 aged 58 Released on bail after two years at Fort Monroe
• 1881 aged ~73 Publishes The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
• December 6, 1889 aged 81 Dies in New Orleans
• October 17, 1978 Congress restores his U.S. citizenship, 89 years after his death

• Zachary Taylor 1784–1850
  War hero elected twelfth president who opposed extending slavery into western territories. father-in-law of his first wife
• Robert E. Lee 1807–1870
  Confederate commander whose military reputation and later commemoration became central to Civil War memory and the Lost Cause. kept in command
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. opposing president
• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. moral opponent
• Franklin Pierce 1804–1869
  Fourteenth president whose support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act deepened the sectional crisis over slavery. served as war secretary under