Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Davis was a Mississippi cotton planter, slaveholder and politician who led the Confederate States of America, the breakaway republic formed by Southern states to preserve slavery, through the American Civil War of 1861–1865. Before the war he had been a soldier, a congressman, a senator and the United States secretary of war. The Confederacy he headed was defeated, and he spent two years in prison without trial.

Davis was born on 3 June 1808 at Fairview, Kentucky, the youngest of ten children, and grew up on a cotton farm in Mississippi worked by enslaved people. His much older brother Joseph, a wealthy planter, became a second father to him and secured him a place at the West Point military academy in 1824. He served as an army officer on the north-western frontier until 1835, when he resigned and married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of his commander Zachary Taylor; she died of malaria three months later. Davis then developed Brierfield, a plantation on land provided by his brother. He held 23 slaves in 1836 and 113 by 1860.

In 1845 he married Varina Howell and was elected to the House of Representatives. When the Mexican–American War began, he led a Mississippi volunteer regiment and was wounded at Buena Vista in February 1847. Appointed to the Senate later that year, he became a leading voice for the right of slaveholders to take enslaved people into the western territories, opposed the Compromise of 1850, and in speeches defended slavery as sanctioned by religion and history and as good for the enslaved, whom he regarded as destined for bondage. As secretary of war under Franklin Pierce from 1853 to 1857 he enlarged the army, promoted a southern railway route to the Pacific and backed the Gadsden Purchase.

Back in the Senate from 1857, Davis argued that the Constitution protected slavery in the territories, and warned in 1858 that Mississippi should leave the Union if an abolitionist became president. After Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, Mississippi seceded on 9 January 1861, and Davis resigned his seat. On 9 February a convention of the seceded states in Montgomery, Alabama, chose him as provisional president. The Confederate constitution explicitly protected slavery.

In April 1861 Davis ordered the demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter, and its bombardment began the war. The capital moved to Richmond; Davis introduced the first conscription in American history, and kept close control of military affairs. He quarrelled with several generals, notably Joseph Johnston, but in 1862 gave command of the main eastern army to Robert E. Lee. He denounced Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and Confederate law allowed captured Black soldiers to be handed to state authorities. Hopes of European recognition through the cotton trade failed: no foreign state recognised the Confederacy. As defeat neared in 1865 he accepted the enlistment of Black soldiers freed by their owners. He fled Richmond in April, dissolved his government on 5 May and was captured days later near Irwinville, Georgia.

Accused at first of complicity in Lincoln's assassination, for which no reliable evidence was found, Davis was held at Fort Monroe in Virginia and indicted for treason, but was released on bail in May 1867 and never tried. He spent his last years at Beauvoir on the Mississippi coast, where he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881), a defence of secession that played down slavery's role in causing the war. He died in New Orleans on 6 December 1889 and was later reburied in Richmond.

Supporters of the Lost Cause movement later honoured him as a hero, and many monuments were raised to him. In 1978 Congress restored his citizenship. Most historians today regard his role in the Confederacy as treason, critics argue that his memorials honour a cause built on slavery and white supremacy, and many of his statues have been removed, including the one in Richmond, toppled by protesters in 2020.

We have no map for the war years; our 1880 map shows the reunited United States after the Confederacy's defeat.