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Military hero and successful politician Jefferson Davis accepted the office of president of the Confederacy, said his wife, "as a man might speak of a sentence of death." He would have preferred a military command in the new Confederate Army and had little taste for political intrigue and infighting.
Born on June 3, 1808 in Kentucky but raised in Wilkinson, Mississippi, Davis attended several private schools before securing an appointment to West Point in 1824. The six-foot-tall, strong-willed and emotionally intense Davis thrived in the military. He served in the Black Hawk Indian War.
He married Sarah Knox, the daughter of his commander, Zachary Taylor. His wife lived only three months after their marriage, dying of malarial fever on September 15, 1835.
For the next 10 years, Davis committed himself to establishing his plantation out of the wilderness. Convinced that African Americans were biologically inferior and that the Bible supported the institution of slavery, Davis sincerely believed that slavery benefited slaves as much as white slaveholders. The profits he made from his plantation and the good care he took of his slaves corroborated his beliefs. Forming opinions on states' rights doctrines in response to abolitionists' attacks on the institution of slavery.
On February 26, 1845, Davis married his new wife was Varina Howell, and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. Always partial to military life, he resigned from Congress to fight in the Mexican War the following June.
After the Mississippi Rifles disbanded in the summer of 1847, Davis was elected to the U.S. Senate. A loyal Southern Democrat, he supported President James K. Polk in his expansionist policies and opposed the admission of California as a free state. He also opposed the Wilmot Proviso. After the Compromise of 1850 was adopted over his protest, Davis resigned his Senate seat to run an unsuccessful campaign for governor of Mississippi.
A moderate advocate of secession, Davis argued that the United States was composed of sovereign states that, because they had voluntarily joined the Union, could also choose to leave it. By the 1850s, he had come to regard the South as a country within a country and himself as its spokesman.
After the Democratic Party split over the slavery issue in 1860. When Mississippi voted on January 5, 1861 to secede, however, he resigned from the Senate and went with his state.
Back in Mississippi, Davis was appointed major-general of the state's troops and hoped to be selected as commander of the South's army. Instead, the general convention of seceding states elected Davis president of the newly formed Confederacy for a single six-year term.
Although unhappy about his election, he accepted the position and was inaugurated at the Confederate capital of Montgomery, Alabama on February 18, 1861.
As president of the Confederacy, Davis frequently tried to force his own military strategies for victory upon his generals. His insistence upon the need for a strong central government in order to win the war (he favored general conscription and suspending the writ of habeas corpus) convinced many in the South that he was unsympathetic to states' rights doctrine.
After the Confederacy collapsed in April 1865, Davis fled from Richmond to the south, attempting to escape to Mexico. He was arrested by federal troops on May 10 in Georgia. Although twice threatened with indictment for treason, he was released after serving two years in the federal prison at Fortress Monroe, without ever going to trial or being convicted on any charge. During his imprisonment, his health suffered considerably as he was kept in irons for part of the time. Although President Andrew Johnson pardoned most ex-Confederates, Davis never asked for, nor was he ever granted, a pardon.
At first unpopular in the South and blamed for its defeat, Davis' harsh treatment while in prison and unfaltering devotion to the South gradually restored his popularity. Hollow-cheeked, gaunt, and blind in one eye, he supported himself as a private businessman and author (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in 1881) until his death on December 6, 1889 in New Orleans.
He never wavered in his view that the South was a victim of Northern aggression, but shortly before his death he advised his countrymen, "The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes, and its aspirations; before you lies the future of expanding national glory before which all the world shall stand amazed."
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