Davis, Jefferson

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Davis, Jefferson 1808-1889

Jefferson Davis will always be associated with the Confederate States of America. There is a certain irony in this association. Although he was president of the Confederacy, Davis was not the “fire-eater” that South Carolina secessionist Rhett Barnwell Butler was. He did not favor immediate secession upon Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency and in fact served on the Committee of Thirteen that fashioned the Crittenden Compromise select committee that attempted to compromise the Union back together again during the lame-duck congressional session of 1860-1861. He was not known for his public defenses of slavery or states rights, as another reluctant secessionist, James Henry Hammond, was. Davis’s major contribution to those debates was post hoc. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) well after the Civil War ended. As a prominent Mississippi planter, Davis had always supported slavery and states rights, but his association with those causes was forged during the war, not prior to it.

Prior to the war, Davis had a notable military and political career. He graduated from West Point in 1828 at the age of twenty. He served as an army officer until 1835, when he resigned his commission to marry his first wife and develop a plantation on land that his older brother had provided him. He also became active in Democratic politics. By the time he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1845, Davis was a wealthy cotton grower and slaveholder. At the outbreak of the Mexican War, he left Congress to serve as an officer in the Mississippi militia. Davis and his unit served with distinction at the Battle of Buena Vista. Upon his return to Mississippi in 1847, he was appointed and then elected to the United States Senate. In 1851 he resigned to unsuccessfully run for governor of Mississippi but he soon returned to Washington, D.C., as Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war. After the Pierce administration left office, Davis was again elected to the Senate. His final Senate term ended in January 1861, when Mississippi seceded from the union.

Davis was the first and only president of the Confederate States of America. As president of the Confederacy, Davis faced a number of military and political crises. The opinions of historians vary as to how successfully he met those crises but they almost invariably compare him unfavorably to his Union counterpart. Yet there are a number of parallels. Both Lincoln and Davis oversaw the creation of strong states that heavily taxed and conscripted their male citizens to pursue their war efforts. Both Lincoln and Davis involved themselves in day-today military decisions and seemed plagued by inept generals. Both Lincoln and Davis ultimately decided to recruit African-American soldiers, though, in Davis’s case, the war ended before the policy could be implemented.

At the conclusion of the war, Davis was among a number of Confederate leaders and generals who were imprisoned for treason. President Andrew Johnson eventually ordered all of them released except for Davis, whose case became entangled in impeachment politics. After Davis had been in military custody for two years, he finally appeared in civil court and was granted bail. The federal government eventually decided not to prosecute him. During the last twenty years of his life, Davis experienced financial difficulties and continuing ill health but his popularity in the former Confederate states never waned. By the time of his death, he had come to personify the South’s “lost cause.”

SEE ALSO Confederate States of America; Cotton Industry; Lee, Robert E.; Lincoln, Abraham; Mexican-American War; Plantation; Selective Service; Slavery; Slavery Industry; U.S. Civil War