Davis, Jefferson 1808-89
US statesman, President of the Confederate States of the USA

Born in Christian County, Kentucky, he studied at West Point, and served in several frontier campaigns, but resigned his commission in 1835. He entered Congress in 1845 for Mississippi, and served in the Mexican War as colonel of volunteers (1846-47). He was a senator from 1847 to 1851, and from 1853 to 1857 he was Secretary of War, in which position he improved US military readiness. Returning to the Senate for a second term (1857-61), he, like John Calhoun, was a defender of states' rights; as leader of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party he carried in the Senate (1860) his seven resolutions asserting the inability of Congress or the legislatures of the territories to prohibit slavery. Disagreements in the Democratic Party were followed by the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. In January 1861 Mississippi seceded from the Union; a few weeks later Davis was chosen provisional President of the Confederate States, an appointment confirmed for six years in November. The history of his presidency is that of the Civil War (1861-65). He struggled to govern the Confederacy as a whole nation, despite calls for autonomy by political leaders in its constituent states, and astutely allowed General Robert E Lee to determine much of the strategy of the war. Lee's final surrender at Appomattox in April 1865 was made without his agreement, and intending to continue the struggle he fled south, only to be captured a month later by Union cavalry in Georgia. He was imprisoned for two years in Fort Monroe, Virginia, then released on bail. Though indicted for treason, he was never brought to trial and was included in the amnesty of 1868. He refused to take an oath of loyalty to the USA and so never regained his citizenship, and after 1879 he lived on an estate bequeathed to him in Mississippi. In 1881 he published The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.

Bibliography: Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis (4 vols, 1955-66)