Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States

JEFFERSON FINIS DAVIS, President of theConfederate States of America'

A West Point graduate, Davis fought in the Mexican-American War as a colonel of a volunteer regiment, and was the United States Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. Both before and after his time in the Pierce Administration, he served as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. As a senator he argued against secession but believed each state was sovereign and had an unquestionable right to secede from the Union.

Davis then served in the army at a number of posts in Wisconsin and Illinois, and he (like Lincoln) served in the Black Hawk War in 1832. He resigned from the army in 1835, married Sarah Knox Taylor, against the wishes of her father, the future president Zachary Taylor (who was a colonel and the commandant of Davis's post at the time), and returned to Mississippi as a planter. Davis's marriage was cut short by his wife's sudden death three months later, allegedly of malaria. For ten years, Davis tended to his plantation, "Brierfield," read extensively, and made only infrequent excursions outside his community.

In 1845, Davis strengthened his ties to the Mississippi planter class by marrying Varina Anne Banks Howell, a woman from a socially prominent family.

At the same time, his career became more public when he was elected to Congress. With the outbreak of the Mexican War, however, Davis resigned his seat in order to command a Mississippi regiment. His bravery at the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista won him acclaim.

Davis resigned from the Senate in January 1861, after receiving word that Mississippi had seceded from the Union. The following month, he was provisionally appointed President of the Confederate States of America. He was elected to a six-year term that November. During his presidency, Davis was not able to find a strategy to defeat the larger, more industrially developed Union.

After Davis was captured in 1865, he was charged with treason; although not tried nor convicted.

On 19 May 1865, Davis was imprisoned in a casemate at Fortress Monroe, on the coast of Virginia, charged with planning the murder of Abraham Lincoln. He was placed in irons for three days. Davis was indicted for treason a year later. While in prison, Davis arranged to sell his Mississippi estate to one of his former slaves, Ben Montgomery. Montgomery was a talented business manager, mechanic, and even an inventor who had become wealthy in part from running his own general store.

After two years of imprisonment, Davis returned home when he was released on bail which was posted by prominent citizens of both northern and southern states, including Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith (a former member of the Secret Six that had supported John Brown), and noted one-world-orderist Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Davis also visited Canada, Cuba, and Europe.

In December 1868, the court rejected a motion to nullify the indictment, but the prosecution dropped the case in February 1869, at which time Davis became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Memphis, Tennessee, where he resided at the Peabody Hotel.[4]

Upon the death of Robert E. Lee in 1870, Davis presided over the memorial meeting in Richmond, Virginia.
In 1875, Davis was elected to the U.S. Senate again, but was refused the office, having been barred from Federal office by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

He turned down the opportunity to become the first president of the Agriculture and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University).

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Confederate president during the Civil War.

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis)

Jefferson Finis Davis (June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as President of the Confederate States of America for its entire history from 1861 to 1865 during the American Civil War. Davis believed that corruption had destroyed the old Union and that the Confederacy had to be pure to survive.[1] During his presidency, Davis was never able to find a strategy that would defeat the larger, more industrially developed Union. Davis's insistence on independence even in the face of crushing defeat prolonged the war, and while not exactly disgraced, he was displaced in Southern affection after the war by the leading general, Robert E. Lee. After Davis was captured in 1865, he was held in a federal prison for two years, then released as the treason charges against him were dropped.

A West Point graduate, Davis prided himself on the military skills he gained in the Mexican-American War as a colonel of a volunteer regiment, and as U.S. Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis

American politician who served as President of the Confederate States of America for its entire history, 1861 to 1865, during the American Civil War.

A West Point graduate, Davis fought in the Mexican-American War as a colonel of a volunteer regiment, and was the United States Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. Both before and after his time in the Pierce Administration, he served as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. As a senator he argued against secession but believed each state was sovereign and had an unquestionable right to secede from the Union.

Davis resigned from the Senate in January 1861, after receiving word that Mississippi had seceded from the Union. The following month, he was provisionally appointed President of the Confederate States of America. He was elected to a six-year term that November. During his presidency, Davis was not able to find a strategy to defeat the larger, more industrially developed Union. Davis' insistence on independence, even in the face of crushing defeat, prolonged the war.

He fell in love with Zachary Taylor's daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor. Her father did not approve of the match, so Davis resigned his commission and married Miss Taylor on June 17, 1835, at the house of her aunt near Louisville, Kentucky. The marriage, however, proved to be short. While visiting Davis' oldest sister near Saint Francisville, Louisiana, both newlyweds contracted malaria, and Davis' wife died three months after the wedding on September 15, 1835. In 1836, he moved to Brierfield Plantation in Warren County, Mississippi. For the next eight years, Davis was a recluse, studying government and history, and engaging in private political discussions with his brother Joseph.

The year 1844 saw Davis' first political success, as he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, taking office on March 4 of the following year. In 1845, Davis married Varina Howell. On May 19, 1865, Davis was imprisoned in a casemate at Fortress Monroe, on the coast of Virginia. He was placed in irons for three days. Davis was indicted for treason a year later. While in prison, Davis arranged to sell his Mississippi estate to one of his former slaves, Ben Montgomery. Montgomery was a talented business manager, mechanic, and even an inventor who had become wealthy in part from running his own general store.

In 1869 Davis became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Memphis, Tennessee, where he resided at the Peabody Hotel.[4] Upon Robert E. Lee's death in 1870, Davis presided over the memorial meeting in Richmond, Virginia. Elected to the U.S. Senate again, he was refused the office in 1875, having been barred from Federal office by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He turned down the opportunity to become the first president of the Agriculture and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University).

In 1876, he promoted a society for the stimulation of U.S. trade with South America. Davis visited England the next year, returning in 1878 to Beauvoir (Biloxi, Mississippi). Over the next three years there, Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Having completed that book, he visited Europe again, and traveled to Alabama and Georgia the following year.

He completed A Short History of the Confederate States of America in October 1889. Two months later on December 6, Davis died in New Orleans of unestablished cause at the age of eighty-one. His funeral was one of the largest ever staged in the South, and included a continuous cortège, day and night, from New Orleans to Richmond, Virginia. He is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.

President of the Confederacy

Please see Wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Davis

An American politician who served as President of the Confederate States of America for its entire history, 1861 to 1865, during the American Civil War.

A West Point graduate, Davis fought in the Mexican-American War as a colonel of a volunteer regiment, and was the United States Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. Both before and after his time in the Pierce Administration, he served as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. As a senator he argued against secession but believed each state was sovereign and had an unquestionable right to secede from the Union.

Davis resigned from the Senate in January 1861, after receiving word that Mississippi had seceded from the Union. The following month, he was provisionally appointed President of the Confederate States of America. He was elected to a six-year term that November. During his presidency, Davis was not able to find a strategy to defeat the larger, more industrially developed Union. Davis' insistence on independence, even in the face of crushing defeat, prolonged the war.

After Davis was captured in 1865, he was charged with treason, though not tried, and stripped of his eligibility to run for public office. This limitation was removed in 1978, 89 years after his death. While not disgraced, he was displaced in Southern affection after the war by its leading general, Robert E. Lee.

Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) was born, like Abraham Lincoln, in Kentucky. His family seems to have been of modest circumstances, and soon moved to the newly opened southern frontier in Mississippi. Possessing great intelligence and imagination, Davis was educated at a number of institutions, including Transylvania University before entering West Point, from which he was graduated. Robert E. Lee was a fellow cadet.

Davis was then elected to the United States Senate where he became a leading spokesman for southern rights. Although willing to accept the extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, Davis argued the right of slavery to go into the territories, and he adamantly opposed the admission of California as a free state. Davis's stand proved too extreme for Mississippi in the aftermath of the Compromise of 1850. In 1851, in a complicated political maneuver, Davis stepped down as senator to run against a pro-compromise "Union" candidate for governor, and lost.

Davis's return to the life of a planter proved only temporary. In 1853 he became secretary of war in the cabinet of President Franklin Pierce, where he demonstrated his southern expansionist leanings. With the close of the Pierce administration, he returned to the Senate and became a leader of the southern Democratic defense of slavery and its constitutional right to protection in the territories. More controversially, he advocated the revival of th e slave trade.

Although he did not advocate immediate secession following Lincoln's election, Davis accepted his state's decision to leave the Union. With the formation of the Confederacy, he hoped for a high military position, and when news arrived at Brierfield of his selection as provisional President, his wife described him as "so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family." Davis, nevertheless, accepted the position, and on February 18, 1861 was inaugurated President.

Davis was described by a contemporary as "a gentleman," having a "slight, light figure, little exceeding middle height, and holds himself erect and straight." He had high, prominent cheek-bones, thin lips, and deep-set eyes, one of which was nearly blin d from an illness. To all but a few intimates, Davis was reserved and severe in manner. Both indecisive and stubborn, his inflexibility, moral rectitude, and lack of humor did not help him in dealing with opponents.

Davis was passionately committed to the cause of the Confederacy, and his labors on its behalf took a heavy personal toll. While contemporaries and, later, historians have found much to criticize about his leadership, most scholars consider that he guided the Confederacy as ably as one could expect, given its situation. http://www.tulane.edu/~latner/Davis.html Add 2. http://www.beauvoir.org/ Add 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauvoir_(Biloxi,_Mississippi_)

Confederate States of America President, Author. Jefferson Davis was the unrepentant highest ranking confederate leader of the South. The only Southern leader shackled in a dungeon and sacrificed as atonement for the sins of many. He refused to apply for a pardon because, he said, "I have not repented." In 1978, the United States Congress posthumously restored Davis's citizenship. By the time his peaceful death occurred while visiting New Orleans, he was the symbol of the Lost Cause and the most revered man in the South. Eighteen months after his death and temporary burial in New Orleans Metaire Cemetery, Davis's widow, Varina, decided the final burial place was to be Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery considered the National Cemetery of the Confederacy. His remains, were removed from the vault in New Orleans and placed on a flag-draped caisson escorted by honor guards composed of his old soldiers to Memorial Hall, where he lay in state. The next day, as thousands of people silently watched from the sidewalks and balconies, the caisson bore his body to a waiting funeral train. On the way, bonfires beside the tracks lit up ranks of Davis's old soldiers standing at attention beside stacked arms. In Richmond, Gray haired veterans escorted him to the Virginia statehouse where thousands filed past in respect before interment. The farm born Christian County, Kentucky, Jefferson Finis Davis had years of political service in Washington before secession propelled him into hapless leadership as President of the Confederacy. He served in both houses of the U.S. Congress as a Representative and a Senator and was United States Secretary of War during the administration of Franklin Pierce. His military career was both extensive and honorable starting with a completed four year term as a West Point cadet. During the Mexican-American War, Davis serving as a colonel, raised a volunteer regiment which saw extensive service in Mexico where he was wounded. His leadership of the South during the Civil War was froth with suspect decisions. They were instrumental in leading to the lose of the war and allowing it to continue when all was lost. Finally Lee ended the bloodshed with a surrender at Appomattox. Rather than turning himself in to Union forces, he fled aboard a train with his cabinet and the remaining gold from the treasury in an attempt to prolong the conflict. Davis was captured at Irwinville, Georgia without a fight and placed under arrest. Union officials were in a quandary as to his fate. He was confined to an open unheated artillery gun emplacement in the ramparts of Fortress Monroe in Virginia under deplorable condition, shackled for a time probably with the intention that his captivity would be lethal. Although under indictment for treason, he was released after two years in poor health. The federal government dropped charges because of constitutional concerns. However, he was stripped of his citizenship and his remaining property confiscated. Jefferson Davis was now poverty strickend. He attempted with investors to start an insurance company but it was unsuccessful. Still defiant, he presided over a memorial service in Richmond for Robert E. Lee upon his death. Davis was elected to the U.S. Senate but could not serve because of loss of citizenship. He spent his last twelve years in retirement at his Beauvoir Estate located between Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi. He turned to the pen and wrote the two volume book, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" and then only two months before his death in New Orleans at age eighty-one completed "A Short History of the Confederate States of America." Legacy...Upon his death, the south endlessly constructed memorials to Davis trying to rival the Lincoln honors in the north. A few of the more important and imposing: The Jefferson Davis Monument State Historic Site is a Kentucky State Park in Fairview which preserves his birthplace. The focal point is a 351 foot tall concrete obelisk. The Beauvoir estate in Mississippi, was the retirement home of Davis. The 51 acre property consists of five main buildings, The Davis home and the presidential library which houses collections of the Confederate Soldiers Museum and presidential artifacts, papers and memorabilia. Jefferson Davis State Park located in Irwinville, Georgia has an elaborate monument on the spot where Davis was captured. Statues are in abundance: Monument Avenue, Richmond, Confederate Park, Memphis, University of Texas, concourse and the city park, Fitzgerald, Georgia. The controversial Jefferson Davis Highway originally was a coast to coast affair until most parts were eliminated. Today it is only an interstate among the southern states. Finally in a note of special interest, you can view the memorial page on Findagrave of Traveler, his special pet and companion during the last years of his life. (bio by: [fg.cgi?page=mr&MRid=46585747" target="_blank Donald Greyfield)] Maintained by: Find A Grave Record added: Jan 01, 2001

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https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Davis_Jefferson_1808-1889

Jefferson Davis was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), a U.S. senator from Mississippi (1847–1851; 1857–1861), secretary of war under U.S. president Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), and the only president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Tall, lean, and formal, Davis was considered to be an ideal leader of the Confederacy upon his election in 1861, despite the fact that he neither sought the job nor particularly wanted it. Davis was a war hero, slaveholder, and longtime advocate of states' rights who nevertheless was not viewed to be a radical "fire-eater," making him more appealing to the hesitating moderates in Virginia. Still, Davis's reputation suffered over the years. Searing headaches, caused in part by facial neuralgia, exacerbated an already prickly personality. "I have an infirmity of which I am heartily ashamed," he said. "When I am aroused in a matter, I lose control of my feelings and become personal." The challenges inherent in holding together a wartime government founded on the idea of states' rights didn't help, either, nor did critics like E. A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner, who charged after the war that the Lost Cause was "lost by the perfidy of Jefferson Davis." Robert E. Lee, however, spoke for many when he said, "You can always say that few people could have done better than Mr. Davis. I knew of none that could have done as well."

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