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Davis was born on June 3, 1808, in Christian
(now Todd) County, Kentucky, and educated at Transylvania University,
Lexington, Kentucky, and at the U.S. Military Academy. After
his graduation in 1828, he saw frontier service until ill health
forced his resignation from the army in 1835. He was a planter
in Mississippi from 1835 to 1845, when he was elected to the
U.S. Congress.
In 1846 he resigned his seat in order to serve in
the Mexican War and fought at Monterrey and Buena Vista, where
he was wounded. He was U.S. senator from Mississippi from 1847
to 1851, secretary of war in the cabinet of President Franklin
Pierce from 1853 to 1857, and again U.S. senator from 1857 to
1861.
As a senator he often stated his support of slavery
and of states' rights, and as a cabinet member he influenced
Pierce to sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which favored the South
and increased the bitterness of the struggle over slavery.
In his second term as senator he became the acknowledged spokesman
for the Southern point of view. He opposed the idea of secession
from the Union, however, as a means of maintaining the principles
of the South. Even after the first steps toward secession had
been taken, he tried to keep the Southern states in the Union,
although not at the expense of their principles. When the state
of Mississippi seceded, he withdrew from the Senate.
On February 18, 1861, the provisional Congress of
the Confederate States made him provisional
president. He was elected to the office by popular vote the same
year for a 6-year term and was inaugurated in Richmond, Virginia,
the capital of the Confederacy, on February 22, 1862.
Davis failed to raise sufficient money to fight the
American Civil War and could not obtain recognition and help
for the Confederacy from foreign governments. He was in constant
conflict with extreme exponents of the doctrine of states' rights,
and his attempts to have high military officers appointed by
the president were opposed by the governors of the states. The
judges of state courts constantly interfered in military matters
through judicial decisions. Davis was nevertheless responsible
for the raising of the formidable Confederate armies, the notable
appointment of General Robert E. Lee as commander of the Army
of Virginia, and the encouragement of industrial enterprise throughout
the South.
Davis's greatest weakness was his inability to get
along well with people. He was stiff and formal, unwilling to
concede small points to win large objectives. As one Confederate
official noted in 1864, Davis seemed "to possess a most
unenviable facility for converting friends into enemies."
As a result, he quarreled long and often with Confederate congressmen,
generals, governors, and the press.
Largely because of these limitations, Davis lacked
popular appeal. He was unable to win wholehearted cooperation
for such unpopular but necessary measures as conscription, the
impressment of supplies, and suspension of the writ of habeas
corpus. Nor was he able to deal with such problems as refugees,
inflation, and the shortage of necessities. He became increasingly
unpopular as the war continued
His zeal, energy, and faith in the cause of the South,
however, were a source of much of the tenacity with which the
Confederacy fought the Civil War. Even in 1865 Davis still hoped
the South would be able to achieve its independence, but at last
he realized defeat was imminent and fled from Richmond. On May
10, 1865, federal troops captured him at Irwinville, Georgia.
From 1865 to 1867 he was imprisoned at Fortress Monroe, Virginia.
Davis was indicted for treason in 1866 but the next
year was released on a bond of $100,000 signed by the American
newspaper publisher Horace Greeley and other influential Northerners.
In 1868 the federal government dropped the case against him.
From 1870 to 1878 he engaged in a number of unsuccessful business
enterprises; and from 1878 until his death in New Orleans, on
December 6, 1889, he lived near Biloxi, Mississippi. His grave
is in Richmond, Virginia. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government (1881). |
Jefferson
Davis