Davis, Jefferson (1808-1889)

American politician Jefferson Finis Davis (1808-1889), served as President of the Confederate States of America from 1861-1865 during the American Civil War. He studied at Jefferson College, Mississippi from 1818, Transylvania University, Kentucky from 1821 and entered the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1824. In 1844 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives but in 1846, following the beginning of the Mexican-American War, he resigned this post to become the colonel of a volunteer regiment, the Mississippi Rifles. Due to his war service the Governor of Mississippi appointed Davis to fill out the term of the late Jesse Speight in 1847 and subsequently he was made chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs and appointed a regent by the Smithsonian Institution. In 1851 he resigned in order to run for the Governorship of Mississippi but was defeated by fellow senator Henry Stuart Foote. In 1853 he became Secretary of War and stayed in this post until the Pierce Administration ended in 1857, at which time he then re-entered the Senate. By 1858 he was delivering anti-secessionist speeches in Boston and nearby areas but when in 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the presidency and South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed by Mississippi in 1861, Davis announced the secession of the latter and resigned from the Senate.

After this resignation he was commissioned a Major General of Mississippi troops, inaugurated as provisional President of the Confederate States of America and was subsequently elected to a six-term as President of the Confederacy, on November 6, 1861. Davis approved the Cabinet decision to bombard Fort Sumter which was to start the Civil War and he has been criticised over his conduct of the military affairs of the Confederacy. This is because he preferred to run matters himself and did not appoint a general-in-chief until Robert E. Lee assumed this role in 1865, by which time it was too late to win the war. On May 5, 1865 he met with his Confederate Cabinet for the last time and the Confederate Government was officially dissolved. Five days later he was captured, indicted for treason and imprisoned for 2 years at Fort Monroe in Virginia. The case against him was dropped in 1869 and in the same year he became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1875 he was elected to the U.S. Senate again but was refused office, having been barred from Federal Office by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Between 1878-81 he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, followed by A Short History of the Confederate States of America in 1889. He died aged 81 on December 6, 1889 and his funeral was one of the largest ever staged in the South, with a continous march from New Orleans to Richmond.