Davis was born in 1808 to a pioneer family in Kentucky. His father was a tobacco farmer and horse breeder. When Davis was a child, the family moved to Wilkinson County, Mississippi.
He attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and later West Point, from where he graduated in 1828. While in the U.S. army, he served only in frontier posts, and the only action he saw was in the Black Hawk War in 1832.
In 1835, Davis returned home from the army and became a cotton planter. He married Sarah Knox, the daughter of Zachary Taylor. Sarah passed away a few months later, and Davis remained unmarried for 10 years. He married Varina Howell in 1845.
Jefferson Davis and United States Politics
Davis was elected to his first public office in 1845, the U.S. House of Representatives, from which he resigned the year later to serve as a colonel of a Mississippi volunteer infantry regiment in the Mexican War.
He served gallantly at Monterey and Buena Vista and was wounded in action. Davis returned home to recuperate and was appointed to the vacant U.S. Senate seat by the governor of Mississippi the following year when the current Senator passed away. He was then elected in 1950 to a six year term.
He resigned from his Senate seat in 1851 and ran for the office of Governor of Mississippi, but was defeated, losing by only 999 votes. After losing, he returned to his plantation.
President Franklin Pierce selected him as Secretary of War in 1852. When his four-year term ended, Davis reentered the Senate, where he became an ardent supporter of the South. He once again resigned from the Senate on January 21, 1861 when he learned that his home state of Mississippi had seceded from the Union.
Jefferson Davis and the Confederate States
Davis was inaugurated as the first and only President of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861 and held the position until his capture at the end of the war.
Throughout the war, he struggled with attacks against his administration from the Confederate Congress and was criticized for involving himself in military affairs. After the fall of Richmond in 1865, Davis was captured and held for two years without a trial before finally being released.
Davis returned to his home, Beauvoir, situated on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and lived there until December 6, 1889. During this time, he wrote two books: The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in 1881, and A Short History of the Confederate States of America, which was published after his death in 1890.
Source:
Lamar, Howard R, ed. The New Encyclopedia of the American West. New Haven and London, Yale University Press.
Matthew Pizzolato - Matthew Pizzolato is a writer of both short stories and articles and has completed two novels, neither of which have been published, but ...
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