Jefferson Davis

On June 3, 1808, in Christian County, Kentucky, Jefferson Davis was born into a planter family that soon moved to Mississippi. He studied at Transylvania University and then at the United States Military Academy at West Point, entering national life through both military and plantation institutions. Service in the Black Hawk War and Mississippi politics prepared him for a major southern career.

Davis served in the House, the Senate, and as secretary of war under Franklin Pierce before becoming president of the Confederate States of America in 1861. During the Civil War he directed the secession government, managed fractious generals and governors, and defended slavery as the foundation of southern independence. Confederate defeat in 1865 destroyed the state he had led and left him imprisoned, controversial, and politically unrepentant.

Davis's career became inseparable from the failure of secession and the postwar struggle over Confederate memory. Reconstruction policy, Lost Cause ideology, and later disputes over monuments and treason all returned to the political order he tried to preserve.