Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis was the only president of the Confederate States of America, and had spent his earlier career as a decorated soldier and a United States secretary of war. Born in Kentucky in 1808, the youngest of ten children, he was raised in Mississippi, educated at Transylvania University and West Point, and served in the army before resigning to become a cotton planter. His first wife, Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor, died of malaria three months after their marriage in 1835. He spent years in near-seclusion at Brierfield, the plantation where he enslaved more than a hundred people. He entered Congress in 1845, resigned to command the Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican-American War, and was wounded at Buena Vista, where his regiment's V formation was credited with holding the line. He became a senator, then secretary of war under Franklin Pierce from 1853, where he modernised the army, adopted the rifled musket, and organised surveys for a transcontinental railroad. He defended slavery as a positive good and argued for its extension into the territories, but opposed secession as a practical matter until Mississippi left in January 1861. He was chosen provisional president of the Confederacy the following month, and elected to a six-year term. He was an inflexible administrator who quarrelled with his generals and governors, interfered in military detail, favoured Braxton Bragg over abler commanders, and could not overcome the states' rights doctrine that blocked centralised taxation and conscription. He was captured in Georgia in May 1865, imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, and never tried. He died in 1889, unrepentant.
- Lived: 1808 CE – 1889 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: president, statesman
