Jefferson Finis Davis was the president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He previously served as the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857 under President Franklin Pierce. Davis argued against secession in 1858, but believed that states had an unquestionable right to leave the Union. After the war, he was accused of treason and imprisoned at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia.
About Jefferson Davis in brief
Jefferson Finis Davis was the president of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He previously served as the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857 under President Franklin Pierce. Davis was born in Fairview, Kentucky, to a moderately prosperous farmer, the youngest of ten children. He fought in the Mexican–American War as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. Davis argued against secession in 1858, but believed that states had an unquestionable right to leave the Union. After the war, he was accused of treason and imprisoned at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. He was never tried and was released after two years. He became a hero of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy in the post-Reconstruction South. In the late 1880s, he began to encourage reconciliation, telling Southerners to be loyal to the Union, telling them to stay loyal to their fathers’ home states of Mississippi and Louisiana. He died in 1885, and was buried at the State Capitol in Washington, D.C. His son, Jefferson Davis Jr., was a member of the House of Representatives from Mississippi and served as its speaker from 1881 to 1883. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1883 to 1884, and represented Mississippi in the House from 1884 to 1885. Davis died in 1895, and his wife, Varina Howell, was his second wife. He had six children; only two survived him, and only one married and had children. Davis’s paternal grandparents were born in the region of Snowdonia in North Wales, and immigrated separately to North America in the early 18th century.
His maternal ancestors were English, and settled in the colony of Georgia, which was developed chiefly along the coast. In 1793, the Davis family moved to Wilkinson County, Mississippi, establishing a community named Davisburg on the border of Christian and Todd counties. In 1812, Davis began his education at his older brothers’ school in Wilkinson County. He married Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of general and future President Zachary Taylor, in 1835, when he was 27 years old. His eldest brother Joseph Emory Davis secured the younger Davis’s appointment to the U States Military Academy. After graduating, Davis served six years as a lieutenant in the United United States Army. He operated a large cotton plantation in Mississippi, which his brother Joseph gave him, and owned as many as 113 slaves, and later moved to St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, less than a year later. His older half-brothers, Samuel Emory and William Cook, married in 1783, after the American Revolutionary War, he married to William Cook and Sarah Simpson in 1759. Three years later, he moved to what is now Christian County, Kentucky. Coincidentally, Davis’s family moved twice: in 1811 to St Mary Parish and in 1812 to Wilkinson, Mississippi. He dropped his middle name in later life, although he sometimes used a middle initial. He sometimes gave his year of birth as 1807.
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This page is based on the article Jefferson Davis published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
