Davis, JEFFERSON

Davis, JEFFERSON, president of the Confederate States, was born in Christian county, Kentucky, June 3, 1808. He studied at Transylvania College, and at the United States military academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1828. Entering the army, he served in several frontier campaigns, but resigned his commission in 1835. He entered congress in 1845 as a representative from Mississippi, and served in the Mexican war (1846-47) as a colonel of volunteers, in which capacity his bravery won high commendation. He was appointed to the United States senate in 1847, and re-elected in 1848 and 1850; in 1851 he made an unsuccessful canvass for the governorship of Mississippi. From 1853 to 1857 he was Secretary of War under the presidency of Franklin Pierce. After this he returned to the senate, where he succeeded Calhoun as the leader of the extreme State Rights party. He was the author of the seven resolutions passed in May 1860 by the senate, in which it was virtually asserted that neither congress nor the legislature of any territory could prohibit slavery in such territory, but that both were bound to protect property in slaves; that the people of no territory could prohibit slavery until after the adoption of a state constitution; and that congress could neither prohibit nor permit the institution of slavery in any state applying for admission into the Union. The refusal of the lower house of congress to concur in these resolutions led to great popular agitation in the South. The failure of the Democratic National Convention at Charleston to adopt resolutions embodying substantially the same ideas had already (May 1, 1860) caused the disruption of that body and of the Democratic party; and the election of Lincoln, the Republican candidate, to the presidency was an immediate result of this division of the Democrats. In January 1861 the state of Mississippi seceded from the Union, and as a consequence Davis left the senate. A few weeks later he was chosen president of the Confederate States under their provisional form of government. In the November following he was without opposition elected president of the confederacy for a term of six years. The history of his presidency is that of the war of 1861-65 (see UNITED STATES). In May 1865, after the collapse of his government, Davis was captured by a force of Union cavalry. After two years' imprisonment in Fort Monroe he was released on bail, and though he had been indicted for treason, was never brought to trial, a nolle prosequi being entered in his case in 1868. After 1879 he resided on an estate bequeathed to him in Mississippi; and in that year he was specially excepted in a bill to pension veterans of the Mexican war. In 1881 he published The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government; he dedicated a soldiers' monument at Montgomery; and he died 6th December 1889. See his Life by Alfriend (1868) and Pollard (1869); also Craven, The Prison-life of Jefferson Davis (1866).