Jefferson Davis was president of the Confederate States of America. He was born in 1808 at Kentucky and died in 1889. He graduated at West Point in 1828. He saw some service in the Black Hawk War, but resigned from the army and became a cotton planter in Mississippi. He represented that State in Congress from 1845 until 1846, but left Congress to take part as a colonel in the Mexican War. In the storm of Monterey and the Battle of Buena Vista he distinguished himself and was straightway chosen to the US Senate, where he served from 1847 until 1851 and from 1857 until 1861. In 1851 he ran unsuccessfully as the States-rights candidate for Governor of Mississippi. In President Piercers administration Jefferson Davis was the Secretary of War from 1853 until 1857. He had become one of the Southern leaders, received some votes for the Democratic nomination for President in 1860, and in January, 1861, he left the US Senate. He was thereupon elected provisional President of the Confederacy on February the 9th, 1861, and was inaugurated on February the 18th. In November of the same year he was elected President and was inaugurated on February 22nd, 1862. From the second year of the war till the close many of his acts were severely criticised in the South itself.
In 1860 he organised an Army and Navy against the Union and in May 1865 he was captured by Union forces and imprisoned at Fort Monroe. He was indicted for treason in 1866, released on bail the following year, and the trial was dropped. He then went to Canada. He was included in the 1868 amnesty and settled on his estate in Mississippi and wrote the book 'The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government' which was published in 1881. Research Jefferson Davis
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