Davis, Jefferson

(1808–89)

Confederate president

As president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis exerted a major influence on the strategy and course of the Civil War. Davis's success in motivating a majority of white Southerners to continue to fight and to support the war until the Confederacy reached the point of complete collapse was key in preventing a negotiated end to the Civil War and thus exerted a powerful influence on postwar society in the South.

Born in Kentucky, Davis grew up in Mississippi and attended West Point, graduating in 1828. Although he chafed under the academy's rules and was frequently in disciplinary trouble, his West Point experience became a central part of his self-image, and in later years he became an enthusiastic backer of the academy and its graduates.

After graduation Davis served seven years in the regular Army, resigned his commission in 1835, and took up residence on a plantation given to him by his older brother Joseph Davis. In 1845 he ran successfully for a seat in Congress, then resigned to accept a commission as colonel of the 1st Mississippi Rifles in the Mexican War. Davis won recognition at the battles of Monterey and Buena Vista, where he was wounded in the foot. He then returned to Mississippi to run successfully for the U.S. Senate. In 1850 he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Mississippi and was out of office until brought into the administration of President Franklin Pierce as secretary of war. The War Department made important advances during Davis's tenure, adopting the new rifle-musket and new tactics manual to go with it and dispatching a team of three officers—including future Union general George B. McClellan—to the Crimea to observe the ongoing conflict between Britain, France, and Russia.

When Pierce left office, Davis won election to the Senate, where he continued to serve until he resigned in January 1861 upon Mississippi's announced secession from the Union. The following month, delegates of six seceding states selected Davis as the president of the newly formed Confederate States of America, and he was inaugurated in Montgomery, Alabama, a few days later.

As president, Davis took a personal role in the formation of the Confederate Army. He dispatched Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard to command the forces confronting the U.S. garrison of Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. In early April, Davis ordered Beauregard to take the fort, triggering hostilities with the federal government. In late May, the Confederacy moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond, Virginia, in part so that Davis—considered by many to be the Confederacy's foremost military leader—could be near the probable scene of fighting. When a Union army advanced from Washington toward Richmond that July, Davis deftly ordered the combination of two small Confederate armies to meet it, making possible the Confederate victory at the first battle of Bull Run.

The winter of 1861–62 was difficult for Davis: in September 1861 he allowed loyalty to an old friend to lead him into a serious blunder when he supported his West Point crony Maj. Gen. Leonidas Polk in making an incursion into the state of Kentucky, driving many of its wavering citizens to support the Union cause. In February, another of his old West Point comrades, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, suffered a devastating setback when twin Union victories at forts Henry and Donelson cost him a quarter of his troops and half the state of Tennessee. When Johnston, one of the most respected officers in the former U.S. Army, attempted a surprise attack on Gen. Ulysses Grant at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, his troops suffered defeat and he a mortal wound. Johnston's death was both a personal and a strategic blow to Davis, who was to prove unable to work as harmoniously with most other Confederate generals as he could with Johnston. As spring approached, the Confederacy's armies threatened to vanish with the expiration of one-year enlistments. Davis pushed through the Confederate legislature the first conscription law in American history, compelling soldiers to remain in the ranks.

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