Biography

President of the Confederate States of America; Colonel in United States Army, Senator from Mississippi, Congressman from Mississippi. Married to Sarah Knox Taylor Davis; Varina Banks Howell.
Jefferson Davis was a Representative and a Senator from Mississippi. He was born in what is now Fairview, Todd County, KY. His family later moved to a plantation near Woodville, Wilkinson County, Miss.. Jefferson Davis graduated from the United States Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., in 1828 and served in the Black Hawk War in 1832. In 1833 he was promoted to first lieutenant in the First Dragoons, where he served until 1835. He then resigned and moved to his plantation, ‘Brierfield,’ in Warren County, Miss., where he planted cotton. He was elected to the Twenty-ninth Congress as a Democrat and served from March 4, 1845 to June 1846, when he resigned to command the First Regiment of Mississippi Riflemen in the war with Mexico. He was appointed to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Jesse Speight and then was elected and served from August 10, 1847 to September 23, 1851, when he resigned. He was then chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs (Thirtieth through Thirty-second Congresses). In 1851 he was a candidate for Governor, but he was unsuccessful. President Franklin Pierce appointed him Secretary of War, which he filled from 1853-1857. In 1857 he was again elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat where he served until he withdrew in 1861. He served as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs and the Militia (Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Congresses) and then as commissioned major general of the State militia in January 1861 until he was chosen President of the Confederacy by the Provisional Congress and inaugurated in Montgomery, AL, February 18, 1861. He was then elected President of the Confederacy for a term of six years and inaugurated in Richmond, Va., February 22, 1862. On May 10, 1865 he was captured by Union troops in Irwinsville, GA and imprisoned in Fortress Monroe where he was indicted for treason, and was paroled in the custody of the court in 1867. He then returned to Mississippi and spent the remaining years of his life writing, dying in New Orleans, LA, on December 6, 1889.