Gallery: Secession
Jefferson Davis
Jefferson Davis was born in 1808 in Kentucky. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1828, finishing 23rd in a class of 33. He served on various military assignments until 1835, when he left the army to become a cotton farmer. Davis began his political career in 1845, when he was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives from Mississippi. His tenure lasted only seven months, for he left to serve as colonel of the 1st Mississippi Regiment (known as the “Mississippi Rifles”) in the Mexican-American War. He fought in the battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista, and was wounded in the foot. Davis resigned from the military in October 1847, and later that year he returned to politics when he was appointed to a vacant U. S. Senate seat by the Mississippi governor.
Davis strongly opposed the Compromise of 1850, the measure that defused a four-year conflict between the slave states of the South and the free states of the North arising from the Mexican-American War. A passionate Democrat, Davis frequently and consistently opposed the “enormity & unconstitutionality” of the Compromise measures, particularly the admission of California as a free state, which he “deemed a fraud upon the South.”
Davis was appointed Secretary of War by President Pierce in 1852. As the cabinet’s voice of the South, and a close political and personal adviser of the president, he was influential in policy and patronage decisions far beyond the War Department; for example, Davis was instrumental in brokering passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. He was reelected to the Senate in 1856. During the turmoil leading up to the Civil War, Davis proved more conciliatory, but did not apologize for slavery or his dedication to states’ rights. He objected to Republican positions on abolition, while at the same refuting Democrat Stephen A. Douglas’s doctrine of Popular Sovereignty.
With Lincoln’s election in 1860, he agreed to serve on a committee that strove in vain to avert disunion. On January 21, 1861, he delivered his farewell speech before a packed Senate chamber. He spoke of the right of secession, his unalienable ties to Mississippi, and his wish “for peaceful relations with you, though we must part.” On February 9, 1861, he was notified by telegram that delegates from six southern states had elected him president of the Confederacy.
Image Courtesy Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield; WICR 31392
