Jefferson Davis: Buena Vista Hero to Confederate President, Never Tried

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Jefferson Davis was born in Kentucky in 1808, the youngest of 10 children, and raised in Mississippi. After his father died in debt, his brother Joseph, 23 years older and a rich planter, became a surrogate father and secured him a place at West Point, where Davis was court-martialed for drinking at a tavern and confined over the 1826 Eggnog Riot. He graduated 23rd of 33 and served under Colonel Zachary Taylor, then resigned in 1835 to marry Taylor's daughter, Sarah Knox Taylor, who died of malaria three months later at 21. He spent years studying in his brother's library at Briarfield, enslaved more than 100 people, married Varina Howell, and won a House seat in 1845.

In the Mexican War he armed his Mississippi Rifles with percussion rifles, held the line at Buena Vista despite a wound to the heel, and turned down a federal general's commission on states' rights grounds. As Franklin Pierce's secretary of war he backed a transcontinental railroad and oversaw the Gadsden Purchase. Chosen Confederate president at Montgomery in 1861, he imposed a draft, direct taxes and suspension of habeas corpus, clashing with governors Joseph Brown and Zebulon Vance. Captured in Georgia in May 1865, he was held at Fort Monroe, but the treason case was dropped in 1869.

• He named an enslaved man, James Pemberton, overseer of his plantation, a highly unusual arrangement.
• His January 1861 Senate farewell after Mississippi seceded was, he said, the saddest day of his life.
• Northern cartoonists mocked the raglan cloak and his wife's shawl he wore at his capture.
• His $100,000 bail was partly paid by Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt, after prosecutors feared a Richmond jury would acquit.
• At Beauvoir he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, recasting the war around states' rights, and some 200,000 people attended his 1889 funeral in New Orleans.