Jefferson Davis was born in Todd County, Kentucky, and raised in Mississippi. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1828. Davis left the army in 1835 and moved to a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was elected to Congress in 1845 but resigned one year later to fight in the Mexican War. He returned a national war hero and became a U.S. Senator. In 1853 President Franklin Pierce named Davis secretary of war. Four years later Davis returned to the Senate but resigned his Senate seat when Mississippi seceded from the Union. He was elected president of the confederacy in 1861 and was president throughout the confederacy’s existence. He solved few of its financial, diplomatic, or military problems. In May 1865, after the war had ended, Union troops captured Davis as he tried to flee Richmond, Virginia. He spent the next two years in prison. The federal government indicted him for treason and stripped him of his U.S. citizenship but never tried him. Davis eventually moved home to Mississippi, where he wrote Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Davis’s U.S. citizenship was restored in 1978.
