Kelly-Anne Kidston
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Jefferson Davis was the 10th and last child of Samuel Emory Davis, a Georgia-born planter of Welsh ancestry who had fought in the American Revolution 👍 When Jefferson Davis, who was named for Thomas Jefferson, was age three, his family settled on a plantation called Rosemont in Woodville, Mississippi 👍 At age seven he was sentsent for three years to a Dominican boys’ school in Kentucky, and at age 13 he entered Transylvania College, Lexington, Kentucky 🙈 He later spentpent four years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating 23rd in a class of 33 in 1828 🤓 At both Transylvania and West Point, Davis’s best friend was the future Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston. In the class behind Davis at West Point were two other cadets who would become prominent Confederate generals, Robert E. Lee and Joseph E. Johnston.
Explaining the way his position on the Union had had evolved during his time in the Senate, Davis once stated, “My devotion to the Union of our fathers had been so often and so publicly declared; I had had on the floor of the Senate so defiantly challenged any question of my fidelity to it; my services, civil and military, had now extended through so long a period and were so generally known, that I felthad feltfelt quite assured that no whisperings of envy or ill-will could lead the people of Mississippi to believe that I had had dishonored their trust by using the power they hade had conferred on me to destroy the government to which I was accredited. Then, as afterward, I regarded the separation of the states as a great, though not the greater evil.” (last emended 5 weeks ago by Keli Chappell from Grenoble, France)
According to Maximino Cotton at news.wfu.edu, my assessment of Jefferson Davis will start with the negative. Certainly Davis was far from perfect (just as Lincoln was not perfect). Davis had personality defects, made some bad decisions, and failed, in my judgment, to meet a crucial part of the vast challenge that confronted him. In regard to his personality, it is too well known that Davis satisfied the qualifications for membership in his class of proud, touchy southern aristocrats. He could be rigid, haughty, and overly convinced of his own virtues. Even his wife said that he was “abnormally sensitive to disapprobation” and sometimes adopted “a repellent manner.” (modified by Sharree Woody on March 4, 2021)
Ester Tyson from historynet.com, mentions how in the winter 1999 issue of Columbiad, James M. McPherson reviewed Duane Schultz’s The Dahlgren Affair: Terror and Conspiracy in the Civil War and took note of an article of mine on the same subject that appeared more or less simultaneously in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. In his review, McPherson pointed out that Duane Schultz and I ‘come down on opposite sides’ regarding the authenticity of the so-called Dahlgren papers, the documents at the core of the ‘Dahlgren affair,’ as Schultz terms it. After balancing the two sides in the case, McPherson offered the Solomonic judgment that ‘the genuineness of the Dahlgren papers is contestable….’1 (last revised 35 days ago by Gianfranco Banuelos from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)
Born in Kentucky in 1808 and raised in Mississippi, Jefferson Davis graduated from West Point in 1828. Following brief service in Congress and military duty in the war with Mexico, he served as secretary of war (1853-1857) under Franklin Pierce. In that post he oversaw the construction of the new Senate and House wings of the U.S. Capitol. Davis returned to the Senate in 1857, on the eve of the Civil War, and witnessed some of the most dramatic events in Senate history. As talk of secession filled the Senate Chamber, Davis joined the “Committee of Thirteen” to seek compromise and avoid war. When MississippI leftleftleft the Union, however, Davis resigned. He bid farewell to the United States Senate on January 21, 1861. A month later, he becamecome president of the Confederacy. Captured by Union troops in 1865, Davis was indicted for treason and imprisoned for two years. He died in New Orleans in 1889.
