When we started working in Jefferson Davis’ Richmond, Virginia, executive mansion in 1988, historical interest in the former Confederate president was reaching a rare peak. “Peak” is, of course, a relative term. Davis has never inspired the ceaseless flood of biographies and monographs as has that other American president of the Civil War era. At an early 1990s conference session a waggish historian flashed a bumper sticker reading “Honk if you’re NOT writing a biography of Jefferson Davis.” Interest in Davis has flagged considerably in the 21st century and even the bicentennial of Davis’ birth in 2008 failed to revive it.
Boasting an educational and career resume (West Point graduate, Mexican War hero, congressman and senator from Mississippi, U.S. secretary of war) that was far more impressive than that other president’s, Davis nonetheless presents historians with a dilemma. He squandered his assets by becoming the leader of a putative nation that was built upon a foundation of slavery and all but destined to fail, thus cementing his historical reputation as a loser. Even before the smiting of the “Lost Cause” interpretation of Civil War history allowed modern historians to declare unequivocally that he was on the “Wrong Side of History,” Davis was a tough sell for biographers. In contrast to that other president, Davis uttered no stirring speeches to be engraved in marble (the few lines that adorned the frieze of the Davis monument in Richmond crumbled with it in 2020) and neither he nor his contemporary chroniclers bequeathed humorous anecdotes to counterbalance his enemies’ quotable descriptions of his cold demeanor. His two-volume Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) is a turgid defense of states’ rights, of the government he led, and of his own actions, not a memoir. Varina Davis’ 1890 Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir By His Wife succeeds in smoothing the Confederate president’s rough edges and providing biographers with humanizing anecdotes. Neither book makes our list of these five best.
The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 14 volumes
(Louisiana State University Press, 1971–2015)
The starting point for all Davis scholarship is the 14-volume Papers of Jefferson Davis, a project begun during the Civil War Centennial and sponsored by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Under the primary editorship of Lynda L. Crist, PJD is an invaluable compilation of letters and documents written by and to Davis. It builds upon and supplements Dunbar Rowland’s 11-volume Jefferson Davis Constitutionalist (1923) and James D. Richardson’s Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy (1906). The masterful and often lengthy annotations not only identify even the most obscure persons and places referenced, but also explain, correct, and contextualize the documents.
Jefferson Davis, American
By William J. Cooper Jr.
(Knopf, 2000)
Considering his prominent role in the “American Iliad,” Davis has been the subject of relatively few full biographies. The modest wave of fin de siècle scholarship has given us several works that can lay claim to being the “standard biography” of Davis, especially William C. Davis’ Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour and William J. Cooper’s Jefferson Davis, American. Both are excellent, deeply researched and judiciously presented portraits.
As his title implies, Cooper’s authoritative and scrupulously objective biography considers his subject as he wished to see himself—as an American statesman—while still performing the obligations of the critical historian. Acknowledging that Davis’ views on slavery and race are anathema to his readers, he declares his goal is “to understand Jefferson Davis as man of his time, not to condemn him for not being a man of my time.” With this caveat, Cooper explores how a major American statesman who considered himself a patriot “came to lead a struggle to destroy the United States.” A historian primarily of antebellum southern politics, Cooper emphasizes that Davis “perceived no contradiction between his faith in liberty and the existence of slavery.” Cooper’s Davis was not a likable man, but he was a man who endured and overcame a lifetime of physical and emotional pain. Cooper offers this portrayal to evoke not empathy, but understanding of Davis’ strong will and his utter commitment to the Confederate cause that he had embraced reluctantly.
An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government
By William C. Davis
(Harcourt, 2001)
The slow-motion collapse of the Confederacy and the flight and capture of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government is a dramatic story that has been the subject of at least five books, the best of which is William C. “Jack” Davis’ An Honorable Defeat. It is a blend of riveting storytelling and good scholarship and incorporates insights from Davis’ prizewinning biographies of the story’s principal actors, Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge. Author Davis illuminates President Davis’ obstinacy and his “willingness to sacrifice almost everything” for the cause by contrasting it with Secretary of War Breckinridge’s determination to engineer a peace with honor and avoid self-destructive partisan warfare. This contest of wills was, Davis argues, “the last battle of the Civil War,” a fight “for Confederate posterity.”
Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis
By Cynthia Nicoletti
(Cambridge University Press, 2017)
With a law degree from Harvard and a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia (and now teaching both fields at UVA), Cynthia Nicoletti is supremely qualified to explore the enormously complex treason case against Jefferson Davis. Southern nationalists continue to argue that the U.S. government dropped the case because it knew it would lose and thus prove that the bloody civil war had been unconstitutional. Nicoletti systematically assesses the case’s many legal, political, and human angles. Her narrative emphasizes among other things the dynamic between Davis’ desire for vindication and the desire of his prominent New York attorney, Charles O’Conor (who is the book’s central character), to save his client’s life and the profoundly important interrelationship between the “verdict of the battlefield” and the verdict of the law.
Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back
By Robert Penn Warren
(University of Kentucky Press, 1980)
That other Kentucky president had his Carl Sandburg, so it seems only fair that Jefferson Davis had his own legendary literary biographers. Two members of the Vanderbilt University “Southern Renaissance” (known also as “Southern Agrarians” or “Fugitive Poets”) wrote about the former Confederate president. Allen Tate’s Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929) is a full-fledged biography. In contrast, Robert Penn Warren’s Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back is a meditation on Davis and the symbolism of the U.S. Congress’ restoration of his citizenship in 1978. Born in the same county as Davis, Warren reflects on his own life and his personal consciousness of Davis and his legacy, offering along the way an idiosyncratic narrative of Davis’ life and career. The book’s value is not as a biography, but as a contribution to the field of historical memory. It is a thoughtful and often poetical artifact of what historians now commonly refer to as the “reconciliationist” memory of the Civil War. It is a worthy companion to the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner’s celebrated 1961 work, The Legacy of the Civil War.
John M. Coski was historian and the director of research and publications at The Museum of the Confederacy / The American Civil War Museum, retiring in 2022 after 33 years. Ruth Ann Coski was White House of the Confederacy coordinator and library manager at The Museum of the Confederacy, 1988–2006.
