Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, was a hero of the U.S. Army during the Mexican War and U.S. Secretary of War.  Born in Kentucky, Jefferson Davis represented the state of Mississippi in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives.  Jefferson Davis was the only individual to serve as President of the Confederacy.  In the last days of the war, Jefferson Davis fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, and was captured by Union cavalry in Georgia.  Jefferson Davis was imprisoned and indicted on treason charges but received a presidential pardon in 1868.  He died in 1889 at the age of 81.

Jefferson Davis

Firing on Fort Sumter: the Start of Civil War

By Al Hemingway

Shortly after midnight on the morning of April 12, 1861, four men in a rowboat made their way across the pitch-black harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, toward an unfinished and architecturally insignificant masonry fort three miles out from the city where the harbor meets the Atlantic Ocean. Read more

Jefferson Davis

Big Black River

By Kirk Freeman

Big battles make the history books. But for the soldiers, it was often the smaller, fiercer fights they remembered most keenly later in their lives. Read more

A Union doctor in a straw hat, foreground, examines a soldier’s leg wound while other casualties sprawl on the ground at a field hospital following the Battle of Savage’s Station, Virginia, on June 29, 1862.

Jefferson Davis

Healers or Horrors: Civil War Medicine

By Richard A. Gabriel

Safe behind its ocean barriers, the United States paid scant attention to the wars that raged abroad during the early 19th century, taking little notice of the lessons that might have been learned from the European experience with mass killing. Read more

Looking back at the Battle of Gettysburg

Jefferson Davis

The American Civil War: Forging a National Identity

by Mike Haskew

The American Civil War was the tragic culmination of divergent perspectives on the proper conduct of the government of the United States and socio-economic issues that had been frequently at the forefront of American political life for decades. Read more

Despite numerous attempts to deescalate the situation on both sides, Fort Sumter was fired upon in April 1861, marking the start of the American Civil War.

Jefferson Davis

American Civil War Timeline: the Road to War

by William Welsh

One of the catalysts for a major rebellion in the United States were irregular warfare in “Bleeding Kansas” from 1854 to 1861 between anti-slavery Free Staters and pro-slavery border ruffians. Read more

Jefferson Davis

The Worst American Civil War Generals and Commanders

By William Welsh The Worst Civil War Generals on the Confederacy

Confederate Maj. Gen. Gideon Pillow. After gaining ground trying to cut an escape path for the Confederates during the February 1862 siege of Fort Donelson by Union forces led Brig. Read more

Union General William T. Sherman and his army cut loose from Atlanta in November 1864 and began cutting a swath of destruction across Georgia.

Jefferson Davis

Sherman’s March to the Sea

By William Stroock

On September 3, 1864, a triumphant Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman telegraphed Washington, “Atlanta is ours and fairly won.” Read more

Jefferson Davis

The Grand Review of 1865

By William Stroock

Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, presaging the subsequent surrender of other Confederate forces in the West and the capture of Southern President Jefferson Davis a few weeks later, marked the triumphant end of the nation’s great sundering. Read more

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