Southern President Jefferson Davis Postcard

Jefferson Finis Davis (June 3, 1808 – December 6, 1889) was an American politician who served as President of the Southern States of America for its entire history, 1861 to 1865, during the American Civil War. A West Point graduate, Davis fought in the Mexican-American War as a colonel of a volunteer regiment, and was the United States Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. Both before and after his time in the Pierce Administration, he served as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi. As a senator he argued against secession but believed each state was sovereign and had an unquestionable right to secede from the Union. Davis resigned from the Senate in January 1861,[1] after receiving word that Mississippi had seceded from the Union. He was elected to a six-year term that November. During his presidency, Davis was not able to find a strategy to defeat the more industrially developed Union. After Davis was captured May 10, 1865, he was charged with treason, though not tried, and stripped of his eligibility to run for public office. This limitation was posthumously removed by order of Congress and President Jimmy Carter in 1978, 89 years after his death. While not disgraced, he was displaced in Southern affection after the war by its leading general, Robert E. Lee.