Jefferson Davis (1808-1889) was born in Fairview, Kentucky, and died in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was an American politician, cotton plantation owner and enslaver, and the president of the Confederate States during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865. Davis went to Jefferson College in Washington, Mississippi, in 1818 and to Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1821. He entered West Point in 1824 and graduated in 1828. After graduating, Davis served six years as a lieutenant in the United States Army. He fought in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. As a member of the Democratic Party, he represented Mississippi in the House of Representatives (1845-1846) and the United States Senate (1847-1851; 1857-1861). He also served as the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857 under President Franklin Pierce. In 1861, the Episcopal Church split and Davis became a member of the newly founded Protestant Episcopal Church in the Confederate States of America (the two denominations were reunited after the war in 1865). After the Civil War, Davis was imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe in Virginia. After two years traveling in Europe, he and his family returned to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1869, where he became president of the Carolina Life Insurance Company. In 1876, he returned to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He would live there for the rest of his life, publishing his account of the war in a two-volume memoir titled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government in 1881.

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