By Tom Morrow

He was a West Point graduate, a Mexican-American war hero, a presidential cabinet secretary, son-in-law to a U.S. President, a U.S. senator, a Congressman, and as president of a bogus nation he was accused of treason and imprisoned. Jefferson Davis was all of these and more.
Born in Fairview, Kentucky on June 3, 1808, Davis was an American politician who served as the only president of the rebel Confederate States from 1861 to 1865. He was a member of the Democratic Party who represented Mississippi in the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives prior to switching allegiance to the Confederacy. He also was the United States Secretary of War from 1853 to 1857, serving under President Franklin Pierce.
After graduating from West Point, 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. Before the American Civil War, he operated a large cotton plantation in Mississippi and owned as many as 113 slaves. Although he argued in the Senate against secession, he believed states had an unquestionable right to leave the Union.

In 1829, after West Point, Davis was stationed at Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, Michigan Territory (now Wisconsin). Zachary Taylor, a future President, had assumed command shortly before Davis arrived.
As an ironic side note, during the Black Hawk War, Capt. Abraham Lincoln led an Illinois company for a short time at Fort Crawford.
Davis fell in love with Sarah Taylor, daughter of Taylor. Both Sarah and Davis sought Taylor’s permission to marry. Taylor refused, as he did not wish his daughter to have the difficult life of a military wife on frontier army posts. Davis’s own experience led him to appreciate Taylor’s objection, so he arranged for the letter to be sent to the War Department. Against his former commander’s wishes, he married Sarah in Louisville, Kentucky.
In August 1835, Jefferson and Sarah traveled south. Their goal was to spend the hot summer months in the countryside away from the river floodplain, for their health, but both of them contracted either malaria or yellow fever. Sarah died at the age of 21, on Sept. 15, 1835, after just three months of marriage. Davis was also severely ill, and his family feared for his life. In the month following Sarah’s death, he slowly improved, although he remained weak. .
In 1844, Davis was sent to the Democrat convention for a third time, and his interest in politics deepened. He was selected as one of six presidential electors for the 1844 presidential election and campaigned effectively throughout Mississippi for the Democrat candidate, James K. Polk.
Davis had met Varina Banks Howell, then 18 years old. She was a granddaughter of New Jersey Governor Richard Howell. Within a month of their meeting, the 35-year-old widower asked Varina to marry him. They were married on Feb. 26, 1845.
During this time, Davis was persuaded to become a candidate for the United States House of Representatives and won the election.
In 1846 the Mexican–American War began. Davis raised a volunteer regiment, the 155th Infantry Regiment, becoming its colonel under the command of his former father-in-law, General Zachary Taylor. On July 21 the regiment sailed from New Orleans for Texas.
In September 1846, Davis participated in the Battle of Monterrey, during which he led a successful charge on the La Teneria fort. On Oct. 28, Davis resigned his seat in the House of Representatives.
On Feb. 22, 1847, Davis fought bravely at the Battle of Buena Vista and was shot in the foot. In recognition of Davis’s bravery and initiative, Zachary Taylor is reputed to have said, “My daughter, sir, was a better judge of men than I was.”
Honoring Davis’s war service, Governor Brown of Mississippi appointed him to the vacant position of U.S. Senator Jesse Speight, a Democrat, who had died on May 1, 1847.
In 1848, Senator Davis proposed and introduced an amendment to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that would have annexed most of northeastern Mexico, but it failed on a vote of  44 to 11. Southerners wanted to increase territory held in Mexico as an area for the expansion of slavery.
The Pierce administration ended in 1857 after Pierce’s loss of the Democratic nomination to James Buchanan. So, Davis ran for the Senate, was elected, and re-entered the Senate on March 4, 1857.
As tensions between the North and South began to grow over slavery, Senator Davis became a vocal advocate of states’ rights.
NEXT WEEK: Jeff Davis, a treasonous American.

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