Who was the first and only president of the confederacy

When Abraham Lincoln, a known opponent of slavery, was elected president, the South Carolina legislature perceived a threat. Calling a state convention, the delegates voted to remove the state of South Carolina from the union known as the United States of America. The secession of South Carolina was followed by the secession of six more states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas–and the threat of secession by four more—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. These eleven states eventually formed the Confederate States of America.
At a convention in Montgomery, Alabama, the seven seceding states created the Confederate Constitution, a document similar to the United States Constitution, but with greater stress on the autonomy of each state. Jefferson Davis was named provisional president of the Confederacy until elections could be held.
When President Buchanan—Lincoln's predecessor—refused to surrender southern federal forts to the seceding states, southern state troops seized them. At Fort Sumter, South Carolina troops repulsed a supply ship trying to reach federal forces based in the fort. The ship was forced to return to New York, its supplies undelivered.
At Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, the new president said he had no plans to end slavery in those states where it already existed, but he also said he would not accept secession. He hoped to resolve the national crisis without warfare.
When President Lincoln planned to send supplies to Fort Sumter, he alerted the state in advance, in an attempt to avoid hostilities. South Carolina, however, feared a trick; the commander of the fort, Robert Anderson, was asked to surrender immediately. Anderson offered to surrender, but only after he had exhausted his supplies. His offer was rejected, and on April 12, the Civil War began with shots fired on the fort. Fort Sumter eventually was surrendered to South Carolina.
The attack on Fort Sumter prompted four more states to join the Confederacy. With Virginia's secession, Richmond was named the Confederate capitol.
Residents of the western counties of Virginia did not wish to secede along with the rest of the state. This section of Virginia was admitted into the Union as the state of West Virginia on June 20, 1863.
Despite their acceptance of slavery, Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri did not join the Confederacy. Although divided in their loyalties, a combination of political maneuvering and Union military pressure kept these states from seceding.

View of the battlefield, First Bull Run, Virginia, July 1861
Public demand pushed General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to advance on the South before adequately training his untried troops. Scott ordered General Irvin McDowell to advance on Confederate troops stationed at Manassas Junction, Virginia. McDowell attacked on July 21, and was initially successful, but the introduction of Confederate reinforcements resulted in a Southern victory and a chaotic retreat toward Washington by federal troops.
None of the included photographs of First Bull Run were made at the time of battle (July 21); the photographers had to wait until the Confederate Army evacuated Centreville and Manassas in March 1862. Their views of various landmarks of the previous summer are arranged according to the direction of the federal advance, a long flanking movement by Sudley's Ford.
Suddenly aware of the threat of a protracted war and the army's need for organization and training, Lincoln replaced McDowell with General George B. McClellan.
To blockade the coast of the Confederacy effectively, the federal navy had to be improved. By July, the effort at improvement had made a difference and an effective blockade had begun. The South responded by building small, fast ships that could outmaneuver Union vessels.

Port Royal, South Carolina—1861-1862
On November 7, 1861, Captain Samuel F. Dupont's warships silenced Confederate guns in Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard. This victory enabled General Thomas W. Sherman's troops to occupy first Port Royal and then all the famous Sea Islands of South Carolina, where Timothy H. O'Sullivan recorded them making themselves at home.
Confederate Winter Quarters—1861-1862
These photographs show Confederate winter quarters at Manassas, Centreville, Fairfax Court House, and Falls Church, Virginia.

This time line was compiled by Joanne Freeman and owes a special debt to the Encyclopedia of American History by Richard B. Morris.

Jefferson Davis was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), a U.S. senator from Mississippi (1847–1851; 1857–1861), secretary of war under U.S. president Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), and the only president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Tall, lean, and formal, Davis was considered to be an ideal leader of the Confederacy upon his election in 1861, despite the fact that he neither sought the job nor particularly wanted it. Davis was a war hero, slaveholder, and longtime advocate of states’ rights who nevertheless was not viewed to be a radical “fire-eater,” making him more appealing to the hesitating moderates in Virginia. Still, Davis’s reputation suffered over the years. Searing headaches, caused in part by facial neuralgia, exacerbated an already prickly personality. “I have an infirmity of which I am heartily ashamed,” he said. “When I am aroused in a matter, I lose control of my feelings and become personal.” The challenges inherent in holding together a wartime government founded on the idea of states’ rights didn’t help, either, nor did critics like E. A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner, who charged after the war that the Lost Cause was “lost by the perfidy of Jefferson Davis.” Robert E. Lee, however, spoke for many when he said, “You can always say that few people could have done better than Mr. Davis. I knew of none that could have done as well.”

Contributor: Ethan S. Rafuse

Jefferson Finis Davis was born on June 3, 1808, in Christian County, Kentucky, less than a hundred miles from where future U.S. president Abraham Lincoln would be born eight months later. Davis was one of ten children; his father owned an inn and was a veteran of the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). The family left Kentucky a few years later and Davis was raised on a small plantation in Mississippi. He returned to Kentucky to attend boarding school in Bardstown and subsequently studied at Jefferson College in Mississippi and Transylvania University in Kentucky before entering the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He finished twenty-third in his class in 1828 and was assigned to the 1st Infantry Regiment in Wisconsin.

Davis missed the Black Hawk War (1832) due to illness—Lincoln, however, battled the Sac and Fox tribes as a member of the Illinois militia—but returned in time to escort the Indian chief into captivity. (Davis “treated us all with much kindness,” Black Hawk recalled in his autobiography.) He also returned in time to meet the daughter of his commanding officer, Virginia native and future U.S. president Zachary Taylor. Against Taylor’s objections, Davis and Sarah Knox Taylor married in 1835, but she died of malaria a few months later. Davis, having resigned his commission, followed the lead of his older brother Joseph and became a cotton farmer. He also entered politics as a Democrat, eventually winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1845, the same year he married Varina Howell.

When the Mexican War began in 1846, Davis left Congress and accepted command of the 1st Mississippi Regiment. He served under his former father-in-law at the battles of Monterrey (1846) and Buena Vista (1847). At the latter engagement, Davis was wounded and won national acclaim for helping to repulse a charge by Mexican lances. “My daughter, sir, was a better judge of men than I was,” General Taylor reportedly told him, and later that year the governor of Mississippi selected Davis to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate.

In the Senate, Davis quickly established himself as a leading advocate of slavery and states’ rights. He was also one of the leading opponents of California’s admission to the Union as a free state, a controversy that erupted during Taylor’s presidency and created chaos in Congress at the end of 1849. Southerners worried that their balance of power would be lost if California, which had been taken from Mexico, were closed to slavery. Tensions ran so high that House members engaged in fistfights and Davis reportedly challenged an Illinois congressman to a duel.

After an unsuccessful run for governor of Mississippi, Davis was appointed secretary of war by U.S. president Franklin Pierce in 1853. He proved to be the most active and effective secretary of war since the 1820s, increasing the size of the army, improving training, and establishing a medical corps. He also oversaw the introduction of the minié ball, a partially hollow, conical bullet whose great accuracy and destructiveness would account in part for the Civil War’s high number of casualties. After leaving the War Department in 1857, Davis returned to the Senate. Although generally opposed to secession, as many Southern moderates were, he nevertheless reestablished himself as a leading defender of the rights of slave states. When Mississippi left the Union in January 1861, Davis immediately resigned from the Senate.

The Starting Point of the Great War Between the States

Shortly after returning to Mississippi, Davis learned that he had been chosen by a convention of seceded states meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, to be provisional president of the newly created Confederate States of America. While he would have much preferred serving in the Confederate army, he accepted the office on February 18, 1861, declaring that the “South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.” Davis populated his cabinet with representatives from each Confederate state and appointed the Louisiana-born Creole Pierre G. T. Beauregard to command Confederate troops at Charleston, South Carolina, where the United States still occupied Fort Sumter. When the Lincoln administration attempted to resupply the garrison, Davis authorized Beauregard to open fire, which led to its surrender on April 13, 1861.

Virginia finally seceded after the loss of Sumter and Lincoln’s subsequent call for volunteers, and in May the government relocated to Richmond. This was both a political and a strategic decision based on Virginia’s symbolic importance, sizable population (free and enslaved), industry, and agricultural resources. Although its proximity to Washington, D.C., made the move a potentially hazardous one strategically, the topography of Virginia was militarily advantageous enough to help offset the risk. In particular, the Appalachian Mountains and the state’s east-to-west-flowing rivers, such as the James and Rappahannock, served as a natural defense against invasion. Six months later, Davis won election to a six-year term as Confederate president.

Jefferson Davis in the Clothes in Which He Was Captured

In Richmond, Davis established a close relationship with Robert E. Lee, despite the Virginia commander’s early setbacks in the western part of the state. The president’s relationships with several other generals, however, would not be so good. Davis was particularly piqued with what he considered to be a less than vigorous pursuit of the enemy after the First Battle of Manassas (1861), an engagement to which he had traveled to witness personally. He directed his ire at Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston, the two principal Confederate commanders at the battle, and the resulting conflict would only intensify and become more personal over time.

A month after the First Battle of Manassas, the Confederate Congress authorized Davis to appoint five men to the rank of full general. Johnston and Beauregard were outraged to find themselves at the bottom of the list—behind the adjutant general Samuel Cooper, a “desk general” and, even worse, a New Jersey native; Albert Sidney Johnston, who had not yet seen action; and Lee, who was at the beginning of a series of humiliating defeats in western Virginia. In a letter to Davis, Johnston accused the president with having “tarnished my fair fame as a soldier and a man.” Beauregard was banished to the Western Theater and later relieved of command. He and Johnston, backed by powerful allies in and out of the Confederate Congress, would become bitter enemies of the administration. Davis, who had become “aroused” in the matter, would not forget the criticism. In fact, historian James M. McPherson has suggested that this marked a crucial difference between Davis and Lincoln: while Davis “could never forget a slight or forgive the man who committed it,” Lincoln was willing “to hold the horse of a haughty general if he would only win victories.”

Davis also had trouble with his western armies. His friendship with Leonidas Polk—an Episcopal bishop who was third cousin to former U.S. president James K. Polk—unwittingly encouraged insubordination, and Joe Johnston, since transferred, seemed to long more for a return to Virginia than for the responsibilities of his immediate command. As a consequence, a poisonous atmosphere developed in the Army of Tennessee that did much to compromise its effectiveness, and Davis, unlike Lincoln, deemed it necessary on occasion to travel outside the capital to involve himself in these contretemps.

Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet

Like Lincoln, Davis was an inviting target for disgruntled military men and politicians. His critics charged him with favoritism, citing his clear preference for West Point-educated officers. And while he brought great energy and attention to detail to his role as chief executive, his subordinates complained of micromanagement. Davis’s cabinet, meanwhile, performed unevenly. Judah P. Benjamin, for instance, served as attorney general, secretary of war, and secretary of state, and while he was censured by the Confederate Congress after the loss of Roanoke Island, North Carolina, in 1862, he always retained Davis’s confidence. Christopher Memminger, on the other hand, oversaw a Confederate dollar that, by the time of Lee’s surrender following the Appomattox Campaign, had a value of 1.5 cents in gold. The man who had proudly authored South Carolina’s declaration of secession resigned as treasury secretary in 1864.

Davis antagonized many with his increased willingness over time to jettison states’ rights in favor of more centralized power. Like Lincoln, he used the war as justification to suspend, on several occasions, basic liberties such as habeas corpus. To maximize the Confederacy’s mobilization of manpower, he pushed a conscription bill through the Confederate Congress in 1862, putting him at odds with his own vice president. The fact that the owners of twenty or more slaves were exempted from the draft excited class resentment and led to claims that this was a “rich man’s war.” In addition, Davis imposed taxes and regulations designed to manage the economy and support the war effort, confiscated private property, and imposed martial law. Such measures were received with great hostility in a nation where states’ rights were not only considered sacrosanct, but were the war’s justification. As a result, Davis’s attempts at fashioning a stronger national government were often obstructed by state and local leaders and protested by angry mobs.

Jeff. Davis Caught At Last.

Still, there were many successes. Mobilization was one. According to the U.S. census of 1860, the North outpopulated the South by more than two to one; yet, until late in the war, for Confederate armies to face an equivalent disadvantage in the field was unusual. (When they did, such as at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863, they had the ability to conjure victory.) Military strategy was another success. Davis dubbed his grand plan “offensive-defensive,” and it emerged out of the Confederate failure early in 1862 to defend all possible invasion routes along the country’s perimeter. Benjamin resigned as secretary of war in part because he could not provide Confederate general Henry A. Wise, the former governor of Virginia, with the manpower necessary to defend Roanoke Island. As a result, the Union was better able to establish its crippling blockade of the Atlantic coast.

The new strategy was developed in collaboration with Lee and called for concentrating as many forces as possible in a single theater and onto a single field, enabling them to take swift and decisive action. “Offensive-defensive” was extremely costly in manpower and ultimately failed to overcome the weight of superior Northern manpower and resources. While the Maryland (1862) and Gettysburg (1863) campaigns were boldly offensive, they were also defeats. On the other hand, the strategy enabled the Confederacy to reverse nearly all Union gains achieved early in 1862 (when the North, following the Peninsula and Seven Days’ campaigns, had come perilously close to taking Richmond) and prolonged the war probably as long as was possible through conventional means. Davis was decidedly less enthusiastic about guerrilla, or irregular, warfare and provided such efforts only limited support.