Jefferson Davis

This collection offers quotations by Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States.

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) was the president of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, served in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and was secretary of war under Franklin Pierce.

William J. Cooper, Jr., is Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University. His most recent book is Jefferson Davis, American, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography and the Jefferson Davis Award. He lives in Baton Rouge.


From the Hardcover edition.

“Eclipsed in our memory of the Civil War by Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and other military heroes, Jefferson Davis was arguably one of the most important figures in the antebellum and wartime eras. Davis’s biographer William J. Cooper, Jr., has sifted through the huge number of Davis letters and speeches to select those that best tell the story of his life and provide insight on his character in this invaluable volume.” —James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

“To have the most important letters, speeches, and public documents of Jefferson Davis gathered into a single volume is invaluable. To have Jefferson Davis’s leading modern biographer making the selection and placing the documents in context was inspired.” —George C. Rable, Charles G. Summersell Professor of Southern History, University of Alabama, and author of Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!, winner of the 2003 Lincoln Prize

“This volume, full of well-chosen words from Jefferson Davis, must be on every Civil War buff’s bookshelf.” —William W. Freehling, Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky and author of The South vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War

“William J. Cooper, Jr., is exactly the right person to prepare a useful and accessible single-volume edition of Davis’s most important writings, and he has performed that task superbly. Historians, students, and the general public alike will all find this to be a fascinating volume.” —Michael F. Holt, Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History, University of Virginia, and co-author of The Civil War and Reconstruction

“He had the pride, the spirit of initiative, the capacity in business which qualify men for leadership, and lacked nothing of the indomitable will and imperious purpose to make his leadership effective.” —Woodrow Wilson


From the Hardcover edition.