Jefferson Davis is one of the most complex and controversial
figures in American political history (and the man whom Oscar Wilde
wanted to meet more than anyone when he made his tour of the United
States). Elected president of the Confederacy and later accused of
participating in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he is a
source of ongoing dissension between northerners and southerners.
This volume, the first of its kind, is a selected collection of his
writings culled in large part from the authoritative "Papers of
Jefferson Davis, a multivolume edition of his letters and speeches
published by the Louisiana State University Press, and includes
thirteen documents from manuscript collections and one privately
held document that have never before appeared in a modern scholarly
edition. From letters as a college student to his sister, to major
speeches on the Constitution, slavery, and sectional issues, to his
farewell to the U.S. Senate, to his inaugural address as
Confederate president, to letters from prison to his wife, these
selected pieces present the many faces of the enigmatic Jefferson
Davis.
As William J. Cooper, Jr., writes in his Introduction, "Davis's
notability does not come solely from his crucial role in the Civil
War. Born on the Kentucky frontier in the first decade of the
nineteenth century, he witnessed and participated in the epochal
transformation of the United States from a fledgling country to a
strong nation spanning the continent. In his earliest years his
father moved farther south and west to Mississippi. As a young army
officer just out of West Point, he served on the northwestern and
southwestern frontiers in an army whose chief mission was to
protectsettlers surging westward. Then, in 1846 and 1847, as
colonel of the First Mississippi Regiment, he fought in the Mexican
War, which resulted in 1848 in the Mexican Cession, a massive
addition to the United States of some 500,000 square miles,
including California and the modern Southwest. As secretary of war
and U.S. senator in the 1850s, he advocated government support for
the building of a transcontinental railroad that he believed
essential to bind the nation from ocean to ocean."
"From the Hardcover edition.
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