This is the story of a house, ""Brierfield,"" and incidentally of a man, Jefferson Davis, and his family. The author traces the story of ""Brierfield"" from its construction in the antebellum period to its final disappearance in the twentieth century, a victim of war, floods, and fire. Most people associate Jefferson Davis with ""Beauvoir,"" his home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the years after 1865, but ""Brierfield"" was his home during the most productive years of his life. We see Davis here as a young planter, a United States Representative and Senator, a Mexican War hero, United States Secretary of War, and President of the Confederate States of America. The tangled web of relationships involving Davis, his second wife, Varina Howell of Natchez, and his older brother and substitute father, Joseph Davis of nearby ""Hurricane Plantation,"" unfolds against the physical setting of ""Brierfield.