Jefferson Davis was a plantation owner, soldier, and politician who was most well-known for being the only President of the Confederacy.

He was born on June 3, 1808, in Todd County, Ky. He grew up in Mississippi, the youngest of 10 children of Samuel and Jane Davis. Young Jefferson attended Transylvania Academy and then enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy in 1824. He graduated four years and saw action in the West, in the Black Hawk War.

Davis, serving under then-Col. Zachary Taylor, fell in love and later married Taylor's daughter, Sarah. They were married in 1835. Husband and wife contracted malaria, and she died, just three months after their wedding.

A devastated Davis retired to his cotton plantation, in Davis Bend, Miss. He depended on slaves to do much of the work on his plantation; by 1860, he had 113.

Entering politics for the first time, he joined the Democratic Party and ran for the state House of Representatives. He lost the 1843 election. Selected as a presidential elector in 1844, he campaigned for the eventual winner, Democrat James K. Polk.

In 1845, he married again, to Varina Howell. They had six children, two of whom lived to adulthood.

Also in 1845, Davis won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Mississippi's at-large district. Not long after taking office, he resigned, to fight in the Mexican-American War. He fought in battles at Buena Vista (at which he was shot in the foot) and Monterrey. He was offered a promotion to the rank of brigadier general in 1847 but opted instead to accept an appointment to the U.S. Senate instead, to serve out the term of a Senator who had died. He opposed the admission of California and the Compromise of 1850. He resigned from the Senate in 1851 in order to run for governor of Mississippi; he lost that election. He campaigned in 1852 for the eventual winner, Democrat Franklin Pierce, a personal friend.

Pierce appointed Davis as Secretary of War in 1853. He was known as a capable administrator and politician, promoting the Gadsden Purchase and initiating the Pacific Railroad Surveys as a means for finding acceptable routes for a transcontinental railroad. He won election to the Senate again in 1857 and was serving in that capacity on Jan. 21, 1861, when his state of Mississippi seceded from the Union. A firm believer in the right of his state to determine its own destiny, he nonetheless urged caution and was part of a Senate committee tasked with finding a compromise before war began. None of those efforts succeeded, and Davis joined the Southern cause.

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