Jefferson Davis

Jefferson Finis Davis (1808–1889) was an American politician who served as the first and only President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. Before the war, he represented Mississippi in both the U.S. House and Senate and served as U.S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. He is best known for leading the Confederacy through its existence from 1861 to 1865 and for his subsequent imprisonment and authorship of a two-volume memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in 1881.