If the Confederacy fails, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a Theory. Jefferson Davis

Of all the leaders associated with the Civil War few are as overlooked as Jefferson Davis. The president of the ill-fated Confederate States of America, Davis is largely dismissed in the pantheon of the “Lost Cause,” passed over in favor of military leaders such as Robert E. Lee, Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, and J.E.B. Stuart.

Yet the relegation of Davis to the shadows of Civil War history is unsurprising; Davis was little understood and often a mystery to his contemporaries, an intellectual who lacked the popular appeal of Abraham Lincoln or the genteel grace of Robert E. Lee, who has since become the figurehead of the Confederacy for many.

Neither current events nor history show that the majority rules, or ever did rule.Jefferson Davis

That Jefferson Davis was ever elected to the presidency of the Confederacy is a wonder. Davis had the credentials, certainly; a graduate of West Point who’d served in the U.S. Army – and in the Mexican-American War – and in the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate representing his home state of Mississippi, and later acting as Pierce’s Secretary of War, Davis appeared to be an excellent candidate for the presidency, at least on paper.

Those who knew Davis, however, often found him to be a mercurial personality, reserved and often intractable. Davis resigned the Army at one point to marry Colonel Zachary Taylor’s, daughter against Taylor’s wishes. Upon his first wife’s death, Davis retreated to Mississippi plantation, where he lived for eight years as a virtual recluse, studying history and government, seeing few people aside from his brother Joseph. He never filled out an entire term to any office to which he was elected or appointed. At the conclusion of the Mexican-American war, he refused President Polk’s offer of a Federal commission as a brigadier general, on the grounds that the Constitution gives states the power to appoint militia officers, not the Federal government.

“My devotion to the Union of our fathers had been so often and so publicly declared; I had on the floor of the Senate so defiantly challenged any question of my fidelity to it; my services, civil and military, had now extended through so long a period and were so generally known, that I felt quite assured that no whisperings of envy or ill-will could lead the people of Mississippi to believe that I had dishonored their trust by using the power they had conferred on me to destroy the government to which I was accredited. Then, as afterward, I regarded the separation of the States as a great, though not the greater evil.” Jefferson Davis

Although he was a supporter of slavery, Davis initially opposed the secession of Mississippi from the Union, a stance he took public both North and South; believing that states were within their rights to leave the Union, Davis nonetheless thought that secession would prove disastrous for the South, who would be unable to compete with the U.S. Army on the military front when the inevitable war that would follow secession commenced.

But in the end, Davis, could not antagonize his home state of Mississippi, and when Mississippi made the decision to secede, Davis reluctantly capitulated. He became immediately the military leader of Mississippi, and soon thereafter was elected president of the nascent Confederacy by the First Confederate Congress.

The presidency was never a post that Davis wanted to fill. His interest was in the military. He initially served only as a provisional president, but the growing antagonism between the Federal government and the Confederate government gave little time for a true election for the position, and Davis found himself elected for a six year term, that like his other political office terms, he’d never fulfill.

“We feel our cause is just and holy; we protest solemnly in the face of mankind that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of our honor and independence. We ask no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the states with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone; that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms.” Jefferson Davis

Davis’ first action as president was to attempt to prevent the inevitable war, a war he knew the South could not win. He sent a peace convention to Washington, but Lincoln refused to hear them out. He proposed buying U.S. military installations in the South, and to pay the Southern half of the national debt. Neither proposal was accepted. The imminent war begins when Davis orders the attack on Fort Sumter.

Most of Davis’ time as president was spent dealing with the war that consumed the Confederacy. There was no time to truly build the country he’d been elected to lead. The war drained the South’s meager resources and Northern blockades strangled the Confederacy, leaving Davis unable to supply his army or his citizens.

After the conclusion of the war and the dissolution of the Confederate States of America, Davis was one of few Confederate officers to be charged with treason and jailed. He was released after two years, the charges against him dropped.

Davis spent the years after the war at his home in Mississippi, writing, refusing to repudiate his role in the Confederacy. He never took an allegiance to the United States, and therefore was never reinstated as a citizen. He never changed his pro-slavery views, and remained bitter about the fatally flawed government he’d led, even until his death.

“Our situation illustrates the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established.” Jefferson Davis