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Much of Jefferson Davis' life and career has been obscured in controversy and misinterpretation. This full, carefully annotated edition will make it possible for scholars to reassess the man who served as President of the Confederacy and who in the aftermath of war became the symbolic leader of the South.

For almost a decade a dedicated team of scholars has been collecting and documenting Davis' papers and correspondence for this multi-volume work. The first volume includes not only Davis' private and public correspondence but also the important letters and documents addressed to and...

Mary Seaton Dix, Associate Editor
The fifth volume of The Papers of Jefferson Davis presents 9,000 of the approximately 21,000 known Davis letters, papers, and speeches from the years 1853 through 1855, when Davis served as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce. Most of the documents are included in summary form in an extensive calendar; 93 are published in full with annotation.

Well prepared for the War Department position by his military education and experience, Davis was already known as a champion of the army and West Point from his years in Congress. As secretary,...

May Seaton Dix, Associate Editor
Richard E. Beringer, Visiting Coeditor

In Volume 4 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis, which covers the years 1849 to 1852, Davis had clearly chosen politics ar his life's work. He relished in his role as Mississippi's senior senator and willingly assumed the responsibility of being a national spokesman for the South. This period also saw a number of events in Davis' personal life, notably the birth of his first child and the beginning of a long estrangement from his brother Joseph.

In January, 1849, Davis signed the Southern Address, although he...

During the last nine months of the Civil War, virtually all of the news reports and President Jefferson Davis's correspondence confirmed the imminent demise of the Confederate States, the nation Davis had striven to uphold since 1861. But despite defeat after defeat on the battlefield, a recalcitrant Congress, naysayers in the press, disastrous financial conditions, failures in foreign policy and peace efforts, and plummeting national morale, Davis remained in office and tried to maintain the government -- even after the fall of Richmond -- until his capture by Union forces on May 10,...

Volume 13 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the former president of the Confederacy as he becomes head of the Carolina Life Insurance Company of Memphis and attempts to gain a financial foothold for his newly reunited family. Having lost everything in the Civil War and spent two years immediately afterwards in federal prison, Davis faced a mounting array of financial woes, health problems, and family illnesses and tragedies in the 1870s. Despite setbacks during this decade, Davis also began a quest to rehabilitate his image and protect his historical legacy.

Although his position...

Kenneth H. Williams, Associate Editor
Peggy L. Dillard, Editorial Associate

The autumn of 1863 was a trying time for Jefferson Davis. Even as he expressed unwavering confidence about the eventual success of the Confederate movement, he had to realize that mounting economic problems, low morale, and rotating army leadership were threatening the welfare of the new nation. Less than a year after the October 1863 Confederate victory at Chickamauga, the South relinquished Atlanta to Sherman.

During the tumultuous eleven months chronicled in Volume 10, Davis retained his fervor for...

Lynda L. Crist, Associate Editor
Mary S. Dix, Assistant Editor

At the end of Volume 2 Jefferson Davis had left Congress to become a colonel in the First Mississippi Regiment. The first item in this volume is a speech as he prepares to leave on a riverboat to serve in the Mexican War. The years 1846 through 1848 see Davis play a conspicuous role in the war and in the subsequent political clashes and controversies over slavery.

Volume 3 details Davis' first experience in battle as an officer of a regiment as well as his initial term as a U.S. senator. He received both praise and...

"Being powerless to direct the current, I can only wait to see whither it runs," wrote Jefferson Davis to his wife, Varina, on October 11, 1865, five months after the victorious United States Army took him prisoner. Indeed, in the tumultuous years immediately after the Civil War, Davis found himself more acted upon than active, a dramatic change from his previous twenty years of public service to the United States as a major political figure and then to the Confederacy as its president and commander in chief.

Volume 12 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the former president of the...