Jefferson Davis

Submitted by sfr on Fri, 2019-08-02 13:59
Character Key Number: 
388
Display Name: 
Jefferson Davis
Sort Name: 
Davis, Jefferson
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
No
Biography: 

Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America for the duration of the Civil War. Although he was born in Kentucky and lived briefly in Louisiana, at the time he was elected to lead the South he had spent almost forty years in Mississippi, and had represented the state in Washington in both the House and the Senate for many years. Despite this Mississippi connection, however, he is mentioned only four times in the fictions, and curiously, mostly by non-Southerners. In Absalom! Shreve calls him "Jeff Davis" (144), and in "The Unvanquished" and again in The Unvanquished his last name is mentioned by an unnamed Union lieutenant (89, 144). After the Southerner surrender he continued to uphold the ideology of the Lost Cause; according to Requiem for a Nun notes, he gave his last public speech in 1884 in Mississippi's "Old Capital" building (87).

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