Jefferson Davis Inaugurated: The Confederacy Begins

Six weeks before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office in Washington, another president was inaugurated on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery. Jefferson Davis became the provisional president of the Confederate States of America on February 18, 1861, leading a nation of seven states (soon to be eleven) that existed for the sole purpose of preserving the institution of slavery. The two inaugurations, separated by just sixteen days and 700 miles, marked the beginning of the deadliest conflict in American history. Davis was not the Confederacy’s first choice. Southern fire-eaters wanted a radical who had been calling for secession for years. Davis was a moderate by Confederate standards — a Mississippi senator, former Secretary of War, and West Point graduate who had argued for Southern rights within the Union until compromise became impossible. He accepted the presidency reluctantly, reportedly telling his wife Varina that the news "was as a sentence of death." The inauguration drew a crowd of several thousand to Montgomery. Davis arrived by train from his Mississippi plantation, greeted by cheering crowds at every stop. His inaugural address, delivered without notes, struck a defensive tone: the Confederacy sought only to be "left alone" and would pursue peaceful relations with the United States. He made no mention of slavery, framing secession as a constitutional exercise of states’ rights. The Confederate Constitution he would swear to uphold, however, explicitly protected the right to own slaves in its text. Davis proved to be a capable but contentious wartime leader. He micromanaged military strategy, quarreled with his generals (except Robert E. Lee), and struggled to impose central authority on states that had seceded precisely to escape it. The Confederacy’s structural contradictions — a central government built by states’ rights advocates — hampered the war effort throughout. The government Davis led that February afternoon in Montgomery lasted exactly four years before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, making the Confederacy one of the shortest-lived nations in modern history and its president a symbol of a cause that cost 750,000 lives.