On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis received a telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time--the Yankees are coming, it warned. That night Davis fled Richmond, setting off an intense manhunt for the Confederate president. Two weeks later, President Lincoln was assassinated, and the nation was convinced that Davis was involved in the conspiracy that led to the crime. Lincoln's murder, autopsy, and White House funeral transfixed...

After the secession of eleven southern states, Jefferson Davis gave up his U.S. citizenship to accept the presidency of the Confederate States of America and led the South in the Civil War.

Examines the rivalry between Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States during the Civil War, and Jefferson Davis, who did not favor secession but became president of the Confederacy and worked to make it a success.

In February 1861, Jefferson Davis told his wife that he had been elected president of the Confederacy. He expressed this news, his wife recalled, "as a man might speak of a sentence of death." Davis feared what might lie ahead: a horrific civil war. Davis was a controversial, enigmatic figure. Despite his desire for peace, he brazenly ordered the attack on Fort Sumter, which triggered the war. Yet, while Southerners were dying and starving, he urged...

Traces the life of Jefferson Davis, who graduated from West Point and served in the Army and the House of Representatives before becoming President of the Confederate States of America during the Civil War.