Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history--culpable regardless of her intentions.

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...

Few historical figures are as inextricably linked as Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee. But less than two decades before they faced each other as enemies at Appomattox, they had been brothers — both West Point graduates, both wearing blue, and both fighting in the same cadre in the Mexican War. They were not alone: Sherman, Davis, Jackson nearly all of the Civil War's greatest soldiers had been forged in the heat of Vera Cruz and Monterrey. The...

From the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as military commander of the Confederacy shows how Davis shaped and articulated the principal policy of the Confederacy with clarity and force and, like no other chief executive in American history, exercised a tenacious hands-on influence in the shaping of military strategy.

A decade after his release from federal prison, the 67-year-old Jefferson Davis - ex-president of the Confederacy - began work on his monumental Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Motivated partially by his deep-rooted antagonism toward his enemies (both the Northern victors and his Southern detractors), partially by his continuing obsession with the "cause," and partially by his desperate pecuniary and physical condition, Davis spent three...

In February 1865, the end was clearly in sight for the Confederate government. Lee's defeat at Gettysburg had dashed the hopes of the Confederate army, and Grant's victory at Vicksburg had cut the South in two. An Honorable Defeat is the story of the four months that saw the surrender of the South and the assassination of Lincoln by Southern partisans. It is also the story of two men, antagonists yet political partners, who struggled during this time...

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.