DAVIS, JEFFERSON (1808-1889). Jefferson Davis, representative and senator from Mississippi in the United States Congress and later president of the Confederate States of America, was born in Todd County, Kentucky, on June 3, 1808. He advocated the annexation of Texas to the United States in 1844. He was in Texas first in 1847, when as an officer in the United States Army he was with Zachary Taylor's force on the Rio Grande. While Davis was United States secretary of war, he recommended in 1854 the Texas or thirty-second-parallel route for construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean and in 1856 sent camels to Camp Verde in a project to use the animals for army supply and overland transportation. After Reconstruction a movement was launched in Dallas to purchase a homestead for Davis and invite him to move to Texas. On June 14, 1875, he was offered the presidency of the newly established Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. When he declined the appointment on July 8, 1875, he wrote of his hopes of revisiting Texas. He died in New Orleans on December 6, 1889. Davis is memorialized in Texas on three monuments placed by the Texas Centennial Commission and by the name of Jeff Davis County (formed in 1887).
BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. F. Arrowood, "The Election of Jefferson Davis to the Presidency of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 49 (October 1945 Mary Lois Blair, Jefferson Davis and His Interest in the West (M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1929 Joseph E. Chance, Jefferson Davis's Mexican War Regiment (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991 Clement Eaton, Jefferson Davis (New York: Free Press, 1977 L. B. Leslie, "The Purchase and Importation of Camels by the United States Government, 1855-1857," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 33 (July 1929 S. S. McKay, "Texas and the Southern Pacific Railroad, 1845-1860, " Southwestern Historical Quarterly 35 (July 1931 Harold Schoen, comp., Monuments Erected by the State of Texas to Commemorate the Centenary of Texas Independence (Austin: Commission of Control for Texas Centennial Celebrations, 1938 Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis (3 vols., New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955-64).
