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The name of this stately house set back amidst the live oaks is Beauvoir (BOV-WAH), a French word meaning beautiful view. This was the home of Jefferson Davis for the last ten years of his life. It is outside the town of Biloxi, Mississippi, just a few hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico. Jefferson Davis was the only president of the Confederate States of America. After the War Between the States (one of the several Southern names for what the Northerners called the Civil War ) ended he was imprisoned for two years as a traitor. When in ensuing legal battles it was argued that he hadn't been a traitor to the country because secession wasn't prohibited in the Constitution, he was freed from further prosecution. Mostly, the prosecution realized he'd suffered enough. However, his former plantation in central Mississippi no longer belonged to him, and he was stripped of his citizenship.

He and his wife Varina came to Beauvoir as a guest of the former owner to live while he wrote his memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. This large book was followed by A Short History of the Confederate States of America nine years later. Varina also wrote a biography of her husband, which was published in 1890. The former owner of Beauvoir, Sarah Dorsey, was in the process of selling the estate to Mr. and Mrs. Davis when she died and willed it to them.

I was not prepared to enjoy reading about Davis' life and seeing the exhibits in his Presidential Library, which is on the grounds of the estate. However, I was quite impressed with Davis' dedication to his country, the United States of America, in his earlier career. He was educated at West Point and had been an officer in the army, fighting in several battles against Mexico in Texas. He had served as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of War, and it was while serving in the latter office that he modernized the American armed forces a few years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. Those refined, modernized Union troops, outfitted with more accurate guns and organized into more efficient units, were to be his undoing in the Civil War.

One of the daughters, Margaret, married and settled in Colorado Springs. There are descendants living there today, I understand. The other daughter Winnie never married.

During Jimmy Carter's presidency Jefferson Davis was posthumously restored to full United States citizenship.