Jefferson Davis

Born in Kentucky in 1808, the youngest of ten, Davis grew up in Mississippi and graduated from West Point. He served as an Army lieutenant, married Sarah Knox Taylor in 1835 (she died of malaria three months later), and became a cotton planter who eventually enslaved 113 people on his brother's land. He remarried in 1845, won a House seat the same year, fought in the Mexican-American War as a colonel, then moved through the Senate and a term as Franklin Pierce's Secretary of War before returning to the Senate in 1857. When Mississippi seceded in 1861, he resigned and was named president of the Confederate States. After the Confederacy fell in 1865, he was captured and imprisoned at Fort Monroe for two years - accused of Lincoln's assassination and treason, but never tried. He died in 1889, by then recast by some as a hero of the Lost Cause, though his memorials have increasingly come down in the century since.