Poor Jefferson Davis. In the popular imagination, he is known simply as the earnest man who led the Confederacy to defeat and destruction. Yet as William J. Cooper Jr. demonstrates in a superb new biography, Davis spent most of his life as a loyal American soldier and statesman who might well have become president of the United States - had his beloved Mississippi not seceded.

Jefferson Davis was born in a Kentucky log cabin and raised on a Mississippi farm. In 1824, he enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy, where he was a mediocre cadet who chafed at rules and restrictions; he compiled more demerits than plaudits. After graduating from West Point, he spent the next seven years in various Army posts in the Old Northwest.

In 1835, Davis married the daughter of his commander, Col. Zachary Taylor, against her father's wishes, and left the Army to become a cotton planter in Mississippi. His bride died of malaria three months later. For 10 lonely years thereafter, a heartbroken Davis developed Brierfield, a plantation near Vicksburg given to him by his older brother.

During the 1840s, Davis became a prominent states-rights Democrat and an ardent proponent of the unrestricted expansion of slavery into the territories. He was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1845. That same year, he married Varina Howell, a charming woman from Natchez half his age. After their first meeting, Howell wrote her mother: "Would you believe it, he is refined and cultivated and yet ... a Democrat."

She recognized that Davis was a self-righteous man of "uncertain temper" and mulish obstinacy who assumed that "everybody agrees with him." Yet she admired his self-confident refinement, wide and deep reading, and "winning manner of asserting himself."

Davis was a lean, erect man with an angular face - high cheekbones; hollow jaws; dark, deep-set, piercing eyes; thin lips; square chin; and prominent nose. Chronic health problems - dyspepsia and neuralgia - made him appear haggard and careworn.

Davis resigned his House seat in 1846 to take command of a Mississippi regiment in the Mexican War. After returning home a wounded war hero, he served with distinction in the Senate and as Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. In 1857, he re-entered the Senate, where he focused on the right to extend slavery into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. He confessed that he was "dogmatic and dictatorial" about such issues, yet when the secession crisis unfolded, he was no "fire-eater;" he hated the thought of leaving the Union.

Nevertheless, on Jan. 21, 1861, having learned that Mississippi had formally seceded, Davis resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate. It was, he said, "the saddest day of my life." Less than three weeks later, he was named president of the Confederacy.

President Davis was a hard worker, ardent patriot, and capable military strategist, but he had fatal flaws of capacity and judgment, which Cooper meticulously documents. Davis was dogmatic in his defense of slavery, intolerant of criticism, ignorant of public finance, and incapable of managing his feuding generals, most of whom were incompetent. Perhaps worst of all, Davis could not inspire public enthusiasm or accept political compromise.

As the war ground on, Davis struggled in vain to deal with the starvation, dissension and desertions plaguing the quixotic Confederate war effort. In the end, as federal troops closed in on him, he hoped to escape to Texas and mount a guerrilla resistance movement. But he and Varina were captured in south Georgia in May 1865.

Davis was charged with treason and imprisoned in Fortress Monroe, Va. He suffered many humiliations while a prisoner but remained defiant. He refused to request a pardon, demanding instead a trial to vindicate his actions and express his fervent belief that the South had a constitutional right to secede. After his release in May 1867, he rejoined his family in Canada, traveled in Europe, struggled as an insurance executive, lived off the charity of supporters and wrote his memoirs until he died in 1889.

Cooper, a distinguished professor at Louisiana State University, has succeeded in bringing Davis back to life in all of his complexity and subtleties. Based on a wealth of primary sources and stippled with color, texture, and detail, his definitive new biography gives lavish attention to Davis' career before and after the Civil War. It also provides compelling insights into the spirited Varina Davis.

In his last public address before he died, Jefferson Davis advised Southerners that the "past is dead." He told the ardent defenders of the Old South to "bury its dead, its hopes and aspirations; before you lies the future - a future full of golden promise." It was good
advice then - and now.