Beauvoir and the Lost Cause: Jefferson Davis Writes the History

Jefferson Davis arrived at Beauvoir in eighteen seventy-seven, about ten years after his release from federal prison and about a dozen years after the Confederacy he had led was defeated in the field. The house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Biloxi had been offered to him by a widow named Sarah Dorsey, who admired him and provided him with space to work. He spent his last twelve years there, dying in eighteen eighty-nine. In that time he produced a two-volume account of the war and the Confederate cause that ran to over fifteen hundred pages and never conceded a single foundational argument.

The work was called "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government." Its central argument was that the Civil War had not been about slavery but about constitutional principle, the right of states to leave a compact they had voluntarily joined. This argument was demonstrably false to anyone who read the actual secession documents, which explicitly cited the preservation of slavery as the cause. Davis knew this. He wrote the book anyway, and it became one of the most influential pieces of historical revision in American history.

The Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War, which would shape Southern textbooks, public monuments, and political rhetoric for over a century, was not invented at Beauvoir, but Davis's book gave it authority and permanence. He was the former president of the Confederacy, and his version of events carried weight that no general's memoir could match.

The house was damaged significantly by Katrina in two thousand five and subsequently restored. The site's interpretation has shifted in recent decades as historians have documented the gap between Davis's claims and the primary sources. Beauvoir is still there. So is the gap.