Beauvoir: Jefferson Davis's Last Home on the Gulf

On a fifty-one-acre estate facing the Gulf of Mexico in Biloxi, Mississippi, a white antebellum cottage stands at the end of a live oak allée, with breezes coming off the water and a cemetery nearby where Confederate veterans are buried. This is Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederate States of America.

Davis came to Beauvoir in eighteen seventy-seven, more than a decade after the Confederacy's collapse and his two-year imprisonment at Fort Monroe in Virginia. He arrived at first only as a guest of the widow who owned the property, Sarah Dorsey, who offered him a cottage on the grounds where he could write his memoirs in peace. He stayed, and when Dorsey died in eighteen seventy-nine she left him the estate. Here, in the shadow of the Gulf, Davis spent his final years completing The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, his exhaustive defense of secession and state sovereignty. He died in eighteen eighty-nine.

Varina Davis, his widow, sold the property in nineteen oh two to the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who opened it as a home for Confederate veterans and their families. The Confederate Soldiers Home operated on the grounds from nineteen oh three until nineteen fifty-seven, and the simple graves of many who died there remain in the cemetery adjacent to the main house.

The Jefferson Davis Presidential Library was constructed here in nineteen ninety-eight, an institution that by definition carries interpretive challenges: Davis was president of a government formed explicitly to preserve slavery, and the library exists in a state that bore enormous costs from that cause. Beauvoir itself took a severe blow from Hurricane Katrina in two thousand and five but has been substantially restored. The house opened for tours in nineteen forty-one and continues to receive visitors seeking to understand how the Lost Cause mythology was built, and why it endured.