Beauvoir: The Last Home of Jefferson Davis
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
Jefferson Davis came to Beauvoir in eighteen seventy-seven, six years after the end of Reconstruction and twelve years after the collapse of the Confederacy he had led. He was sixty-nine years old. He had spent two years in federal prison at Fort Monroe in Virginia after the war, never tried for treason, never convicted, never granted a full restoration of his citizenship. He had spent the intervening years traveling, failing in business, and writing.
Beauvoir, the name means beautiful view in French, was an antebellum cottage on the Gulf Coast between Biloxi and Gulfport. It sat on about forty acres of live oaks and Spanish moss a few feet above the beach. The owner, a widow named Sarah Ann Dorsey, invited Davis to come and write his memoirs there. She gave him a cottage on the grounds for his personal use. When she died in eighteen seventy-nine, she left Beauvoir to Davis in her will.
Davis completed his two-volume memoir, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, at Beauvoir in eighteen eighty-one. The book ran to over fourteen hundred pages and defended the Confederate cause in the language of states' rights and constitutional theory that remained his position until he died.
He lived at Beauvoir until his death in December of eighteen eighty-nine in New Orleans, where he had gone for business. His body was returned to Beauvoir temporarily and then, after years of debate among Southern states competing for the honor, buried in Richmond, Virginia, in eighteen ninety-three.
The Mississippi Sons of Confederate Veterans purchased Beauvoir after his death and converted it into a Confederate veterans' home, housing hundreds of aging former soldiers and their widows over the following decades. The grounds also became a Confederate cemetery. Today the property operates as a house museum and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The hurricane of two thousand five destroyed the main house's interior and most outbuildings; restoration was completed in two thousand eight.
