Reuben Davis: The Congressman Who Turned Against Both Presidents

In Aberdeen, Mississippi, on a quiet street in Monroe County, stands Riverview, the house that Reuben Davis built for himself and then tried to forget. It is a striking Greek Revival mansion, constructed between eighteen forty-seven and eighteen fifty-one, and it stands today as a National Historic Landmark. But the house is really a monument to one of the most paradoxical political careers in antebellum Mississippi.

Reuben Davis was born in Tennessee in eighteen thirteen and arrived in Mississippi as a young man intending to study medicine. Instead he fell in love with the law, became one of the most feared criminal defense attorneys in the South, and served as a colonel in the Mexican-American War. By eighteen fifty-seven he was in Washington as a U.S. Congressman representing Mississippi's second district. Contemporary observers described him as a gifted orator, passionate, theatrical, and nearly impossible to ignore on the floor of the House.

When Mississippi seceded in eighteen sixty-one, Davis followed his state out of the Union and into the Confederate Congress in Richmond. Here the paradox deepened. Davis was an outspoken critic of President Jefferson Davis, no relation, attacking Confederate policies so often and so vigorously that he missed more legislative votes than he attended. He was, in a sense, an obstructionist within the rebellion itself.

After the war he retreated to Mississippi and wrote a remarkable book, Recollections of Mississippi and Mississippians, which historians still consult as one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of antebellum Southern life. He had been a colonel, a prosecutor, a congressman on two sides of a broken nation, and finally a memoirist. He died in eighteen ninety, and Riverview still stands as the house he built when Mississippi was cotton and commerce and the future seemed unambiguous.