Jefferson Davis BicentennialThis year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis, who was born in Fairview, Ky., on June 3, 1808, and at the age of 2 moved with his parents to Rosemont Plantation near Woodville, Miss. In 1835, Davis moved to Warren County where he spent the most productive years of his life. This is the ninth of a series of 11 articles about Davis as a local citizen.At 81, Davis made his last visit to Brierfield, where he became ill before going back to the Gulf Coast. It is a coincidence of history that Capt. T. P. Leathers, who took him aboard his steamboat in 1861 as he traveled to Montgomery, Ala., to assume the presidency of the Confederacy, would again come along in 1889 to give him his last ride from his plantation home in Warren County.

When the steamboat Laura Lee arrived at Brierfield in November 1889, the elderly, distinguished-looking gentleman who had boarded it in New Orleans was too ill to disembark, and the boat continued upriver in the darkness to Vicksburg. The next day the old man got on board another boat for Davis Bend.

The visit was Jefferson Davis’ last to the plantation. Though he had celebrated Jefferson Davis as he appeared shortly before his death in 1889his 81st birthday the previous June, the former president of the Confederate States was feeling well when he left his home at Biloxi for the trip to New Orleans and then upriver.

The weather had been pleasant, but at New Orleans it turned quite cold and he was exposed to rain and sleet.

By the time he arrived at Brierfield, Davis was so ill that he was almost delirious, but he refused to allow his manager to send for a physician.

On Nov. 11, the manager, John Trainor, secretly sent a telegram to Mrs. Davis at Beauvoir, the home on the Gulf of Mexico where they were living. She usually accompanied her husband on such trips, but he had been insistent this time that she stay at home.

On Nov. 12, Jefferson Davis wrote a letter to his wife. He was so ill that the words were barely intelligible. He would go back to New Orleans the next day, he wrote, adding that he had suffered much but that Mrs. Davis should not be alarmed. “Nothing is as it should be, and I am not able even to look at the place,” he began a sentence, “but by the help of the Lord ….” He was unable to complete his thoughts.

Davis was given loving and attentive care by the Trainor family, who lived in the old home which Davis had built 40 years earlier. By Nov. 13, Davis, through sheer determination, prepared to depart Brierfield aboard a boat owned by his old friend, Capt. Thomas Paul Leathers.

As Davis was ready to leave the house, Alice Desmaris, the 10-year-old niece of John Trainor, hesitantly presented her autograph album. Despite his illness, the courtesy and gentleness for which Jefferson Davis was noted was evident as he thoughtfully penned the following words:

Brierfield, 13th Nov. 1889. May all your paths be peaceful and pleasant, charged with the best fruits, the doing good to others.

– Jefferson Davis

Aided by his friends, Davis made his way through the hall, across the front gallery, and past the gate where the Glory of France roses grew, the ones he had been pruning 28 years earlier when a messenger had arrived from Vicksburg informing him that he had been elected president of the Confederate States of America.

Almost a century later, Vicksburg attorney and historian Frank E. Everett Jr. described the final scene in his book “Brierfield, Plantation Home of Jefferson Davis:”

“The bent and lonely figure was taken on board Captain Leathers’ glistening boat. The weathered old riverman perhaps recalled the day, years before, when this same Jefferson Davis had boarded his vessel destined for Montgomery, Alabama, and leadership of the Confederacy. The great paddle wheel made the amber water foam as a deep blast from the steam whistle lifted a proud white plume, appropriate symbol of a gallant knight. The sound could be heard for miles around – a respectful salute, a cry of love, a moan of sorrow, a plaintive, lonely lament addressed to Brierfield and reminiscent of the message Jefferson Davis left with the Senate in 1861: ‘….it only remains for me to bid you a final adieu.'”

NEXT: Mourners tell the story

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.