Dedicated:  June 3, 2003 
SPONSOR: Friends of the Old Court House Museum

JEFFERSON DAVIS AT BRIERFIELD:
"The painful selection of a president"

On a February day in 1861 as Jefferson and Varina Davis were pruning roses on the lawn at Brierfield, their home south of Vicksburg, a messenger arrived information Davis that he had been elected president of the Confederate States of America.

Mrs. Davis wrote, "He looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family.  After a few minutes' painful silence, he told me, as a man might speak of a sentence of death ..."  The mural captures the approaching storm clouds of war.

He left the next day for Montgomery, Alabama, for the inauguration, making his first speech as president-elect at the Vicksburg Wharf.

Davis was a graduate of West Point and a hero of the Mexican War.  He served in the United States Congress, Senate, and was Secretary of War.

After the War Between the States, he was a greatly revered Southern statesman and predicted for America "a future full of promise, a future of expanding national glory, before which all the world will stand amazed."

Back to Home    Back to Murals Page