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Jefferson Finis Davis (June 3, 1808 - December 6, 1889) was an American statesman and leader of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Davis was born in Kentucky and grew up on plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and fought in the Mexican-American War as the colonel of a volunteer regiment. He served as the United States Secretary of War underDemocratic President Franklin Pierce, and as a Democratic U.S. senator from Mississippi. His plantation in Mississippi depended on slave labor, like most Southern plantations. As a senator, he argued against secession, but did agree that each state was sovereign and had an unquestionable right to secede from the Union. Davis lost his first wife to malaria after three months of marriage, and the disease almost killed him as well. He had six children with his second wife, but only two of them survived him. He suffered from ill health for much of his life.

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