2-21-07 Jefferson Davis Memorial State Historic Site, GA

Poor Gene. He stayed up late last night planning our route. We were rumbling down the highway on our way to Atlanta when I looked up from my book and saw a brown sign (state and national parks have brown signs). I read it aloud and said, “Aren’t we going there?”, and Gene’s plans go out the window. Fun stop though…it’s the spot where Jefferson Davis was captured. Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederacy (just in case history wasn’t your forte). The war ends at Appomattox, VA when Lee surrenders his army in April of 1865. Davis and a few of his remaining staff members crossed the Savannah River into Georgia on May 3, 1865. They were headed west where Davis planned to unite rebel forces and continue fighting for the “lost cause” as they called it. They camped at the site we visited, not knowing that pursuit was close behind. At dawn, Davis was surrounded by two independent groups of Union cavalry who were hunting for him, but also were not aware of the other group. Unfortunately, they started firing at each other (thinking, I suppose, that they had engaged Davis’ men). This “friendly fire” killed two Union cavalrymen. Davis was taken prisoner and held in a Virginia prison, without a trial, for two years. While he was in prison, his citizenship was stripped away for 111 years, until 1978 when President Jimmy Carter re-instated it.

Here’s an odd fact: Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were both born in the same year, in Kentucky, and only 100 miles apart!