On February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis delivered his inaugural address as president of the newly formed Confederate States of America. In early 1861 representatives of the states seceding from the Union elected Davis as president of their provisional government. His selection as president of the Confederate States of America required that he deliver an inaugural address.

Davis delivered his inaugural address to an audience of government officials and members of society of Montgomery, Alabama. Among the government officials present was Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who had been elected vice president of the provisional government. Davis, who spent a full day writing the speech, especially directed its contents to his immediate audience.

Unlike the impromptu speeches that Davis had delivered as he traveled from Vicksburg to western Georgia and then on to Montgomery, the inaugural address was intended for a broader audience. Like many of Davis’s prepared speeches, the inaugural address was designed to serve several audiences. He informed the seceding states of his support for their cause, yet at the same time offered to slaveholding states that had not yet seceded a justification for doing so. To northern states, those states firmly aligned with the government of the soon-to-be-inaugurated president, Abraham Lincoln, he offered the olive branch of peace and a chiding justification for the South’s conservative revolution. He even addressed international businessmen and governments when he stated that the Confederacy intended to continue to sell its staple crops overseas.

Davis’s speech occurred in a curious interregnum in American history. While some of the states that would form the Confederate States of America had left the Union, others had not. Abraham Lincoln, the newly elected president of the United States, would not take the oath of office until early March. War seemed uncertain. So, too, did the future of the nation. The nation assumed a wait-and-see attitude toward the slaveholding states, and the seceding states pondered their next move, too. Davis’s inaugural address pointed toward a tentative plan for the seceding states’ future.

Full text of Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address

Timeline of events surrounding the address

For immediate download: Expert analysis of the address by Bradley G. Bond