previous next
Jeff Davis's early history.--For the benefit of those who admire and hurrah for Jeff Davis, we publish the following bit of family history taken from the Nashville Union:

A trifling little rebel paper in Kentucky professes to doubt the truth of our statement respecting the origin of Jeff Davis. What we stated is well known to hundreds of our best citizens of Christian and Todd Counties of Kentucky. Jeff Davis's father lived for a number of years in a log cabin situated in what is now the town of Fairview, twelve miles from Hopkinsville, Kentucky. The house is now weather-boarded, and used as a tavern. Old Davis was a man of bad character, a horse-trader, a swindler, and of very low habits. A fine horse was missing on one occasion in the neighborhood, under such suspicious circumstances that he found it safest to leave the country immediately and fly to Mississippi. Jeff Davis is his illegitimate son, born some miles distant from his father's house, and taken home by him when several years of age. These are notorious facts. Some of Davis's relatives still live in that part of Kentucky. We would not [31] have alluded to this sinister bar on Jeffs escutcheon were not his friends continually prating about Southern gentility and the low breeding of the Union people. Our own opinion is, that Jeff's birth does him more credit than any portion of his subsequent life.

--The New South.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Kentucky (Kentucky, United States) (3)
Mississippi (Mississippi, United States) (1)
Hopkinsville, Ky. (Kentucky, United States) (1)
Fairview, Ill. (Illinois, United States) (1)
hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Jeffs (1)
Jeff (1)
Davis (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: