Occupying, as he did, the most exalted station in the government of the seceding states, he became from the day of his accession to the presidency, the embodiment of two diametrically opposite ideas. The loyal people of the North, disregarding the fact that the Confederacy was a representative government of limited powers, that a regularly elected congress made the laws, often against the judgment of the chief executive, that many of the policies most bitterly condemned by them were inaugurated against his advice, transformed the agent into the principal and visited upon him all of the odium attaching to the government that he represented. Nay, more than this. The bitter passions engendered in the popular mind by the conflict clothed him with responsibility, not only for every obnoxious act of his government, but, forgetful of the history of the fifty years preceding the Civil War, saddled upon him the chief sins of the very genesis of the doctrine of secession itself. Thus confounded with the principles of his government and the policies by which it sought to establish them, the acts for which he may be held justly responsible have been magnified and distorted while the valuable services previously rendered to his country, were forgotten or minimized, and Jefferson Davis as he was disappeared, absorbed, amalgamated, into the selfish arch traitor intent upon the destruction of the Union to gratify his unrighteous ambition. The masses of the Southern people, on the other hand, holding in proud remembrance the gallant soldier of the Mexican War and deeply appreciative of his able advocacy of principles which they firmly believed to be sacredly just, regarded their chief magistrate as the sublimation of all the virtues inherent in the cause for which they fought. When the Confederacy collapsed, the indignities heaped upon its chief, his long imprisonment and the fact that he alone was selected for perpetual disfranchisement added the martyr's crown to the halo of the hero, thus creating in the South an almost universal mental attitude of affection and sympathy, which was as fatal to the ascertainment of the exact and unbiased truth of history as were the rancor and bitterness that prevailed at the North. That this prejudice and predilection still exist cannot be doubted. But time has plucked the sting of malice from the one and has dulled the romantic glamor of the other sufficiently to enable us to examine the events that gave birth to both with that calm and dispassionate criticism which subrogates every other consideration to the discovery of truth. I do not underestimate the difficulties that beset the self-imposed task, but to the best of my humble ability and free from every motive except that of portraying the impartial truth, I shall endeavor to delineate the life of the real Jefferson Davis. [Illustration: Jefferson Davis' Birthplace, at Fairview, Ky.]