On This Day In History - 1st and Last President of the Confederate States of America

On this day in 1861, Jefferson Davis, a veteran of the Black Hawk and Mexican-American Wars, began his term as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. As it turned out, Davis was both the first and last president of the ill-fated Confederacy, as both his term and the Confederacy ended with the Union's 1865 victory of the Civil War.