The Confederate leader’s prospects were grim in April 1865 after the South surrendered and President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. The new president, Johnson, ordered a $100,000 reward — equal to about $1.8 million now — for the capture of Davis, who was fleeing into the South.
After a manhunt by the Union Army, he was captured in Georgia in May 1865. It was widely assumed that he would be convicted of treason and sentenced to death.
Jefferson Davis sat in jail for nearly two years before he was allowed to post bail and await his eventual trial.
President Andrew Johnson, who’d taken office upon the death of Lincoln, began his administration by at first demanding stern justice for the leaders of the Confederacy. As time went on, however, President Johnson began to feel more sympathy for the Confederate officials, who were after all part of the same Democratic Party as Johnson himself.
Eventually, Johnson went so far as to bring
Southern white supremacists back into the government while resisting new rights for black citizens. After Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the House impeached Johnson, and his trial in the Senate was scheduled for March 1868 — the same month as Davis’s trial.
The trial of President Johnson was protracted, and absorbed so much political energy and public attention, that the trial of Jefferson Davis was delayed again and again. Johnson was eventually acquitted and allowed to remain as president.
Even the Republicans, who’d unswervingly opposed slavery, began to point out that it was unjust to deny a speedy trial. In December 1868, President Johnson issued a pardon to his fellow Democrat Jefferson Davis. Johnson left office to spend a few years away from politics, but was eventually elected to the U.S. Senate.
Jefferson Davis worked in several different businesses after being pardoned by Johnson, eventually becoming the president of an insurance company. He outlived Johnson and “died in 1889 at age 81, unrepentant.” He never expressed any regret for defending slavery, for the rebellion, or for the war.
As the leader of the rebellion, Davis was prevented from engaging in the political process or running for elected office, but his connection to various leaders in the Democratic Party continued until his death. Nearly a century later, it would be a Democratic president who paid the final honor to Jefferson Davis:
In 1978, President Jimmy Carter went one up on Johnson, signing a bill restoring Davis’s full U.S. citizenship rights to bring a close to “the long process of reconciliation” after the Civil War.
It was Andrew Johnson who inadvertently ended up saving Davis’s life: had Johnson’s impeachment trial not exhausted the nation, Davis would have gotten a speedy trial, and most probably executed quickly thereafter.
