I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

This includes his reluctance to resolve a dispute between Leonidas Polk a personal friend and Braxton Bragg who was defeated in important battles and distrusted by his subordinates. By the late 1880s Davis began to encourage reconciliation telling Southerners to be loyal to the Union. On about April 12 he received Robert E.

He was aided in the last decade of his life by the generosity of Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey a wealthy widow. S. Historians have criticized Davis for being a much less effective war leader than his Union counterpart Abraham Lincoln which they attribute to Davis being overbearing controlling and overly meddlesome as well as being out of touch with public opinion and lacking support from a political party (since the Confederacy had no political parties).