the state penitentiary and wac through the halls of the governor's mansion. the local content vehicles explore the history of cities across america. next weekend from jefferson city. on c-span 2 and 3. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits historic places. during the civil war, confederate president jefferson davis and his family lived in this mansion in richmond, virginia. in this second of a two-part tour of the home, dean knight of the museum of the confederacy tells a story about the rooms on the second floor. but, first, we asked mr. knight about how the national historic landmark has been preserved and restored since the civil war. >> let's start back in april 4th, 1865, that's when lincoln was here. jefferson davis left town april

2, 1865, about 11:00 p.m., the union army took over the city with the house on the morning of april 3rd, and abraham lincoln was here april 4th. he came in through the front doors. five days after that general lee surrendered his army and on april 14th lincoln shot, died the next day, jefferson davis captured by the union army may 10th, 1865. now, general godfrey whitzel turned this into headquarters april 3rd and remained that until january 1870. the union army took very good care of the house, for the most part. this was their home and headquarters for almost five years. now, in the first week or two of occupation, things were a little bit different. soldiers and officers coming and going, taking souvenirs from the house, sleeping on the floors and in the chairs and on the piano, in one case. so it was pretty chaotic first

couple of weeks. after things settled down here a bit, this was lived in by a succession of u.s. army generals who took good care of the house. in january 1870, virginia was re-admitted to the united states so this house eventually went back to the city of richmond and the federal army left. the city got it back. the city in 1870 sold everything in this house and turned it into a school. this was a school for 20 years. that's when it suffered damage, not during the war, not during the u.s. army occupation, but when this was a school. the city wanted to tear it down after about 20 years of being a school and replace it with a new building, but it was saved from demolition by a group of women here in town, a group that had originally formed as the hollywood memorial association preserving confederate graves in hollywood cemetery here in richmond.

these ladies reformed into the confederate memorial literary society and took over the house. they fixed it up and opened this building as a museum in 1896. now, it didn't look like this then. in 1896, when this opened, it was the confederate museum. you walked around, each room was dedicated to a southern state and you had artifacts relating to the state in each room. it was that way for 80 years. and then in 1976, the main museum of the confederacy opened and all of the exhibits and artifacts were moved over there and this house was shut down for an extensive restoration. so this opened as it is now as a restored historic home in 1988. still the same group of people, the confederate memorial literary society, same people, the same organization that has owned it since 1890s.

the second floor of the house in this era was typically private living space. this house is no exception. jefferson davis, his wife and children, lived on the second floor. so decoratively the second floor maybe isn't quite as exciting as the first. they weren't trying to impress as much up here. so you'll see furnishings that are older, plainer, little less expensive and a little bit behind the fashions of the day. so the people that came up here would be, of course, the davis family, davis' private secretary, burton harrison, slaves and servants, and people on official business to see jefferson davis in his home office, which we'll see in a minute. the -- this is the office for burton harris. again, davis' private secretary, and those on official business to see harrison would be shown up here. speak with harrison and he would decide when, or if, you got back

to see davis in the home office. burton harrison was a young man from louisiana. he taught math at the university of mississippi. and he began his appointment as jefferson davis' private secretary in february of 1862. davis had had a secretary for the first year of the war but that relationship didn't seem to work as well. harrison got along very well with the president and with his whole family and harrison became very much like a member of the family. it's someone like lincoln's relationship with his two young secretaries. harrison, in fact, remained in touch with the davises for the rest of his life and died in, i believe, 1904. in fact, in one measure of how close harrison was with it family and how trusted he was, is that when davis sent his wife and children out of town about 36 hours before he, himself, evacuated richmond, he sent them in the care of burton harrison.

so he trusted his entire family with him. we don't know very much about the third floor. burton harrison lived up there. there was bedroom and guest space up there, and we know mrs. davis gave birth once up there, but that's about all that we know. so today it's just museum office space we don't take groups up there. another false surface is this. oak grain simulation wall paper. it may look like the sort of thing you buy at target, and in fact you can, but this was very fashionable in the 1850s and '60s. and this actually is an exact reproduction of what was here. and so visitors who were lucky enough to see jefferson davis in his home office would be able to come back here. now, again, this is jefferson davis' home office. this was a bedroom when he moved into this house, but it seems one of the first thing his did when he got here was convert it into a home office. now as we mentioned earlier, this house was meant to be just

the residence for jefferson davis and his family, but he very soon turned some of it into working space. his executive office was in a different building. it was just south of the virginia state capitol in a building that is still there today. in fact, today that building is the federal court of appeals for the 4th circuit. during the war that building housed jefferson davis' executive office, the confederate state department and the confederate treasury department. a very important building for the confederate government and davis spent a great deal of time there, but also a lot of time here working. davis worked a great deal. davis was what we today might call a micromanager or -- and a workaholic and also an insomniac. he worked long, hard hours almost every single day of this war. now, jefferson davis, as i mentioned earlier, went to the u.s. military academy at west point.

that wasn't really his idea. his brother arranged that for him. davis, at the time, seemed to be leaning more towards a career in the law. but his brother was extremely influential in his life, in fact, after their father had died when davis was a teenager, his brother, who was about 20 years older than he was, almost took over as his father figure. so off davis went to west point. he didn't exactly distinguish himself at west point. his grades were not great, but he did graduate, and he entered the army. he served about seven years in the united states army as a young officer. like many young ambitious men, he eventually left army life in the 1820s and '30s was static, somewhat boring for the young, ambitious man, and davis left partly because he was young, ambitious man and also partly he wanted to get married. he met sarah knox taylor,

the daughter of zachary taylor, who of course later became president of the united states, but at this time taylor, zachary taylor, was a colonel in the army and davis' commanding officer. zachary taylor didn't want his daughters marrying military men. he knew how hard that life could be. but davis resigned from the army and married knoxy, as she was called but died less than three months later of malaria, and he was devastated by her death. more or less retired to his plantation in mississippi and spent the next eight years working very hard on that plantation and also developing a strong interest in politics. and he started getting involved in mississippi politics and then entering the national stage. 1845 jefferson davis elected to the u.s. house of representatives. the next year, the mexican war began, and davis was a little conflicted, not about the war himself, he was fully in support of the war politically and fully

in support of president polk's war aims but he wasn't sure if he should join the war himself or if he should stay in congress. he eventually decided to leave congress and he was elected colonel of a volunteer regiment that was raised in his home state of mississippi. so he led that regiment into combat in mexico. he saw action at the battles of monterey and buena vista and gained fame due to his actions at buena vista and came back home a war hero, nationally known war hero. very soon after his return became a united states senator. he was appointed quickly to fill a vacancy left by the death of one of mississippi's two u.s. senators. so that opening coinciding with davis' triumphant return home from war propelled davis into the national spotlight. he left the senate a few years later to make a run for the

governor of mississippi. he entered that race late and lost it narrowly, in fact by 999 votes. so he was out of politics briefly but not that long. when franklin pierce was elected president, pierce chose davis to be his secretary of war and that's a position that davis held throughout the entire franklin pierce administration, 1853 to 1857 and davis, i think it's fair to say, redefined that job. the men who had held it before him had been almost literally secretaries. jefferson davis took over and was a very powerful secretary of war. the day that pierce left office, davis became a u.s. senator once again. he had been elected shortly before that. so he was in the senate during those last contentious years of the 1850s and into the early 1860s. so in january of 1861, when mississippi seceded from the

union, davis was not only a sitting u.s. senator and one of the most prominent of the senators but certainly one of the best-known men in the united states. davis was very well known throughout the country, north and south, and west. he was very highly respected, he had friends and allies throughout the country, not just in the south. and he was in the mainstream of american political life. he didn't just come out of nowhere. and he wasn't on the fringes of politics. he was very much in the thick of it throughout the 1850s. very well-known man. when mississippi seceded from the union, davis resigned from the u.s. senate, he went home to mississippi, and two weeks later, while he was pruning his rose bushes on his plantation, he got a telegram from the provisional confederate government at montgomery, alabama, the telegram told him that he had been chosen to serve a one-year provisional term as president of the brand-new confederate states of america. davis accepted.

he moved to montgomery, he moved here to richmond when the capitol came here and then he was elected for a six-year term for the same position in november 1861. this is more or less davis' secondary office. we think -- we don't have a lot of specific information about how often he used this office as opposed to the other one but used this in the evening. jefferson davis had a lot health problems. there were types during the war he wouldn't leave the house. he would govern the country from here, either from his room or sometimes his bedroom. severe illness did not stop him from working. davis had a lot of problems. he had facial neuralgia which caused severe contorting pains down one side of his face, dyspepsia caused nervous and

he had a shrapnel wound in his right foot from the war, recurring bouts of pneumonia, problems arthritis, he was blind in his left eye, he was just not in very good shape by our standards today. sometimes i wonder if those health problems helped him become president rather than becoming a general, that it seems as though sometimes he would not have been well suited for a military role. but anyway, this office would have seen a lot of work by jefferson davis who certainly spent a lot of time here. actually this table is an original and this apparently is the one that he used for the first year, year and a half of war and then he apparently traded to someone for a more proper desk. we don't have that desk. this desk, however, does have a direct connection to jefferson

davis. this desk and this chair were used by davis in the other office that i mentioned to you, the executive office, on bank street, just a couple blocks away from here. while we're looking at the desk, this is a pretty interesting piece. now, i should say, first of all, this is a reproduction but there are very few of these things left today. this is called a courtenay coal bomb. and one of these was found on jefferson davis' desk by the union army when they took over the city and this house in april of 1865. it's a fake piece of coal. it's hollow. you can see the hole there. so you fill it up with gun powder and then you'd seal up the hole, that's a threaded hole there, you'd seal it up and put resin on it, cover it in coal dust and then you put it into your enemy's coal supply, and then hopefully the enemy shovels

it on to a ship and into a ship's boiler, so the ship explodes. that's the idea. it's called a courtenay coal bomb because of the inventor. irishman named thomas courtenay who moved no the united states before the war and when war came sided with the confederacy and produced these for the confederate military. this is very much an extension cord. the way that we have extension cords today with a couple of differences, it's not for electricity. that's the main difference. it is for gas. these are gasoliers, gas-powered chandeliers, and sometimes they would use these hoses, vulcanized rubber hoses encased in canvas, used these to distribute gasoliers down to lower level desk lamps like this. many people characterized him in not entirely flattering terms. he -- he's called rigid and aloof. he's called today the sphinx of the confederacy. a lot of people aren't able to

get inside his head. i think with his peers. with other white, political men he could be quite adversarial, especially with those he didn't agree with. his wife is probably the best observer of him and she has a couple good quotes about him. both relating to what i'm talking about. one of them is, if anyone disagrees with mr. davis, he resents it, and ascribes the difference to the perversity of his opponent. this is his wife talking. his wife also said, my husband does not understand the art of politics and would not practice them if understood. now, that relates to what i was saying earlier. it doesn't mean that he was not good at his political jobs. i think it's pretty clear davis was a top-notch u.s. secretary of war and u.s. senator. whether or not you agree with his policies, he was clearly very good at his job. what she was getting at is he didn't care for the glad

handing, the politicking, the i'll scratch your back if you scratch mine, he wasn't that kind of man. he wasn't that kind of politician and he just didn't do it. so i hope that gives some feeling as to davis' character, at least out in the arena with other men. it's also clear that with people that, frankly, were considered his social inferiors, i.e., women, children, black people, he was very generous, very kind, tolerant, indulgent even, but with other men he could be sharp. and our next room is the bedroom. that was shared by jefferson davis and his wife, varina. that was a little unusual for this time period just because a wealthy married couple of this era would tend to have separate

beds and separate bedrooms. as we've seen jefferson davis converted the other bedroom into his office so he and his wife, varina, shared this room and this bed. this is the original bed. the mattress is modern, we got that at sears. mrs. davis was an interesting woman in her own right. her full name was varina banks howell from natchez, mississippi, 18 years younger than her husband. she was 18, he was 36. very intelligent woman, strong-willed, independent-minded, about as well-educated as was possible for a mid-19th century american woman to be. sharp-tongued at times but i think on the whole she had more friends than enemies. this is her room, actually, off to the side. she used it as a sitting room, dressing room, reading room, writing room. we have an original writing desk of hers in there.

actually she wrote quite a bit, especially later in her life. actually after jefferson davis died, in 1889, at the age of 81, mrs. davis moved to new york city. she signed a contract with joseph pulitzer, the newspaper publisher, to provide him with newspaper columns. for the last years of her life she lived in a hotel in manhattan writing newspaper columns for the new york world and die in new york in 1906 at the age of 80. this painting is a pretty interesting one. somewhat for what it is. what it is is the arc angel michael expelling lucifer from heaven and we think it dates to 1517. it was said to have been given to jefferson davis by the pope, pope pius ix. we admit we're not sure about that. we haven't been able to find the smoking gun document to prove

that. what we do know definitely is that jefferson davis, pope pius ix corresponded during the war. the pope started it. the pope wrote a letter to the archbishops of new york and new orleans in 1862, trying to get them to use their influence to mediate an end to the war. the letter eventually became public and jefferson davis and many others read it, and davis wrote a letter to the pope in september 1863, trying to enlist the pope's sympathy and support for the confederacy. the pope wrote back to jefferson davis in december of 1863, and the museum owns that letter, actually. we have it on display right now. although some on the confederate side interpreted it as more or less recognition of the confederacy by the pope it really wasn't that. it was more like a nice diplomatic note, a friendly one, yes, but that's all it was. neither the pope nor any other

foreign leader actually recognized the confederacy. but i think jefferson davis had another angle in writing to the pope. i think he would have certainly taken recognition if it was offered but he also new -- remember, this was december 1863, after well more than two years of fighting -- he knew that a lot of men serving in the union armies were not americans. they were europeans. i have read one conservative estimate of 400,000 europeans serving in the union army throughout the four years of the war. what davis and many others knew is that most of the europeans were catholic, they were coming from the poorer sections of europe that were heavily catholic, ireland, parts of britain, part of what is now germany. so i think davis and probably secretary of state benjamin were hoping that the pope writing a friendly note to the confederacy, expressing some sympathy, might help sway some

of the catholics from joining the union army. it doesn't seemed to have worked but it was a shot. all right. well the next stop is the nursery. and the davises needed a large room for a nursery because when they moved in they had three young children. there was maggie who was 6, jefferson davis jr., who was 4, and joe who was 2. mrs. davis was pregnant when they moved in. she gave birth december 1861 upstairs. their first child, samuel, had died in 1854 right before his second birthday. so he, obviously, never saw this house. these were young, wild kids, by all accounts. the wildest was certainly jefferson davis jr., and we have a couple of his things in this room. this is one of them. it's a fully functioning cannon. so it was a real cannon. he also had several confederate army uniforms and that's one of them over there. so what he would do would be to

put one of those uniforms on, he'd take the cannon out in the back, he'd set up targets that he would call yankees, and he'd shoot them with the cannon. now, jefferson davis jr. and his brother, joseph, were in a street gang called the shockoe hill cats. we are standing on shockoe hill, this house is on top of shockoe hill, and this was a wealthy urban residential neighborhood. these were the rich kids in the gang. down the hills in a less wealthy urban residential neighborhood called butcher town, hometown of the butcher cats, arch enemies of the hill cats up here. these two gangs would fight each other all the time and one day jefferson davis himself walked down the hill trying to work out a truce between the two gangs. he was tired of his sons coming home bruised and bloodied from the gang wars. so he gathered the butcher cats around, sat them down, gave them a speech, he called them the future rulers of their country

and tried to get them to stop fighting and to put aside their differences, and they listened to him politely. one of them stood up and he said, president, we like you. we didn't want to hurt any of your boys but we ain't never going to be friends with them hill cats. so much for that. davis turned around, walked back up the hill, and as his wife wrote later, like many a self-appointed peacemaker, he accomplished nothing except an exhausting walk. wild kids. unfortunately, though, the boys didn't live very long. jefferson davis jr. died at 21 from yellow fever. billy died at 10 from diphtheria. joseph died in this room on april 30th, 1864. joseph was playing around on the eastern portico and fell off of it, that was then a 15-foot drop, twice what it would be

today, and hit his head and he was found still alive, and carried up into this room, and he died here about an hour later at the age of 5. the two girls did a little bit better. varina ann lived to be 34, she survives her father, though not her mother. she died from complications from malaria. maggie died at 54. she was the only one to survive both parents but barely. she died in 1909 just three years after her mother's death. maggie, however, was also the only one to get married and the only one to have children. she married a man named joel addison hayes and they moved out to colorado springs in the 1880s and they had several children, one of them changed his name from hayes to hayes-davis in honor of jefferson davis. today there are direct descendants of jefferson davis and some of them still bear that name, hayes-davis. jefferson davis spent two years in prisoned at ft. monroe in hampton, virginia. he was released in may of 1867

on a writ of habeas corpus. he received bail and a trial date. the trial was postponed several times and then eventually dropped. davis, although they had been indicted formally for treason, was ultimately never tried. he spent time in canada, specifically in montreal and lennoxville, quebec, spent some time in europe, especially in england and france, wound up in memphis, tennessee for a few years as president of an insurance company. he removed himself from that company and moved down to the gulf coast of mississippi to a plantation called bovoire. he wrote a very long book called "the rise and fall of the confederate government" and then more or less settled into retirement. he spend the last 12 years of his life at boviore died in december 1889 at age of 81. davis was back in richmond, actually, his habeas corpus hearing was in richmond, not only in his former capital but in the building that housed his former executive office.

before the war, it had been a court's building, a post office and customs house. after the war it was, once again, a federal courthouse and that's where the hearing was. he was back here at that time and at least one other time after the war, too, although he never returned to this house. we're a museum. we are a research library so we do have that function and that's very important for many of our guests, our researchers, our academics who are doing research in our library right in the museum over there. but for the average visitor, i think that is the most important thing to me as a guide. that's what i want to hear, when someone takes my tour and they tell me, i want to go read more about this, then i feel good. i've done my job. >> this was the second of a two-part look at the white house of the confederacy. american artifacts airs every sunday at 8:00 a.m., 7:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m. eastern time.

next weekend head to the state capitol named in honor of thomas jefferson, with book tv, in jefferson city, missouri, saturday, noon eastern, lit rather life with book tv on c-span2. jean carnahan on family life inside the governor's mansion, from her book "if walls could talk," a provisions list from ancient mesopotamia, the stories behind eight miniature babylonian clay tablets. and sunday at 5:00 p.m. eastern. >> one time 1967, this was called the bloodiest 47 acres in america. >> a former warden takes you through the historic missouri state penitentiary. walk back through history in the halls of the state capitol and governor's mansion. once a month c-span's local content vehicles explore the literary life of cities across america.