Object description

Brierfield Plantation was a large forced-labor cotton farm in Davis Bend, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg and the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The use of the plantation, with more than 1,000 acres, was given to Davis by his much older brother, Joseph E. Davis ; it had previously been a part of Joseph Davis's much larger Hurricane plantation which it adjoined on a bend of the Mississippi River twenty miles from Vicksburg. With his brother's financial assistance and the forced labor of enslaved people, Jefferson Davis became a successful planter on the acreage following his brief first marriage to Sarah Knox Taylor ; after his second marriage to Varina Banks Howell in 1845, Davis erected a large comfortable frame house on the property that was home to himself, his wife, their children, as well as Davis's widowed sister and other relatives.