See that granite marker on the front lawn? The one that looks like a tombstone? Read it if you can get close enough.
It says this is the house where Jefferson Davis died — the first and only President of the Confederate States of America. December sixth, eighteen eighty-nine.
That November, Davis left his home near Biloxi on a steamboat. He was eighty-one, got caught in cold rain on the river, and fell gravely ill. Stubbornly refused to send for a doctor. When the boat reached New Orleans, his physician took one look at him and said he was too sick to travel.
So they brought him here — to the guest room of a family friend who happened to be a Louisiana Supreme Court justice. And that's where a former president of nine million people died — as a houseguest, in someone else's bed, because he couldn't make it home.
His last words were — and I really need you to hear this — Pray excuse me. I cannot take it. He was refusing medicine with the manners of someone declining a second helping
of dessert. This man led a rebellion and spent two years in federal prison wearing leg irons. His last act on earth was being polite about not wanting to take his pills.
When he died, he wasn't a citizen of any country. The Confederacy was gone, and the United States had stripped his citizenship. He was specifically excluded from an amnesty bill that pardoned every other Confederate. He didn't g
