Brierfield Plantation
Brierfield Plantation
When Union General Ulysses S. Grant moved against the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi, during the spring and summer of 1863, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was extremely concerned.

With its big guns high on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, Vicksburg gave the Confederates control of the most important waterway on the continent for the transport of troops and war materiel, as well as commercial products. Davis knew that the capitulation of the bluff city to the Union might well signal the ultimate failure of the South's bid for independence.

But as General Grant's forces converged on the city, squeezing the Confederate defenders inside, where they would remain besieged for the next seven weeks, Jefferson Davis had a more personal reason for anxiety. His plantation, Brierfield, was located only 20 miles south of Vicksburg at a jog in the river called, appropriately, Davis Bend. The 1000 acre property had been given to Davis by his older brother, Joseph.

The Vicksburg campaign puts Jefferson Davis's highly valuable property at risk …show more content…
He, along with the one slave he owned at the time, started clearing the land for planting cotton in 1835. According to William J. Cooper in his book Jefferson Davis, American, the plantation became so profitable by 1848 that Davis was able to invest $6000 (a huge sum in that era) in the house he built on the property. The 1860 federal census listed Brierfield Plantation as being worth $75,000. By then Davis had acquired 113 slaves, worth at least $80,000, to work the place. Brierfield had made Jefferson Davis a rich