Brierfield Plantation

Brierfield Plantation
1880's engraving of the main house.
Location	Davis Bend, Mississippi
Coordinates	32°09′12″N 91°07′15″W / 32.15320°N 91.12094°W / 32.15320; -91.12094Coordinates: 32°09′12″N 91°07′15″W / 32.15320°N 91.12094°W / 32.15320; -91.12094
Built	1847
Built for	Jefferson Davis
Demolished	1931 (burned)
Architectural style(s)	Greek Revival
Governing body	Private
Location of Brierfield Plantation in Mississippi

Brierfield Plantation was a cotton plantation located in Davis Bend, Mississippi, south of Vicksburg and the home of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. The more than 1,000 acre plantation was given to Davis by his much older brother, Joseph E. Davis (1784-1870), and 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 financial assistance and slaves given by his brother, Jefferson Davis became a successful planter on the acreage following his brief first marriage to Sarah Knox Taylor (who died of malaria a few months after their wedding); 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.

Brierfield had very profitable years as well as years of disastrous flooding, but generally provided a very comfortable living to subsidize his relatively modest earnings from public office. Davis left the plantation for large periods of time including during his term in the House of Representatives, his service in the Mexican–American War, his terms in the Senate, and his four years as Secretary of War in the Franklin Pierce Administration. He considered Brierfield his primary residence and it was the home to which he returned when not in office and to which he returned upon his resignation from the United States Senate following the Secession of Mississippi in 1861. His return to Brierfield was very brief as he was soon notified, while tending the flower gardens of the house with his wife he would recall, that he had been chosen as president of the newly formed Confederate States of America and was summoned to Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederacy's first capitol.

Davis did not visit Brierfield during his tenure as Confederate president. The plantation, along with Hurricane, began to be pilfered by Union troops and deserters soon after the fall of New Orleans in 1862, with many of the more than 200 slaves who lived on the plantation in 1860 fleeing from the advancing armies. Much of the family's personal property was crated and shipped from the house for safekeeping, though most was left behind and looted when Union forces officially seized and occupied the property during the undefended Vicksburg campaign.