A Short History of the Confederate States of America A Short History of the Confederate States of America A Short History of the Confederate States of America is a memoir written by Jefferson Davis, completed shortly before his death in 1889. Davis wrote most of this book while staying at Beauvoir along the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Mississippi. The book is much less a Davis memoir than an articulation of the secession argument. In Davis' earlier work, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government", he had written what is probably the most thorough exegesis of the compact theory of the United States Constitution in existence, devoting the
Confederate States of America French-like revolution, but a transfer of rule. The Montgomery Convention had assumed all the laws of the United States until superseded by the Confederate Congress. The Permanent Constitution provided for a President of the Confederate States of America, elected to serve a six-year term but without the possibility of re-election. Unlike the United States Constitution, the Confederate Constitution gave the president the ability to subject a bill to a line item veto, a power also held by some state governors. The Confederate Congress could overturn either the general or the line item vetoes with the same two-thirds votes required in