The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis ― The Political Life of Henry S. Foote, Southern Unionist

Antebellum politician Henry Stuart Foote (1804 -1880) was among the most vocal, well-travelled, and controversial statesmen of the nineteenth century. Although largely forgotten today, as historian Ben Wynne reveals in his comprehensive biography, Foote was a key player in a remarkable array of the era’s most important events.

Born in Virginia, Foote moved to Alabama and then Mississippi during the 1830s and made a name for himself as a gifted but volatile lawyer and political personality. He was an eyewitness to most of the great historical events of his lifetime and he opined on everything. He became one of the South's most outspoken Unionists, infuriating many of his southern colleagues by promoting cooperation with the North during debates that would eventually produce the Compromise of 1850. Foote fought at least five duels during his lifetime, had physical altercations with at least half a dozen fellow politicians, including a famous fistfight with Jefferson Davis, and once pulled a gun on colleague Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He left the Senate in 1851 to run for governor of Mississippi on a pro-Union platform and defeated Jefferson Davis, his worst political enemy, by a small margin.

Returning to the South several years later, Foote established himself in Nashville and was elected to the Confederate Congress after Tennessee seceded. There he was one of the most vocal opponents of the Davis administration and a constant thorn in the side of the Confederate president. In 1865, as the Confederacy was crumbling, Foote launched a bizarre scheme that took him from the South to Washington, DC, where he tried to broker an unauthorized peace settlement with the Lincoln government. Given the choice by Federal authorities to return to the Confederacy or leave the country, Foote escaped to Europe and then for a short time lived in Canada. Shunned by many Democrats who considered him a traitor to the southern cause, he joined the Republican Party and later received an appointment as director of the United States mint in New Orleans, a position he held at the time of his death in 1880. The Man Who Punched Jefferson Davis paints a vivid portrait of one of the era’s most fascinating, notorious political mavericks.