NPG historian David C. Ward discusses Jefferson Davis.

While traveling in the United States in 1849, English-born artist George L. Saunders painted this miniature of the future president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. At the time, Davis was a senator representing Mississippi. A few years afterward, a contemporary recorded this impression of Davis: "His slender, tall and erect figure, his spare face, keen eyes and fine forehead . . . presented the well-known strong American type. There was in his bearing a dignity which seemed entirely natural and unaffected, that kind of dignity which does not invite familiar approach but will not render one uneasy by lofty assumptions."