Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller took a tone-deaf approach to Black History Month by praising Jefferson Davis, a slaveholder and president of the Confederacy.
In a Facebook post on Saturday, Miller celebrated the anniversary of Davis being selected as the president of the Confederate States of America, which lost a war against the United States of America in an effort to protect the institution of slavery.
"On this day in 1861, Jefferson Davis, a former U.S. senator from Mississippi who served as U.S. secretary of war in the 1850s, receives word he has been selected president of the new Confederate States of America. Delegates at the Confederacy’s constitutional convention in Montgomery, Alabama, chose him for the job," Miller wrote. "Davis was at his plantation, Brierfield, pruning rose bushes with his wife Varina when a messenger arrived from nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi."
"The presidency was not a position Davis wanted, but he accepted it out of a sense of duty to his new country," he added.
According to Miller, the former Confederate president was "prescient in his concerns, and drew sharp criticism during the Civil War."
"Davis remained president of the Confederacy until its government was dissolved on May 5, 1865. Less than a week later, he was captured by the Union and jailed for two years. He died at age 81 in New Orleans in 1889," the post concluded.
Miller failed to note that the Confederacy was dissolved because it lost the war. And at no time did Miller mention that Jefferson was a slaveholder or the role of slavery in the Civil War.
