This Petition is to stop the University of Texas from removing the Statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis on the campus of UT.  This statue is an important part of our Southern History.  Universities should be teaching history, not destroying history.  You cannot change the past.  But you can learn from it.

Jefferson Davis was a patriot, statesman, visionary and American and rendered service for Texas as much as any other soldier of the time.  
Jefferson Davis, representative and senator from Mississippi in the United States Congress and later president of the Confederate States of America, was born in Todd County, Kentucky, on June 3, 1808. He graduated at the United States Military Academy in 1828 and served seven years in the army before resigning in 1835. After spending nearly ten years as a planter in Mississippi, he became active in Democratic Party politics and won a seat in the United States House of Representatives, which he took he December 1845. He supported the annexation of Texas to the United States. 

Davis came to Texas first in 1846, when the volunteer regiment from Mississippi that he commanded was assigned to Zachary Taylor's army on the Rio Grande. He served with distinction in the Mexican War and was elected to the United States Senate in 1847. He resigned from the senate in 1851, but when his friend Franklin Pierce became president in 1853, Davis received an appointment as Secretary of War. In this position, he recommended in 1854 the Texas or thirty-second-parallel route for construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean and in 1856 sent camels to Camp Verde in a project to use the animals for army supply and overland transportation.

After Reconstruction a movement was launched in Dallas to purchase a homestead for Davis and invite him to move to Texas. On June 14, 1875, he was offered the presidency of the newly established Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas. When he declined the appointment on July 8, 1875, he wrote of his hopes of revisiting Texas. Davis is memorialized in Texas on three monuments placed by the Texas Centennial Commission and by the name of Jeff Davis County (formed in 1887).