[1] He attended the public schools and engaged in mercantile business at Gallatin.
[2] On March 12, 1812, Desha was appointed as a captain in the Twenty-fourth Regiment of the United States Infantry in the War of 1812.
[4] He declined to be a candidate for renomination in 1830 for the Twenty-second Congress, moved to Mobile, Alabama and continued to engage in mercantile pursuits there.
[10] Through his daughter Phoebe, he was a grandfather of Mary Virginia "Jennie" Smith (who married the Cuban American banker Fernando Yznaga)[11] and Alva Erskine Smith, who married William Kissam Vanderbilt in 1875.
They divorced in 1895 and she remarried to Oliver Belmont in 1896 and remained married until his death in 1908.