Davis wrote the book as a straightforward history of the Confederate States of America and as an apologia for the causes that he believed led to and justified the American Civil War.

He wrote most of the book at Beauvoir, the Biloxi, Mississippi, plantation where he was living as a guest of the novelist and wealthy widow Sarah Ellis Dorsey.

He corresponded voluminously with surviving Confederate statesmen and generals, including Judah Benjamin and Jubal Early, for fact-checking and details on key issues.

Davis defended the detailed military accounts in the book by explaining that, unlike most nations, the entire history of the Confederate States of America was inseparable from the story of a war.

[citation needed] By the time of the book's publication, the once-wealthy Davis was elderly, in ill health, and nearly penniless due to the destruction of his estates, the abolition of slavery, and the collapse of the Southern economy during and after the Civil War.

Davis refused to go on publicity tours that might have aided sales, citing his poor health, his unwillingness to see Southerners pay money they could not afford, and his lack of interest in the book's reception by non-Southerners.

[citation needed] The book was far from a complete failure, selling more than 22,000 copies by 1890,[4] but it was never on par with such 1880s bestsellers as the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant or Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.