Built in 1818, it served as the main executive residence of the sole President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, from August 1861 until April 1865.

The Jefferson Davis Executive Mansion was owned by the Confederate Memorial Literary Society from 1894 until 2014, when the Museum of the Confederacy merged with the American Civil War Center.

The second White House of the Confederacy is a gray stuccoed neoclassical mansion built in 1818 by John Brockenbrough, who was president of the Bank of Virginia.

Davis suffered recurring bouts of malaria, facial neuralgia, cataracts (in his left eye), unhealed wounds from the Mexican War, including bone spurs in his heel, and insomnia.

As a result, Davis maintained an at-home office on the second floor of the house, where his personal secretary Colonel Burton Harrison also resided.

(This was not an unusual practice at the time, and the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., was similarly added during the Theodore Roosevelt administration.)

The house was abandoned during the evacuation of Richmond on April 2, 1865 and within twelve hours had been seized intact by soldiers from Major General Godfrey Weitzel's XVIII Corps.

They held a number of meetings with local officials in the house, including Confederate Brigadier General Joseph Reid Anderson, who owned the Tredegar Iron Works.