A perfect example of both letting the past speak for itself and that the US isn't so old. Civil War isn't even so ancient that one has to read: we have audio and video recordings and interviews of people who lived through it.

Jefferson Davis was a leader in the movement for the better treatment of slaves.

The largest laboratory in black economic independence was Davis Bend, a peninsula formed by the tortuous course of the Mississippi River just south of Vicksburg, which contained the huge plantations of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph. Davis Bend had already been the site of one Utopian experiment before the Civil War. Influenced by Joseph’s encounter with British socialist Robert Owen, the Davis brothers had attempted to establish a model slave community, with blacks far better fed and housed than elsewhere in the state and permitted an extraordinary degree of self-government, including a slave jury system that enforced plantation discipline. Other planters mocked “Joe Davis’s free negroes,” but the system enhanced the family’s reputation among blacks. After the war, one group of Mississippi freedmen pressed for Jefferson Davis’s release from prison because “altho he tried hard to keep us all slaves … some of us well know of many kindness he shown his slaves on his plantation.”

...When Joseph Davis fled his plantation in 1862, the slaves not only refused to accompany him, but broke into his mansion and appropriated clothing and furniture.

Source: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877.

He was a far better man than the current president who condemns him, though of course a man of his time.