Frank H. (Frank Heath) Alfriend

Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1841, Frank Heath Alfriend studied at the College of William & Mary; surviving college records note the wartime delay of his bachelor’s degree and the granting of a master’s degree in 1866. Archival descriptions also identify him as a journalist and teacher.

Alfriend is chiefly remembered for The Life of Jefferson Davis (1868), a full-length biography published just a few years after the Civil War. Contemporary and archival records connect him directly with Jefferson Davis and former Confederate officials while he was gathering material, and one later edition describes him as a former editor of The Southern Literary Messenger.

He died in Washington, D.C., in 1887, at just 46 years old. Although not widely known today, his surviving papers and his Davis biography have kept his name in view for readers interested in nineteenth-century Southern writing and Civil War memory.