He introduced the short-lived US Camel Corps

Jefferson Davis was not the one who proposed that the US Army utilize camels rather than horses and mules to traverse the dry regions. However, he is the one, who after being appointed Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce, was successful in obtaining congressional authorization to import camels from the Middle East, leading to the founding of the US Camel Corps in 1856.

Davis, a native of Mississippi, was interested in the integration and growth of the Southwest, maybe in an effort to extend the Southern economy and the slave system which relied on the Pacific. But he and others battled to find solutions to what was known as the "tyranny of distance" in the days before railroads.

Four years later, as Secretary of War, he was successful in getting a $30,000 budgetary allocation for the purchase and testing of a small camel herd. For the goal of purchasing many camels "for army transportation and other military reasons," Jefferson Davis refitted a ship and sailed it to North Africa and the Levant in 1855. The project was only given up after the Civil War started. Later, as railroads advanced, reviving the Camel Corps seemed wholly unnecessary.