Is It True That The Southerners Were The Ones Who Made Jefferson Davis A Villain?

The answer is yes in the beginning the south didn’t want to blame Lee for the defeat of the South so they turned to the Politicians who they saw as the cause of high taxes and inflation that had made it impossible for the Southern Military to fight the war well.
The best difference in the sides can be seen in the style of leadership the the Union under Lincoln and the South under Davis had. Lincoln was a political leader who very rarely backseat drove the war if he trusted his general and then he only used his power to push that general in a direction he wanted. With Grant Lincoln never sent a prod or an order as he trusted Grant to fight the war.
Davis backseat drive all his generals he went to Atlanta to referee a conflict between Bragg and his Army’s Other Generals he told Lee the objectives and needs of the Army of Northern Virgina and he waited until 1865 to do what the Union had done in 1861 that is appoint a supreme General over all his Armies. By then it w3as too late to save the Confederacy. In fact the South blamed Davis until Davis wrote his memoir in which he started the lost cause myth that was taught for years in the schools.
This opinion comes from studying the American Civil War for over 45 Years.

Sadly when you lose a war you have to blame someone and it fell on Jefferson Davis, the south were proud of General Lee and what he had tried to do so Jefferson Davis became the villain.
The north must have thought he was a villain as they imprisoned him and indicted for treason and kept him in prison for 2 years. As someone living in the UK, I personally think he thought he was doing right for the south and it did not work out for him and he paid the price.

This seems to be the pattern. Veterans of wars rarely blame their generals, for to blame their generals also lays a possibility of blame on themselves.
You find the same pattern of blaming the politicians after most defeats. You can see it in the Civil War, Viet Nam, and the Wiemar republic.

I would say yes, but someone who messed things up as bad as he did deserves to be a villain. Lee was a more attractive person. He messed up very badly and was not near the leader that so many pose him as.

I just finished reading “Love and War” by John Jakes, which covers the length of the Civil War from the viewpoints of two families, one northern and one southern. Jakes worked very hard to be as accurate as possible, and present as many aspects of the war as possible.
I say that to say this, that in the book Davis is portrayed as a dedicated, smart, and tenacious president. He is also portrayed as stubborn and a bit of a self-styled monarch. Northerners had a single great reason to cast Davis as a villain, but Southerners found many reasons to villainize him as well. He was inflexible in his military policies, to the point of taking the war out of the hands of his generals; he did little to help his own people whose suffering increased steadily throughout the war; he did little to fight corruption in government and society. It didn’t help his cause that as the war went on, it became more and more certain that the South would lose, and he ignored pleas for an end to the war that would not lead to the utter destruction of the southern states.
To this day, you don’t dare say a foul word about General Lee, but Davis is and long has been an object of derision in both the North and the South.