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Notes -
I mean, probably the same thing he did in real life. It's very hard to fight a war against a larger enemy without an offsetting advantage. The only offsetting advantage that the South had was that their troop quality was superior.
Since troop quality tends to equalize over the course of a war (very noticeable change, for instance, in the capabilities of Southern cavalry relative to their Northern peers over the course of the war) fighting an aggressive campaign to rack up as many victories as possible and break the enemy will to fight early on is pretty smart.
I am sure that in hindsight there is a lot of things Davis could have done differently, but my study of the war didn't focus very specifically on him and thus I am likely ignorant of many of them.
I think Lee can perhaps be criticized for being willing to win costly victories early in the war, but ultimately the South was never going to win a war of attrition, and Lincoln basically needed to cycle through commanders until he found one (Grant) that understood this and was willing to throw his own men into the meatgrinder, so fighting to optimize for casualties probably doesn't help you win the war if it means you are losing more often - this was basically McClellan's strategy (McClellan as far as I can tell was actually very good at training and loved his men - if anything, this was a problem, he wasn't willing to let them die) and he was pretty evidently ill-suited for actually winning the war.
But it seems to me that there wasn't much Davis could do differently in most cases. What is he supposed to do about Johnston or Jackson, tell them "don't die"? Or tell Lee "good job, try to get fewer people killed"? He could have put Lee in charge sooner, or perhaps put him in charge in the West, but Lee wasn't ultimately capable of beating Grant. Maybe he could have tried to have Grant assassinated after Shiloh, or something similarly off-the-wall.
The one thing I know I would push for if I woke up tomorrow as Jefferson Davis, newly elected President of the Confederacy, is push to free slaves to fight sooner. But a lot of that is because I think such an effort would be better for the postwar South (regardless of who won) rather than thinking that it would win the war. There's also a real problem here in terms of timing - something like this became more politically viable late in the war, but arguably too late to matter. If Davis had been able to free the slaves on Day One, it might have made a difference in terms of Northern political will, and garnered additional support from England. But obviously that was politically impossible. The best he could likely have done would have been to launch pilot programs earlier in the war. Maybe that would have worked well, or maybe not.
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