Varina Anne Davis (June 27, 1864 – September 18, 1898) was an American author who is best known as the youngest daughter of President
Jefferson Davis of the
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America (CSA), commonly referred to as the Confederate States or the Confederacy was an unrecognized breakaway republic in the Southern United States that existed from February 8, 1861, to May 9, 1865. The Confeder ...
and
Varina (Howell) Davis. Born in the last year of the war, by the late 1880s she became known as the "Daughter of the Confederacy". Images of her were widely circulated when she was young, helping morale. Later in the 1880s, she appeared with her father on behalf of Confederate veterans' groups. After his death, she and her mother moved in 1891 to New York City, where they both worked as writers. She published a biography and two novels, in addition to numerous articles. Davis died from an infectious disease at age 34.
Childhood
Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis was born one year before the end of the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states ...
in the
White House of the Confederacy
The White House of the Confederacy is a historic house located in the Court End neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Built in 1818, it was the main executive residence of the sole President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, ...
in Richmond, Virginia. She was the second daughter and the sixth child of
Varina Banks (Howell) Davis and Jefferson F. Davis. The youngest, she was the only child of the family who was allowed to visit her father in
Fort Monroe
Fort Monroe, managed by partnership between the Fort Monroe Authority for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the National Park Service as the Fort Monroe National Monument, and the City of Hampton, is a former military installation in Hampton, Virgi ...
with her mother during his two years of imprisonment that followed the Civil War. They eventually were given an apartment in the officers' quarters to use.
Winnie was home-educated by her parents in her early years. She later accompanied her parents on their numerous journeys. At the age of thirteen, she was sent to the ''Misses Friedländers School'' in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied for five years in the renowned boarding school, in that time acquiring a slight German accent. Later, she studied in Paris for a short while before returning to the United States.
[Heath Hardage Lee, ''Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause'', University of Nebraska Press, Potomac Books: 2014]
Daughter of the Confederacy
During the 1880s, Winnie lived with her parents at
Beauvoir, their Gulf Coast estate near Biloxi, Mississippi. It was bequeathed to Jefferson Davis in 1878 by
Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a wealthy widow and supporter of the Confederacy. In 1886, Winnie and her aging father visited West Point, Georgia, on a tour of the South promoting his books and the
Lost Cause
The Lost Cause of the Confederacy (or simply Lost Cause) is an American pseudohistorical negationist mythology that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. Firs ...
of the Confederacy.
On April 24, 1886, Governor
John Brown Gordon
John Brown Gordon () was an attorney, a slaveholding plantation owner, general in the Confederate States Army, and politician in the postwar years. By the end of the Civil War, he had become "one of Robert E. Lee's most trusted generals."
Af ...
called Davis "The Daughter of the Confederacy". This title stuck, and Winnie became an icon for Confederate veteran groups and an inspiration for the
United Daughters of the Confederacy
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is an American neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers engaging in the commemoration of these ancestors, the funding of monuments to them, ...
, which formed in 1894. Together with her father, she made public appearances and speeches, and acted more and more as his representative. Confederate groups, including women's associations, worked to fund and organize cemeteries, memorialize the war and its soldiers, and honor the "Lost Cause" of the South.
In 1888, Winnie published her first book, a monograph of Irish revolutionary
Robert Emmet
Robert Emmet (4 March 177820 September 1803) was an Irish Republican, orator and rebel leader. Following the suppression of the United Irish uprising in 1798, he sought to organise a renewed attempt to overthrow the British Crown and Prote ...
titled ''An Irish Knight of the 19th Century.''
Davis was involved in a few well-known romantic relationships, but she never married. In 1885–1886, she may have been courted by the noted landscape and portrait artist
Verner Moore White, but the relationship supposedly ended when White moved to Europe to further his studies in art. This relationship has never been completely verified.
In 1887, Davis developed a more serious relationship with Alfred Wilkinson, a successful New York attorney, whom she met while staying with family friends in Syracuse, New York during the late fall of 1886. Her mother met Wilkinson and initially approved the match, but her father disapproved, based on Wilkinson being from the North and his grandfather having been an
abolitionist
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people.
The British ...
. Davis reconsidered his disapproval after meeting Wilkinson, and the engagement of the couple was announced in 1889. Northern papers publicized it as healing the wounds of the Civil War. However, an outcry against it in the Southern United States burdened the romance, for some dreamed that the young Davis would marry a prominent Southerner, preferably a descendant of one of the generals.
Jefferson Davis died shortly before the announced wedding date, and mourning custom required postponing the nuptials for a year. During this time, Wilkinson's house burned down. Winnie's mother Varina became opposed to the marriage. Her Southern friends considered the relationship an insult to the Davis legacy. More importantly, her husband had left the widowed Varina in financial difficulties, and she worried that Wilkinson would be unable to support Winnie. This concern was incorrect, but the damage was done. The engagement was ended in October 1890.
By 1891, Varina Davis moved with her daughter to New York City, deeming the climate of Mississippi unhealthy. Richmond, Virginia had offered them a home, but both women realized they needed to work to support themselves financially. The widowed Varina had no pension, nor signing authority with respect to what remained of Davis's estate. Mother and daughter both became correspondents for the ''
New York World
The ''New York World'' was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers. It was a leading national voice of the Democratic Party. From 1883 to 1911 under pub ...
'', a newspaper owned by
Joseph Pulitzer
Joseph Pulitzer ( ; born Pulitzer József, ; April 10, 1847 – October 29, 1911) was a Hungarian-American politician and newspaper publisher of the '' St. Louis Post-Dispatch'' and the ''New York World''. He became a leading national figure in ...
, a good friend of the Davis family who was married to Kate Pulitzer, a distant Davis cousin and friend of Varina's. The Davis women lived in a series of residential hotels, eventually settling at the Gerard Hotel in what is now the theater district.
During this time, Davis also wrote for national magazines, such as ''
The Ladies Home Journal
''Ladies' Home Journal'' was an American magazine last published by the Meredith Corporation. It was first published on February 16, 1883, and eventually became one of the leading women's magazines of the 20th century in the United States. In ...
''. She published two novels: ''The Veiled Doctor: A Novel'' (reprinted 2015) and a ''A Romance of Summer Seas'' (1898, reprinted 2009). Both books were moderately successful.
Death
In July 1898, Winnie Davis became deathly ill. She had been soaked in a rainstorm at a Confederate Veterans' Reunion in Atlanta, Georgia, then traveled by train to meet her mother in Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island. They vacationed there annually in the summer at the fashionable Rockingham Hotel. Doctors diagnosed Davis with "malarial gastritis".
She had already suffered for years from
gastritis
Gastritis is inflammation of the lining of the stomach. It may occur as a short episode or may be of a long duration. There may be no symptoms but, when symptoms are present, the most common is upper abdominal pain (see dyspepsia). Other possi ...
.
[Jane Turner Censer, Review: ''Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause'' by Heath Hardage Lee](_blank)
''The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography'', Vol. 122, No. 3 (2014), pp. 282-284, via JSTOR; accessed June 8, 2018 (It has been associated with bacterial infection.) Davis suffered for weeks from fever, chills, and loss of appetite. The Rockingham Hotel closed for the season in early September, but the management allowed Davis and her mother to stay on. Davis died there on September 18, 1898. She was 34 years old.
Her mother arranged for her daughter to be buried in Richmond's
Hollywood Cemetery, with military honors because of her service to Confederate veterans' groups. She was next to the graves of her father and brothers, who had been reinterred here.
Davis was survived by her mother Varina and by her sister Margaret (Davis) Addison Hayes, then living in Colorado Springs, Colorado with her husband Joel Addison Hayes, and her sister's children. Among their several children was a daughter, Varina Howell Davis Hayes. The youngest Varina later married
Gerald Bertram Webb. Among their children was daughter named Varina Margaret Webb.
Photo Record: Four Generations of Davis Women, # 0985.07.00264
American Civil War Museum, 2017; accessed June 8, 2018
Works
*
* "Foreign Education for American Girls" (1889), monograph
*
* ''A Romance of Summer Seas'' (1898), novel
Biography
* Mary Craig Sinclair
Mary Craig Sinclair (1882–1961) was a writer and the wife of Upton Sinclair.
Early life and education
She was born Mary Craig Kimbrough in Greenwood, Mississippi on February 12, 1882, the oldest child of Mary Hunter (Southworth) and Allan McCas ...
, ''The Romance History of Winnie Davis'' (unpublished)
* Heath Hardage Lee, ''Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause'', University of Nebraska Press, Potomac Press: 2014
References
Sources
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Davis, Varina Anne
1864 births
1898 deaths
American columnists
American people of English descent
American people of Welsh descent
Burials at Hollywood Cemetery (Richmond, Virginia)
Deaths from gastritis
Jefferson Davis family
Writers from Richmond, Virginia
American women columnists
19th-century American journalists
19th-century American women writers
Journalists from Mississippi
American women novelists
19th-century American novelists
Journalists from Virginia
Novelists from Virginia
Lost Cause of the Confederacy
Daughters of national leaders
People born in the Confederate States