Tag: Davis (Varina A. B. H.)

Wikipedia says: Varina Anne Banks Howell Davis (May 7, 1826 – October 16, 1906) was the only First Lady of the Confederate States of America, and the longtime second wife of President Jefferson Davis. She moved to a house in Richmond, Virginia, in mid-1861, and lived there for the remainder of the American Civil War. Born and raised in the South and educated in Philadelphia, she had family on both sides of the conflict and unconventional views for a woman in her public role. She did not support the Confederacy’s position on slavery, and was ambivalent about the war.

…Jefferson Davis resigned from the U.S. Senate in 1861 when Mississippi seceded. Varina Davis returned with their children to Brierfield, expecting him to be commissioned as a general in the Confederate army. He was elected as President of the Confederate States of America by the new Confederate Congress. She did not accompany him when he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama (then capital of the new country) to be inaugurated. A few weeks later, she followed and assumed official duties as the First Lady of the Confederacy.

Davis greeted the war with dread, supporting the Union but not slavery. She was known to have said that:

the South did not have the material resources to win the war and white Southerners did not have the qualities necessary to win it; that her husband was unsuited for political life; that maybe women were not the inferior sex; and that perhaps it was a mistake to deny women the suffrage before the war.

In the summer of 1861, Davis and her husband moved to Richmond, Virginia, the new capital of the Confederacy. They lived in a house which would come to be known as the White House of the Confederacy for the remainder of war (1861–1865). “She tried intermittently to do what was expected of her, but she never convinced people that her heart was in it, and her tenure as First Lady was for the most part a disaster,” as the people picked up on her ambivalence. White residents of Richmond freely criticized Varina Davis; some described her appearance as resembling “a mulatto or an Indian ‘squaw’.”

In December 1861 she gave birth to their fifth child, William. (Due to her husband’s influence, her father William Howell received several low-level appointments in the Confederate bureaucracy which helped support him.) The social turbulence of the war years reached the Presidential mansion; in 1864, several of the Davises’ domestic slaves escaped. James Dennison and his wife, Betsey, who had served as Varina’s maid, used saved back pay of 80 gold dollars to finance their escape. Henry, a butler, left one night after allegedly building a fire in the mansion’s basement to divert attention.

In spring 1864, 5-year-old Joseph Davis died in a fall from the porch at the house in Richmond. A few weeks later, Varina gave birth to their last child, a girl named Varina Anne Davis, who was called “Winnie”. The girl became known to the public as “the Daughter of the Confederacy;” stories about her and likenesses of her were distributed throughout the Confederacy during the last year of the war to raise morale. She retained the nickname for the rest of her life.

Davis became a writer after the American Civil War, completing her husband’s memoir. She was recruited by Kate (Davis) Pulitzer, a purportedly distant cousin of Varina’s husband and wife of publisher Joseph Pulitzer, to write articles and eventually a regular column for the New York World. Widowed in 1889, Davis moved to New York City with her youngest daughter Winnie in 1891 to work at writing. She enjoyed urban life. In her old age, she attempted to reconcile prominent figures of the North and South.