Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Varina was a gracious hostess, a highly educated woman, and a superb conversationalist. These skills had served her well during her time with her husband in Washington DC in the 1850s, when they had been among the city’s most popular political couples. One of Varina’s early biographers flatteringly summed up Varina’s character by sketching her as “a combination of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and Andromache. Queen Elizabeth for her wit, shrewdness, tart epigram, haughtiness, and statesmanship; Victoria for her dignity, propriety, conservatism, and practice of homely virtues; Andromache for the Trojan lady’s unselfish absorption in fatherland, husband, and children.”10 Richmonders often used the word queen to describe Varina, but it was not always employed in such a flattering manner.

  Constance “Connie” Cary Harrison, wife of Jefferson’s private secretary, Burton Harrison, knew the first lady well. She described Varina as “a woman of warm heart and impetuous tongue, witty and caustic, with a sensitive nature underlying all; a devoted wife and mother, and most gracious mistress of a salon.” Varina’s sister, Margaret Howell, also lived with the Davises’ in the Executive Mansion and was well known for her mischievous nature and sparkling wit.11

  Richmond, however, was not Washington DC. The Confederate capital was a far more conservative and provincial place. Here the “First Lady of the Confederacy” was looked down upon for her intellect. Varina was accustomed to the warmer manners of the Deep South of Mississippi, and she found many Richmonders to be cold and snobbish. In her study Civil War Wives Carol Berkin writes: “The elite women of the Old Dominion condemned her as coarse and unpolished. To these women of impeccable genealogy, Varina represented the crass, nouveau cotton society.”12

  Women from old Richmond families often snubbed her, while the men called her “Empress Eugenie,” an allusion to Eugenie de Montijo, the imperious Spanish-born wife of Emperor Napoleon III. The Richmond newspapers echoed the sentiments of the town’s socialites and took potshots at Varina’s appearance, criticizing her as “portly and middle-aged.”13

  The nursery was home base for the four Davis children and Catherine, their Irish nanny. Mary Chesnut, the South Carolina diarist and great friend of the family, described the Davis children as “wonderfully clever and precocious children—but unbroken wills. At one time there was a sudden uprising of the nursery contingent. They fought, screamed, and laughed. It was bedlam broke loose.”14 Jefferson and Varina’s room was separate but nearby and decorated in grand Victorian style, with a massive carved bed in the center.15

  Maggie was the Davises’ only girl at this time. She had sparkling black eyes, glossy brown hair, and good, even features. She also had the Howell family’s olive skin, a trait inherited from their Welsh forebears.16 Rambunctious Jeff Jr., the oldest Davis boy, led the nursery gang. “Jeffy” was 4 introduction indulged by the staff and aides at the White House, who also called him “the General.”17 He was always described as a handsome child, “well-made, with dark hair, dark eyes, and good features.” Like his sister Maggie, “his skin is a rich brown, like that of all his family.”18

  Billy and Joe typically followed Jeffy’s lead. Billy had been born deaf and was the most sensitive of all the Davis children. He was paler than his sister and other brothers, with gray eyes, light hair, and an aquiline nose.19 The youngest Davis child, Joe Jr., was gentle and sweet but also extremely curious and full of energy. His favorite toy was a miniature cannon that actually fired. He and his brothers spent many happy hours dressing up in miniature Confederate and Zouave uniforms, blowing up imaginary Union soldiers.20 He was described by many as an extremely intelligent, affectionate little boy and also the best behaved of all the Davis children.21 He was also perhaps the most beloved by his parents. Jefferson and Varina had high hopes for his future.

  The children were joined in their revels by a black friend, James Limber, who was the orphan of a free black woman. Varina had rescued the child after she spied a black man beating him on a carriage ride around Richmond one day. He joined the household as a free black and became a playmate and companion to the Davis children.22

  Despite the battles around Richmond, life for the Davises went on much as it had before the war. The seeming normalcy of day-to-day routines in the home lulled the Davis clan into a false sense of security. Little did Jefferson and Varina know that the figure of Tragedy guarding the front hall portended extreme misfortune for their family. The horrors of war were becoming well known outside the confines of the mansion, but terror would soon spring unexpectedly from within.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Tragic Fall

  Despite the comforting routines of day-to-day life within the Executive Mansion, it was fast becoming impossible for Varina to ignore the increasing sounds of not-so-distant gunfire just outside of Richmond. The noise made the Confederate first lady extremely nervous, and rightly so, as a breach of the city by the Union army was a constant threat. Author Mary P. Couling describes that time: “The early glitter of extravagant parties had given way to the fear and panic at the frequent tolling of the tocsin—the warning bell—in Capitol Square and the frightening sound of the Federal cannon less than ten miles away.”1

  Despite the looming shadow of Union invasion, the southern spring of 1864 arrived fragrant and fresh. At the end of April azaleas and dogwoods, with their pink and white petals, were bursting into bloom, though the weather over the past week had been rainy and much cooler than usual.2

  On the afternoon of April 30 a heavily pregnant Varina left the Executive Mansion on 12th and Clay Streets to take her husband lunch at his Custom House office. The Confederate first lady was a born nurturer and known to stay up all night with her husband nursing him through various illnesses. Jefferson, often too busy to eat, had grown weak and thin, so his wife had made it part of her daily ritual to take him his lunch and often dinner as well.3

  Scarcely had Varina rushed out to make this important delivery when a messenger from the Executive Mansion approached her with awful news. Her youngest child, Joe Jr., had fallen from the mansion’s high balcony to the pavement below.

  Apparently, the children’s nanny, Catherine, was not watching her charges as the five-year-old Joe was able to make his way out the window to play on an outdoor portico. The open balcony was just too enticing for the two young boys to ignore. Older brother Jeff was reportedly walking from pillar to pillar. Little Joe tried to imitate him but failed, falling twenty feet to the ground below.

  The fall was over in a second, but poor Joe lived on, breathing shallowly. His left thigh was broken, his small skull was crushed, and blood oozed from the corner of his mouth. Jeff reached him first, and he was beside himself with fear and frustration. He may have felt that the accident was his fault.

  Two men happened to pass by the Executive Mansion at this moment, one of whom was a Confederate officer. In the officer’s eyewitness account he noticed Maggie crying and running to the neighbors next door for help.4 The two men rushed over to offer their aid, joined by Jeff Jr. and Billy. They found little Joe “in the arms of a Negro man, insensible and almost dead.”5 The men rubbed camphor and brandy on the unconscious child. Their attempts revived him momentarily, and he began to breathe better.

  Medical aid was sent for immediately, and the badly injured boy was brought into the Executive Mansion. Four local physicians were all in attendance in short order.6 Meanwhile, a servant was dispatched to the Custom House with the news. He communicated his story to Jefferson’s messenger, Mr. William Davies, a young man of only eighteen.

  Davies had the terrible task of informing Jefferson and Varina of the accident. Davies tried to soften the blow temporarily by concealing its potentially fatal nature from Varina. In a whispered aside, however, Davies alerted Jefferson to the serious nature of the fall. The meal forgotten, the frantic parents jumped into their waiting carriage and rushed home, tearing through the back streets, desperate to reach their young son.

  As Varina and Jefferson reached little Joe’s side, they
realized they had little time left with him. The Confederate officer who had come to the small child’s aid remembered that Joe opened his eyes once more, and the crowd around him hoped he was reviving. Alas, as it was reported in the Richmond Sentinel a month later, “it was the last bright gleaming of the wick in the socket before the light was extinguished forever.”7

  Forty-five minutes later the small child died, and then both parents unraveled, Varina completely and immediately, shrieking with grief and utter disbelief. The Confederate officer witnessed the terrible shock his president was experiencing firsthand, and he would never forget it. As Jefferson watched his favorite little son die before him, the officer told the newspaper, “such a look of petrified unbearable anguish I never saw. His pale intellectual face, already oppressed with a thousand national troubles, that now so imminently threaten our existence, seemed suddenly ready to burst with unspeakable grief, and thus transfixed into a stony rigidity.”8

  Jefferson broke down later. Varina recalled that her husband was numb. “I saw his mind was momentarily paralyzed by the blow . . . [he] called out, in a heart-broken tone, ‘I must have this day with my little child.’”9 This was the one time known on record when Jefferson stayed home from his work for the Confederacy. For just one day during the war he left behind his role as president of the Confederate States and allowed himself to be simply a bereaved father who had lost his favorite son.

  Close family friend Mary Chesnut was in Richmond at the time of the accident and went directly to the White House to help the Davises’ on that awful day. Her eyewitness account painted a gloomy picture of this tragic event: “Mrs. Semmes [a family friend] said when she got there, little Jeff was kneeling down by his brother. And he called out to her in great distress, ‘Mrs. Semmes, I have said all the prayers I know how, but God will not wake little Joe.’”

  Mary continued: “Poor little Joe, the good child of the family, so gentle and affectionate, he used to run in to say his prayers at his father’s knee. Before I left the house I saw him lying there, white and beautiful as an angel—covered with flowers. Catherine, his nurse, lying flat on the floor by his side and weeping and wailing as only an Irish woman can.”10 In her diary Mary remembered the Confederate president’s heavy footsteps reflecting his heavy heart that evening: “That night with no sound but the tramp of his [Jefferson Davis’s] foot overhead, the curtains flapping in the wind, the gas flaring, I was numb—stupid—half-dead with grief and terror.”11

  Jefferson’s only consolation seemed to be that he was sending his son to heaven. His mantra, repeated over and over silently to himself and behind closed doors, was “Not mine, O Lord, but thine.”12 Joe had been his father’s favorite, adored by his family and the staff alike. Burton Harrison’s wife, Constance Cary Harrison, wrote of the boy as “little, merry, happy Joe, petted by all visitors to the Executive Mansion—he who when his father was in the act of receiving official visitors, once pushed his way into the study and, clad only in an abbreviated nightgown, insisted upon saying his evening prayer at the President’s knee.”13

  The popular little boy’s unexpected death inflicted great psychological damage on the family. Varina’s letter to Brig. Gen. Richard Griffith’s widow summed up her sorrow: “One week ago I should have been able to tell of my most beautiful and promising child. Now I can only tell you that I have three left—none so bright, none so beautiful, but all infinitely precious.”14

  Joe Jr. was the second son Jefferson and Varina had lost. The Davises’ first son, Samuel Emory, had been an unexpected blessing to the couple. After seven years without a pregnancy, Varina and Jefferson had given up hope of ever having a family. When he was born, in July 1852, they could scarcely believe their good fortune. Davis proudly called him “le man,” a Celtic nickname, and enjoyed showing him off whenever he had the opportunity. The boy was a charming and lively infant, and the couple was overjoyed and relieved at his arrival.15

  Sadly, the joy was not to last. In 1854 their adored son died just before his second birthday from measles. Samuel’s illness was especially gruesome: “His mouth had swelled and blistered and bled. His eyes had turned bloodred. Sores spread over his entire face, and though Varina managed to cure them, it left his head ‘a perfect mat of scabs.’” After a brief recovery, Samuel died. Both parents were devastated.16

  Samuel’s death, like the death of his first wife, Sarah Knox-Taylor, was life changing for Jefferson. The tragic and early demise of these adored individuals took away a great deal of his ability to love and be loved by others. After these two traumatic events, a hard and unyielding shell formed around his heart—a self-protective mechanism to be sure but one that would later critically hobble his marriage to Varina.

  To lose one child to an illness is horrific, but sadly, this was not an uncommon occurrence in the mid-nineteenth century. The shadow of death lurked around every nursery corner at this time: antibiotics such as penicillin had not yet been discovered. Not until World War II was penicillin widely available and used to treat infections, thanks to its discovery in 1928 by Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming. Thus, Samuel, like so many wounded later in the Civil War, had very little chance of survival when faced with such an illness.

  While Samuel’s death may have devastated Jefferson the most, Joe’s death was perhaps more painful for Varina. Losing a second child in such a tragic and potentially avoidable accident must have cut both parents to the core. All night long Varina and Jefferson mourned their son. The lights burned in the Executive Mansion through the darkness as they sat with his little body and prepared themselves for a bleak future without him. A massive funeral was held on May 1, at Richmond’s Hollywood cemetery. The other Davis children were witnesses to this terrible grief.

  Mary Chesnut stayed in Richmond a day longer than planned to attend the funeral and provided a firsthand account of the sad event: “Immense crowd at the funeral. Sympathetic but shoving and pushing rudely, thousands of children. Each child had a green bough or a bunch of flowers to throw on little Joe’s grave, which was already a mass of white flowers, crosses &c&c.”17

  Mary also recalled that Jefferson seemed to have aged overnight following his son’s death and that Varina had lost her vigor. “The dominant figure, that poor, old gray-haired man. Standing bare-headed, straight as an arrow, clear against the sky by the open grave of his son. She stood in her heavy black wrappings and her tall figure drooped. The flowers, the children, the procession as it moved, comes and goes. But these two dark, sorrow-stricken figures stand.”18 Prophetically, Mary questioned the reader, “Who will they kill next of that devoted household?”19

  Maggie was the oldest child of the Davises and nine years old at the time of Joe’s death. Jeff Jr., who had found his brother lying on the pavement outside the Executive Mansion, was seven. Billy was scarcely three. Winnie’s birth was just weeks away. Her mother’s emotional state was precarious and volatile. Varina was grieving for one child while simultaneously preparing for the birth of another. Despite the gratifying outpouring of support from Richmonders, family, and other friends after Joe’s death, the scars left on the Davis parents and their children were deep and had far-reaching repercussions. Sadness would hallmark each and every member of this prominent southern family.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My Name Is a Heritage of Woe

  May 1864 witnessed the death of beloved Confederate major general James Ewell Brown “J.E.B.” Stuart, a great loss for Confederate troops and a heavy blow to their already sinking morale. The young military hero was well known to all Southerners for his extreme bravery, witty banter, and dashing sartorial sense. A peer of J.E.B. wrote: “His fighting jacket shone with dazzling buttons and was covered with gold braid; his hat was sloped up with a gold star and decorated with an ostrich plume; his fine buff gauntlets reached to the elbows; around his waist was tied a splendid yellow silk sash; and the spurs were of pure gold.’ He had piercing blue eyes, a full beard, an athletic figure and a zest for life.”1
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  The young general loved parties, dances, and theatricals. He often came to Richmond in between battle engagements to partake of Confederate society. As Connie Harrison, diarist and wife of Jefferson’s private secretary, Burton Harrison, noted in regards to J.E.B. and his socializing, however, “In all our parties and pleasurings, there seemed to lurk a foreshadowing of tragedy, as in the Greek plays where the gloomy end is ever kept in sight.”2

  This bright, handsome young man was mortally wounded in the Battle of Yellow Tavern north of Richmond on May 11, 1864. In an ironic twist of fate, J.E.B. was struck down by the troops of his old enemy from his student days at West Point, Union cavalry commander Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan. As he was carried from the battlefield, J.E.B. propped himself up and called to his men, saying: “Go back! Go back! Do your duty as I have done and our country will be saved. I would rather die than be whipped!”3

  In the late afternoon of May 11, the seriously wounded soldier was taken by ambulance to Richmond, jolted mercilessly during the long journey. He would not allow his suffering to be mitigated by brandy the doctor tried to give him: J.E.B. had promised his mother twenty years ago that he would not touch alcohol.

  The ambulance finally reached the home of his brother-in-law, a Confederate surgeon general, Dr. Charles Brewer—the husband of Flora’s sister Maria—at 206 East Grace Street in Richmond.4 This gracious home with yellow roses blooming behind a low red brick wall was the scene of J.E.B.’s last hours. The bullet wounds to his belly would produce a slow, excruciating death.

  After a long, painful night, May 12 dawned, full of ominous thunder and lightning.5 Word of J.E.B.s fatal injury had spread quickly around Richmond, and a huge crowd was already gathered outside the Brewers’ home weeping for their fallen soldier. John B. Jones, the famous Confederate war clerk, kept a diary (published after the war, in 1866) that offered his firsthand observations from the War Office. A sense of gloom pervaded his diary entry on this stormy day. “Major Gen. J.E.B. Stuart was wounded last evening through the kidney, and now lies in the city, in a dying condition! Our best generals thus fall around us.”6