Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  On April 9, 1865, a few months before Winnie’s first birthday, General Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, after losing the Battle of Appomattox Court House, which effectively ended the war in Virginia. While the nightmare of war was finally over, Varina and her brood were still struggling desperately through the mud and muck toward Chester, South Carolina, with the Confederate treasure. When the railroad tracks ended, Varina and the children were forced to get off the train, and the treasure guards had to reload the valuable cargo onto wagons.

  The exhausted Davis children were frightened and fearful for their father’s safety. Maggie, Jeff Jr., and Billy were “tired, scared, and hungry,” writes historian Retta D. Tindal. “The ambulance that was transporting the Davis family was too heavy for the muddy roads that had turned into quagmires from the rain, so Mrs. Davis, carrying her baby Winnie in her arms, walked through the darkness one long night.”10 Varina, her silk skirts filthy with mud, trudged onward toward an uncertain future. Was her wanted husband dead or alive? His enemies were howling for his blood. Union soldiers across the country were chanting, “Hang Jeff Davis from the Sour Apple Tree,” set to the tune of the popular marching song “John Brown’s Body”:

  They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!

  They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!

  They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!

  As they march along!11

  On the heels of Lee’s spectacular defeat at Appomattox came more shocking news. John Wilkes Booth, the famous American actor, who was also a Confederate sympathizer and agent, had shot and killed President Lincoln during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington dc on the night of April 14.12 Booth hoped that by killing Lincoln, he could help rally the remaining Confederate troops to continue fighting against the Union. Lincoln’s death was far from welcome news for the Confederacy. The murder, meant to help the Confederate cause, effectively rendered Jefferson Davis and his remaining Cabinet members prime suspects in the case.

  Varina Davis broke down upon hearing the news of Lincoln’s death. She later wrote about her reaction in her memoir of her husband: “I burst into tears, tears which flowed from the mingling of sorrow for the family of Mr. Lincoln and a thorough realization of the inevitable results to the Confederates, now that they were at the mercy of the Federals.”13 With this tragic turn of events, hopes for mercy upon the rebels and their leader were dimming.

  The Davis camp, upon hearing news of the assassination, despaired both for the fallen leader and for the fate of the South. Burton Harrison reported to his wife, Connie, that these were “tidings universally regretted by the [Confederate] staff and following. ‘Everybody’s remark . . . was that in Lincoln the Southern states had lost their only refuge in their then emergency. There was no expression other than of surprise and regret. As yet, we knew none of the particulars of the crime.’”14

  Although there was absolutely no evidence that Jefferson had committed this heinous crime, northerners and the federal government used the supposition as a pretext to reel in the rebel leader, offering a reward of $100,000 for his capture. Thus began a manhunt that lasted for several weeks. Jefferson rode through the Carolinas, often just miles behind Varina and her party as they fled further and further south. The fugitive finally caught up with his family near Irwinville, Georgia. He decided to stay the night of May 9 with them, planning next to continue on to Texas alone.

  Varina, though a practical and sensible woman, also had a superstitious side to her. She often had detailed and prophetical dreams and seemed able to forecast disasters. Her good friend Mary Chesnut was among those who noted Varina’s gift or curse in this area: “At West Point the year before the war began, Mrs. Davis said to Mrs. Huger sadly: ‘The South will secede if Lincoln is made president. They will make Mr. Davis president of the Southern side. And the whole thing is bound to be a failure.’”15

  On the night of May 9 Varina told her younger sister, Margaret, who was traveling with her party, that “she dreamed they would be caught at a campsite in Georgia, and that this was the place in her dream.”16 Despite Varina’s intuitive sense of danger, the group set up camp at the site anyway. Exhausted, both mentally and physically, after almost six weeks of living like refugees, they collapsed and slept deeply and dream-lessly. What next ensued was truly the stuff of nightmares for the Davis family. The event has been endlessly reported, analyzed, and dissected. In the end neither Jefferson Davis nor Varina were portrayed in a flattering light, despite heroic efforts on the part of Varina to save her husband and herculean efforts on Jefferson’s part to escape in order to keep defending the Confederate cause.

  The New York Times on Sunday, May 14, 1865, trumpeted the headline, “DAVIS TAKEN.” The article’s subheads included “Cowardly Behavior of the Head of Southern Chivalry” and, even more humiliating, “He Puts on His Wife’s Petticoats and Tries to Sneak into the Woods.” The story was based upon capturing federal general James H. Wilson’s May 13 telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, which read, “The captors report that he [Jefferson] hastily put on one of his wife’s dresses and started for the woods, closely followed by one of our men, who at first thought him a woman, but seeing his boots while he was running, they suspected his sex at once.”17 Jefferson Davis thus became the butt of many a cruel joke because of these rumors. He was caricatured frequently in newspapers of the time wearing women’s clothing.

  Yet the idea circulated gleefully by the capturing federal troops, aided and abetted by the northern press, that the former Confederate president was wearing his wife’s dress in a deliberate attempt to elude capture is patently false. As Clint Johnson notes in his study of Davis’s capture and imprisonment, “Not only would it have been physically impossible for Davis to put on one of Varina’s dresses in the short amount of time he had before trying to escape, he would not have done it. He would rather have died.”18 In truth Jefferson had apparently thrown on, or Varina had thrown on him, her raglan (a short-sleeved cloak) as he attempted to escape from their encampment near Irwinville, Georgia. By the mid-1860s both upper-class women and men were wearing variations of the raglan cloak, originally developed by the British baron Lord Raglan during the Crimean War.19

  A 2012 exhibition entitled President in Petticoats! Civil War Propaganda in Photographs at the International Center of Photography (icp) in New York supports this view of Jefferson’s capture and the related false reports. The exhibition closely examined the portrayal of these deliberately false images of Jefferson in the northern media. icp assistant curator Erin Barnett noted that the feminized caricatures of Jefferson in the northern press “circulated in the newspapers, illustrated periodicals, and prints as well as cartes de visite” and that “these vengeance-fueled caricatures of Davis in a dress further damaged his reputation and that of the Confederate States just as Lincoln was being hailed as a martyr. These images allowed Northerners to emphasize their own manliness by feminizing Davis, celebrate their victory over the South, and laugh.”20

  As soon as Jefferson was captured, Varina threw her arms around her husband to save him from a Union soldier who had trained his gun directly on Davis. Although Varina probably saved her husband’s life by doing so, Davis became angry with her for interfering. The northern press also chose to present this detail in a derisive manner. Suggestions were made that Varina was more masculine than her husband and that she was the one who truly was the head of the Davis family. As historian Nina Silber noted in The Romance of Reunion, “To underscore the transformation of [gender] roles and the loss of the male aristocrat’s power, the Herald [a New York City newspaper] informed its readers that Mrs. Davis’s actions proved her to be ‘more of a man than her husband.’”21

  The humiliating story that Davis tried to escape in a woman’s disguise, along with the suggestion that Varina was the family protector and not he, deeply wounded both Jefferson’s pride and that of his men.22 To call a southern soldier’s manhood into
question was the most shameful taunt imaginable at the time: southern soldiers took the insinuation that the leader of the Confederacy had fled his camp in full woman’s costume as an insult to the entire Confederate army. The accusation underlined the total demise of the southern cause. According to historian William C. Davis, “There could be no more fitting end to punctuate the utter defeat of the Confederacy than to . . . [have] its president run in ignominy with skirts about his heels.”23

  Although Winnie was just an infant in 1865, carried in her mother’s arms as the family fled a falling Confederate capital, this incident would seriously impact her much later in life. Her very existence reinforced the masculinity of her father and of all former Confederates. Their deeply rooted insecurities, stemming from the southern defeat in the Civil War, ultimately became an issue Winnie was forced to defend. Indeed, as Silber has pointed out, “numerous southern leaders squirmed at the implications of the capture accounts, as well as the other assaults on southern manliness, and launched their own reaffirmation of southern virility in their protection and idealization of Davis’s daughter Winnie.”24

  On May 19, 1865, Davis arrived at Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia, where he was to spend the next two years in prison. Thus began a dark period of confinement resulting in illness, emaciation, and deep depression for Davis. For the first year in prison Davis was confined to a very small cell. Only in May 1866 was he finally allowed more spacious quarters, exercise, and generally better treatment. At this point Varina took up permanent residence at Fort Monroe and was allowed to see her husband on a more frequent basis.

  Winnie, at this point a toddler, was the only one of Davis’s children allowed to visit with him. During the two horrific years of 1865–67, Charles Clifton Ferrell wrote in 1899, Winnie was “the only sunshine that came to him.”25 For Davis his young daughter was one of the few links to the outside world and to a past in which he was revered by many and empowered to control his own fate. In later years her father remembered that it was this shared experience at Fort Monroe that, despite Winnie’s young age, bound daughter and father together inextricably.

  Although she was probably barely conscious of her visits at the time, Winnie was forever marked by the remembrances of this period provided to her by other witnesses. Winnie was fussed over by officers and their wives at Fortress Monroe, where she played with their children and attended parties and musical entertainments.26 In her infancy and toddlerhood she became the receptacle for her family’s nostalgic memories of the past.

  Jefferson had shown his family and the nation by example that he was willing to sacrifice his own material comforts as well as his life, if necessary, for the Confederate cause. During his time at Fort Monroe, the former Confederate leader reportedly endured terrible treatment, all the while refusing to ask for a pardon for his leadership of the South in the Civil War. He steadfastly and staunchly endured all these ordeals without complaint. The end result, according to historian Cita Cook, was that “people who had questioned the judgment of the President of the Confederacy in the midst of a bloody war had begun to consider him a Confederate George Washington once he was sent to prison.”27 Jefferson’s terrible treatment at Fort Monroe transformed him from master to martyr of the Confederacy.

  Although Jefferson was prepared and fully willing to forgo almost everything for the cause, he tried to distance his actions from his family so that they would not also have to suffer his fate. In an 1862 letter from Richmond to Varina he declared that “the heroism which could lay my wife and children on any sacrificial altar is not mine.”28 Yet, however noble this desire, it was impossible for Jefferson to separate himself from Varina and the children. For better or for worse, the entire family, its legacy and its reputation, were staked on his fate. Particularly in the nineteenth century, when a woman’s fate was so closely tied to her husband’s, Jefferson’s wish was a futile one, and his suffering became his family’s suffering. It was a public fate and one that created permanent psychic scars on his children.

  Thus, the ideal of personal sacrifice was imprinted upon Winnie even as a small child. The Davis legacy of self-sacrifice was nationally known and discussed continually. It would have been practically impossible for an approval-oriented young girl, as Winnie turned out to be, to miss such vivid cues. The stamp of martyrdom, so visible in her father’s story, was internalized by Winnie at Fort Monroe and would be regularly reinforced throughout her girlhood. Even so, her father hoped for better things for his youngest child, asking Varina, in a letter sent from Fort Monroe, to “kiss the Baby for me, may her sunny face never be clouded, though dark the morning of her life has been.”29

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Fatal Romance

  The stoic, long-suffering father Winnie first knew at Fort Monroe was a personality forged as a result of severe political upheavals and personal tragedies, including the death of his beloved first wife. The marriage Winnie observed between her mother, Varina, and her father, Jefferson, in the 1860s was stable and at times affectionate but by no means a fairy tale. Although Varina adored Jefferson, she resisted his controlling nature. He in turn resented Varina for her lack of submission to his will and decisions.

  Jefferson had not always been such a hardened figure. He grew up the adored son and tenth child of Samuel Davis and Jane Cook, who were married in 1783 in Georgia. The couple soon moved to Kentucky and then later to Woodville, Mississippi. Jefferson respected his parents, who were well educated for their time. His mother and sisters were very loving toward the boy, but Jefferson characterized his father as cold and distant.

  Education was important in the Davis family. Jefferson was a stand-out in ancient languages such as Latin and Greek. His father insisted he attend Transylvania University in Lexington Kentucky, a well-known and distinguished school, where he did extremely well. After Samuel suffered major financial difficulties and then died, Joseph, Jefferson’s much older brother, assumed the paternal role in the Davis family. He insisted Jefferson either go on to West Point as a cadet or attend the University of Virginia to study law. Surprisingly, despite his clear disdain for those who did not agree with him, Jefferson chose life at West Point. There he became known for his willful and spirited behavior.

  The young and mischievous cadet frequently disobeyed orders, stayed out late at parties, drank too much, skipped drills, and generally thumbed his nose at authority. Although he briefly became a soldier in the frontier territories after graduation and enjoyed soldiering, he had a strong dislike of authority, and in 1835 he decided to leave the military. He then dove straight into marriage and the life of a southern plantation owner.1

  Jefferson’s first wife, Sarah Knox “Knoxie” Taylor, was the daughter of Lt. Col. Zachary Taylor, who was later to become president of the United States. Zachary, who knew Jefferson through their military service together at Fort Taylor in the Michigan territories in the 1830s, forbade the match for several years. Although a career soldier himself, he did not wish for his adored daughter to suffer the life of a military wife. He also clashed with Jefferson during their time soldiering together. Zachary eventually consented to the match, but he and his wife did not attend the wedding on June 17, 1835, at Sarah’s aunt and uncle’s house, Beechland, in Kentucky.2

  Knoxie was feisty and pretty and accustomed to the good things in life. Mrs. Anna Magee Robinson, a cousin of Sarah who was present at her marriage, describes a young, striking couple madly in love on their wedding day: “My cousin Knox Taylor was very beautiful, slight and not very tall, with brown, wavy hair and clear gray eyes, very lovely and lovable, and a young woman of decided spirit. Lieutenant Davis was of slender build, and had polished manners, and was of a quiet intellectual countenance.”3

  The new couple had originally planned to delay their move to Brier-field, Jefferson’s Mississippi plantation, due to the summer sicknesses such as malaria and yellow fever that annually claimed hundreds of lives across the Deep South. But Davis insisted that he and Sarah move to his Missi
ssippi residence immediately. As historian William C. Davis describes it, the impulsive young man was “looking ahead to a new life, with the anxiety and impetuosity of youth, he wanted Sarah for his wife now, his wife in his bed, and his bed at Brierfield.”4

  After spending time with Jefferson’s older brother Joe at Hurricane Plantation in Mississippi, the newlyweds made their way to Locust Grove, Louisiana, to visit Jefferson’s sister and brother-in law, thinking the hill climate healthier. It was a fatal mistake. Both Jefferson and Sarah contracted malaria in short order. Jefferson, who was the hardier of the two, survived, but Sarah was not so lucky. She died in her husband’s arms, singing “Fairy Bells” while her young life ebbed away. They had been married for less than three months. Sarah was only twenty-one years old when she was laid in the ground at Locust Grove.5

  William Davis notes that this event marked a significant turning point for Jefferson. The cadet who had delighted in parties, pretty girls, and drinking became a more sober, serious character. Although there is no record that shows he expressed guilt or remorse for Sarah’s untimely demise,6 the tragedy completely crushed Jefferson. As he was often wont to do, he had made a quick decision and never looked back. His ill-advised choice had cost him his beloved first wife7

  Once his adored Knoxie was gone, the grieving husband locked his deepest emotions away for good. The more joyful and emotional version of the young Davis was never to be glimpsed again by another woman. His young wife’s tragic death diminished his capacity for marital affection and love. He would never love a woman so deeply again. Nearly one hundred years after Sarah’s death, the historian Burton J. Hendrick wrote: “So vanished the one human being who was able to arouse the deepest emotions of this silent, undemonstrative man. Though Jefferson Davis married a second time . . . he never recovered from the shock of his first and lasting love affair.”8