Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Jefferson Davis’s second marriage to Varina Howell has been analyzed many times by historians but far too often only superficially. The two Mississippians had much in common: Welsh progenitors, family ties, and superior educations for their time. Both became doting parents whose great mutual love was that of their children. On paper the couple seemed to be well suited, if not destined for each other. Yet their commonalities would work against them as each struggled to control the other.

  Varina Howell’s family was a boisterous, open-minded, and emotional clan. Her family first settled in Delaware, then New Jersey. Varina’s grandfather Richard Howell served with distinction under General Washington and later became governor of New Jersey.9 Her own parents, William Howell and Margaret Kempe, settled in Natchez, Mississippi. They were married in 1823, with Joseph Davis, Jefferson’s older brother, attending the wedding as best man.

  Varina’s father made a good living in merchandising for a time. As a child, Varina lived in a well-off household and was one of eleven children. Margaret insisted Varina be well educated, with an emphasis on literature, languages, and music. She hired an at-home tutor for her daughter named George Winchester, who schooled Varina from the time she was a young girl until she married. She was his only student, and the two became lifelong friends. She also briefly attended a girls’ academy near Philadelphia.10

  In addition to being well educated, Varina’s views on life were not limited to the provincial South. She had cousins in New Jersey with whom she was close and therefore had ties to both North and South. For this she later famously termed herself a “half-breed.”11 She also knew both wealth and poverty. Her father’s financial collapse in the 1830s forced her to experience life without material wealth. Her ability to empathize with different constituencies: rich and poor, South and North, would both aid her struggles later in life and hurt her reputation as the first lady of the Confederacy.

  Varina Howell met Jefferson Davis almost eight years after Sarah’s death through his brother Joseph and mutual friends in Mississippi. Varina fell quickly for Davis, telling friends that he was her first love and the only man she had ever loved.12 The couple’s courtship took a speedy path, and they were soon engaged. The wedding itself was put off for months, however, due to a lingering fever that afflicted Varina. When she recovered, she was determined they should be wed with little delay, and the ceremony took place on February 26, 1845.13

  It is telling to note that the day after their wedding Jefferson and Varina made a visit to Sarah Knox Davis’s grave in Locust Grove. They were visiting Jefferson’s family there, where Knoxie was buried in the family graveyard. The cemetery visit could not have been too palatable to the newlywed Varina.14 It would be understandable if this incident planted a seed of jealousy and competition within her. How could a flesh-and-blood wife compete with a sentimentalized ghost?

  Jefferson, while attracted to the young Varina, never considered her the equal of his first wife. “The Sainted Sarah,” as Varina called her, had also been a strong-willed character. Unlike Varina, however, Sarah had not lived long enough to offend her husband, to nag him or do anything but enjoy his company.15 Jefferson was a southern gentleman, with lovely manners, attractive looks, and a melodic voice. But he expected nothing less from his wife than complete submission and acquiescence to his commands.

  Both Varina and Jefferson were extremely strong personalities with a pronounced contempt for those who tried to control them. This tendency would make life with her husband especially difficult for Varina. The mold for southern wives of the era required total acceptance of male authority. Successful wives were, as historian Anne Firor Scott notes, “obedient, faithful, submissive women [who] strengthened the image of men who thought themselves vigorous, intelligent, commanding leaders.”16 Young Varina did not fit comfortably into this role. Jefferson’s inability to admit fault caused problems in his second marriage from the start. He and Varina fought both during their courtship and within months of their marriage.17

  Jefferson and his new wife spent their honeymoon in New Orleans and then settled at his plantation. The couple did not enjoy much time together, as Jefferson’s political duties often kept him on the road. He had started his political career as a Democratic delegate representing Mississippi’s Warren County in 1842 and quickly ascended up the political ranks. In 1844 Davis made an advantageous reconciliation when he randomly ran into his former father-in-law, Zachary Taylor, on a riverboat. Taylor and Jefferson’s clash in the 1830s and Sarah’s tragic end did not prevent the men from now becoming fast friends. One wonders what they said to each other on that riverboat. Did they talk about Sarah and their mutual loss? More than likely they did not, as both tended to keep their deepest emotions to themselves, but they both seemed to be ready to put their past behind them. From that point on the friendship deepened, and Jefferson and Zachary developed a clear sense of mutual trust and respect.18

  When Jefferson took his place in the House of Representatives in the fall of 1845, he left Varina behind in Mississippi. He would move even farther away from her when he resigned from Congress in 1846 to join Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War. There Jefferson led a regiment of Mississippi volunteers and fought bravely alongside his former father-in-law. This time together cemented the friendship between the two men. But the time apart further damaged Jefferson’s relationship with his new wife.19

  Even early in their marriage, Jefferson spoke of his “need for separation.” The couple would live apart again and again during the course of their relationship. “In the end,” according to William C. Davis “it is quite probable that the only reason the marriage lasted as long as it did is that Varina finally was willing to subordinate her own strong will to her husband’s.”20 Perhaps the long separations also made their hearts grow fonder of each other. By 1849 both he and Varina moved together to Washington dc for the congressional session.

  Zachary Taylor was now President Taylor, and his connection to the nation’s leader began to produce political dividends for Jefferson. The young senator from Mississippi and his second wife had instant entrée to the White House and its social life.21 Columnist Retta D. Tindall writes, “The Davises spent a great deal of time at the White House in their official capacity by virtue of Jefferson’s Senate seat and also as esteemed members of the extended Taylor family.”22

  The political connection with Taylor and other relationships the couple developed during their time in the nation’s capital further encouraged the young senator’s political ambitions. In 1851 Jefferson resigned his Senate seat to run as the Democratic candidate for governor of Mississippi. When Jefferson lost to opponent Henry Foote, however, he and his wife moved back to Brierfield.

  This residency was not to last for long. When Franklin Pierce became the president in 1852, he asked Jefferson to become his secretary of war, and the Davises returned to Washington dc in the spring of 1853. Throughout the 1850s Varina was occupied with being a mother and the social whirl and intrigue of the nation’s capital.

  Washington dc was a power center in the 1850s, just as it is today. The cultural, political, and social life there was rich and varied. Women tried to outdo one another with their fabulous ball gowns and fashionable accessories. Elaborate balls, parties, dinners, and receptions were regular parts of life, and congressional wives had a full and even exhausting social calendar. Virginia Clay remembered that in 1850s Washington DC, “it was no uncommon thing for society women to find themselves completely exhausted ere bedtime arrived.”23

  Varina might enjoy Washington dc’s exhilarating social life and exercising her sharp wit among the city’s high society. But she also relished her time at home with her children. The young matron “enjoyed the social life in Washington,” writes Tindall, “but her family took precedence over any other obligations. She was a ‘hands-on’ mother, tending to her children’s needs, overseeing their meals, teaching them Bible stories, and reading to them at bedtime.”24 Jeff Jr. was born in the winter of 1857 duri
ng the couple’s time in the capital, joining his older sister, Maggie.

  Although Jefferson was a loving father and always interested in his children and their doings, the young senator was often tied up with his political career and his obligations to Brierfield plantation in Mississippi. During his four years as secretary of war under Pierce, Jefferson had many significant achievements, including the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, the beginnings of the movement to build the Panama Canal, and the introduction of a humanities program at his old school, West Point.25 Although Jefferson was often far away from his family, he always kept in close touch through his letters. The written word allowed him to express emotions he could not or would not show when he was physically present.26

  By the summer of 1860 political talk of the southern states seceding from the Union began to solidify. Lincoln was elected president in November 1860, and Jefferson resigned his Senate seat in January 1861. By February he had been chosen as provisional president of the Confederacy.27 The couple’s marriage then took a backseat to the epic political drama of the approaching Civil War beginning to unfold around them.

  Joan Cashin, one of Varina’s recent biographers, eloquently summarizes the Davis union: “They had a difficult relationship, fraught with passionate outbursts of love, regret, and resentment and marked by terrific power struggles, most of which she lost. She did not have the companionate marriage she wanted, but she tried to accommodate, to overlook, and to forgive, as did most women of her generation.”28

  Both partners in the Davis marriage wanted control over the other. Neither one, however, would ever be able fully to achieve this dominance. Varina and Jefferson were doomed to perpetually misunderstand the other’s motivations and actions. The Davis children were witness to this constant power struggle, and it undoubtedly affected Winnie’s views of marriage, perhaps contributing to her reluctance to wed later in life. Her personal views of marriage, expressed in her writings, reflected her ambivalent stance toward this institution.

  Yet Winnie also observed the survival of the Davis marriage despite the overwhelming forces of war, death, homelessness, and their ultimate loss of wealth and status. This model meshed well with her father’s example of self-sacrifice of the individual for the good of the whole. Keeping the family intact within a marriage was the couple’s top priority, divorce was almost unthinkable, but happiness within marriage? That was an entirely separate affair.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Scandal and Sickness

  After Jefferson’s release from Fort Monroe in 1867, the Davis family reunited in Montreal, where Varina, her mother, and her sister, Margaret, had been living with the four Davis children. Varina notes that when Jefferson was finally released, “we were pecuniarily prostrate, our plantations had been laid waste and seized … we turned our faces to the world and cast about for a way to maintain our little children, four in number, Margaret, Jefferson, William, and Varina.”1

  The family was overjoyed to be back together again, yet their happiness was temporary. Like many former soldiers, Jefferson seemed to suffer from what might now be termed “post-traumatic stress disorder,” the result in particular of his experiences in the war and at Fort Monroe. The Canadian winters also proved too harsh for Jefferson’s enfeebled frame, so the family spent some time in Cuba after hearing that a Confederate agent had deposited money in an account there on behalf of the Davis children.2 The rumor proved false, and the family soon journeyed on to Mississippi.

  When the family returned to the South, their first order of business was to check on the former Davis family plantations. Jefferson became even more depressed upon witnessing what he described as “the desolation of our country.”3 Both the Brierfield and Hurricane plantations were completely ruined, echoing the fate of countless other family homes throughout the region. The federal government had confiscated both plantations several years earlier, in 1865.4

  The physical destruction of the war was mirrored by the psychological damage done to many white southerners, like the Davis family. Historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown describes the widespread affliction: “Demoralization of Southern white families was a serious consequence of the war—the mourning for lost kindred and neighbors, the wrenching adjustments to be made in race relations, the woes of lost investments and treasure, ruined homesteads.” Utter desolation of the spirit remained in southern communities long after the military conflict had ceased.5

  The politics of this new Reconstruction era were clearly inhospitable to the Davis family. Seen as the ultimate perpetrator of slavery and all its evils, Jefferson received many death threats; rumors of plots to hurt him and his family were never far from his ears. Given the great political animus they faced in the post–Civil War world, Varina and Jefferson were always terrified that some harm would come to their children.

  Two political schools of thought ruled the United States directly after the Civil War. The Radical Reconstructionists demanded a complete overhaul of the South in the North’s image, while the Moderates preached reconciliation between North and South and an end to Reconstruction in the southern states.6

  The emancipation and integration of former slaves in this postwar environment was not easy. Freed slaves often experienced their new lives as a nomadic existence, wandering from place to place in search of food and work. The Freedman’s Bureau, established in 1865 to manage the transition of blacks from slavery to freedom, had mixed results. The bureau’s responsibilities included the provision of medical care, funds, and education to both white and black refugees.

  During its seven-year existence, white southerners angrily fought back against the bureau and its policies, particularly the redistribution of former Confederate-owned lands. In response to this national political effort, vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) first appeared in the South. The KKK persecuted and terrorized blacks while intimidating any whites who might try to help them.7

  Despite institutions such as the Freedman’s Bureau and the prevailing winds of national politics, many southerners still refused to accept the changes thrust upon them by the North. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust explains the subversion that many southerners subscribed to as a way of fighting back against the new political regime. Faust cites a postwar letter from Mary Lee of Winchester, Virginia, in which Lee explains: “Political reconstruction is inevitable now, but social reconstruction, we have in our hands and we can prevent.”8 This statement would prove prophetic for Davis daughter Winnie, in particular.

  Although many in the North saw Jefferson Davis and his family as the embodiment of such southern subversion, at this point in their lives Jefferson and Varina were more focused on personal and family matters. Their total loss of income was the couple’s primary preoccupation in the postwar world. How would they feed, clothe, and educate their brood? What would Jefferson do for a living that was both worthy of his status as former president of the Confederacy and could produce enough income to maintain his wife and children sufficiently? In which corner of the world could they be received and protected without death threats descending upon their doorstep? For many years after the war these questions would remain frustratingly unresolved.

  In late 1867 the Davis family moved again to Lennoxville, a small town near Montreal. Here Davis, still in terrible physical shape, fell down a long flight of stairs with the three-year-old Winnie in his arms. Varina noted: “While vexed by every anxiety that could torture us, in coming down a long flight of stairs with baby Winnie in his arms, Mr. Davis fell from top to bottom, breaking three of his ribs. His first question after he came out of the fainting fit into which he sank was for the baby.”9 There was never any question that Jefferson adored Winnie; the bond they had formed at Fort Monroe was unbreakable. Luckily, Winnie was unharmed by the accident.

  Impoverished and in very poor health, Jefferson and his family then made their way to Quebec from Lennoxville and sailed on to Liverpool in the summer of 1868. The family then spent time in London and Paris and were for th
e most part well received by English and French friends and sympathizers as well as former Confederate colleagues such as former Cabinet member Judah P. Benjamin who were also living abroad.10 The couple somehow still had some money. Friends had likely stashed some away for the couple during the war, southern sympathizers gave them monetary gifts, and British friends even paid their boys’ tuition for a time.11 Letters that survive also note that Benjamin let Varina know about $12,500 remaining Confederate funds in England that were earmarked for her family. He ultimately invested a portion of this money for her in British government securities.12

  Although Varina loved England and would have been content to stay there long term, Jefferson missed the American South and found he could not make an adequate living in London. In 1869 he was offered a job as president of the Carolina Insurance Company, which he gladly accepted.

  Winnie and the other children remained in England with their mother while Jefferson became established in his new job. They all missed their father deeply and fervently wished for his return. Jefferson wrote Varina from Memphis on November 23, 1869, replying to a previous comment from his youngest daughter: “Tell Winnie Anne I am trying to get ‘a good home and stop wandering about’ as she had advised.”13

  In another letter to Varina, Jefferson worried about the precocious Winnie and her many questions to her mother on a variety of subjects: “I fear from your account of Winnie Anne’s extraordinary conversations that her brain has been much too excited. She is too old for her years, pray keep her back that her constitution may be such as to bear study when she can better profit by it.”14 This remark notes a recurring theme in the Davis family: concern that intellectual “fever” may wear the physical body out. Jefferson often applied this nineteenth-century psychology to his curious and intellectually gifted youngest daughter.