Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  During his time alone in Memphis, Jefferson developed a deep admiration for and perhaps an infatuation with the lively Virginia Clay, whose husband, Clement, had been a friend and colleague of Jefferson in the U.S. Senate. Clement had also been imprisoned with him in Fortress Monroe for his Confederate activity, so the two men knew each other well. Virginia and Clement were childless, so after her marriage to him in 1843, she continued to collect beaux. This attractive and vivacious woman was “ambitious, self-centered, energetic, attractive, and sociable”; according to historians Carol Bleser and Frederick M. Heath, she “attempted for over twenty years to be a married belle, a role through which she enjoyed some of the delights of her single days and achieved both recognition and influence.”15

  According to Varina’s biographer Joan Cashin, Jefferson suggested to Varina at this time that she would not like Memphis and that with his new job he could provide her with the means to “live elsewhere.”16 He seemed to be content at this point to live in Memphis alone. Varina was understandably bewildered and upset by this suggestion. Finally, in the fall of 1870 Jefferson returned to England to retrieve his family and sail with them back to Memphis. The former Confederate first family rented a lovely home on fashionable Court Street in downtown Memphis. They tried to settle into a consistent routine and to lead as normal a life as possible after years of searching for financial and geographic stability. Ugly rumors about his personal life surfaced, however, on July 15, 1871, when the Louisville Daily Commercial newspaper published an account accusing Jefferson of having an adulterous tryst on a train with another woman. The newspaper identified the woman as a former Memphis actress by the name of Mrs. Bowers,17 while other accounts claimed the woman in question was Virginia Clay.18

  Jefferson denied the incident, as did Virginia. Varina never acknowledged the accusations, but it surely cut her deeply. Voluminous correspondence suggests a deep emotional relationship between Jefferson and Virginia that continued long after and despite the scandal of the train affair. His letter of October 1871 confirms his attachment to Virginia, whom he often called “Ginnie”: “I wish to come to you in this season of gorgeous colors and do love you not little but long.”19

  Scholars of the Jefferson Davis papers at Rice University who have analyzed all the Jefferson Davis–Clement and Virginia Clay correspondence have offered another conclusion. Jefferson, while alone in Memphis and trying to adjust to his new job, reached out to both Clays, who entertained him and corresponded with him often. Clement was asthmatic and often ill, so it was primarily Virginia who responded to Jefferson’s letters and hosted him. According to these scholars: “Although he never hid his abiding affection for Ginnie, he always thought of the two Clays, not just one. He told them of his daydreams for the three of them—a good ship, good cigars, and a good library.”20

  Ginnie was probably attractive to Jefferson as she had no children to care for, no dependents to divert her attentions from him. She was not nearly so intelligent as his wife and was never in a position to criticize him. Unlike Varina, who had family in the North and therefore divided loyalties, Virginia wholeheartedly supported the Confederate cause. For all these reasons she was the perfect object of his affections. She was also a married “belle” and therefore a somewhat safe choice.21

  Varina stayed silent on this issue, and in her memoirs of her husband there is absolutely no mention of the scandal or her thoughts about Virginia Clay. She was still in love with her husband, and there is no evidence that she herself ever strayed with another man or even flirted with one. As Jefferson’s personal nurse, adoring wife, and tireless lobbyist for her husband’s release from prison, to have such rumors floating about must have been humiliating and devastating for Varina, even though the train incident may have been simply vicious gossip.

  Yet social scandal would soon pale in comparison to the tragedy about to befall both Davises. In October 1874 the couple’s eleven-year-old son Billy died of diphtheria. Like the Davises’ first child, Samuel, Billy was the victim of a disease that claimed so many in the nineteenth century prior to the development of penicillin. There was literally nothing the hopeless parents or their physicians could do as the child slowly suffocated.

  Varina’s grief over Billy’s death is still palpable nearly a century and half later. She wrote at the time: “All that sympathy and kindness could do was tempered to us to alleviate our grief, but the death of one whose character, talents, and personal beauty made the joy of our lives, and promised to justify the hope of our old age, was a blow which must leave us mourning until the end.”22

  The agony of Billy’s death was devastating to both parents as well as to his remaining siblings. He was the third Davis boy to go to an early grave. Now the only son remaining in the Davis family was Jefferson Davis Jr.. Even in the nineteenth century, the childhood deaths the Davises had suffered were extreme. Both parents tried to remain calm and stoic, but with each child who died, Jefferson retreated further into his interior life. Varina tried harder to interact with her family, but she also was profoundly depressed following her son’s death. Winnie was surely intently absorbing the drama that surrounded her, observing silently while her parents suffered yet another almost unbearable blow. Winnie, Maggie, and Jeff Jr. together mourned for Billy, their observant, gentle brother.

  Soon after this tragedy, the family faced another major upset. In 1873 the Carolina Life Insurance Company failed and was sold to another company. Jefferson then resigned his post with the company and shortly thereafter left his family alone again as he sailed to England in the early winter of 1874 to seek new employment. Although his job search proved to be unfruitful, perhaps the time alone allowed for some reflection. Jefferson at least temporarily realized the faithfulness his wife had demonstrated to him at this point, as he wrote her from England on their anniversary in February 1874, pledging his love to her and his regret that she had had to deal with so many important responsibilities alone throughout their marriage.23

  When their father finally returned home to Memphis from this latest trip to England in June 1874, Maggie was a young lady of nineteen, Jeff Jr. a seventeen-year-old, and Winnie ten years of age. Since her brother Billy’s death particularly, Winnie, more than Jeff Jr. or Maggie, was the child upon whom both parents focused most of their attention.

  Winnie attended school at the Memphis Female Seminary in the early 1870s. The young girl could walk to the school, located just a few blocks from her home. It was a small establishment, with only five teachers, where a group of young women received instruction in music, art, and languages.24 Education at the seminary was supplemented by instruction at home by Winnie’s parents. Varina and Jefferson had more time on their hands now than they had had with their other children to develop Winnie and her education. As a result, Winnie developed extremely close bonds with both parents, bonds that were perhaps a bit too tight.

  Victorian child-raising techniques, as historian Sarah Wollfolk Wiggins puts it, held that “the essential issue was that children voluntarily obeyed their parents.”25 Winnie had little problem fitting into this school of thought. A child like Winnie was treated as a small adult who possessed an inherent congruence of interests with her parents. Fortunately, the young girl was eager to please, and she loved classic English literature. Both parents took great pains to ensure that Winnie was well-read.26 Jefferson was extremely proud of Winnie’s developing intellect, and he encouraged and helped shape her serious nature. Conversely, however, the overprotective father worried about intellectual overstimulation in his youngest child.

  Although Jefferson and Varina’s home instruction was intended to teach the child how to “fit in” in their southern community, in reality it had the opposite effect. Winnie found social interaction with others outside her family to be difficult and awkward at best. Spending so much time with her parents in the adult world from a young age created a child who did not know how to play with her peers. Neither Winnie nor her parents realized that too much time spent wi
th parents obsessed with the past was preventing her from living fully in the present.

  The early attention and teachings of Jefferson had affected Winnie in an especially profound manner: she knew what would win her father and mother’s attention. Things like parties, clothes, boys, and gossip were seen as frivolous and not worth discussing, while political issues, literature, and philosophy were the tickets to attention, praise, and time with her adored parents. But this precious period of time at home with the full attention of both Jefferson and Varina was not to last for Winnie. By the age of thirteen this shy, awkward young girl would leave the confines of home for a broader education in Europe. She would not see her beloved father again for five long years.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Boarding School Blues and the Dorsey Dilemma

  Trained in the schools, and broadened too,

  By reading, travel, and converse.

  Rev. R. M. Tuttle, a fragment of his poem

  “Miss Winnie Davis, a Tribute,” 1905

  How strange it must have seemed to those who were aware of the extremely close relationship shared by Winnie and her parents that they would send her off to a German boarding school at the age of thirteen. The child—so sheltered, shy, and fond of both her parents and siblings—was terribly homesick and traumatized about leaving the comforts of home. Several events may have triggered this decision by Jefferson and Varina. Winnie would soon be alone in the Davis household, as her sister wedding to a young and charming Confederate veteran was imminent, and her brother was attending Virginia Military Institute.1

  In 1875 the Davises’ oldest daughter, Maggie, had become engaged to Joel Addison Hayes, “a native Mississippian from an old and distinguished Tennessee family.”2 Addison was a Confederate veteran, well liked by both Jefferson and Varina, who held a good bank job in Memphis. Maggie, more outspoken and independent than her younger sister, had grown into “a pretty woman with soulful eyes, a mass of dark hair and a taste for beautiful clothes.”3

  The oldest Davis girl was known for her sweet singing voice and had been educated at a convent in Paris, where she became friends with two European princesses. A Confederate Veteran magazine article from 1909 noted the friendship: “Margaret of Italy and Princess Margaret of Bavaria were her closest friends. To distinguish her [Maggie Davis] in this trio of ‘namesakes,’ she was called Pearl, the meaning of her name, and that jewel entered largely into her life pleasures.”4

  Despite the Davis family’s lack of funds, Jefferson and Varina made every effort to make sure their oldest girl was married in high style. Lynda L. Crist and Suzanne Scott Gibbs note that “although the family was in difficult financial straits, Maggie wore a gown from Paris.” (It is possible that this dress was her Aunt Margaret’s Parisian couture wedding gown from 1870.)5 The event was noted not just in the Memphis and southern papers but in the New York Times as well.6

  In photos of the event Maggie looks every inch the fashionable and sophisticated product of an upper-class family of the era. Her intricately draped lace dress had a fitted bodice that showed off her tiny waist. She wore a crown of orange blossoms in her hair. Looking the part was very important both to her and to her parents, even if money was in scarce supply.

  The wedding took place on New Year’s Day morning, 1876, at St. Lazarus Episcopal Church in downtown Memphis. Winnie and Jeff Jr., along with Addison’s sister Sallie, were in the wedding party. A reception followed at the Davis home, and the newlyweds spent a few days honeymooning in St. Louis.7 Maggie and Addison seemed to be madly in love, and Jefferson and Varina were both pleased and relieved that their oldest girl had married well with another southern aristocrat.

  The Davis girls were typecast from the very beginning. Each had her own role to play: Maggie’s wedding set her on the traditional nineteenth-century feminine path of becoming a wife and mother. She was always considered the “pretty one” in the Davis family, while Winnie was the “smart one.” Their mother had created this contrast.

  While, according to historian Suzanne T. Dolensky, Varina’s “written comments about Winnie overwhelmingly outnumbered those about all their other children combined, her only regret was that Winnie was not pretty. She often commented on the beauty of her sons and found Maggie as a young woman ‘unusually pretty.’”8 With the wide age difference and the girls living in different places, this type of labeling did not seem to present a problem. Later in life, however, Maggie would express some jealousy regarding her sister, doubtless exacerbated by her mother’s blatant favoritism of her youngest child.9

  With Maggie safely married off, Varina and Jefferson began more seriously to consider Winnie’s future. Sending their youngest, most intellectual child abroad for school seemed like the perfect solution. The parents reasoned that if Winnie were in Europe, where many had favored the Confederate cause, the young girl might escape some of the abuse directed toward her family as well as unflattering commentaries about her father’s conduct during the war. Jefferson especially was always solicitous of his daughter’s well-being and never wished her to bear the consequences of his actions as the leader of the Confederacy.10

  Moreover, the traumas Varina had endured over the years, her three sons’ tragic deaths, her frequent struggles with Jefferson within her marriage, their loss of fortune, and the collapse of the Confederacy had finally caught up with her. She was suffering from debilitating depression, and Jefferson felt she could not adequately care for their youngest child. Although Varina had pulled herself together for her eldest daughter’s wedding, the former Confederate first lady suffered from unidentified physical ailments—probably the result of the crushing mélange of misery that had weighed her down over the years.

  As early as 1873, Jefferson himself had perceptively noted the connection between Varina’s physical ill health and her mental state in a frank letter to family friend Lucinda Davis Stamps on January 4, 1873: “Varina has for a long time suffered from a numbness in her limbs and her mental depression caused by our domestic bereavement has increased both the frequency and the violence of the attacks. The Doctors seem powerless, and only advise cheerfulness.”11 By 1876 Jefferson decided that Varina could no longer care for Winnie sufficiently. According to historian Carol Berkin, “Modern doctors would conclude that Varina Howell Davis had suffered a nervous breakdown.”12

  The Davises had another reason for sending Winnie away, this one perhaps more surprising. Jefferson was apparently quite worried about his youngest daughter’s stubbornness and lack of parental deference.13 Jefferson did not admire this trait in his wife, and he would certainly not tolerate such displays in his youngest daughter. It seems the parents jointly decided to crush this trait out of Winnie. Perhaps Varina knew how much her own strong will had cost her within her marriage and wished to save Winnie from facing similar problems. Jefferson expected complete deference from all females. So, on this point, at least, the Davises were in agreement.

  Consequently, the couple decided to place Winnie in a girls’ boarding school known as the Misses Friedlanders’ School for Girls in Karlsruhe, Germany. The establishment operated under the patronage of the Grand Duchess Luise of Baden, whose palace was not far from the school.14 Varina and Jefferson had other friends with children in the school, and Varina’s brother-in-law Carl de Wechmar Stoesse, Margaret’s husband, a titled Alsatian, may have also recommended the establishment.15

  Although Maggie had attended boarding school in Paris, at the Convent of the Assumption in Auteuil, 16th Arrondissement,16 Jefferson vetoed this path for Winnie. He wrote to Varina that he was disgusted by the Parisian open display of “prints and toys of amorous passions, such words and the exhibition of such types of general sentiment cannot be favorable to the cultivation or preservation of modesty.”17 Why the Davises allowed Maggie to go to Paris and not Winnie remains a mystery.

  Winnie, her friend Pinnie Meredith, and her parents sailed for Liverpool in late May 1876. Varina and the girls stayed with her sister Margaret and her husband in
Liverpool while Jefferson worked in London.18 Then, in early September 1876 Jefferson took a very apprehensive Winnie and a nervous Pinnie to a London railway station to place them en route to boarding school. Jefferson left them there with a friend of the family, who accompanied them to Karlsruhe.19 Varina did not see the girls off. She stayed at home in London, too ill to accompany them.

  It was Jefferson who answered Winnie’s first letter home to her parents. Writing from London on September 21, 1876, he began his letter sympathetically, but Jefferson also chided Winnie for not acknowledging his parting gesture: “I yet see your sad little face as you sat crouching in the corner of the R.R. carriage, too absorbed in your grief to notice my last salutation. The house seemed funereal when we no longer heard the voices of our little ones, and your Mother said she was ever expecting one of you to come in.”20

  He continued, now launching into what was to be a recurring and central theme in both his own life and that of his approval-oriented daughter: “It is true, but not pleasant that duty demands self-sacrifice. Yet it is the highest attribute of humanity to be able to give to a sense of duty, that which it costs pain to surrender.”21 This was the formative lesson that Winnie was to absorb above all others and to reflect dramatically in her adult personal life.

  Jefferson soon sailed back home, but Varina stayed on in Liverpool alone, remaining physically and mentally too ill to travel. As she began to feel better, she often visited Winnie in Karlsruhe, but her health still did not permit her to return to the United States. Varina wrote her husband on February 18, 1877, noting, “I am much better last week—I am however afraid to risk travelling yet, so remain near Winnie until I am strong enough to go to England again.” In the same letter she relates that her physician Dr. Cartwright had diagnosed her troubles as “misplaced malaise.”22