Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  These gatherings were filled with elaborate rituals, symbolic gestures, and strictly observed codes of conduct. Historian David Hardin notes, “In the shame of defeat and the squalor of Reconstruction, Southerners were again eager to fasten on to these cavalier notions.” Hardin further comments that author and satirist Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi (1883), would sneer at the melodrama Sir Walter Scott had created in his novels, calling the writer out for his creation of a “‘Middle Age sham civilization’ and for culturally misleading southerners before the war.”4 Yet Scott’s influence was long lasting; his portrayals developed how the antebellum South was romanticized in nineteenth-century literature.

  Representative southern women were literally placed on pedestals during veterans’ reunions, to be worshipped by their knights. This concept was not taken lightly; indeed, the idea of southern men being knights who would give their lives to protect their women was, according to historian Joel Williamson, “deadly serious.”5

  These courtly rituals concealed a darker fear that possessed and indeed obsessed many of the veterans. These men frequently expressed fears of rape of white women by “outsiders.” The term outsiders referred to both northern white men and black men. Some southern males had an abiding horror that black men and Yankees were actively attempting to steal their women away from the South. Insecurity bred by wartime defeat and dramatically diminished economic status resulted in this preoccupation for many former Confederate soldiers.6

  The concepts of chivalry ingrained in the type of southern aristocratic male who originally participated in the veterans’ reunions dictated that a true gentleman must rescue ladies in distress. The fact that southern soldiers had often not been able to fulfill this dictate during the Civil War caused feelings of rage and inadequacy among many veterans that the rituals of reunion sought to alleviate.

  When the Davis entourage pulled in to the train depot in West Point, Georgia, on April 30, 1886, its occupants were more than ready to disembark from their sooty quarters. A swelling crowd of Confederate veterans were waiting, eagerly anticipating their leader’s arrival. Despite the South’s crushing defeat in the Civil War, Jefferson still retained his stature, and his popularity that spring was rising.

  Winnie was also on the train that day, accompanying her father as he helped unveil a series of new Confederate monuments. A band was playing as they arrived, and it is likely that Winnie and Jefferson heard welcoming brass bands playing “Dixie” or “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” accompanied by Confederate veterans’ savage-sounding rebel yells.7 In contrast to the themes of courtliness and chivalry present at inaugural veterans’ meetings, the former president and his daughter were now seeing wilder, more uncontrolled displays of enthusiasm from their supporters.

  On this particular afternoon Jefferson had taken ill and was not able to speak. The host of the event, Georgia governor John B. Gordon, a shrewd former Confederate general with a flair for the dramatic, grabbed Winnie and propelled her to the platform to take her father’s place. Gordon introduced Winnie as “the daughter of the Confederacy … the war baby of our old chieftain.”8 The huge crowd of world-weary, grizzled Confederate veterans roared their approval and delight when they saw the poised, attractive young girl.

  Here, in burned-out, defeated West Point, Winnie was reborn and christened the “Daughter of the Confederacy.”9 The surprised but pleased young woman waved shyly to the crowd during the speeches that followed. Although she said nothing, her presence lent an air of authenticity to the veterans’ rally. Her mother noted in her memoirs, “Governor Gordon, our heroic paladin of long ago presented Varina [Winnie] to the crowd as ‘The Daughter of the Confederacy.’”10 The very next day her new title was employed again in Atlanta at the unveiling of the monument to Benjamin H. Hill. Newspaperman Hon. Henry W. Grady introduced Winnie once again as the Daughter of the Confederacy.11 This triumphal tour marked the beginning of Winnie’s rise as the most powerful female symbol of the “Lost Cause.”

  Despite receiving her title in such an impromptu manner, Winnie quickly emerged as a southern superstar, eclipsing even her father in popularity. Her days of anonymity had disappeared forever, and she became a vessel for sentimental southern memories. These myths of an antebellum and Civil War era South were ones Winnie helped to propagate, even though they were visions that she did not herself possess.

  As historian and Jefferson Davis biographer William C. Davis explains, it is the conquered, not the conquerors, who tend to indulge more in mythmaking: “Winners have little to explain to themselves. They won. For the losers, however, coping with defeat, dealing with it personally and explaining it to others, places enormous strains on the ego, self-respect, and sense of self-worth of the defeated.”12 Postwar Confederate veterans were continually trying to make sense of what had happened to them, to come to terms with their crushing defeat. They needed an icon to cling to, someone to guide them through the choppy and unknown waters of Reconstruction. Jefferson Davis’s youngest child became this icon. She came to represent redemption to these defeated soldiers. Winnie’s presence reassured them of their self-worth and manhood, while she also embodied the idea of the vestal virgin. Veterans and the adoring southern public deemed her “the unrivalled pearl of Beauvoir.”13

  Confederate veterans hailed Jefferson, their former president, for his suffering during and after the war. While her father’s image signaled to veterans the need to preserve the past, Winnie symbolized their hopes for the future. As the female embodiment of the Lost Cause and the living representative of the principles for which the veterans had fought, Winnie afforded these men the sort of absolution they craved. She was quickly “adopted” by the veterans and became part of their tribe and tribal rituals.

  It became more and more common at UCV reunions to introduce attractive representative women, usually the daughters of prominent Confederate leaders, to the veterans. Winnie quickly became the most sought-after candidate for this honor. She was always considered a cut above the other women presented at such gatherings.14 These women were almost always young, pretty, and unmarried. They were always instructed to wear white to the presentation ceremony. Historian Gaines Foster calls this recurring tableau “a ritual presentation of virgins to veterans, it assured the soldiers that the women of the South loved them despite their defeat and thereby indirectly affirmed their manhood.”15 On the surface these spectacles resembled nothing so much as a modern-day beauty pageant, but beneath the surface bubbled a much more serious undertone.

  Female sponsors at these reunions were intended to represent the ideal southern woman who had remained true to the Confederate men and the Confederate cause both during and after the war. Although the intent was to reward these women for their loyalty, the presentations also reaffirmed the antebellum stereotypes of ideal southern womanhood: piety, innocence, unwordliness, and complete deference to and unequivocal support of men—concepts Winnie’s father Jefferson surely endorsed.

  Winnie’s married older sister, Margaret Hayes, also attended some of these reunions, but she never inspired the kind of furor and admiration that Winnie did. Some historians think that slender, beautiful, Paris-educated Margaret might have been a bit wounded by all the praise garnered by her sister. Joan Cashin writes that “Maggie Hayes sometimes felt excluded by all the attention lavished on her sister, but it was hard to duplicate Winnie’s bond with the neo-Confederate public.”16 But Davis family letters between the sisters during this period show no evidence of the older sister’s jealousy, only Margaret and Addison’s longing to see Winnie more often.

  Margaret wrote Winnie affectionately during this time but referred to childbirth injuries and a “nervousness” that disinclined her to write more often. “I cannot tell you what a relief and pleasure the charming letter you wrote me was … I would be always writing if I followed my inclinations but I find it increases my nervousness and produces so much pain I can’t afford to do it.”17 Perhaps her inability to write as frequently as her mother
and sister would have liked, coupled with her residency far from the South, in Colorado, kept her at a distance from both her blood family and their surrogate family of Confederate veterans. Margaret, Addison, and their brood had moved to Colorado Springs in the summer of 1885, due in part to Addison’s debilitating asthma but also so the couple could seek their fortune out West, far from the ruined postwar South.18

  General Lee’s daughter Mildred also could not compete with Winnie’s incandescent appeal. Winnie held a special place in Confederate veterans’ hearts. The younger daughter of Jefferson Davis was enshrined in a way that no other daughter of a southern or northern general could rival.19 The primary reason for Winnie’s extreme popularity with vets was the fact that she had been born in the Confederate White House during the war, thus providing proof of Jefferson Davis’s manhood and virility. Winnie’s sweet and submissive nature and her unmarried status sealed the deal. She is almost always depicted in virginal white bridal-esque dresses in her portraits. A married woman could not have represented the desires of the veterans as Winnie did.

  Winnie was not simply a comforting goddess figure for the men of the South. She would also serve as a rallying figure for a growing number of southern women’s Confederate memorial associations. Her first honorary title came when she was unanimously elected in March 1891 as the first president of the Missouri Daughters of the Confederacy.20 This organization eventually became part of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an important second-generation women’s Confederate memorial association.

  According to historians Caroline E. Janney and Karen Cox, the first-generation Ladies’ Memorial Associations (LMAS) in the South were primarily populated with those who had experienced the war as adults (those born between 1830 and 1850).21 LMAS paved the way for a newer, more modern women’s memorial group: the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was established on September 10, 1894, in Nashville, Tennessee.22 UDC members considered the LMAS the “mother” association, but as the “daughters” of this group, Janney argues, the UDC “may have gained such widespread popularity because [it] appeared to be a more youthful association.”23

  Association with the young, beautiful, and well-educated Winnie lent credibility, an aristocratic tinge, and a sense of vibrancy and freshness to the UDC—exactly the image these young women wished to portray. Just as she had within the United Confederate Veterans Association, Winnie held a special status at the UDC that no other woman could touch. She was quite literally the patron saint who inspired the organization’s name.24 Winnie was a member of the Mary Custis Lee Chapter, No. 7, of the UDC in Alexandria, Virginia, which she had joined in October 1896. Her mother was also a member of this chapter.25 Applications also exist for Varina and Winnie indicating they applied and were accepted for membership in the New York Chapter, No. 103, of the UDC in March 1897.26

  The UDC continued its mission to preserve the traditions and historical memory of the Lost Cause even as veterans began to die off. Foster writes, “The preservation and the promulgation of the southern view of the war” was one of their stated goals.27 The UDC also provided an important outlet for women of the era to channel their energies outside of the home. From the time of the organization’s founding until World War I, the ladies of the UDC provided a legitimate place for southern women to work within the public sphere.28 Even into the twenty-first century, Winnie retains a special status in the UDC. According to Jamie Likins, the current president general of the organization, Winnie remains an aspirational figure for the United Daughters: “It is no wonder that UDC members revere Winnie’s memory because, during her short life, she demonstrated fulfillment of the Organization’s objectives: Historical, Educational, Benevolent, Memorial, and Patriotic.” Likins notes that the UDC sparingly awards “Winnie Davis” medals to members of exceptional achievement, those whose dedication “far exceeds the requirements of membership, just as Winnie went beyond the call of duty in her relationships and endeavors.”29

  Winnie Davis’s image as the female icon of the Confederacy thus came to represent many of the goals and ideals of both the ucv and the UDC. According to historian Cita Cook, the young woman represented both a feminine Liberty figure and a damsel in distress that Confederate “knights” in their shining armor were bound to rescue and protect. Some took these personifications even a step further into religious deification, casting her as “the Virgin in a Confederate passion play.”30

  Despite Winnie’s European education as a teenager, she did not rebel against her new role as Daughter of the Confederacy. She seems to have been groomed with the ideals of southern womanhood so early on that she could never fully reject them. From birth Varina and Jefferson had raised her to be a lady, though not a frivolous one. She accepted most of the traditional models for women without question at this stage in her young life.

  Winnie was both by nature and by nurture the perfect tabula rasa on which to project Lost Cause nostalgia. She was the polar opposite of her strong-willed, opinionated mother, Varina, whose love for political conversation and wit had made her widely disliked in conservative Richmond. Winnie by contrast was quiet, shy, humble, and loved by almost everyone because she kept her opinions to herself in social discourse.

  While Winnie was demonstratively an ardent advocate of the Confederate cause due to her familial roots and public persona, she would never take issue with those who opposed her on the subject.31 She always set out to appease, never to offend. One can conjecture that Winnie observed her mother fight and lose almost all the battles with her father for control. She perhaps surmised that the way to win affection, particularly from men, was by showing complete and utter deference to their opinions.

  Winnie was consequently apt to underestimate the worth of her personal opinions and often made self-deprecating comments to others about her own intelligence. In an 1887 letter to friend Gaston Robbins, Winnie proffered an opinion, only to negate its value by describing it “as just the opinion of such an unlearned person as I am.”32 Some of these comments were probably just forms of southern politesse, as social rules dictated that women observe a certain degree of modesty when conversing with men. But some of them can be attributed to Winnie’s inherent shyness. She typically hung back from leading discussions of any nature. According to one source, “she was chary of expressing her opinions,” and she was “too modest to lead a conversation.”33

  Winnie was unmarried and thus seen as pure and virginal, a quality much venerated by veterans. She was young and fresh, offering a striking contrast to the older, grizzled, and battle-scarred former Confederate soldiers. The Daughter of the Confederacy was a living representation of sweethearts on the home front who had stayed true to their southern soldier beaux even when the men came home paralyzed, with amputated limbs, and addled by what would now be termed post–traumatic stress disorder. This at least was the fantasy of Winnie Davis held by these veterans, who had lost practically everything in the war.

  At first Winnie willingly accepted the adulation, honors, and pledges of brotherhood that the vets offered up to her. She was surely dazzled by all the attention and worshipful stance of the veterans who surrounded her, not yet realizing the binding consequences of such an association. When Winnie was given a badge of membership in the Robert E. Lee Camp, Governor Fitzhugh Lee of Virginia declared she was not only the Daughter of the Confederacy but also the sister of these men.34 According to Keith Hardison, a former curator of Beauvoir: “Veterans saw Winnie as the female activist in the presidential family. Therefore, she belonged to them.”35 At twenty-one Winnie seemed to accept this role without question or hesitation.

  Many former Confederates hoped fervently that Winnie would marry a son of one of the great Confederate generals, thereby preserving and even enhancing the Lost Cause legacy. Historian William C. Davis notes, “Well-meaning protectors of the Lost Cause even expressed a hope that through her a sort of Confederate royal bloodline might be preserved and passed on, suggesting to Davis that she marry some gr
andson of Lee or Jackson, Sidney Johnston or Breckenridge.”36 The former soldiers’ affection for Winnie was further stoked by her frequent appearances at their meetings and her apparent willingness to play the part assigned to her by her father and his former colleagues. The veterans took a paternal, protective stance toward Winnie, one that eventually devolved into a fierce territorial jealousy.

  Marriage itself was seen by many of these former Confederates as a degradation of women. Mary Chesnut, the Davises’ friend and noted diarist, wrote, “There is no slave, after all, like a wife … You know how women sell themselves and are sold into marriage, from queens downward.”37 The idea of Winnie getting married and having children, thus losing her virginity and her special status, was anathema to many of the southern men who worshipped her.

  What southern war veterans really wanted was a goddess or an angel, someone otherworldly who was above banal domestic occupations. The United Daughters of the Confederacy wanted a role model and an inspiration. Thus, Winnie Davis would become a revered part of the Confederate pantheon. But in exchange the chosen one would have to conform to an Old South code of conduct that would not fit easily into the ways of the New South.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Life in a Fishbowl

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” These lines from Keat’s immortal poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” had a tremendous impact on the literary public of the nineteenth-century South, reflecting the Romanticism inherent in its antebellum, upper-class way of life.1 The medieval mind-set and the lost world of knights and their ladies remained very much on these southerners’ minds. And for them Jefferson Davis’s youngest daughter seemed like the perfect woman to carry this banner of Romanticism forward into the future.