Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Or was she?

  The triumphant Confederate tour of spring 1886 had brought momentous change to Winnie’s formerly calm, ordered lifestyle. After the twenty-one-year-old was crowned “Daughter of the Confederacy” in West Point, Georgia, with another engagement in Atlanta, the Davis entourage went on to Montgomery, Alabama. There Winnie stood next to her father at the state capitol in Montgomery on the exact spot where Jefferson had been inaugurated as the Confederate president twenty-five years earlier. Varina’s biographer Ishbel Ross describes the event: “The band played ‘The Bonnie Blue Flag.’ The crowd cheered. Many of the women wept. For the first time, Winnie realized the full intensity of feeling that surrounded her father’s history.”2

  Winnie was at this point a young woman who had been brought up with a European perspective. Her parents’ well-meaning and deliberate isolation of her as a teenager in Germany made her unique among her southern peers. At twenty-one she was more German than American and saw life in the postwar South through a predominantly European lens. She had spent almost half of her short life away from the United States and the South. As a consequence, writes historian Joan Cashin, Winnie was “fluent in German and French, and her accent when she spoke English was mittle-European.”3

  Winnie’s “otherness” sprang from an education abroad that was partially designed by her parents to separate her both physically and psychologically from the bloody history of the Confederacy. She herself realized that she was different from other girls her age and often felt excluded and lonely. Years after she returned from her European schooling, she wrote firmly against this popular practice among the American elite. In 1892, in a piece written for the Ladies’ Home Journal, Winnie recalled her own boarding school experience, living in drafty, unheated rooms with frozen pitchers of water, hard beds, and plain food, “conditions which in America would be considered hard usage for servants of the meanest class.”4 She revealed in an earlier piece what she called “the seamy side of a foreign schoolgirl’s existence, some of the hardships endured patiently, some of the necessary things left unlearned, and the unimportant things laboriously acquired, only to prove unwieldy ballast when they enter the race for society favor.”5

  The newly minted Daughter of the Confederacy sometimes felt at odds with her native South and sometimes even with her family due to her European education. The niceties of English were a struggle for her, and she frequently felt misunderstood. She wrote in the Ladies Home Journal: “From the moment of her return to her native heath, the Europeanized American girl begins to find herself the victim of her misdirected education … All her little peculiarities are misunderstood, or unobserved, all her ideas regarded as odd, her mannerisms smiled over, she stands among her kindred an alien in her own family.”6

  Varina herself soon realized that her youngest daughter—so recently returned to her—was foreign, essentially German, and this made her entry into American society awkward. She noted that Winnie’s intelligence and education also sometimes resulted in social difficulties. “My child is good and wonderfully clever—but not like the rest of the world. This mutual difference separates her from most girls, and she wonders why she feels lonely.”7

  Winnie also lamented her lack of education concerning American history, noting that American girls like herself who had been recently educated in Europe “stumble over the battle of New Orleans, and is not quite sure whether it was Washington or General Grant who commanded.”8 Her advice to upper-class Americans considering a European education for their daughters was clear. Although the academic experience might be superior, stay home: “Though her French or German may not be quite so fluent, in the dignity of her American womanhood she will proudly boast … ‘I dwell among my own people.’”9

  Winnie was essentially a European who had spent her formative years in countries governed by monarchs. She wrote that women like her had been “nurtured on the divine right of kings as an unanswerable hypothesis, and dazzled by glimpses of court splendor, she often learns to look upon a republican form of government as a crude expedient of people in the transition state between barbarism and monarchy.”10

  Although she clearly benefited from her studies abroad in terms of her academic and cultural development, Winnie also suffered from what a person from her time period would call an “over-education.” In Europe she would have been welcomed into intellectual circles. In the United States, however, she was out of step with her peers and her family. Winnie clearly and correctly deemed herself a stranger in her own land.

  How ironic it was, then, that this sheltered and thoroughly European convent girl was destined to become the most prominent living symbol of the southern Lost Cause. Her new role, while attractive to her, had been thrust upon her by an adoring but dispirited southern public. Winnie displayed all the qualities of the ideal southern woman. Yet she lacked the deep hatred of northerners that so many would have expected her to possess. She was a unique combination and a young woman who appealed to both her peers and those of her parents’ generation.

  After the tour ended and Winnie and her father returned to Beauvoir, she began to travel and act on her own. She slowly became part of a more national social scene, appearing not only in big southern cities, including New Orleans, where she was a Mardi Gras debutante, but also in northeastern cities such as New York. The young woman was invited to balls, parties, and teas by friends of Varina and Jefferson who had scattered all over the country after the war.

  Although she still preferred art galleries and books to parties, she felt obliged to attend such events as a representative of her family. Her mother, Varina, also instinctively realized that this was the ideal time for her youngest daughter to find a husband. Winnie was at the peak of her attractiveness and charm and her popularity in the South continued its meteoric rise.

  Winnie had looks, modesty, and an exotic lineage to her credit. She was soon also to receive a societal assist from powerful family allies. Before Winnie’s return from boarding school in the early 1880s, Jefferson and Varina had become friendly with newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer through his wife, Kate, a distant Davis cousin. It was an interesting and ironic relationship because Pulitzer, a self-made man and also Jewish, had fought on the Union side in the Civil War. The newspaper owner’s status had significantly improved since his early days as a poor, Hungarian immigrant who could barely speak English. Since he had taken over the New York World newspaper in 1883, according to his biographer James McGrath Morris, “the World had grown at meteoric speed, becoming at one point, the largest circulating newspaper on the globe.”11

  As a result of this success in the world of print, Joseph and Kate became fabulously wealthy. Joseph’s newspaper voice often denounced the upper classes, even while he himself had joined their ranks financially. Although the press baron often ridiculed the elite in his papers, he had essentially become one of them himself. He was one of the fifty richest Americans by 1891, with three imposing mansions: one on New York’s Upper East Side, one on Mount Desert Island in Maine, and a third estate on posh Jekyll Island, a millionaire boys’ club retreat off the coast of Georgia.12

  To an impressionable Winnie, Kate and Joseph must have seemed incredibly glamorous. They in turn must have been attracted both to the young woman’s sweet nature and to her growing status as the Daughter of the Confederacy. The Pulitzers grew so attached to the young girl that they eventually asked her to be godmother to their middle son, Joe Jr. In May 1887 Varina wrote Joseph Sr. a somewhat fawning letter inquiring after his son and reassuring the Pulitzers about Winnie’s commitment to her role: “How is Winnie’s godchild? … Winnie says she means to be a ‘fine enough Godmother’ and intends to teach him his duty to his neighbor. She then added ‘he would do well to follow his father’s example.’”13

  Later that fall Winnie wrote a warm letter to Joseph Sr., comparing his boy to her other high-spirited godson, her nephew, Jefferson Addison Hayes: “My two god-sons seem to be rather alike from all I can hear, as this littl
e man is as bright, and as bad as he can be; and makes me very glad to think I have not to fulfill the sponsorial task of teaching him his catechism for some time to come.”14

  When Winnie made one of her first visits to New York after returning home from Europe, in 1885, Kate became her guide to the city’s social scene.15 The two women attended a December society ball together, but the New York Times society columnist did not remark upon Winnie at all. She was still relatively unknown to the northern public and did not particularly stand out.

  Unlike her younger relative, the striking Kate did not escape notice, fashionably attired as she was in a satin gown trimmed with ostrich feathers and crystal pendants. A New York society columnist wrote: “Her manner is cordial and fascinating. She has large black eyes fringed with long lashes, a brilliant color, perfect teeth, lovely white sloping shoulders, a head well-poised and coils of dark brown hair.”16

  In the years to come, because of the Pulitzer connection as well as her status as the Daughter of the Confederacy, the New York press treated Winnie as if she were a southern princess and began to take more and more interest in her social movements. Historian Cita Cook observes that Kate acted as a “surrogate big sister for Winnie whenever she was in the Northeast.”17

  Kate and Winnie were opposites. Winnie was sweet, demure, not interested in fashion, gossip, or clothes, and without much in the way of financial resources. Kate was a firecracker: feisty, opinionated, fashionable, and worldly, with money to burn. Winnie played the role of Gone with the Wind’s Melanie Wilkes to Kate’s Scarlett O’Hara.

  Despite their vastly different temperaments, or perhaps because of them, the two women were destined to become fast friends and frequent traveling companions throughout Winnie’s adult life. Joseph and Kate were both instrumental in launching Winnie into the broader, more diverse society of the Northeast, where she would begin to spend more and more of her time.

  Perhaps Joseph Pulitzer also recognized a kindred spirit in Winnie. To the public both were American icons, he a newspaper baron and she a darling of the postwar South. But despite their elevated status, Joseph and Winnie often felt isolated from American society. Neither of them would ever quite fit in.

  In 1886, once Winnie became known as the Daughter of the Confederacy, the anonymity she had experienced in New York with Kate Pulitzer just one year earlier was gone forever. Her every move was chronicled by the Victorian southern and northern presses, both perpetually hungry for scandal and gossip about the Davis family. Because of her new status as a Confederate goddess, the papers that had not remarked upon her presence at the 1885 ball in New York with Kate Pulitzer were now salivating over her. The press reported constantly on the young woman’s socializing, making it difficult for Winnie to move about freely without judgment.

  In late December 1886 Varina wrote about the issue to her old friends Connie and Burton Harrison, noting that Winnie “is so watched by reporters that I cannot telegraph and by the time I hear anything she has left the place where it happened … I have been so tormented by anxiety that but for my knowledge of her rare discretion and well-poised character I would summon her home at once.”18

  In the same letter Varina indicated her conflicted stance on Winnie’s newfound celebrity. She seemed to want her daughter to get out and have a social life, despite her worries about the nineteenth-century paparazzi. Varina confided in Connie: “Mr. Davis, who is, as you know, very old, dwells on the past. The shadow of the Confederacy grows heavier over him as years weigh his heart down and my child is the coming woman, not the woman of my day still less of his.”19

  The young girl soon began to chafe against the chains placed upon her. As Confederate royalty, certain expectations were placed upon Winnie that would dramatically change the course of her life. The intense media scrutiny placed a heavy burden on Winnie, as she was held up to young women throughout the South as a role model. “Her every move would be watched paternally by millions,” writes historian William Davis, “and in an era where a young woman could find herself idealized, Winnie bore special responsibilities to be the perfect daughter and, it was expected, the perfect wife.”20

  During the 1880s both Winnie and her mother began a warm correspondence with novelist and essayist Charles Dudley Warner. Charles was a good friend of Mark Twain, coauthoring a novel with him in 1873 entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. The letters between Warner, Winnie, and Varina reveal tantalizing glimpses of Winnie’s personality as it related to her literary work. Winnie’s letters to her newfound literary mentor are disingenuous and worshipful. On December 23, 1885, Winnie wrote Warner a Christmas card that she had illustrated herself with a beautiful sketch of a sailing ship: “[I] enclose a card of home manufacture, which having no great merit in itself, may yet perhaps bring with it some part of the gratitude all of your readers must feel for the lovely visions your pen conjures up before them.”21

  1. Jefferson and Varina early in their marriage. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  2. William H. Mumler, Mrs. Jeff Davis—“Don’t provoke the President or he may hurt some of you.” This political propaganda image from 1865 of the former Confederate president trying to escape capture in petticoats was a northern fabrication. (International Center of Photography, gift of Charles Schwarz, 2012.)

  3. Carte de visite of Joseph Evan “Little Joe” Davis, who died tragically at age five (Valentine Richmond History Center, Richmond.)

  4. The balcony at the White House of the Confederacy where Joe Davis fell to his death. The balcony was fifteen to twenty feet above ground level when the house was built. Some sources say Jefferson Davis had the original balcony demolished after Joe’s fall. (Photo by James Christopher Lee.)

  5. Winnie as a baby with her mother, Varina. Winnie would become Varina’s favorite child. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  6. The Davis children in Montreal, circa 1866, when Jefferson was imprisoned at Fort Monroe. Left to right: Jeff Jr., Maggie, Billy, and Winnie. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  7. Winnie as a little girl in fancy dress, already looking like the “Daughter of the Confederacy.” (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  8. Margaret “Maggie” Davis on her wedding day, January 1, 1876, to Joel Addison Hayes. Despite the Davises’ financial woes, Margaret still wore a couture gown from Paris as her wedding dress. (Beauvoir, Biloxi MS.)

  9. Winnie at sixteen, when she attended the Misses Friedlanders’ School for Girls in Karlsruhe, Germany. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  10. Sarah Dorsey, “authoress,” mistress of Beauvoir, and fervent admirer of Jefferson Davis. (Beauvoir, Biloxi MS.)

  11. The photo, circa 1890, most often used to depict Winnie as the “Daughter of the Confederacy.” (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  12. Newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer. He and his wife, Kate, were friends of the Davis family. He would become Winnie and Varina’s financial savior in later years. (World Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.)

  13. Kate Pulitzer, wife of Joseph Pulitzer. Kate was Winnie’s glamorous best friend and “chaperone” for many of her travels in the northeastern United States, Europe, and the Middle East. (World Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York.)

  14. A miniature of Winnie, 1880s. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  15. Alfred “Fred” Wilkinson was a handsome, six-foot-tall Harvard graduate who became engaged to Winnie. He was also the northern grandson of famous abolitionist Samuel Joseph May. (Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse NY.)

  16. Samuel Joseph May’s home at 157 James Street in Syracuse ny, where Winnie and Fred courted. During the Civil War Fred’s abolitionist grandfather hid runaway slaves under his back porch. (Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse NY.)

  17. Winnie as the 1892 Queen of Comus at the New Orleans Mardi Gras, surrounded by the ladies of her court. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  18. A sta
ged photo of the two Davis sisters, Margaret and Winnie, at tea, mid- to late-1880s. Margaret was the only child of Jefferson and Varina to marry and have children. (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond.)

  19. Photo of Winnie in New York 1890s. (Valentine Richmond History Center, Richmond.)

  20. Photo, left to right: unidentified man with Winnie, Margaret, and Addison Hayes, taken June 19, 1894, at gold rush site Cripple Creek near Colorado Springs co. Winnie was on a visit to Colorado Springs to see her sister and her family. Margaret and her husband, Addison, left the postwar South in 1885 and moved out West for the sake of Addison’s health and to make their fortune. (Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.)

  21. The Angel of Grief statue on Winnie Davis’s grave at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond. (Photo by James Christopher Lee.)

  While Winnie was penning such charming notes to her mentor, the shrewd Varina was already networking on her beloved daughter’s behalf. Varina wrote Warner from Beauvoir just after Christmas in 1886 that she hoped Winnie would go to Bar Harbor the next summer with her friends Connie and Burton Harrison but that Winnie would probably just as soon stay home: “Her father seems to think that she would rather see the reflection of the world in books, but I have found out that world is old, and hers is young and strangely different and she must study her own and make the most of it.”22 In the letter Varina pressed Warner to help Winnie with her writing career, should she eventually produce anything of value.23 Warner did indeed help Winnie, and he would help her find publishing opportunities throughout her career. With his encouragement, Winnie began to pursue her literary career openly and with zest. Winnie’s first work, an article about serpent myths, was published in the North American Literary Review in 1888.24