The Davis family had also become friends with Irish publisher John Lovell while in Canada in the late 1860s, and Winnie had remained friends with one of Lovell’s daughters. Subsequently, Lovell agreed to publish Winnie’s monograph of Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet, entitled An Irish Knight of the 19th Century, in 1888.25 It is easy to see why the young author was drawn to Emmet, a young rebel of the Irish political cause. Winnie was interested in the subject partially because Varina’s grandfather, Col. James Kempe, of Natchez, had acted as one of Emmet’s men as a teenager, when he still lived in Ireland.26 Perhaps Winnie was also inspired by Irish writer Oscar Wilde’s 1882 visit to Beauvoir. There are also many obvious parallels in the book to the life of Jefferson Davis himself.
Like Jefferson, Emmet was jailed for his political activities and mistreated by his captors. In her book on the young revolutionary, Winnie wrote sympathetically as if she had known Emmet personally: “The prisoner’s ankles were severely lacerated by the fetters; yet, though weakened by loss of blood, overcome by the fatigues of the previous day and the want of food, his uncomplaining fortitude seems to have touched even the heart of the prison official.”27
Another part of Emmet’s story illuminates Winnie’s own views of romance, love, and duty. Emmet had loved a woman named Sarah Curran and longed to marry her. He denied himself this love, however, and devoted himself to the Irish cause. Like Jefferson Davis as well as Irene, the self-denying Confederate heroine of Augusta J. Evans’s novel Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice (1864), Emmet felt it was best to yield up his personal life in service to a higher purpose. Winnie put these words into the Irish patriot’s mouth: “Heaven forbid that an excusable passion should thwart the design of my life, or cause me for an instant to neglect my country’s good for the purpose of promoting my own personal advantage.”28 She also created a verse at the very end of the book that can be read not only as a tribute to Emmet and his eventual martyrdom but also an homage to her own father’s doomed leadership of the Confederacy: “Oh not for idle hatred, not for honor, future, nor self-applause, / But for the glory of the cause, You did what will not be forgot.29
Despite Winnie’s clear literary talents, her well-known and widely praised intellect was not always seen as a plus. It was considered a defect by many men and was something Winnie often tried to conceal. Unlike either of her parents, Winnie had a sense of personal humility so strong that she was apt to underestimate herself. This behavior worked well in the marriage market, and she was often praised for her humble opinion of herself.
In order to attract the ultimate prize of a husband, Winnie would not only have to downplay her intellect, but she would also have to put her physical charms on display. Winnie did not go out of her way to show herself off—it was not her style. But she was constantly in the papers and subjected to much the same scrutiny that celebrities face today. Her looks were an endless source of debate for journalists of the era. The constant opining on her face and figure in newspapers and magazines of the day must have at the very least annoyed Winnie, if not completely upset her.
Despite her fishbowl existence among the nineteenth-century paparazzi, Winnie was finally allowed to make a trip up North on her own during the fall of 1886 to visit Bessie Martin Dew, her brother Jeff Jr.’s old girlfriend, now married to a doctor and living in New York. Although her father apparently opposed the trip, Varina thought it would be healthy for Winnie to get away from Beauvoir, noting that the home was “as isolated as the island of Elba.”30
On the visit Winnie’s presence in New York City was duly noted and commented upon by numerous papers of the day. As she ate her first breakfast in the city at the New York Hotel, reporters freely commented on her looks and her demeanor: “She has a dark complexion and is a pure Southern type of brunette … She bore all glances with calmness and was not in the least disturbed. Miss Davis is distinguished-looking, tall and sylph-like, but not handsome. Her carriage and deportment though, are so refined and perfect, any one not knowing her would turn to look at her twice.”31 The Confederate “It Girl” was learning to deal with the press, and they in turn caught something of her luminosity in their reports.
After Winnie’s trip to the city was over, Varina seemed to have had second thoughts about her daughter’s solo excursion. She wrote Bessie in late December 1886, “I never desired Winnie to go to New York City, for I was in the extremest misery the whole time she was there lest the reporters talk to her.” In her letter the former first lady of the Confederacy deemed New York a “babel” where both Winnie and Bessie—a resident of the city at the time—were “out of your depth … as much as I should be in Paris.”32
Perhaps the mother felt like her youngest daughter might be slipping out from under her control. Winnie did not write her frequently enough, she complained. “When Winnie writes she sends a meager account,” Varina told Bessie. “Night after night I lie awake fearing that the morning papers would bring me some wretched squib against her.”33 Winnie, for her part, seemed to be finally enjoying herself away from her mother’s constant micromanagement. She neither courted nor shied away from the press; instead, she simply soaked up the atmosphere of this most cosmopolitan of American cities and enjoyed being independent.
The young woman thus began to spread her wings and fly from the confines of her sedate lifestyle in Mississippi. She was beginning to find her way on her own and to make friends outside of the South. As she began her foray into this more diverse northeastern society, however, Winnie’s status as Daughter of the Confederacy was called into question. One man would stand as her champion, and he would be the most unlikely candidate imaginable.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I Will Never Consent!
Winnie’s love story begins, not unlike Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with a party.1 In the late fall of 1886, after Winnie and Bessie had enjoyed a visit together in New York City, Winnie moved on to Syracuse, New York, to visit her parents’ friends Gen. and Mrs. William H. Emory and their son Dr. Thomas Emory and his wife. The northern town in the 1880s was at the peak of its prosperity, strategically located as it was on the Erie Canal.
Many locals were not too enthusiastic about the Daughter of the Confederacy visiting their town. Some northerners, according to a piece in the New Orleans Times-Picayune from mid-December 1886, “had hoped she would not come to Syracuse.”2 Many in this northern city still found the southern cause abhorrent, and Winnie was seen as part and parcel of this legacy.
Winnie was acutely aware of this ill feeling regarding her background, and as a consequence she had declined repeated invitations to visit the Emory family. Mrs. Thomas Emory had urged Winnie to visit for three years. Mrs. Emory’s father-in-law, General Emory, was an old friend of Jefferson from his time as a senator in Washington in the 1850s. The time had come for the young woman to accept the Emorys’ invitation. “3
Dr. Thomas Emory had served in the Confederate army and had later married the daughter of a prominent Syracusian family, the McCarthys. Dr. Emory became a partner in the dry goods store the family had owned since 1806. Over the years the Emory family came to be important leaders in the town’s political and social circles.4
The Emory home, known to have the most elegant dining room in the city,5 was located at fashionable 80 East Fayette Street. The neighborhood was replete with Greek Revival mansions bought with railroading fortunes. The dinner parties at the Emory mansion, according to the piece in the Times-Picayune, were well known in the community “for their excellence, and to be invited there is one of the tests of position in society here.”6
This gracious home of the Emorys reportedly hosted both Winnie and Varina in the late fall of 1886. The famous mother and daughter were the Emorys’ guests of honor at a fabulous ball one evening during their visit to Syracuse. It was a glamorous and festive event. A 1946 Syracuse radio dramatization described the scene: “Carriage after carriage drew up in front of the big house on Fayette Street and stylishly dressed couples descended to enter.
”7
Although all the northern press reports place Varina in the receiving line with Winnie that night at the Emorys’ party, none of the southern reports mention her presence that night. Perhaps this is a deliberate omission? Varina was known to many to have northern friends and family. Many southerners still thought her loyalties during the war had been unpardonably divided.
The former Confederate first lady and her youngest girl did not have the money (or in Winnie’s case, the interest) to dress at the height of fashion. Consequently, Winnie may have felt a bit diminished by the ladies she was meeting that evening dressed in their New York finery. At the time tiny-waisted bodices were de rigeur as well as starched lacy collars. Hair was either piled high on the head in a pompadour style or drawn up tightly in a topknot, perhaps anchored with a jeweled comb. Ensembles were finished off with billowing skirts and bustles of epic proportions.8
Although Winnie may not have been the most stylish guest, her personal magnetism was evident. Many reports noted that she entranced many of the Emorys’ friends, skillfully avoiding contentious issues about her lineage and her views on the war. She insinuated herself into the Syracuse community, thanks to her unassuming and humble demeanor. A special dispatch to the Washington Post, on November 22, 1886, offered a description: “Miss Winnie Davis has quietly made her way into the good graces of the people of Syracuse. She has shown so much discretion in her conversation, and is so modest in her bearing, that those who have met her are already charmed.”9
Winnie even tried to help the Syracuse hospital board by appealing to Joseph Pulitzer for financial support and advice.10 Despite Winnie’s charitable efforts on behalf of her northern host town, some resident socialites still refused to talk to her and continued to nurse their anti-southern sentiments. Consequently, it is not surprising to find mention of Winnie suddenly becoming ill and finding herself unable to attend a Tuesday evening dinner party shortly after her arrival in town.11 Sickness was a socially acceptable way out of such obligations and became a coping pattern for the young woman that she often displayed in times of stress.
It was at the Emory home where Winnie first encountered Alfred “Fred” Wilkinson, an eligible young patent lawyer. She supposedly was introduced to Fred in the receiving line and was intrigued by the attractive and unattached Syracusian. The young man was described in one of Varina’s letters to her friend and neighbor Maj. W. H. Morgan as “handsome and physically striking with an imposing height of six feet, dark eyes and even, regular features. He possessed a refined and cultured demeanor in addition to excellent manners.”12 Fred was regarded in the community as a confirmed bachelor at the ripe old age of twenty-eight but an individual whom young women of the town watched with interest. The eligible young man would have been considered quite a catch for any young woman in the Syracuse social set.13
The young barrister had attended Harvard, where he graduated in the same class (1880) as Theodore Roosevelt.14 From a northern perspective Fred’s lineage was illustrious. His paternal grandfather was a lawyer and one of the founding fathers of Syracuse, The young lawyer’s maternal grandfather, the Reverend Samuel Joseph May, was a well-known abolitionist linked with Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Wendell Phillips. Samuel Joseph had wielded great influence both in the United States and in Great Britain as a spokesman for this cause and was known as “one of the bright gems in the Abolitionist sky.”15
Samuel Joseph was best known for his role in the “Jerry Rescue” of 1851. “Jerry” was the nickname of William McHenry, a mulatto who had escaped slavery in Missouri and come to Syracuse, where he found work as a cooper. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act compelled local police to arrest Jerry. In October 1850 Samuel Joseph, Gerrit Smith, and other local abolitionists arranged for dozens of men to break into the police station to free Jerry. He was then smuggled out of Syracuse to Kingston, Ontario.16
Each October thereafter, Samuel Joseph organized a public celebration of “Jerry Rescue Day,” one reason that the city was known as a “laboratory of abolitionism, libel, and treason.” From a southern perspective abolitionists were a dangerous lot and considered political extremists. Ironically, Gerrit Smith had been one of a group of prominent northerners who guaranteed a bond of $100,000 for Jefferson Davis’s release from Fort Monroe in May 1867.17
When Winnie and Fred first began to spend time together during the late fall and winter seasons of 1886–87, the young woman had already suffered through some unpleasant encounters with Syracuse socialites who refused to be drawn in by her winning personality. According to the memoir of one of the town’s native sons, travel writer E. Alexander Powell, Syracuse began as a clannish town that did not welcome outsiders, southern or otherwise: “Our local society was a close corporation, dominated by a few old families who were inclined to regard all outsiders with suspicion and distrust.”18
Fred, despite his abolitionist heritage, did not view Winnie’s background as a defect. Nor did she seem to give his grandfather’s pivotal role in the abolitionist movement a second thought. As is typical of those young and in love, their forebears’ political leanings made not a dent in their initial attraction for each other. “Really who cares about that now? It was so long ago,” the couple might have said to each other, if they even acknowledged these facts at all.
Others remembered the past vividly, however, and could not forget it so soon. Fred gallantly championed Winnie, trying to protect her from the rudeness she encountered in the northern atmosphere. In Fred’s eyes the young southern visitor, five years his junior, was beautiful, bright, cultured, and everything he could want in a potential mate. From all accounts Winnie regarded Fred in exactly the same manner. It was a classic case of love at first sight.
Because no love letters between Fred and Winnie have ever been found (women’s personal correspondence was often burned in the nineteenth century to preserve their privacy), one must imagine the psychological and emotional factors that drew the young couple together. Physically, they were both young and attractive. Both were extremely well educated and well spoken. Both were kind, thoughtful people from close-knit families.
Their backgrounds, however, could not have been more opposite. Was this perhaps part of their initial attraction? Up North Winnie had the freedom to see whomever she chose, and there were few southern “friends” to keep her away from northern men, who would be seen as undesirable. She could breathe in the North, relax, and be herself in a way she could not at home. Her public persona in the South was too much in demand.
The new couple doubtless enjoyed the rounds of holiday parties. A description from Powell’s first-person account of Syracuse in the 1880s describes the “Germans,” or cotillions, of the upper-crust city as formal affairs with men in swallowtail coats with high collars and white kid gloves. The ladies, according to a later account by E. Alexander Powell, were stunning in “their wasp-waisted gowns of flowered satin that looked like human bouquets, though one wondered by what miracle of dressmaking the daring décolletages were kept from revealing more than was intended.”19 Because of Winnie’s modesty and disinterest in clothes, it is likely that she was dressed demurely, without the slyly noted décolletage on display.
Winnie never ate much, like her father; she had anorexic tendencies and regarded food as a necessary evil. But these parties offered abundant and rich foods such as oyster patties, scalloped potatoes, sliced turkey, chicken salad, and ice cream. Cocktails had not yet been introduced, and generally only lemonade or punch was served for the liquid refreshment. Typically, however, someone would “spike” the punch by the end of the evening, thus adding to the festive atmosphere.20
During Winnie’s extended visit to Syracuse, the couple was often seen riding in Fred’s horse-drawn carriage or “strolling out of James Street towards the old home of [Fred’s] grandfather, Samuel Joseph May.”21 Later generations speculated that the couple must have spent some of their time courting in the charming summerhouse outside of May
’s home—an ironic place for the northern Fred to romance the daughter of Jefferson Davis, considering that that his grandfather’s back porch had been a known hiding place for slaves headed to Canada via the Underground Railroad.22
Although both Winnie and Fred were lovestruck, even in the midst of the heady holiday atmosphere of Syracuse in the 1880s, there were nevertheless rules and rituals that each party was bound to observe. These rituals transcended North-South boundaries and represented the mores of the social class to which both young people belonged. The pressure of wartime romances had ended, and social etiquette of the period now prescribed a more gradual courtship. Winnie was to be treated in much the same manner as her alter ego, the Daughter of the Confederacy. As was considered appropriate for southern young ladies of her social status, Winnie was to be placed “on a pedestal, enshrined like a holy object . . . and approached only through a set ritual.”23
Fred for his part was probably not even considering the repercussions of pursuing a romance with the daughter of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederacy, at this point in the relationship. It is easy to imagine that he was not even thinking of family genealogy when he was first getting to know Winnie. He had just met an attractive, cultured, and lovely young girl in need of his protection and assistance. What could have been more appealing?
Winnie returned home to Beauvoir at the first of the year in 1887 in a glorious fog, probably envisioning her life to come with Fred up North, far away from her parents and what she may have seen as her temporary role as Daughter of the Confederacy. She had enough presence of mind, however, to keep the romance a secret from Varina, Jefferson, and her sister, Margaret.
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