Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Varina also attributed her youngest daughter’s health issues partially to the hot, humid climate so prevalent at Beauvoir. Varina wrote to her good friend Constance Cary Harrison that “Winnie is at Beauvoir in bad health, poor child she hardly gets her boxes unpacked on the Gulf Shore before the climate makes her ill.”9 Conversely, Varina blamed Winnie’s “respiratory ills on the poor heating from the porcelain stoves in Germany.”10

  No recorded documentation has been found with Winnie’s firm medical diagnosis. It seems evident, however, that the young woman’s symptoms, which manifested as physical ailments, often had their root cause in mental strain and her approval-oriented personality. Winnie likely had, according to the primitive psychiatric terms of the day, a vague and all-encompassing condition labeled “neurasthenia,” a state of exhaustion of the nervous system.11 Known as a “period disease,” the term neurasthenia had been introduced by New York neurologist Dr. George Beard in 1869.12

  This popular physician and his followers claimed that nervous disorders were becoming more and more common due to the industrialization and urbanization of post–Civil War America.13 Well-educated, upper-class white women such as Winnie were particularly susceptible. During this time women began to flock to urban centers for work. They consequently began to spend more and more time in public, unchaperoned.14 Young women like Winnie were becoming more involved in paid work such as secretarial jobs, writing, or artistic projects.

  Winnie’s real-life neurasthenic drama just slightly prefigured the plight of the heroines of both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Kate Chopin’s novella The Awakening (1899). In both stories the female protagonists are driven mad by enforced rest cures for their supposed mental illnesses. In both tales paternalistic marriages keep them from pursuing artistic fulfillment.15

  The Daughter of the Confederacy’s underlying tendency toward neurasthenia might have also been coupled with another nineteenth-century “illness” brought on by her romance with Fred. Excess of passion was a melodramatic term coined by an 1883 doctor, who, according to Melinda Beck in the Wall Street Journal, described the condition as such: “The passions are like burning coals tossed into the dwelling of life, or serpents that spit poison into the vessels.”16 Winnie’s intense romance plus her strenuous literary work for her father were apparently sucking the life out of her fragile frame.

  What was the cure for such dire diagnoses? Enforced rest for the victim, preferably abroad in luxurious European resorts. As a result of Winnie’s continuing poor health and the alarmed reaction of their southern friends to her Yankee romance, the Davises shipped their fragile daughter off to Europe with her good friends Kate and Joseph Pulitzer.17 Her January 1889 trip to Europe was completely paid for by the Pulitzers, and it was their generous attempt to shield Winnie from the mounting engagement controversy.

  The stricken young woman certainly had a sympathetic audience. Both the Pulitzers were urging Winnie to marry Fred “in spite of Confederate sentiments.”18 They had a progressive view of such things bred from Joseph’s background as a self-made man and their frequent travels around the globe. Winnie set sail first to Paris, where she was to spend some time shopping for her wedding trousseau. Fred was to meet her in Italy in early 1890. Varina hoped Fred would press his suit with Winnie and return home with a firm date for the marriage.

  This was a particularly stressful time for both halves of this young, attractive couple. Both Winnie and Fred were under enormous pressure to restore their families’ broken reputations, Fred with his father’s scandalous financial problems and Winnie with her own father’s failed bid for southern independence. The two young people may have felt they had to be perfect, make the “right” choices, and play their cards correctly in order to redeem their family fortunes and reputations.

  Each dealt with these pressures in an entirely different manner. Fred was optimistic about his future. Things were going well for him financially, and he was prepared to risk southern disapproval and make Winnie his bride. He was confident and sure of himself—his litigation background had prepared him for such challenges. Unlike her fiancé, however, Winnie’s faith in true love was beginning to waver. Even as a child, she tended to be crushed by any disapproval from authority figures. Despite the support of her northern friends such as the Pulitzers, the southern reaction to her engagement was slowly beginning to poison her feelings about the match.

  Had she made a terrible mistake? Was Fred really the one for her? Winnie’s resolve about marrying her northern beau began to weaken as she realized how disappointed fellow southerners, particularly her parents’ set, were in her controversial choice. After all, many of them (including her own mother) had suggested there were plenty of eligible bachelors in the South for her to pick from—why was she looking up North for a husband?

  Many of her Confederate veteran friends were beside themselves with rage. Winnie regularly questioned her own judgment and undoubtedly did so at this juncture. As she set sail for Europe that fall, she must have hoped that the brisk sea air would clear her head and help her to make up her mind.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Italian Idyll

  When Winnie and the Pulitzers arrived in Paris in October 1889, she and her host Joseph were both semi-invalids. The atmosphere was that of a convalescent ward. Winnie and Joseph both suffered from eye and stomach problems.1 In both individuals stress and anxiety seemed to exacerbate, if not cause, their physical symptoms.

  Despite her illness, Winnie was willing to participate in the cultural delights that Paris had to offer. Socialite Kate enjoyed coordinating their activities and shepherding Winnie and the children to glittering events such as an evening performance at the Paris Opera. Winnie wrote her father on December 5, 1889, from the Pulitzers’ rented home on the Rue Courcelles in Paris about taking Kate’s eldest son Ralph Pulitzer to the show: “The other night Kate and I took Ralph to the opera, and you should have seen the grandeur of that little fellow with his miniature beaver and dress suit! He opened the box with an air, and altogether behaved like the fine little gentleman he is.”2

  In her letter Winnie told her father of her concerns for his health. She had learned recently that he had fallen ill on a November visit from New Orleans to his plantation Brierfield in Mississippi. The young woman adored him, and she had departed for Europe nearly oblivious to his increasing frailty. Jefferson and Varina deliberately led Winnie to believe that her father’s health was continually improving. Jefferson did not want to alarm his daughter, given her own fragile physical and mental state, and he wished for her to go ahead with her European trip.

  Winnie continued her letter on a more serious note. “I am broken-hearted to think that you could have had bronchitis and I have been away off here. Had I known, or had any idea of what was the matter, I should have come home immediately, but from the telegrams I concluded it was one of those exaggerated reports so often in the newspapers about prominent men.”3 Jefferson Davis died on December 6, 1889, in New Orleans, just a few hours after this letter was written, and never saw his daughter’s last words to him.

  Upon reading the awful news, in the papers and probably by telegram, Winnie was, according to the Middleton Daily Press back in the States, “beside herself with grief. But she bore up bravely.”4 The same newspaper article noted that the Daughter of the Confederacy, still in Paris, had widespread support from those in the French community: “During the afternoon and evening, a great number of people called to leave cards and condolence in evidence of their sympathy with her under the great bereavement.”5

  All the sources agree that Winnie’s doctors in Paris urged her not to make the trip home for the funeral due to her feeble physical state. Her mother agreed and would not allow her to make the long sea voyage home for the funeral. Even before his death, Jefferson forbade Varina from urging either Margaret or Winnie to come to his sickbed in New Orleans.6 Racked with grief and guilt over her father’s death and her failure to be
by his side during his last illness, Winnie began an even more precipitous physical and mental decline.

  A few months after her father’s death, Winnie was still struggling to control her emotions. She became uncharacteristically angry with her mother for insisting that Fred come over to visit her in Europe. Varina told her friend Maj. W. H. Morgan on March 9, 1890: “There is no news of Fred and Winnie except a sharp letter from her which I do not think she knew was sharp reproving me for letting or advising Fred to go abroad and jeopardize his prospects.”7 Winnie did have a valid point, as her mother was constantly worrying about Fred’s financial situation yet had urged him to take several months off to vacation with her daughter abroad.

  Varina had asked Fred to go to Europe in the late winter of 1890 to check on Winnie’s fragile emotional and physical state. The letters Varina received from Winnie seemed to indicate that her youngest daughter was deeply depressed and in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Varina had another motive for sending Fred to see Winnie. After months of keeping the engagement mostly a secret, and temporarily on hold, she wanted Winnie to set a firm date for the marriage and hoped that Fred could persuade her. By the time Fred arrived in Naples, Italy, in late February 1890, Winnie was unsure she wished to continue the engagement, although her mother was urging her to move ahead with wedding plans.8 The emotional trauma of her father’s unexpected death, coupled with the experience of being away from Fred for long periods, had created a chilly distance between the young woman and her fiancé. For Winnie absence seemed to have made her heart grow colder and more fearful of commitment.

  The letters contained in the Jefferson Davis Papers, housed in the Library of Congress, give historians significant insights into the minds of the three principle players in this drama: Winnie, Fred, and Varina. The letters from Fred and Varina in particular help decipher the situation somewhat. Very few of Winnie’s letters from the time of her courtship and 1889–90 stay in Europe survive. It is very likely that Varina destroyed most of the couple’s correspondence—a typical practice of this era, as women’s personal letters were seen as private family documents, too personal to be kept for posterity. Much of what Winnie thought about Fred and the engagement therefore remains a mystery.

  From the letters that do survive, it seems that the possible husband and mother-in-law were locked in a power struggle over the reluctant bride-to-be. Fred, for his role, acted in a paternal manner toward the now fatherless young woman. He tended to cosset and indulge her. Varina displayed the behavior of a meddling mother-in-law, even though no marriage had yet taken place.

  Despite all the bickering back and forth across the Atlantic, Winnie did seem genuinely glad to see Fred when he arrived in Naples. She reported to her mother soon after her fiancé arrived that “Fred is here and as dear an old goose as ever.”9 The couple and the Pulitzers all stayed at the famous Grand Hotel in Naples, described by travelers of the era as “a luxurious five-story building on the bay whose shuttered windows looked out on Mount Vesuvius, the Castel dell’Ovo, and the bustling city that smelled of the sea.”10 Still, Winnie would not or could not commit herself to a firm wedding date, which greatly troubled Varina. Fred took a much more cautious and long-term approach in dealing with his troubled paramour.

  Was Winnie’s anxious state simply due to stress, or were there more serious issues at play? Certain letters that passed between Fred, Varina, and Major Morgan have been used to support the idea that Winnie was pregnant when she sailed for Europe. Before Fred journeyed to Italy to see Winnie, for instance, Varina wrote her friend Major Morgan an urgent letter asking him to meet with her. She claimed Winnie was in some sort of “trouble.”11

  More intimations of a possible pregnancy may be read into Fred’s letter of March 4, 1890, to Varina, written after he arrived in Italy. He confided in her that “the more that I think about it the more impossible it seems to me to live without seeing her often, particularly now that I know about her physical condition and how more than ever she turns to me in everything.”12 The urgent tone of the letter certainly might suggest that Winnie and Fred had a secret that bound them tightly together. It also shows Fred attempting to assert his authority over Varina and perhaps to draw a line between them and her attempted meddling in the couple’s romance.

  It is curious that the Davises would let their daughter travel abroad with her fiancé under only the loose supervision of friends. Such a trip would not have reflected well on Winnie’s image as a virginal, Confederate icon. The Victorian period, lasting from the mid-1830s to the beginning of the twentieth century, is famed for its excessive attention to rules and regulations concerning courting couples. European customs in particular mandated chaperones for all unmarried women when dating young men.

  Winnie and Fred’s trip violated all the rules of Victorian courting etiquette. They were often alone on the trip, particularly when they went on excursions to distant ruins in the Italian countryside. In this era etiquette experts insisted that “no young lady should consider driving alone with her fiancé or attending the theater alone with him. A chaperone must be present at all times.”13

  The 1890s did mark the beginning of women’s rebellions against such formalities as chaperones, but it is noteworthy that Winnie, Daughter of the Confederacy and daughter of one of the most conservative men in the South when it came to women’s roles, was allowed to flout established rules of conduct on her own, largely unsupervised trip abroad.

  Illegitimate pregnancies were not without precedent in the Howell and Davis families. Margaret Howell, Varina’s flirtatious sister, had a son, Philip, out of wedlock, and Jefferson Davis’s brother Joseph had several illegitimate children.14 Such occurrences were shocking but certainly not unheard of even in upper-class Victorian families.

  Joseph Pulitzer, one of Winnie’s hosts, was practically blind at this point and completely absent at various points on the trip. Because of his many both real and imaginary ailments, writes biographer James McGrath Morris, “Joseph wandered the globe in the company of secretaries, doctors and valets, while Kate led a busy social life in Paris, London, and New York.”15 Thus, Kate and Winnie were destined to spend great amounts of time together in the 1880s and 1890s due to Joseph’s peripatetic lifestyle. The eccentric newspaper baron spent most of his time on his various yachts, tending to business with his secretaries while searching for health cures. Kate was a sophisticated and worldly woman who would later conduct an extramarital affair.16 She was more of a companion and confidante to Winnie than a chaperone.

  Winnie and Fred’s largely unsupervised Italian holiday was without a doubt highly unusual for this era. With so much mistrust of Fred and his background bubbling at home, the situation seems all the more remarkable. What must Varina have been thinking by allowing her beloved daughter to vacation in Europe with her controversial fiancé? Perhaps Jefferson’s ill health and subsequent death had distracted them from their usual worries about how things might look to the southern public, which they all, willingly or unwillingly, represented.

  Varina trusted Winnie implicitly, and she must have convinced herself that her youngest daughter had the judgment and maturity to handle herself in the correct manner. Europe was also far enough away from the southern United States that she would have a measure of privacy there that she did not have at home. There were no instant communication networks to report on her activities, illicit or otherwise.

  Still, the question remains. Despite every opportunity to be alone with her beau, in an exotic setting far from her parents and the American press, did Winnie and Fred give in to temptation? The young couple certainly had more than one opportunity to sleep with each other. Despite suggestions that Winnie had become pregnant, it seems doubtful that a physical consummation of their relationship ever occurred.

  Evidence suggests that Jefferson and Varina’s youngest daughter was far too approval oriented, rule conscious, and nervous around men to have risked having premarital sex with Fred. The idea that she was pregnant and ha
d to go away to have her baby does not fit her customary, and well-documented, behavior. She was no wild child like her aunt Margaret, whose nonconformist behavior had been a great source of worry for Varina for many years before Margaret indeed became pregnant out of wedlock. Nor was she lord and master of a large plantation like her uncle Joseph, who was in a position to do as he pleased, producing several illegitimate offspring.

  A Davis family friend noted cryptically years later that Winnie’s “soul brought a secret into the world; it carried it out. None ever guessed it.”17 While this quote has been used in the past as support for Winnie’s supposed secret pregnancy, it is far more likely that the family “secret” was a marked tendency toward anxiety and depression, the pattern of which Winnie inherited from her father. Varina’s bouts of depression seemed to be more reactive, while Jefferson’s depressive states, like Winnie’s (and her sister Margaret’s melancholy), seemed endemic. Winnie’s neurasthenic complaints were most likely a type of “masked depression,” a depressed state that manifests itself first as a physical ailment.18

  Winnie was not a slavish follower of fashion, gossip, or trends. She was a sweet but serious personality unconcerned with the vagaries of style. Yet in one respect she was in lockstep with the prevailing winds of the “nervous century,” as the nineteenth century later came to be known. Stomachaches, headaches, sore throats, eye troubles—they all seemed to prevent her at times from attending social events and enjoying her life as a young, attractive, and popular young woman. This so-called neurasthenia, like depression and anxiety-related illnesses in our contemporary society, created major relationship problems for Winnie and prevented her from forming any real long-term commitments or intimacies with the opposite sex.