Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  A letter from Winnie, written to her family friend Major Morgan in March 1890, reflects her deep and persistent gloom. “As for myself,” she said, regarding her time in Italy, “I have very little joy in anything.”19 Fred was now able to observe his fiancée’s behavior up close. Was Winnie just recovering from a reactive bout of the blues following her beloved father’s untimely death, or was there something more sinister affecting her moods and her health?

  The young Syracusian may also have had his doubts about the situation. Although he steadfastly clung to the notion that the two would be married, hopefully sooner rather than later—he had already courted Winnie for almost four years—he must have seen Winnie’s confusion, her hesitation, and her anxiety over the match. She often seemed to doubt his love and was beginning to mistrust him. He needed to convince her to leave both her anxiety and depression and her persona as the Daughter of the Confederacy behind in Europe. Otherwise, their chance for mutual happiness might be doomed.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Dear Diary

  To my beloved Mother, with the hope that the love, by the light of which these pages were inscribed, may blind her a little to their numerous imperfections.

  Varina Anne Davis to Varina Howell Davis, January 29, 1890

  Winnie’s European travel journal from January 29 to April 3, 1890, resur-faced in 2010. The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, was able to obtain the diary at auction through a third party. The item had long been in the possession of a distant branch of the Davis family living in New England.1 This 8” x 51/2” leather-bound volume has a locking clasp and is 242 pages long, full of the young woman’s insights and comments.

  The volume is dedicated to Winnie’s mother, Varina, who her daughter felt would probably never be able to venture abroad again due to her advancing age and poor health. There is, surprisingly, not a single reference to Jefferson Davis in the diary.2 Perhaps Winnie was so traumatized by his recent death that she could not bear to even mention her father’s name. Or perhaps she felt guilty about her unchaperoned time with Fred in Italy and wanted to keep it entirely separate from thoughts of her father. This image conflicts with the role of the dutiful daughter she played so often at home.

  Winnie’s diary entries vividly describe the high life she experienced as part of a wealthy American traveling group. At the beginning of the tour Winnie admired her traveling companion Kate Pulitzer’s glamorous ensemble: “Kate is in pink tonight with all her diamonds on.”3 Famous personalities of the day appear throughout the journal, including Buffalo Bill and his entourage,4 and the infamous society portraitist and playboy Carolus-Duran. One of Winnie’s very first entries describes an encounter between Carolus-Duran and Kate Pulitzer, who had engaged Carolus-Duran to paint her portrait: “Carolus Duran came to see Kate this morning and whisked her off to have a dress made according to his taste at Worth’s shop. [Worth was one of the premier Parisian couture houses of the era.] He is a handsome man, but always in his own French type.”5

  Winnie’s writing gives the modern reader a rare window into upper-class Victorian society and tourism of the day. The volume was ostensibly written for the purpose of keeping her mother up to date about her experiences, so we do not gain access to Winnie’s innermost feelings. Yet glimpses of a conflicted and at times distraught young woman who could not make up her mind between love and duty still peek through the heavy Victorian prose. Despite the unusual circumstances of the trip and the angst that Winnie was so clearly experiencing, she seemed thrilled when her fiancé finally arrived in Naples in late February 1890. The stage seemed set for a romantic and picturesque idyll in the Italian countryside à la E. M. Forster’s famous English novel Room with a View (1908).

  Museum of the Confederacy historian John Coski observed that the travel journal commentary shows that Winnie and Fred quibbled and quarreled with each other affectionately, “just like an old married couple. They talk about health issues, going out to tour versus staying in.”6 Winnie noted that Fred often brought her flowers, such as violets and forget-me-nots, during their outings.7 They attended the ballet and the opera, visited art museums, shopped, and enjoyed long carriage rides together. Winnie’s enthusiastic journal descriptions seem to indicate her pleasure in such excursions.

  On March 4 Winnie openly describes her unchaperoned excursions with Fred to her mother. Unbelievably, she mentions an outing in which they specifically go out driving together in a “closed carriage” alone.8 It is as if they were a married couple and not a courting one. Winnie knew her mother was desperate for her to marry Fred. Perhaps she was testing the limits of her freedom by telling her mother this detail?

  Once the couple settled into a regular routine, however, Fred quickly began to notice Winnie’s profound melancholy. In a letter to Varina from February 1890, he noted with concern, “Physically, she is decidedly better, but mentally she has some depressed days, almost anyone else I should call morbid.”9 Fred’s diagnosis seems to ring true when compared to one of Winnie’s journal entries from that time. The couple visited Naples and saw Vesuvius in the background under a full moon. This sight enthralled Winnie with its savage beauty. Yet her reaction was mixed: “I had another look at all this beauty which I pray I may never forget if I live to—well, if I live a long life which I can’t say I desire as I used to . . . I hope I shall not be left like some frightful survivor to linger here when my generation has passed away; it would be far better to go out like that moon than to burn forever like Vesuvius.”10

  One imagines that a woman of any era would have been delighted to have the freedom to tour Italy unrestricted on an all-expense trip with her handsome Harvard-educated fiancé. Fred was completely devoted to Winnie; she was insulated from the American South and its gossip both by distance and by the Pulitzers’ wealth. Varina had urged Fred to join Winnie in Italy—both to help seal the marriage deal and to uplift her spirits. But she still seemed unable fully to enjoy the pleasures that lay in front of her. Melancholy hung on Winnie like a shroud. This can be attributed in part to her neurasthenic tendencies and also as a normal response to Jefferson’s recent death.

  By early March, Fred was writing to Maj. W. H. Morgan, a Davis family friend who was sympathetic to the young couple and their engagement. Fred confided many of his fears regarding Winnie’s melancholy to Morgan and expressed concern about pushing the engagement too hard upon her, as Varina had been urging him to do. “I shall let her wait as long as she wishes,” declared Fred in a March 1 letter from Naples to Morgan. He wrote also that he understood how much the disapproval of her friends upset her. “You know that she longs all the time to have her friends love her.”11

  Fred was coming to terms with the desperate need for approval that was so deeply ingrained in Winnie’s character. This was a legacy both from her parents and from her time under the roof of the strict Misses Friedlanders’ school in Karlsruhe, Germany. In a March 4 letter to Varina, Fred acknowledged the depth and breadth of Winnie’s despair: “I must tell you, that while I am not much discouraged about her, I am just beginning to wake to the fact of the care that must given to her the next year.”12 The reality of the situation was setting in for Fred as well. He surely must have wondered if he could take care of Winnie, a semi-invalid at this point, adequately.

  In his letter to Varina, Fred noted that Winnie was becoming worried that he was not fully disclosing his business affairs to her—a worry Varina had surely planted in her mind. “The least little thing starts her off,” wrote Fred. “For instance yesterday she asked me a question about my business because I hesitated a few seconds before answering, she thought I was trying to deceive her and of course it took an hour to quiet her.”13

  As their Italian vacation neared its conclusion, however, Winnie’s spirits seemed to improve. She, Fred, and the Pulitzers had an exciting, though somewhat dangerous, visit to Mount Vesuvius. Fred once again proved to be Winnie’s valiant champion. Winnie wrote about their adventure: “By this time I had so
much been touched by the volcano fever, that nothing else would do but I most go to the top of the new crater . . . We waited until the smoke flag showed that the wind was blowing from our side . . . the breeze suddenly turned the whole volume of shifting fumes and the rain of red hot stones in our direction.”14

  The young woman continued her tale, noting the sartorial loss by her fashionable female companion: “One fell on my neck burning my veil in two before Fred could knock it off . . . with my hat over one eye, my dress torn and my boots destroyed . . . noticing the strong smell of burnt feathers, looked around to see [Kate] contemplating the ruin of her fine feather boa . . . It had been such an exciting day that none of us wanted to go home.”15

  For a young woman who had just avoided a potentially fatal accident, Winnie’s report of the incident shows no fear or regret. She seems to shrug it off and view it in an almost romantic sense. Her sense of adventure and enjoyment of foreign travel and unique experiences seem evident. Fred had once again demonstrated his devotion to her at Vesuvius. He had given up months of income from his law practice to come see her and take care of her; he dutifully reported her condition to her mother and to Major Morgan. Despite Winnie’s clear melancholy, he did not run away; he still wanted to marry her. He had seen her at her worst, but he still did not falter in his affections. He had convinced himself that “a few quiet happy years will make her as well as she ever was.”16

  When it was time for Fred to sail home, in early April 1890, he insisted Winnie remain in Europe due to the frayed state of her nerves. He told Varina frankly before he left, “I will never consent to her staying in Beauvoir all summer.”17 There were certain “things” at the Davis home that would upset Winnie. Did he mean memories of her father or possibly her meddling mother herself?

  Varina had pushed both her daughter and Fred to seal the marriage deal, but she simultaneously seemed to be poisoning Winnie against Fred by planting worries in her mind about his finances. The micromanaging mother further diminished Fred’s ability to produce income by insisting he take weeks off to make the long voyage to Europe to see his fiancée. None of this behavior on Varina’s part made sense, nor did it smooth the way for Fred’s marital suit with the Davises’ youngest daughter, who was in such a precarious mental state.

  Varina and Winnie were discussing the idea of going to Colorado Springs for the summer of 1890, both for the climate and to visit Winnie’s older sister, Margaret Hayes. While he was in Italy with Winnie, Fred suggested some modifications to their travel plans. “If you carry out your plan of going to Colorado, she [Winnie] might come somewhere a few hundred miles nearer Syracuse, perhaps to Asheville. Once home from Europe, never again shall I let her stay so far from me that I can’t get to her often, even if we can’t be together all the time.”18 The young man was asserting his claim to his bride-to-be, something Varina did not like, despite the engagement and marriage she was pushing so hard. She still wanted to retain control of Winnie somehow. This push-pull between the mother and the fiancé is clear in the correspondence that survives.

  Although he wanted Winnie to be close by him after her return from Europe, Fred told Varina of his decision not to press for a wedding date right away. “Feeling as she does right now,” he wrote on March 4, 1890, “it would be cruel to talk to her of marriage before next winter. I don’t agree with her but understand how she feels so.”19 The decision to stay apart after their European tour allowed Winnie time and space to think about the romance—perhaps too much. Fred’s kindness and decision not to force her into marriage would also have a profound effect on their future together.

  Winnie’s travel journal ends April 3, 1890, when she was in Paris. All too soon, the Daughter of the Confederacy and her northern beau would return to the more restrictive, disapproving environment of the American South. Romantic and glamorous interludes such as the couple’s trip to Italy would prove few and far between. Continued rumors of Fred’s financial troubles—dug up by “friends” of Varina—and a tragic fire in Syracuse would profoundly affect the couple’s future. The Mediterranean respite the couple had known would soon seem truly a world away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A World on Fire

  Fred returned home to Syracuse in April 1890, leaving his adored but uncertain fiancée abroad with the Pulitzers. The young couple was at a critical juncture in their relationship. Fred was deeply concerned about Winnie, but he needed to get back to work at his law practice. Since his father’s banking scandal, the Wilkinson wealth and reputation had dissipated, and the young man’s goal was to rebuild the family coffers. Fred had a mother and sisters who relied on him financially, and he could not afford to extend his European idyll any longer. Winnie was sure of nothing at this point and was fast losing her enthusiasm for the romance.

  Varina, forceful as always, decided to take the couple’s love life into her own hands. In April, shortly after Fred returned to the States, she publicly announced their engagement. National newspapers such as the New York Times quickly picked up the story.1

  The engagement announcement was a huge tactical error, both from the standpoint of Winnie’s faltering mental and physical health and from a public relations perspective. Winnie’s meddling mother also went straight to the wrong person for support. Former Confederate general Jubal Early was a Davis family friend but was shortly to become Fred’s most implacable enemy. Early became known after the war as the “Watchdog of the Confederacy,” a guardian of Lost Cause ideals and mythology. The unmarried lawyer was also known to be proprietary with widows and daughters of Confederate generals. In his view they belonged to the South, and woe to any northerner who tried to spirit them away.2

  Varina wrote a placating letter to Jubal on April 20, saying, “I have thought several times of telling you that Winnie was engaged to be married, and only been deterred by the doubt it might never take place.”3 Early’s replies have not survived, but his attitude and later actions confirm that this news only further enraged the venomous general, who with like-minded cronies such as former Confederate general Lunsford Lomax, promptly set out to undo the engagement by any means possible.4

  Then, too, there was the omnipresent press. Some northern papers seemed merely surprised by the announcement and mildly curious, treating the proposed match as if it were an amusing circus sideshow. A piece in the Rochester Herald in April 1890 declared, “Love perpetrates many freaks, but few are more curious than would be manifested in such a union.”5 But most papers outside the South thought the pairing a positive step toward reconciliation between old foes, with the South submitting willingly to the victorious North. The Troy Times proclaimed, “The proud ‘daughter of the confederacy’ has capitulated to the scion of abolitionism, and all the bitter memories of the past will fade before the sweet promises of the future.”6

  Not quite. The southern reaction to the news was devastating and swift. The announcement exploded in the press like a bomb.7 Letters disparaging the engagement rapidly arrived at the Davis household with some regularity. Southerners were not just upset; they were completely outraged. Winnie’s initial apprehensions began to seem justified in light of the furor that now erupted at home.

  Alfred Wilkinson, who had nothing to do with the Civil War, became the scapegoat for all of the South’s suffering. Confederate Veterans in particular channeled their rage against the bewildered young man. He represented their worst nightmare: that the women of the South would desert them for the victors of the North.

  Although the Davis family received letters with threatening overtones concerning the engagement, Fred received direct threats against his life. One infamous letter from a veteran of the Robert E. Lee regiment read:

  I write you at the request of my comrades in arms ’61 to ’65 to say that the choice of the “Daughter of the Confederacy” is by no means approved by us. No, Sir, and should she bow our heads and crush our hearts in humiliation most damnable by marrying the offspring of an Abominable Abolitionist, she will have to go to som
e northern city of burg to do so. The very sleeping dead Southern soldiers would rise from their graves, and hustle you back to Yankeedom ere they would see the daughter of Jefferson Davis ruined, and shamecovered forever by marrying one whose only desire in marrying her is to get a Southern woman—preferring such and one with warm feelings to the Salamander-like girl of Yankeedom.

  No, Sir, a thousand balls would be shot into your Negro-loving heart ere we would permit such an humiliating outrage consummated in our own Southland—and even should Miss Winnie, whom we so deeply love as infinitely purer than any Yankee woman on earth, consent to go North, then we will bind ourselves together to lay you in the dust.8

  Under such circumstances it is surprising that Fred wished to continue their relationship at all. Many suitors would have fled in the face of such heated sentiments.

  The letter’s reference to Fred’s “Negro-loving heart” is telling. Although Fred had never expressed any strong political opinions at all, his lineage was damning evidence. He could not escape the well-known views and actions of his grandfather Samuel Joseph May, one of America’s first and best-known abolitionists.

  As a northerner, Fred was already classed by many southerners of the era in the same category as a black man when it came to marriage with a southern woman. He was an outsider, and southerners violently opposed the idea of such a union with Winnie, who was considered not only Jefferson Davis’s daughter but also the symbolic daughter of the entire defeated South.

  The engagement situation deteriorated still further in July. Winnie returned from Europe in the middle of the summer, terribly upset by all the menacing letters being sent to Fred and her family. Aside from facing southern death threats, Fred was also soon to be dealing with another serious matter on the home front in Syracuse.

  Fred’s mother’s home in Syracuse was named Harperly Hall after the Wilkinson ancestral home in Yorkshire, England.9 This stately mansion was located at fashionable 809 James Street. Before his death Alfred’s father, Alfred Sr., surrounded the house with lush and extensive gardens much admired by those in the exclusive neighborhood.10