Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  In a family memoir written by Fred’s sister, Katharine May Wilkinson, she describes the summer of 1890 as one full of promise and expectation. Fred had recently returned from his Italian adventure with Winnie and the Pulitzers, and their engagement had been announced in April. “They would be married perhaps in the fall, and Mama had bought in Philadelphia for the house they would have a handsome eighteenth century sofa, and also a mahogany desk and great sets of bedroom furniture.”11

  Fred’s mother, Charlotte, and his sister Marion (known to the family as “Mal”) had just left for a highly anticipated European tour, where they would attend the 1890 performance of the famous German Passion Play in Oberammergau. The other four sisters—Charlotte, Katharine, Josephine, and Louisa—had gone to Blue Mountain Lake in the Adirondacks to escape sweltering Syracuse for the humid months of July and August.12

  Fred remained in town with his legal practice. Henry, or “Harry,” Fred’s younger brother, had just graduated from architecture school at Cornell. Life seemed finally to be in perfect order for the Wilkinson clan. Sadly, events were soon to take a tragic turn. Katharine noted in her memoirs, “The season that began with every prospect pleasing came to a violent end.”13

  Horror disrupted the James Street neighborhood on the hot, humid morning of July 22, 1890. Around ten thirty that morning, according to a newspaper account a month later, “a noise like the discharge of a cannon startled neighborhood residents, and those who were near enough witnessed a sight they will never forget.”14 The roof of the Wilkinson mansion on the rear west wing was suddenly and violently blown off of the house. At the same time, a man was seen flying out of the west side window. The house was soon completely ablaze.

  The victim of the house fire was the Wilkinson family’s longtime gardener, Cyprian Couvrette. Couvrette had apparently been directed to use the chemical benzene to rid the house of bugs and fleas that had infested the stately residence during Mrs. Wilkinson’s extended visit to Europe. In her memoir Katharine claimed her dog had fleas, which had gotten into the carpet of her mother’s bedroom.15 The vents had been sealed off when the benzene powder was laid on the rugs, though no one could later provide a suitable explanation for how the explosion had occurred. Perhaps Couvrette or his helper had lit a cigarette while they were working.

  Couvrette was soon found covered in flames on the Wilkinson lawn, writhing in pain. Doctors arrived right away, but it was too late. As his clothes were being taken from him, his “flesh clung to his underwear.” He died mercifully quickly, by 4:30 that afternoon, in the hospital, leaving behind a wife and five children, all of them under fifteen years old.16

  James Street at this point in time did not have a neighborhood water supply, so water had to be brought up the hill to the house by hand. This lack of water proved devastating for the home and for those involved in the accident.17 Fred was at his law office when the explosion occurred, while his brother Harry was at home with the maids in another part of the house.

  The house, valued at about thirty thousand dollars, was considered a total loss, though much of the furniture and valuable paintings were carried out to safety by neighbors, Harry, and the servants. Everything on the first floor, including the billiard table, survived. These household treasures were then stored in the barn on the property and next door at the neighbors’, the Moore’s, house.18

  By that evening eyewitnesses to the fire observed “the darkened mansion looked like a long-deserted ruin. Some of the walls were still standing, but the entire roof is gone and the interior gutted.”19 The sisters who had been in the Adirondacks enjoying a respite from the summer heat returned to Syracuse immediately to help, staying at their Aunt Louisa’s on McBride Street until new quarters could be located. Harry set sail for Queenstown, Great Britain, where he would meet his mother and sister on their way home from Europe to prepare them for the state of affairs.20

  Fred was devastated, not for the loss of his mother’s house, which, he pointed out, could be replaced. But Couvrette, the family’s faithful servant, could not. He had stood by the Wilkinsons in tough times, during the family’s financial scandal. Fred said: “I do not care so much about the loss of the homestead as I do about poor Couvrette . . . We always considered him one of the family. He was a trusty, faithful man and I can’t express my grief for his wife and children.”21

  It now fell to Fred, as the eldest son and acting head of the family, to make arrangements for a new home for his shaken mother and sisters. His father’s scandalous past had created in Fred a strong sense of moral duty and a desire to do right by his family and by Winnie. Even under intense scrutiny in his hometown and nationally over his family, the house fire, and his romance with the Daughter of the Confederacy, the young lawyer from Syracuse always remained a gentleman. But the strain that these events etched upon Fred would remain with him in the years to come.

  After the tragic fire, Fred quickly leased two houses farther down James Street, moved in all the remaining family possessions, and bought new furniture and bedding to replace items lost in the blaze. Friends of the family worked diligently to make the new living space attractive. Other friends, including Wilkinson neighbor Mrs. Land, even offered money for daughter Charlotte’s tuition that upcoming fall at Smith, though it was declined as not necessary.22

  In light of this tragedy, as well as Winnie’s nervous agitation after she returned from Europe, Varina and Winnie decided to delay the marriage. In August 1890 Varina announced to the press that the young couple’s marriage had been postponed until June 25, 1891. According to historian Ishbel Ross, the reason proffered in Varina’s formal announcement was that “Miss Davis [is] not desiring to be married until after a year of the date of her father’s death.”23 It is almost certain, however, that the postponement was a play for time on the Davis women’s part. With the fire at Fred’s mother’s home, Varina may have been worried about whether he could support her daughter any longer. The actions that followed created a firestorm of another sort.

  Shortly after the tragic events in Syracuse and the announcement of the engagement delay, Fred learned that a “prominent Mississippian” has arrived in his hometown to do a background check on his finances, his family situation, and his career prospects.24 This unknown Mississippian also carefully investigated Fred’s father’s banking scandal, attempting to find out exactly how much of the debt had been paid and how the family had supported itself since the incident. It is quite possible that this person was an emissary of Jubal Early or of some other former Confederate keen on ending the engagement.25

  Fred was furious. He had been transparent with the Davis family about his finances. But Varina continued to plant doubts in Winnie’s mind about Fred’s ability to support her. Varina and her other southern “friends” had decided that the house fire in Syracuse would put a huge dent in Fred’s bank account.

  In October a New York newspaper, the Utica Globe, sprang to its native son Fred’s defense: “It does not appear just how young Wilkinson sustained any loss [from the fire] except prospectively. The great property of the Wilkinson estate was sold a couple of years ago and more than half a million dollars was realized.”26 The house belonged to Fred’s mother outright: no debt remained.

  Varina’s miscalculations were especially ironic given that she and Winnie were living in genteel poverty at Beauvoir. Fred was incensed. He angrily wrote his mother-in-law-to-be that he had been open with her about his family and his financial circumstances and did not approve of or understand her actions.27 Fred’s letter has since been lost or, more likely, was destroyed by Varina.

  In hindsight these accusations of Fred’s shaky finances were baseless. Varina may have fallen under the sway of those such as Jubal Early and Lunsford Lomax who could not bear the thought of the Daughter of the Confederacy marrying a northerner. But Varina had many northern friends and relatives. She herself much preferred the cosmopolitan atmosphere of New York to the humid backwaters of Mississippi. So, she may have been at war with h
erself on this issue.

  More than likely, what finally turned Varina against Fred was that he could not be counted on to carry out her wishes regarding Winnie. Fred’s kind refusal not to push Winnie for their engagement to be announced infuriated his potential mother-in-law. Varina could see clearly that he was not going to do her bidding just as she wished. In her own marriage Varina had experienced a total lack of control. Jefferson was always in charge, and he constantly reminded her of that fact. With her husband gone, Varina may have thought she finally had a chance for control over her family and their destinies.

  Fred was the interloper, and though he was a kind person, he was firm in his beliefs regarding his fiancée. When Varina saw she was not going to be able to control Fred, nor Winnie once they married, she turned on Fred. The idea that she might lose control and influence over her youngest daughter might have been too much for her to bear.

  As the wedding date approached, Varina must have also known she would be utterly alone once her daughter walked down the aisle. With her own husband dead and her oldest daughter, Margaret, living far away from her in Colorado, Winnie had become her life, and all of Varina’s energy and focus was placed on her. This almost obsessive level of attention operated to the detriment of both Winnie and her fiancé.

  Varina was a smart, strong, capable, and resilient woman, but the tragic losses she had suffered over the years had traumatized her. The aging widow loved, as Shakespeare wrote in Othello, “not wisely but too well.” She was simply unable to allow Winnie, her central focus, to live her own life, which by necessity would not always include her.

  Margaret was long married with children and living far away in Colorado Springs. But more than distance separated mother and daughter: Varina had created a rift in her relationship with her oldest daughter by failing to return from Europe to comfort her after the death of Margaret’s firstborn son, thus driving her eldest daughter into the maternal arms of the widow Dorsey at Beauvoir and in the process damaging her own marriage to Jefferson still further. If Winnie married Fred, Varina would no longer have a child and companion who belonged to her alone.

  The serious doubts Varina whispered into Winnie’s ear, which had come up in discussions between Winnie and Fred during their time in Italy, had poisoned the couple’s relationship. Winnie now did not trust Fred, though she still seemed to be in love with him. Fred for his part did not understand Winnie’s inability to break free from her mother. He remembered only that they had been madly in love and could not understand Winnie’s hesitation.28

  After Fred’s angry response to Varina about the financial inquiries going on in Syracuse that summer, she imperiously summoned him to Beauvoir for an interview. He made the long journey from New York to Mississippi just after his mother and sister returned to Syracuse from their European trip. His younger sister Katharine recalled, “The responsibilities of all decisions had naturally fallen on Fred, and after Mamma and Mal had returned and before school opened, he went South for the comfort that a visit to Winnie Davis would give him.”29 Katharine, her mother, and sisters probably did not yet know the true reason for Fred’s visit to Beauvoir. It is doubtful Fred would have burdened them while they were away with the unpleasant details regarding southern inquiries into his reputation.

  As Fred sat through the nearly fourteen hundred–mile train ride to Biloxi from Syracuse, he had ample time to become both anxious and angry at the summer’s turn of events. The young lawyer would have had several days on the train to cogitate on his unhappy state. He may have been incensed by the casual cruelty inflicted on him by Varina and her friends as they threatened his reputation in the midst of the personal tragedy he had just been through. Even more important, he must have known that a permanent separation from his beloved Winnie was the possible outcome of this unpleasant journey.

  Fred arrived at the Davises’ Mississippi home “looking like a criminal and sat expecting sentence evidently,” wrote Varina.30 The young man, so used to courtroom drama through his own legal practice, now found himself on trial. Varina accused him of concealing not only his financial state from her but also the scandal surrounding his father’s bank. He was utterly taken aback by her accusations, as he had been quite frank with Varina about all of these issues. But Varina, so often compared to imposing French empress Eugénie, had convinced herself that Fred had deceived them all.

  She later wrote her friend Major Morgan, describing the last interaction between her and the young man who was so deeply in love with her daughter: “He said then that he had told me all about his Father . . . I said, my poor boy, frankness is the only policy in life that succeeds if it is to be a family connection. I then told him that I loved him and grieved over the sorrow to him.”31

  Winnie, who tended to quit eating when under stress, was surely emaciated at this point, pale and listless. Her resistance had been worn down by the months and years of her mother’s chipping away at her romance and her trust in her fiancé. She nevertheless did see Fred off after this devastating final conference between her mother and her now former suitor.

  Varina’s letter to Major Morgan noted that Fred did not want to see Winnie but that she had come down to see him off anyway. “After they had a long and affecting conversation,” she wrote, “he went off on the 4 o’clock train looking about the same as he did when he came. She suffered dreadfully for a while but is now cheery and eats more. He has written her since a farewell letter in which he said he would never give her up. The correspondence has stopped however, and thank God it is over.”32

  One can only imagine what this young couple, still so deeply in love, said to each other in this last, tragic conversation. Surely Fred pleaded with Winnie to come away with him up North, away from all the southern madness; she had the perfect excuse to hang up her laurels as the Daughter of the Confederacy and start over in Syracuse with Fred. Despite what Varina said, the young lawyer did have money, prospects, and excellent social connections in Syracuse. If Winnie married him, she could break free of the chains of duty to her family legacy and the long-dead Confederacy and start a new unfettered life in the North, breathing an air of freedom there far from the ruined South.

  Winnie, however, was not a rule breaker nor one to depart from everything she had been taught to value since birth. Duty, honor, family ties—they all bound her up more tightly than true love ever could. Ties of blood and symbolism kept her away from Fred. The young woman’s nervous temperament, which might have benefited greatly from leaving all this emotional baggage behind, simply could not break free from the familiar, even if it made her miserable. She lived in a gilded cage of sentimental memories crafted by her family, Confederate veterans, and southern Lost Cause supporters that was ultimately impossible to leave.

  Poignantly, when Fred returned home to Syracuse, his sister Katharine was the first to notice his downcast demeanor: “I shall never forget his return,” she wrote in her memoir. “I ran up to his room to greet my adored brother. Standing by the window, he hardly turned to me but said he must see Mamma at once and I ran down to get her. Long afterward in her [Fred’s mother’s] diary from 1890, I found the only entry for that day was ‘One can doth tread upon another’s heels so fast they follow,’ for at the command of her mother, Winnie had broken the engagement to Fred.”33

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Queen of a Mystic Court

  The dreams of sweet young womanhood

  Were sacrificed at last;

  She gave the utmost that she could—

  A martyr to the Past!

  Mary Craig Kimbrough, Queen of a

  Mystic Court, bk. 1

  One can suppose that Winnie wandered around Beauvoir wraithlike in the days after her final rupture with Fred. Perhaps she and one of her father’s old hunting dogs roamed the Mississippi beach together, looking for sea glass, shells, anything to distract her from her failed romance. Rumors of the breakup had been rampant in both southern and northern papers in the early weeks of October 1890.


  A New York paper reported on October 16, 1890, that the engagement was definitely broken, as confirmed by Miss Davis herself. This particular account claimed that Winnie gave an interview to a reporter at “family friend” Mrs. George A. “Libbie” Custer’s apartment at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Libbie was the wife of the famous general George A. Custer. During this conversation Winnie supposedly quashed rumors that she had severed her relationship with Fred over financial matters: “Suffice it to say that no mercenary motive prompted me in the course I decided to take. Mr. Wilkinson and I severed our relation by mutual agreement.”1

  Winnie was portrayed in the article as a young, self-centered woman exasperated by the attention given to her broken engagement who denied emphatically that her friends and family had influenced her in ending her relationship with Fred. “‘The decision was left entirely to myself. Many of my relatives in the South were particularly fond of Mr. Wilkinson, but,’ said Miss Davis, checking herself and biting her lip just perceptibly, ‘I don’t think such matters are for the public. I prefer to keep personal affairs to myself.’” As for her immediate family, Winnie noted, “they are perfectly satisfied with my conduct.”2

  Winnie and Varina left the scene at this point, and their “friend” Libbie supposedly gave her opinion on the matter, much of it unflattering and not at all in alignment with what we know about Winnie and her personality: “Miss Davis is very self-willed and likes to have her own way. She has been the idol of every aristocratic southern family since her birth, and has formulated some very decided notions concerning the late war, which she never hesitates to express.”3