Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  After her return from Europe, Mary Craig noted, Winnie seemed even more aloof to her contemporaries. “This cultivated girl, so accomplished, so foreign in her manners, was head and shoulders above . . . provincial tastes. Though really demure and shy, she frightened the young men who realized that she was educated beyond them.”35 Her comment rings true and matches up with many other descriptions of Winnie from this period.

  Ultimately, however, Queen of a Mystic Court is not a biography of Winnie. The work is a fanciful portrait of a woman who never existed. The author described the Daughter of the Confederacy as a flirtatious coquette whose constant intrigues got her into serious trouble: “The young woman who resembled royalty in the eyes of her friends was dispensing with royal lavishness her charms upon courtiers in her train. But, poor little princess, she seemed constantly in a maze of intrigue and adventure, continually striving to straighten out the tangles she made of her affairs, maneuvering to keep peace in a jealous court.”36

  Mary Craig may have been projecting her own personality—that of a true southern belle—onto the far more serious and intellectual persona of Winnie Davis. No one who knew Winnie would ever have called her a flirt or a coquette. She certainly had no taste for the social intrigue that Mary Craig imagined.

  Fred Wilkinson morphed into “Frederick Van Vleet” in Mary Craig’s account. Instead of being from Syracuse, New York, he lived in “On-the-Hudson, N.Y.”37 The author imagines Fred’s visit to Beauvoir to ask for Winnie’s hand, the trip to Italy the couple shared, and the subsequent broken engagement. Fred’s story follows the correct timeline, but many details are fabricated, such as love letters between Winnie and Fred. The correspondence between the young couple that Mary Craig presents in Queen is a figment of her own imagination. The words in these fictional missives sound nothing like what the real Fred and Winnie might have ever penned.

  But Mary Craig clearly had access to some of the letters and documents of the Davis family. Fred’s letters to Varina from Naples, Italy, are here, as along with some of the letters Varina wrote to friends such as Major Morgan. Winnie’s letters to her mother from Italy also are transcribed word for word.38

  Mary Craig’s father, Judge Kimbrough, was a trusted friend of the Davis family who later would help Varina with legal issues. Mary Craig mentioned that he kept some of the threatening letters that Confederate veterans sent to the Davises during Winnie’s engagement.39 Mary Craig clearly obtained these documents from her father, and it seems likely that Varina gave her permission to use them in her biography of Winnie.

  Queen of a Mystic Court reveals Mary Craig’s philosophy that southerners possessed “racial traits” that made them more moral than northerners. In it she theorized, “These were the things that blood and breeding meant to them—not a groundless pride or snobbishness, but the preservation of racial traits of honor and nobility.”40 In her mind, and in the mind of many southerners of the time, “Yankees” did not possess such finer qualities. The war had shown southerners the ugly side of human nature, and many of them blamed their wartime experiences on the entire northern population. Mary Craig wrote: “The Southern people had seen little evidence of these traits and qualities—which they believed to be noble—in the people of the North. On the contrary, they had seen decided evidence of the lack of them” within the context of their wartime experiences.41 Mary Craig then proceeded to put these very words into Winnie’s mouth, as she imagined the breakup between Winnie and Fred: “Fred, I have found out only recently that we really are two different races—we of the South, and you of the North.”42

  This idea of racial purity, of white southerners being noble, superior beings, appears often in the literature of the period. Marrying a northerner was akin to marrying a black man in the minds of many, particularly Confederate veterans. Mary Craig noted this sentiment of superiority specifically in Queen: “It would be a shame for Winnie Davis, who represented the womanhood of the Confederacy, to unite herself with one of those who has conquered her country by brute force.”43 The theme of rape by an outsider surfaces again here. Queen of a Mystic Court was definitely a representative product of a southerner inculcated with the specific values of her class and community.

  Mary Craig was later to become the second wife of famous writer and social reformer Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle (1906). After reading her “biography” of Winnie, he declared: “Your book is terrible! You can’t write, I can’t honestly encourage you.” Perhaps Upton was correct in his assessment of his wife’s literary abilities. Even Mary Craig admitted she later “lost interest in the prim, sentimental story I had written about Winnie Davis.”44

  Nevertheless, Queen of a Mystic Court provides a valuable document for historians. Mary Craig gave us a window into the minds of the upper-class South at the turn of the century. Winnie’s romance and subsequent broken engagement were viewed as a genuine sacrifice on her part, and she was rewarded in the minds of many with honors such as the Queen of Comus title. Yet this sacrifice was expected and demanded by Confederate veterans and others with little thought about how it would affect Winnie personally. It was her duty, they thought, to both her father’s memory and to the South.

  Mary Craig duly noted the Faustian deal made by Winnie with these Confederate veterans when she was named Daughter of the Confederacy in 1886: “How she had thrilled at the tribute! And she had vowed that she would return it with everlasting loyalty to them, striving always to be worthy of such a patriotic, great-hearted people. It was her coronation and she accepted her mystic crown with grace and dignity, and gratitude for its bestowing—little dreaming that it was but a shadowy symbol, freighted with real and crushing responsibility.”45 Shadowy is the key word here—the tribute given to Winnie was that of a lost shadow civilization, one that no longer existed and had perhaps never truly existed at all.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  New York, New Woman

  We felt, at times, our bird had flown

  Into the North too far from home.

  Rev. R. M. Tuttle, a fragment of his poem

  “Miss Winnie Davis, a Tribute,” 1905

  Winnie certainly could have had her pick of southern men. Her parents and many a Confederate veteran hoped that if she did deign to marry, it would be to a young man of prominent Confederate heritage. In this manner she could help carry on the Davis name and legacy—as her sister, Margaret, had done through her marriage to former Confederate officer Joel Addison Hayes of Memphis, Tennessee. Fervent supporters of the Lost Cause dreamed, as historian David Hardin describes it, that through Margaret and Winnie “tiny Rebels would be spawned, not only to replace the dead but to preserve certain forms—good manners, for instance—that would segregate the South from Yankee vulgarity.”1

  Winnie’s path in life was to prove far different, however, than the traditional one followed by her older sister. Her existence post-engagement to Fred would be unconventional and geographically distant from her past. Although the young woman could have pursued the role of a glittering socialite in New Orleans or anywhere in the South, she had no interest in this kind of vapid existence. Winnie was far too serious-minded to enjoy such frivolities. Lack of funds also curtailed her social life; the money to buy gowns and jewels and to support a life of leisure were beyond her grasp without a husband or family wealth to support her.

  Many people both North and South had the mistaken idea that Varina and her youngest daughter led a pleasant life after Jefferson died, one full of amusing trips and entertainments. Even the Davises’ young Mississippi neighbor Mary Craig Kimbrough bought into this myth. “Did I not know,” she wrote, “that Winnie and her mother had left Beauvoir and gone to live like royalty in New York and Narragansett Pier [a fashionable Rhode Island resort of the era]?”2

  To the contrary, Winnie had a small income from Beauvoir, willed to her upon her father’s death by Sarah Dorsey. She and her sister, Margaret, also had a modest income from Tunisberg in Louisiana, the Howell residence that had been con
fiscated during the war and finally returned to them.3 But these funds were simply not enough to support Winnie and her mother. Both women tried to get work with southern newspapers but to no avail.

  At this point Varina again asked her author friend Charles Dudley Warner to help her and Winnie find work up North.4 Warner and other southern writers such as Thomas Nelson Page had realized almost immediately after the war that their careers were dependent upon the northern literary market. Page wrote, “The great monthly magazines were not only open as never before to Southern contributors, but welcomed them eagerly as a new and valuable acquisition.”5

  Both Winnie and Varina were forced to make a choice. They could stay at Beauvoir, moldering away in genteel poverty, or make a new life for themselves elsewhere. They could have gone any number of places—Varina had always loved London and Paris. They had also lived in Memphis and Montreal. Winnie had spent most of her girlhood in Germany. They were citizens of the world and at this point had many doors open to them. They were unfettered by husbands or young children and could start over in a place entirely of their own choosing. They chose New York.

  Even in 1890, twenty-five years after the war had ended, the choice seemed shocking and inappropriate. New York was Winnie’s former fiancé Fred’s home state, a former hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. New York City seemed like the last place on earth the women should have chosen if they were worried about how they might appear to their southern friends.

  The pair did not escape the southern soil unscathed. A Birmingham paper accused Varina and Winnie of “abandoning” the South. The New York Times quickly reacted, defending their right to live where they pleased. Varina and Winnie were not alone in choosing New York as their postwar place of residence. Numerous other former Confederates lived in New York City: Burton and Constance Cary Harrison, James Longstreet, and John Singleton Mosby,6 as well as Davis friends Roger and Sara Pryor.7

  Winnie and Varina’s close friends knew the decision to live in the North was partially to the result of financial exigency. Varina wrote her friend and neighbor at Beauvoir Mary Hunter Kimbrough (Mary Craig’s mother) declaring she had little choice in the matter: “I got literary work here and do get it now. Winnie gets it also, and thus we manage to eke out an anxious existence.”8

  Aside from her financial worries, Varina had never loved Beauvoir like Jefferson had. It was not her home, and she was never really its mistress. Sarah Dorsey, the former owner of Beauvoir and Varina’s literary and perhaps romantic rival for Jefferson, had stipulated that after Jefferson’s death, the house belonged to Winnie and not to Varina. Adding to Varina’s personal distaste for Beauvoir was the fact that the Gulf Coast home was becoming expensive to maintain.

  The women’s financial knight in shining armor ended up being family friend and press baron Joseph Pulitzer. Both Varina and Winnie enjoyed writing and preferred literary pursuits to other work. Pulitzer knew this and presented an honorable way out of their financial dire straits for the impoverished pair. He proposed the women go to work for his paper the Sunday World for a stipend of fifteen hundred dollars each per year. Winnie, the more creative writer of the two, would write short fiction, sketches, verse, and book reviews. Varina, ever the more practical one, would write nonfiction that often recalled her days as the first lady of the Confederacy.9

  The two women also worked for other magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal. Varina showed herself to be a classic stage mother, still trying to drum up contacts that Winnie may have been too shy to cultivate on her own. A letter from a private collection documents Varina writing a fawning letter to a Miss Alice Graham Lanigan, an editor at the Ladies’ Home Journal. In it Varina urges Alice not to cut a word from Winnie’s article, asking: “Now, can you arrange this? If so, it would be a great satisfaction to us both. I do not feel the least concern about your notice of her for I am quite willing to trust in your strong but gentle hands.”10

  Varina told her friends that she and Winnie much preferred New York City due to the lower cost of living, the healthier climate, and the much more cosmopolitan lifestyle there. Beauvoir was isolated from both city culture and friends, and she and Winnie claimed they sometimes felt unsafe there.11 Varina’s serious heart condition was aggravated by the hot southern climate, while Winnie’s literary future was also stagnating at Beauvoir.12 Privately, Winnie also found life in the Northeast to be far more culturally stimulating than that of the Gulf coast community she deemed “sleepy.”13

  So, the two women left behind the humid, Spanish moss–draped estate of Sarah Dorsey for the artistic, literary culture of New York City. Here they would work for their livings, but they hoped finally to have found a place that would appreciate their artistic talents more than their connection to the Lost Cause and the Confederacy.

  New York in the Gay Nineties was a lively, busy place. The city was the country’s nexus of the literary and publishing world, the perfect place for aspiring writers like Winnie and her mother to congregate. Manhattan in the Gilded Age was also full of contrasts—with rich and poor living cheek by jowl in the crowded city.

  Photographer and activist Jacob August Riis shocked the country with his 1890 documentary book, How the Other Half Lives, which gave readers a glimpse of New York ghetto life, with its shabby shanties, sweatshops, and saloons—places Winnie and her mother would probably never have seen.14 The book produced its intended result in helping expose the plight of the urban poor, though Riis’s methods were not necessarily welcome; he had no compunction about bursting in on his unwitting subjects in the middle of the night for a surprise photograph.

  But Manhattan was also a location bursting with more laudable superlatives. New York boasted Wall Street, the country’s financial hub; the nation’s leading commercial port; and its chief manufacturing center. The city was also the arts and philanthropic capital of the United States, filled with world-class museums, theaters, and charitable organizations.15

  Far from the heat and isolation of Beauvoir, Winnie and Varina found a cultured island where boredom was almost impossible. The pair first lived at the Hotel Marlborough, where Varina hosted Sunday literary salons that included artists, actors, writers, and playwrights. According to historian Carol Berkin, “She charmed and dazzled the young men and women who visited her, just as once, long ago, she had charmed senators and presidents” in 1850s Washington DC.16 Winnie was often present at these gatherings, and she probably enjoyed watching her vivacious mother entertain while she herself quietly absorbed the literary and artistic talk of which she was so fond.

  The Old Guard from the South also came to call, among them Jefferson’s former secretary Burton Harrison and his enchanting wife, Connie. Despite her chameleonlike ability to fit into New York’s Gilded Age society parlors, Connie missed the South and its genteel ways. Her sharp eye noted the greed and shallowness around her in northern society, though she moved through it expertly.17

  By 1893 mother and daughter had moved to less expensive quarters—the Hotel Gerard at 123 West Forty-Fourth Street, in what is now the Theater District.18 Winnie and Varina were now part of the city’s social fabric, attracting some surprising friends, among them Julia Dent Grant, wife of former Union general and later president Ulysses S. Grant. Varina met Julia by chance in June 1893 at Cranston’s Hotel on the Hudson River. The two women met several more times over the next few days and then again later in 1893 and 1894 at Narragansett Pier, a Rhode Island resort. Winnie and her mother also developed a fond acquaintance with Julia’s daughter, Nellie Sartoris. The Davis women lived all of twenty blocks away from Julia, and the two former first ladies became good friends and correspondents for the rest of their lives.19

  The year 1893 also marked the time when Jefferson Davis’s remains were transferred from their temporary resting place at Metarie Cemetery in New Orleans, where he had died in 1889, to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia. Hollywood was home to numerous Confederate generals and officers but also, more important, to Jefferson’
s beloved sons: Samuel Emory, Joe Jr., Billy, and Jefferson Jr. Varina clearly dreaded going to the ceremony and all the painful memories it would evoke for her and her girls. On May 26 she wrote her friend Ann Grant, noting the unusual and tragic nature of her circumstances: “It does not devolve upon many women to twice bury a husband and four children, and I am overcome by memories of the past.”20

  The Jefferson Davis funeral train left New Orleans on May 28, 1893, and arrived in Richmond on the morning of May 31, after traveling over twelve hundred miles for fifty-five hours.21 Winnie and Margaret accompanied the coffin from New Orleans to Richmond. During the long and arduous journey Winnie made her way to the funeral car to visit her father’s coffin, which at that point was heaped with flowers. The Richmond Dispatch of May 30, 1893, reported that she “moved slowly to the head of the coffin, stopped and looked at the silent men before her and started to speak, but broke down and then hurriedly turned away and left the car.”22 The event may have renewed Winnie’s original feelings of guilt and distress over her inability to return home for her father’s original funeral in 1889.

  Varina met Winnie and Margaret at the station in Richmond early the next morning. At three in the afternoon on May 31, the funeral procession wound its way to Hollywood Cemetery, six white horses drawing the funeral carriage. The Richmond Dispatch account of the event noted that “at least 75,000 people were along the streets and at the cemetery, and not since the war had so many Confederate soldiers been seen in Richmond.”23