Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Addison closes his letter by cautioning Winnie not to become so attached to Europe that she thinks of her home as provincial. “You must not do like your sister though, fall so much in love with the country as to think we have nothing good ever here.”38 While Margaret’s depression stemmed primarily from the loss of her infant son, she also may have missed the glamorous Paris she had known during her boarding school days.

  Addison wrote to his young sister-in-law, perhaps more frequently than his wife did, repeating his desire to have Winnie back home in the United States. “I am very anxious to have our darling girl back among us once more, for we have continued to miss you, since the day you left.”39

  A few years later Margaret’s physical and mental state seemed to have improved significantly. This was surely due in part to the birth in 1878 of another child, a healthy little girl she and Addison named Varina after her mother. In 1879 Margaret wrote to her sister about baby Varina, whom Winnie had yet to meet: “Darling how your old sis does long to see your dear face once more. It seems hard that my only little sister should never have seen my baby daughter. I know you would love her she is like you and so bright and good.”40 These sentiments eerily echo the comments Varina made to Mary Chesnut about Winnie as a baby in October 1864.

  The next year Margaret wrote to Winnie at Karlsruhe, commenting on how much little Varina reminded her of her younger sister: “I wish you could see the little Daughter she is so like you when you were little in fact the pictures taken of you are excellent likenesses of Varina … She is very little but clever and bright as possible.”41

  Addison seemed lonely for family, as his wife often went on trips without him. The loss of his firstborn son had likely affected him deeply. He may have seen Winnie as a temporary replacement for his lost child, someone he could spoil and coddle through his letters because he had no daughter or son of his own to dote upon.

  On August 4, 1880, Addison again wrote to Winnie: “Margaret is now at Blue Ridge Springs, Virginia, but has been sick since she has been there.”42 Illness seemed to follow Maggie often, just as it did her father and mother. Writing these letters to Winnie may have allowed Addison a place to vent his frustrations with his wife’s poor health. Winnie was probably too young and too far removed from their marital situation to grasp the significance of these letters or the concerns that Addison may have had regarding his wife’s physical and mental health.

  Despite Margaret’s fits of depression and Winnie’s life isolated from family and southern culture in Europe, it would ultimately fall to the two Davis daughters alone to provide heirs. Having children was one way the two young women could participate in their family legacy. The cultivation and preservation of Confederate culture would prove to be another. Margaret would follow the first, more traditional path, while Winnie would soon become an iconic symbol of Confederate postwar dissent.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Portrait of a Lady

  In the summer of 1882 Jefferson and Varina finally sailed to Europe to fetch Winnie home from Germany. Jefferson was apparently overjoyed at the prospect of seeing his daughter again. Theirs had been a long separation. Historian William C. Davis writes, “He had not seen his daughter in five years, and the reunion gladdened his heart.”1 Both he and Varina were thrilled to be able finally to bring Winnie home and introduce her to southern society.

  The years of convent school had created a very erudite and accomplished young woman who was far more of an intellectual than most of her southern peers. Winnie had become fluent in German and French, knowledgeable about European history, and particularly well versed in German literature and history.2 All this in addition to her notable skills in painting, writing, and music earned her a deserved reputation as “one of the most cultured women of her time.”3

  Winnie had been in Paris studying French for several months, and the family enjoyed a vacation there before returning to the States.4 The Davis women strolled along fashionable streets shopping for clothes and visited Parisian art museums with abandon, Varina being more interested in the shopping and Winnie in seeing the museums. While Jefferson longed for home and was unimpressed with French culture, Varina and Winnie relished this idyll in the City of Light, a respite from the constant shadow the Confederacy had cast over their family in the United States. Varina particularly cherished her time in Paris and found it “a great wrench” to leave.5 Winnie bid a fond adieu to her time in Germany and France, but this was not to be her last visit abroad.

  Winnie had grown into a very attractive young woman of eighteen. She was described by her friend author Charles Clifton Ferrell as “tall, slender, fair-haired with grey eyes of peculiar beauty.”6 Although Winnie’s beauty may have been a little less dramatic than most sources suggest, it became part of her legend. Grace, charm, and beauty were all crucial pieces of the southern lady mythology. The emphasis on Winnie’s physical looks also enhanced her moral worth in the eyes of her admirers.

  Yet Varina often bemoaned her daughter’s lack of interest in the modes of the day. The former first lady of the Confederacy was savvy enough to realize that this “defect” could negatively affect the public perception of her child. “Winnie does not care enough for dress—and when I have been urging her to rearrange some half-worn dress, she leads off on the woes of the Irish, the labor question, or some system of philosophy which she has been studying with intense interest.”7 Newspapers of the era would echo her mother’s sentiments, though they often attributed Winnie’s lack of fashion savvy to the diminished financial state of her family after the war. This quality was typically presented as a virtue on her part: “She does not make the most of what she has to dress on, but dresses plainly but most elegantly, for the daughter of Jefferson Davis could not afford to get herself up in the gew-gaw style.”8

  Although the Davis’s youngest girl was definitely attractive, as evidenced by her many photographs, she was perhaps not so much beautiful as striking. Winnie represented a certain archetype of female beauty that was fashionable in the late nineteenth century. She was a wistful, nervous heroine such as one might find described in the novels of Kate Chopin (The Awakening) or Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper).

  Pictorially, portraits of women of Winnie’s physical type abounded during her adult years: Thomas Eakins, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and Thomas Wilmer Dewing all produced works of women in white feminine frocks, with drooping countenances and pallid complexions. Winnie embodied this popular physical type, and her passive personality reinforced the image. Varina’s biographer Ishbel Ross describes the Davises’ youngest daughter: her “health was delicate, her manner pensive. All who knew her noted a certain melancholy about Winnie.”9 Melancholia and neurasthenia were prevalent Victorian era “diseases” that often seemed to be prerequisites for late-nineteenth-century heroines. In this sense Winnie fit the cultural mold of the times. Her sadness is quite evident in her photographs, in which she is rarely seen smiling. These pictures all capture a woman with a winsome expression and wan face.

  Yet Winnie suffered from something more serious than occasional bouts of dark moods. She possessed a predisposition toward anxiety and depression likely inherited from her father. Ross writes that “Winnie had her father’s overwrought temperament and suffered extremely from stress.”10 Her propensity to worry herself sick was a family legacy; her mother also had suffered from anxiety and depression. This genetic inheritance was likely the root cause of many of her later bouts with unspecified illnesses.

  At eighteen, however, the world seemed mostly bright, and the young girl returned home from Paris with high hopes for the future. Winnie retreated to Beauvoir with her family, where she read, painted, and proved to be a reliable source of both entertainment and comfort for the aging Varina and Jefferson. She was arguably far more of an intellectual than either of her parents. She quickly became her father’s confidante and best friend, acting somewhat as a replacement for Jeff Jr., who had acted as his father’s secretary and companion before his untim
ely death.

  Her parents and other observers often described Winnie as “a loving daughter … a tender and solicitous companion.”11 Jefferson particularly delighted in spending leisure time with his daughter. His biographer William Davis writes: “He walked with her along the beach … Each evening they played backgammon and euchre.”12

  There is some evidence that Winnie did not spend all her time alone with her parents at Beauvoir. She may have enjoyed her first romance shortly after her return from Europe when she met a handsome young artist named Verner White. The young man was also a southerner, born in Lunenburg County, Virginia, close to Richmond, in 1863. While he had little memory of the Civil War itself, its aftermath informed his childhood and his artistic aesthetic. James Graham Baker describes the young artist: “Although he grew up in the ruins of the Old South among people who clung to the memories of a culture that had been largely shattered, his was a privileged youth.”13

  Verner studied art at Southwestern Presbyterian University and then traveled throughout the South painting. From 1884 to 1886 he maintained a studio in Mobile, Alabama. At some point he supposedly met both Jefferson and Winnie and began work on their portraits.14 Mertie Broughton White, later Verner’s wife, claimed that her husband frequently visited Beauvoir during this period and soon fell in love with the Davises’ accomplished youngest daughter. Verner’s brother corroborated her story. He claimed the artist was commissioned to make a dual portrait of Winnie and Jefferson to be called “The Father and Daughter of the Confederacy,” though the painting seems never to have been finished. Verner did complete a portrait of Jefferson Davis, however, that hung in the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.15

  Winnie and Verner certainly would have had much in common: age, southern heritage, and geography. They both had one foot in the Old South and one in the New. It seemed to be their love of art, however, that attracted them to each other. Winnie was herself a talented artist, having studied drawing both at school in Germany and also in Paris. Her letters are full of her whimsical drawings in the margins, Beauvoir boasts a fireplace with her decorative touch, and the Museum of the Confederacy has several of her finely detailed drawings.

  Verner’s family members claimed that while Verner was working on portraits of the Confederate father and daughter, Winnie “recommended he go to Europe to study and improve his art before he finished her portrait.”16 Perhaps Verner departed in a huff at this suggestion, but he did take Winnie’s advice, spending the next eight years abroad. This effectively put an end to the romance, if it indeed existed at all.

  Things turned out well for the young artist. He was soon on his way to becoming a southern version of John Singer Sargent. According to James Baker: “Wealthy patrons liked this cultivated, cultured, well-traveled young man. His southern heritage stood him in good stead with Confederate veterans, who by 1900 were back in control of commerce and government across the states of the former Confederacy.” Verner surely would have been an acceptable candidate for Winnie’s hand. His “charm, good looks, connections, culture, and artistic skills made him one of the best-known and most respected artists in Texas between 1895 and 1904.”17

  No Davis family records or letters exist that mention a possible romance or Verner’s visits to Beauvoir, so historians cannot know how Jefferson and Varina viewed their daughter’s relationship with the young man, if indeed it existed at all. Docents at Beauvoir claim to have never heard this story.18 The dual portrait of Jefferson and Winnie by Verner White has never been found. Verner’s studio in Galveston, Texas, and much of his work was destroyed by a massive hurricane in September 1900.19 Perhaps the unfinished portraits of Winnie and Jefferson were among his artistic casualties?

  If the romance did take place, it may have been just a passing flirtation. Winnie did not let her attraction to Verner tie her down socially, nor did he let the romance deter him from his extended artistic studies in Europe. In 1884 Winnie was asked to be a lady-in-waiting for General Lee’s daughter Mildred, who was queen of Comus at the New Orleans Mardi Gras festivities. The occasion was Winnie’s official launch into southern society. Jefferson and Winnie came in from “the country” at Beauvoir to attend the balls.20

  Winnie’s time in New Orleans was likely filled with glittering balls, tableaux, and parades. A reporter at the event described the scene as Rex, the king of Mardi Gras, appeared on Canal Street: the Mardi Gras monarch was “gorgeously throned, royally habited, glistening with jewels, and attended by Mamelukes soldiers, the woman of his harem, and nobles by the dozen.”21 New Orleans’s over-the-top carnival spectacle likely did not impress Winnie. Indeed, the serious-minded young woman was probably overwhelmed by the mass of gaudy color, flash, and noise.

  Southerners had selected Jefferson Davis to be president of the Confederacy in part because he seemed to represent the best of their society. In his study of race relations in the South, Joel Williamson writes that Davis “was a paragon of the gentlemanly ideal, the living representative of the potential high elegance of Southern culture.”22

  Although Davis was not as popular as other Confederate leaders, such as the much-loved J.E.B. Stuart, he possessed an air of unassailable confidence attractive to southerners looking for a rock during and after the chaos of the Civil War. Admittedly, this confidence stemmed in a large part from Jefferson’s firm belief that he was always right. This trait did not always win him friends, created many enemies, and frequently troubled his marriage to Varina.

  In June 1881 the first volume of Jefferson’s memoirs, entitled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, was published with little fanfare. It received a lukewarm reception, but Jefferson felt relief that he finally had a venue to tell his side of the story, the story he had not been able to express in a courtroom—that “secession was a constitutional right, not rebellion or treason.” Rise and Fall, weighing in at a lengthy fifteen hundred pages, showed that the former president of the Confederacy had no doubts concerning his side of the argument.23

  Although the massive tome was a modest success at best, the end result of its publication had far greater import. A slow trickle of visitors descended upon the Davises at Beauvoir. Even the eccentric writer Oscar Wilde arrived at the Davises’ doorstep, much to Varina’s delight.24 Confederate monuments began to be dedicated across the South, and Jefferson’s popularity as a speaker and standard-bearer of the Old South, along with that of his former military colleague Gen. Robert E. Lee, slowly began to escalate.

  The fading of the war years seemed to create a halo of martyrdom around Jefferson and other former Confederate leaders. This nostalgia, together with defeated southerners’ seething resentment toward their northern counterparts, proved to be a powerful social force in the postwar South. Jefferson became a living symbol of the growing “Lost Cause” movement. Although the Confederacy may have lost its fight, it still maintained the vision that the South was superior to the North in terms of culture, honor, and morals. Davis’s 1886–87 speaking tour cemented his newfound prestige, and he began to ascend to new heights of glory.25

  Beginning in the 1880s, Winnie gradually began to take her mother Varina’s place as Jefferson’s traveling companion, secretary, and literary assistant.26 It was Winnie and not her mother who accompanied Jefferson on his many trips throughout the South to veterans’ reunions and ceremonies and on speaking tours. In 1886, after fulfilling a series of obligations in Alabama, Jefferson and his youngest daughter decided to extend their journey to Atlanta and Savannah. This last-minute decision would change the course of young Winnie’s life.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Daughter of the Confederacy

  There are many daughters of the Confederacy,

  there is only one Daughter.

  Mrs. Cornelia Branch Stone, United

  Daughters of the Confederacy

  The South that Jefferson and Winnie traversed during the mid-1880s was falling deeper and deeper into economic depression. Jobs were scarce, and southerners who had been wealthy
in antebellum times found themselves less and less able to provide for their families. Confederate veterans were particularly embittered by their wartime experiences, berating themselves for their sense of helplessness both during and after the war.

  How could southern soldiers have let the Yankees steal their wealth, their land, and their homes? How could they have let their enemies terrorize their wives and children and in some cases rape and kill them? When these men returned home in total defeat to their ruined dwellings and “ruined” women, many felt that a sense of deep disappointment was all that remained for them. As historian Gaines Foster explains, “Defeat had indeed undermined Southern soldiers’ confidence in their manhood.”1

  Partially in response to these unmanageable feelings, large numbers of these former soldiers began to organize into cohesive veterans’ groups in the 1880s, forming “camps” and holding veterans’ reunions each year. In June 1889 all these camps officially merged to become known as the “United Confederate Veterans,” or ucv. The organization’s primary focus was to honor veterans, especially important Confederate leaders, and to glorify the southern past.2 Another one of its primary goals, explained an organizer, was to “preserve in the South the respectful devotion to its splendid womanhood that the Southern manhood inherited from their chivalric ancestors.”3

  In a kind of mass group therapy, veterans began to retreat into this quasi-medieval world of courtiers, knights, and their damsels in distress. Southern gentlemen had been preoccupied with the ideas of chivalry and courtly love even before the Civil War. Confederate veterans’ reunions took this concept a step further and seized upon such ideals as an important underpinning of their organization.