Winnie Davis

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Many oral histories and accounts of the funeral claim that Winnie’s former fiancé, Fred Wilkinson, figured into the last scene of this dark Victorian drama. According to these reports, he attended Winnie’s funeral at St. Paul’s and was described as being greatly distressed, sitting in a pew far back in the church, and gazing sorrowfully across the crowded room.25

  Like Winnie, Fred would never marry, having lost his heart, his youth, and his reputation to the Lost Cause. He died on May 18, 1918, at the age of fifty-seven, in Atlantic City, where he was recovering from a severe nervous breakdown.26 It is certainly possible that the public furor caused by the northern lawyer’s engagement to Winnie and the resulting intense scrutiny of his personal life were factors in his breakdown. Ultimately, even practical, matter-of-fact Fred suffered from feelings of angst so prevalent in the “nervous century.”

  Varina was practically prostrate for the entire service, leaning heavily on her one remaining child, Margaret, for comfort. She was clearly devastated and bereft. When the service ended, Varina had a difficult time standing up to leave the church. As the cortege finally was ready to depart, the Richmond Dispatch reported: “Mrs. Davis’s emotion almost overcame her, and three of her old friends stepped forward and kissed her, uttering words of love. She regained her self control in a few moments, however, and took her place in line.”27

  The melancholy funeral procession next wended its way from Grace Street to Cherry Street, where Hollywood Cemetery lies. Many of the Confederate dead were already buried there. Winnie was put to rest in the Davis family plot, to the left of her father, just as the sun was setting that evening. This serene spot commanded a view of half of Richmond and the whole panorama of the James River.

  At the head of the young woman’s grave stood a giant palmetto tree, planted there by the South Carolina delegation from Isle of Palms. Varina and Margaret gave Winnie one last kiss, and the casket was sealed and lowered into the ground. Varina, Margaret, and their companions did not return to the Jefferson Hotel until well after dark.28 The light had been extinguished not just from their long and arduous day but from the one they called the “Daughter of the Confederacy” forever.

  Winnie’s death signaled the end of an era. The most significant link between the Old South and the Lost Cause was now broken. In its tribute the Walter Barker Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy described Winnie as if she were an antique object, not a person: “The last and only souvenir of the ‘Lost Cause’ has passed from earth to heaven.”29

  Winnie was a signifier, a face on the veterans’ badges worn at Confederate reunions; she was in essence a “souvenir.” Souvenir, if used in French as a noun, translates as “memory, recollection, and remembrance”: a fitting motto for the deceased Daughter of the Confederacy. The young woman was not described by this UDC chapter in human terms—she was too special for that and clearly could not be replaced.

  The Daughter of the Confederacy had functioned as the true representative of Jefferson Davis’s legacy since his death in 1889. Although the mourners at St. Paul’s that day and the Confederate veterans’ groups thought they knew who Winnie was, she remained an enigma even for those closest to her, including her mother, her former fiancé, and her sister. Because she had remained with Varina and had stayed loyal to the memory of her father and the Confederacy, she could never truly leave the all-consuming sadness of the Civil War behind. Although Winnie had moved to New York and become a workingwoman, she lived there on borrowed time. Her existence was ruled by the past, despite her brave attempts to move her life into the present.30

  To understand the circumstances of Winnie’s death, one must first understand the dynamics of the Davis family. Passion, death, politics, and southern culture all combined to produce an atmosphere in which the Old South and the New collided. Although Winnie had a foot in both eras, she ultimately became trapped by the past, unable to reconcile her private personality with her public persona. As the daughter of Jefferson Davis, she could never shake the family legacy that ultimately consumed her, despite having grown up abroad, having been engaged to a Yankee grandson of an abolitionist, and having experienced a most unconventional life.

  Four years later Varina summed up her thoughts on her beloved Winnie’s existence and her deep despair at losing her youngest daughter: “She was born in the blackest storm of war which overwhelmed us, she suffered all the penalties without much of the glory, but accepted them gladly and triumphantly bore aloft her distinguished father’s name in her own personality before contending parties North and South and no woman descended from a great man of our day has done so much.”31

  Varina would die of pneumonia in New York on October 16, 1906, the anniversary of her sons Jeff Jr. and Billy’s deaths. She was eighty years old. Both her oldest daughter, Margaret Hayes, and Davis cousin Kate Pulitzer were at her bedside that day. She had outlived everyone in her family but her younger sister Margaret Howell Stoess and her daughter Margaret.32

  Margaret Hayes did not outlive Varina for long. She died a scant three years after her mother, on July 18, 1909, of breast cancer. She was in Colorado Springs at the end, with her children and grandchildren around her.33 Although Margaret was the last of the Davis children to pass away, the Davis legacy would not die with her. Varina Davis had already prevented that. In 1890 Varina marched Margaret and Addison’s eight-year-old son, Jefferson Addison Hayes, down to the Mississippi legislature. That very day the boy’s legal name was changed. His new name was Jefferson Addison Hayes-Davis.34 This change ensured that the Davis name, at least, would be preserved.

  But it was the Daughter of the Confederacy’s early and untimely death that severed the most significant Davis family link between the Old and the New South. No female representative of the Lost Cause would ever replace her. Winnie was a superstar of the nineteenth-century South, and her bond with the Confederate past and its war veterans was impossible to duplicate. Other young southern women were suggested as her replacement, including her older sister. These ideas were met with a harsh “emphatically no,” however, from former Confederate general John B. Gordon, who had first christened Winnie the Daughter of the Confederacy.35

  Winnie was an original: a unique combination of intellectual and woman of the people, American and European, southern and northern. Her image represented an odd fusion of ideals and fantasy as well as a bridge between the divides of North and South, the Old South and the New. The intellectual, sophisticated Daughter of the Confederacy, who had found her greatest happiness as a writer in New York City, remained a paradox to the end.

  Epilogue

  The Great-Great-Grandson of the Confederacy and the Daughter of New York

  On a gorgeous early October day in 2012 I find myself at Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library in Biloxi, Mississippi. I am here to soak up the ambiance of the Gulf Coast home where Winnie spent so much time in her twenties. This raised Louisiana cottage was the site of her romance, the meeting between Fred and her parents to ask for her hand, and the final interview between Varina and Fred that terminated the couple’s engagement.

  The young lawyer would have arrived from Syracuse, New York, at Beauvoir Station on the edge of the property, hat and bags in hand. He would have made his way past Oyster Bayou—possibly spotting an exotic bird in flight—and then walked through Varina’s prized rose gardens to reach his beloved Winnie.

  I am awed by the inside of the house, as Fred himself must have been. Meticulously restored after Hurricane Katrina, the foyer ceilings boast gorgeous frescoes and plasterwork. An artwork originally displayed in the Vatican, chosen by Varina, hangs on one wall, and musical instruments such as a golden harp and a piano are prominently displayed. Winnie was known to serenade her parents and visitors to Beauvoir with her beautiful piano melodies in the front parlor. She and her sister, Maggie, both played the organ in the local Episcopal church when they stayed with their parents.1

  I am here not only for the scenery but also to in
terview Bertram Hayes-Davis and his wife, Carol. Bertram is the great-great-grandson of Jefferson and Varina, the great-grandson of Margaret and Addison Hayes, and the grandson of Jefferson Addison Hayes-Davis. The former geologist who grew up in Colorado Springs is now the newest executive director of Beauvoir. Bertram is the last link in Winnie’s story—the one who I hope can shed some light on her unusual life.

  I wander a bit on the property, admiring the gorgeous lines of Beau-voir’s raised cottage architecture—apparently, an adaptation of the style used by French settlers in the Caribbean to catch the cool ocean breezes.2 I pass through a charming gift shop loaded with the southernisms that I miss as a Virginian living in the Midwest: a linen hand towel embroidered with a lobster and Merry Christmas Y’all next to a cookbook entitled Gone with the Grits. I am then ushered into the inner sanctum, the executive director’s office.

  Which is in a trailer.

  Bertram Hayes-Davis smiles up at me. He is handsome, with thick white hair and a movie star smile. He looks eerily like the portraits I have seen in Colorado Springs of his great-grandfather Addison, known to the family as “Daddy Hayes.”3 His elegant and stylish wife, Carol, is a midwesterner from Ohio with a warm manner. Both are working together in said trailer while construction of the Presidential Library and staff offices is completed.

  The library was to be open several weeks ago, but plans have been delayed by the unfortunate appearance of Hurricane Isaac. Determination and perseverance, however, are Davis family traits—and clearly part of Carol’s heritage as well. The couple is not going to let a hurricane, or any other obstacle, hold them back from their plans for Beauvoir. “This is not what we signed up for,” notes Carol, “but we are doing it for the right reasons—to carry out Varina’s message for her.”4

  The couple graciously invites me into their world with an openness that I had not expected. They are busy today, just as they are every day here. Soon they will be greeting busloads of tourists, hosting a school event, and preparing for an evening cocktail party on-site. Even so, I feel I have their full attention when I ask them about Winnie, Margaret, Jefferson, and Varina.

  I notice that despite the activity swirling around him on this particular day, Bertram still pauses to take a photo with a young boy on Beauvoir’s back porch. The boy’s family is clearly delighted and a bit stunned to encounter the great-great-grandson of Jefferson Davis mingling casually with visitors. They look as if they have seen a celebrity.

  We spend lots of time talking over the next few days and eating delectable seafood at local restaurants White Cap Seafood and the Chimneys. We are united in our disappointment that the Chimney’s famous coconut cake is not available the day we lunch there. Southern food enhances and facilitates our discussions about Winnie and her family.

  What I find out is that Bertram’s great-aunt Winnie could not escape the South, but his great-grandmother Margaret did. According to Bertram, Margaret’s personality was quite unlike that of her people-pleasing younger sister: “I think Margaret was a much different person. She was born much earlier than Winnie and had been through a lot . . . Her love for the South and her family was intense, but she had created her own life in Colorado Springs. Maybe she had seen so much she needed to do something else.”5

  Now the generations have come full circle, with Bertram and Carol returning willingly to the South to preserve—and perhaps to change—the perception of the Davis legacy. They are custodians with a western-midwestern viewpoint and a commonsense approach to history.

  Bertram and Carol enthusiastically explain their new vision for the historic site. Beauvoir will no longer be a monument to the Confederate soldier; it will be revamped according to Varina’s stated wish that the property become a monument to Jefferson Davis. Carol confesses that she struggled with this concept until she began to understand that Varina wanted the public to be educated about her husband and all his achievements, not just the legacy of the Confederacy. Since moving to Mississippi, Carol reveals that she has been having dreams in which Varina visits her—perhaps the Davis matriarch is trying to give her advice on the direction Beauvoir needs to go post-Katrina.

  Bertram, Carol, and I continue talking on the porch of the rebuilt Hayes cottage, where Margaret and her children used to stay when they visited Beauvoir. We sit in rocking chairs outside, luxuriating in the sunshine and sea breeze, with the glittering Gulf just across the street. Did Jefferson Davis finally get some real peace here at Beauvoir after all his struggles, both professional and personal? Bertram thinks so. Did Winnie? I think probably not. He was at the end of his life, while she was just beginning hers.

  The Daughter of the Confederacy’s bedroom lies just inside Beauvoir’s front door and is dominated by her portrait as Queen of Comus at the 1892 New Orleans Mardi Gras. She is beautiful but projects that same melancholy air I noticed in the portrait of her I had seen in Virginia years ago. Her room boasts an ocean view and examples of her exquisite needlework. I can just imagine her sitting at her desk in this room working late into the night on her stories. Or perhaps writing love letters to Fred—all of which seem to have been destroyed by her mother or else lost to the winds of time.

  Even in view of her comfortable life here and the cherished hours she spent with her aging father and mother—hours she deeply craved while in boarding school in Germany—I can see that the twenty-something Winnie was restless in this lovely but lonely place. Despite the railroad service and Beauvoir Station behind the property—which brought Fred, the Pulitzers, and even Oscar Wilde to visit—Beauvoir was an isolated location in the 1880s. You had to be determined to make your way here.

  New York City proved to be a better place for Winnie to achieve her literary dream of writing and publishing her novels. Like her older sister, she tried to create her own identity outside of her southern heritage. While Winnie did achieve her dreams of writing and publishing her novels, she could not escape her status as Daughter of the Confederacy. In that respect Margaret was the One Who Got Away.

  While many southerners still shy away from the history of the Confederacy and its related casualties, such as the broken engagement of Winnie Davis and Fred Wilkinson, Bertram emphatically does not. “History is one of the most important things we have in this country,” he asserts, “and we need to make sure that we understand it, that we know all the reasons things occurred. I don’t think it’s difficult at all to talk about the War between the States.”6

  Perhaps the Davis family’s southern mythology will be rejuvenated by the no-nonsense, can-do attitude of Beauvoir’s newest director and his wife, who plan to cut through the crusty layers of “Lost Cause” mythology and examine Jefferson’s life and career in its entirety. They feel the focus on his tenure as president of the Confederacy during the Civil War does not do justice to his other achievements.7

  Most Americans do not realize that before he was elected president of the Confederacy, Jefferson was an army officer, a congressman, secretary of war under Franklin Pierce, and a two-term Mississippi senator. He was also a cultural force, helping to found the Smithsonian Institution and to design the United States Capitol building.8

  Within this process Bertram and Carol will examine the Davis women as well: Winnie, Varina, Margaret, and Margaret’s descendants. It is not just the physical structure of Beauvoir they are aiming to renovate. Understanding the spiritual, social, and personal structure of this most southern of families is integral to their vision for Beauvoir. Under their leadership the next chapter of the Davis and Hayes-Davis saga may prove to be its most revealing and its most exciting story yet.

  While Bertram and Carol watch over and cultivate Beauvoir for the next generation in Mississippi, I get a sense that Winnie’s spirit may rest elsewhere. New York became her true home, a place where she could relax, breathe, and blend in with the crowd.

  The energy of the Theater District, where Winnie and Varina lived, must have suited her better than the languor and heat of the Gulf Coast. The literature, art,
and culture of Manhattan drew her out of her shell and emboldened her to pursue her own literary career. It was here she became the best and truest version of herself.

  Not more than a month after I visit Beauvoir, I find myself in New York City meeting a fellow biographer and dear friend for dinner. She suggests we eat at Un Deux Trois, a well-regarded French restaurant at 123 West 44th Street, located in what used to be the lobby of the Hotel Gerard, Winnie’s second New York apartment. Located in the Theater District, the space is packed, filled with chic urbanites headed out to the latest Broadway show.

  Before my friend arrives, I order a glass of Sancerre, close my eyes, and imagine I can hear Winnie’s footsteps clicking across the parquet floor. I can see her in my mind’s eye. She is wearing a tailored silk dress in her favorite dove gray color.

  She sits down with me and laughs at the old southern myth that “poor Winnie Davis pined away and died because she had been forbidden to marry the Yankee.”9 She has been busy writing articles for Mr. Pulitzer and finishing up her latest novel. She indicates that we will meet another time, and she runs out the door to attend the theater, her gray eyes flashing with anticipation. The Daughter of the Confederacy, now the Daughter of New York, smiles and waves to me as she disappears into the crisp November night.

  Acknowledgments

  I have been working on this biography of Varina Anne “Winnie” Davis on and off since I was twenty-one years old. I am now forty-three, and throughout all that time, her tragic story has haunted me. When I moved to the Midwest four years ago, the allure of the South, with its dark, gothic postwar history, kept calling. Writing about Winnie has been a therapeutic way to stay connected with my southern past.