At the height of the Civil War, in the Confederate capital of Richmond, the woman who was supposed to embody the new nation found herself at war with its own people. The newspapers, eager to wound her and her husband through her, printed insults that were meant to shock. They called her a mulatto and an Indian, slurs calculated to inflame racial anxieties in a society obsessed with bloodlines and purity. They drew attention to her sallow skin and dark features.
Her own family life was crumbling around her; she was frequently pregnant, grieving the loss of a son, and burdened with doubt about the very cause she was expected to champion. Varina Davis, first lady of the Confederacy, never truly believed in the Confederate cause, and the people who met and talked with her in Richmond picked up on it. The suspicion that dogged her had followed her since birth. Varina Howell was born on May 7, 1826, into a family that embodied the early American elite.
Her parents, William and Margaret, lived in Natchez, Mississippi, but she was likely born in rural Louisiana while they were visiting relatives. Some sources claimed Mississippi instead. On her father’s side, ambition and public service ran deep; her paternal grandfather had served as governor of New Jersey in the 1790s, and her father had taken up arms against the British in the War of 1812. Her mother, Margaret Louisa Kemp, was the daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter and slaveholder, a Scots-Irish immigrant who had carved out status and fortune in the Deep South.
Varina was the second of eleven children, though in the harsh reality of the nineteenth century, only seven would survive to adulthood. Her documented family lines traced back to European ancestors, primarily from the British Isles, including Welsh and Scots-Irish roots. Yet from the moment of her birth, some whispered that she did not look as expected. She had an olive complexion, dark eyes, dark hair, and a broad nose.
These features were later attributed to her Welsh ancestry, but not everyone was convinced. To many in the rigid, race-obsessed society of the antebellum South, these traits seemed unusual, and unusual invited suspicion. A boarding school in Philadelphia gave her an excellent education. She worked tirelessly, so that when she returned home, she was likely one of the most well-read women in her entire community.
The family’s comfortable life had not lasted; in the 1830s, her father’s poor investments and increasingly expensive lifestyle sent his finances into steady decline, and by 1839 the setbacks had mounted to bankruptcy. It was his wife’s wealthy family who stepped in to rescue them, and likely through their support that William could send his daughter north for her schooling. In late 1843, at just seventeen, Varina met her future husband at a Christmas party at Hurricane Plantation. He was Jefferson Davis, eighteen years her senior and a wealthy plantation owner.
Jefferson had been briefly married before to Sarah Knox Taylor, who had died just months after the wedding in 1835. Sarah had been the daughter of Zachary Taylor, the US Army general who would briefly serve as the twelfth president of the United States between 1849 and his death in office in 1850. Varina was smitten with Davis from the moment they met. Her parents were far less enthusiastic, troubled by the differences in age, background, and politics between the pair.
Still, after some hesitation, they gave their consent, and the courtship continued through 1844 and into the following year. Davis then proposed, and the wedding was planned as a grand social affair, but this was later abandoned. When they married in 1845, the ceremony was held at her parents’ home with only a small circle of Varina’s relatives and friends in attendance. Strangely, no one from the Davis family was there.
Only after the marriage did Varina realize that her husband’s attitudes toward gender norms were quite traditional and that he expected her to play the role of a conventional Southern wife despite her education. She also realized that he carried a lingering affection for his deceased first wife. After her death, Davis had mourned deeply and had spent much of the next eight years withdrawn from society, unable or perhaps unwilling to let go of the past. Varina would later admit that she sometimes felt like a consolation wife.
Even their brief honeymoon served as a reminder; it included a visit to his elderly mother, Jane Davis, and a solemn stop at the grave of the woman who had come before her. The newlyweds settled at Brierfield, the plantation Jefferson had established on land provided by his older and richer brother, Joseph. Soon after, his widowed and impoverished sister arrived with her seven children to live there, a decision made without consulting Varina, much to her displeasure. In 1846, Jefferson Davis was elected to the US House of Representatives, and Varina accompanied him to Washington, D.
C. , a city she quickly grew to adore. She threw herself into its social life and soon established herself as one of the city’s most popular and youngest hostesses. Before long, however, Davis resigned his seat to serve in the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848.
After the conflict, he returned to politics with renewed ambition. As his stature grew, so too did the tension between husband and wife, as his views on politics were at odds with Varina’s. She had more of a northerner’s views on slavery, while Jefferson didn’t, and he had even compared enslaved people to livestock. Despite this, she was able to reconcile their opposing perspectives in her head, and the relationship remained steady.
Jefferson’s growing wealth in the 1850s seemingly smoothed out a lot of the issues in their marriage. He served for many years as a senator for Mississippi, and in 1853 he was appointed Secretary of War in the administration of President Franklin Pierce. While their home remained in Mississippi, the family spent much of their lives between 1845 and 1861 living in Washington, D. C.
There, Varina felt more at ease, finding the city’s broader political and social world better suited to her outlook than Mississippi’s increasingly heated atmosphere. Family tragedy was just around the corner. Between 1852 and 1864, Varina and Jefferson had six children, four boys and two girls. Most would have short lives.
In 1854, the Davises were devastated when their first child, Samuel, died before reaching two. Grief-stricken, Varina withdrew from social life for a time. The following year brought the birth of their daughter, Margaret, the only one of their children who would grow up, marry, and have a family of her own. A third child, Jefferson Junior, survived into adulthood but died at just twenty-one in 1878 during a yellow fever epidemic in the Mississippi River Valley.
Two more sons followed, Joseph born in 1859 and William born in 1861. Both died in childhood. Their youngest child, Winnie, born in 1864, was especially close to her mother. The entire trajectory of Varina’s life changed in late 1860.
The debate over slavery had been escalating for decades. The northern states were more urbanized and industrial, their economies no longer reliant on slave labor, and many had begun to ban the institution. By Varina’s time, there was a clear divide between the free states of the north and the slave-owning states of the south, where enforced labor was still central to the cultivation of cotton and tobacco on enormous plantations. Varina had lived her entire life against this backdrop.
While slavery was normalized for many southerners, her more cosmopolitan upbringing and education meant she had been exposed to the views of northern liberals for many years. Given her connections to both regions, she called herself a half-breed. The expansion of the country westward had ignited a debate about whether slavery should be allowed in new states, which boiled over in the 1850s, especially after the formation of the Republican Party. Its presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, was elected president in November 1860.
Although Lincoln had not explicitly campaigned on a platform of abolishing slavery nationwide, the southern states feared his intentions. In December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. A host of other states followed between January and April 1861, uniting to form the rival Confederate States of America in the south. That same April, the first shots of the American Civil War rang out, igniting a conflict that would tear the nation apart.
Varina and her husband would become the first and only president and first lady of the Confederate States of America. Their path to this unique position was gradual. Mississippi seceded from the Union on January 9, 1861. Jefferson formally resigned from the Senate in Washington, D.
C. , twelve days later. Just four weeks later, he became the provisional president of the Confederate States at a convention assembled in Montgomery, Alabama. The provisional position was made permanent on February 22, 1862, by which time the war was well underway and the capital had moved to Richmond, Virginia.
Jefferson’s elevation was owing to his seniority as a long-standing senator and former Secretary of War. Varina’s position as first lady was difficult. She never truly believed in the Confederate cause, and her doubts left her ill-suited to be the first lady of the new breakaway nation. People who met her in Richmond picked up on this, and the press began to comment on her appearance.
Hostile critics described her in language meant to shock, calling her a mulatto or an Indian. To make matters worse, the Davises’ family life was strained. Their son Joseph died in April 1864 after a bad fall right after his fifth birthday. Just months later, Varina gave birth to Winnie.
The child soon became known as the Daughter of the Confederacy, and her image and story circulated across the South during the war’s final year in an effort to lift morale. Thus, Varina spent the war years pregnant, grieving, being criticized, and thrust into being one of the most prominent public female spokespersons of a cause she didn’t really believe in. The war ended in defeat for the Confederacy in April 1865, almost four years to the day after it started. While Confederate General Robert E.
Lee organized the surrender, Jefferson, Varina, their family, and supporters fled south from Richmond. They were captured in Georgia, and Jefferson was detained after suspicions arose that he was connected in some way to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln just days after the fighting stopped. Jefferson spent the next two years in confinement. During that time, Varina sent their children to Canada to place them in safekeeping with relatives while she campaigned to get her husband released.
He was freed on bail in May 1867 and was included in a general amnesty of former Confederate politicians and soldiers issued by President Andrew Johnson at Christmas 1868. The Davises were now free to live their lives again, but the society around them had changed. Jefferson’s wealth had been largely based around his plantations run by slave labor, which was now gone. There was no chance of a renewed political career, and the family’s wealth had been decimated by the war and his legal fees during imprisonment.
The family traveled to Europe, making some money through speaking and appearance fees owing to their celebrity status as the former president and first lady of the Confederacy. Varina and the children remained in Europe after Jefferson returned to America, and she considered taking up various teaching roles. In England with her sister and children, Varina was outraged to read about Jefferson’s possible affairs back in the United States in 1870 and 1871. During this time, their son William died just before his eleventh birthday, and this, combined with the collapse of their fortunes, plunged them into prolonged periods of depression.
In the mid-1870s, Varina returned to America, and the couple gradually reconciled, eventually living together again by 1878. Jefferson was relying on the generosity of a patron, Sarah Dorsey, the wealthy widow of a Louisiana planter. Dorsey had known Varina since their school days in the 1830s, when the two girls attended boarding school together. Dorsey was also a writer and historian who became a fierce defender of the Confederate cause in her writings.
She invited the Davises to live on her estate at Beauvoir, Mississippi, on the Gulf of Mexico, and eventually sold them a house there at a cheap rate. When Sarah died in 1879, she left Jefferson a substantial sum of money that largely alleviated their financial problems for the rest of his life. Jefferson died during a massive yellow fever outbreak across the southern states in 1889, aged eighty-one. After her husband’s death, Varina went to live in New York City, a move viewed as controversial at the time.
She was related to the media magnate Joseph Pulitzer, and he gave her a job writing for the New York World in 1891. Her daughter Winnie went with her. Winnie was also writing during these years and published several books, such as a study of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet. Varina and her daughter lived a middle-class life as writers in Manhattan in the 1890s, often living in apartment hotels in the city or with relatives.
Occasionally, Varina was criticized in the Southern press for her decision to move north and write for a Yankee newspaper in New York City. She shot back at these criticisms, stating that the war and her husband’s death meant she had to work to support herself. In 1898, tragedy struck when Winnie died at thirty-four, possibly from pneumonia or gastritis. Varina arranged for her to be buried in Richmond next to her father and brother.
She continued to write thereafter, though she was growing older. Many of her later articles focused on the idea of promoting reconciliation and better understanding between the northern and southern states, as the country was still bitterly divided three decades after the war. In her later years, she had an interest in expanding educational access. In 1901, she met with the influential African-American leader Booker T.
Washington and discussed the ways in which both women and African-Americans could have greater educational opportunities in America. She enjoyed taking a daily ride through Central Park and attending the theater. She lived to be eighty years old, dying of pneumonia in her midtown Manhattan apartment on October 16, 1906. She was survived by her daughter, Margaret Davis Hayes, as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
To this day, many look at her photographs and speculate about her ancestry, with some believing she must have had some African or Native American heritage given her looks. Some also point to the fact that she called herself a half-breed to further support this. Yet genealogical research and the work of modern historians have found no credible evidence to support it. Varina Howell Davis was honored with a funeral procession through the streets of New York City and was later laid to rest in Richmond, meaning that the only first lady of the Confederacy was laid to rest in its brief capital.
Her tombstone simply read, “At peace. “
