Varina Anne Davis

Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis was born on June 27, 1864, near the end of the American Civil War, in Richmond, Virginia, at the White House of the Confederacy. She was the second daughter and the sixth child of Varina Banks Howell Davis and Jefferson F. Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America. Davis was the only child of her family permitted to visit her father during his two years of imprisonment at Fort Monroe following the Civil War.

Early in her childhood, Davis was educated at home by her parents. She accompanied her parents on numerous journeys and, at the age of thirteen, attended the Misses Friedländers School in Karlsruhe, Germany, where she studied for five years, acquiring a slight German accent. She later studied briefly in Paris before returning to the United States.

In 1878, the Gulf Coast estate called Beauvoir near Biloxi, Mississippi, was bequeathed to Jefferson Davis by Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a supporter of the Confederacy. During the 1880s, Davis resided there with her parents. In 1886, she and her father toured the South, visiting West Point, Georgia. During this period, the nickname "The Daughter of the Confederacy" was associated with her, following a speech by Governor John Brown Gordon calling her by this title. This moniker became widely recognized, and she served as a symbolic figure for Confederate veteran groups and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which was founded in 1894.

Davis engaged in public appearances, speeches, and efforts to promote Confederate memorialization alongside her father. She published her first book in 1888, a monograph titled *An Irish Knight of the 19th Century*, about Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet. She maintained personal relationships with several individuals; notably, she was romantically linked to artist Verner Moore White in the mid-1880s, and later developed a more serious relationship with Alfred Wilkinson, a New York attorney. The engagement to Wilkinson was announced in 1889 but was called off in October 1890, shortly before their planned wedding, due to family disagreements and Wilkinson's financial difficulties.

Following the death of Jefferson Davis in 1890, Varina and Winnie Davis relocated to New York City in 1891. They sought financial independence, as Varina had no pension or authority over Davis's estate. Both worked as writers, contributing to the *New York World* and other publications. Davis also published two novels: *The Veiled Doctor: A Novel* and *A Romance of Summer Seas*.

In July 1898, Davis contracted an illness after being soaked in a rainstorm at a Confederate Veterans’ Reunion in Atlanta, Georgia. She traveled with her mother to Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, where they vacationed annually. Diagnosed with "malarial gastritis," she suffered from persistent fever, chills, and loss of appetite. Despite medical care, Davis died on September 18, 1898, at the age of 34, at the Rockingham Hotel. She was interred at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, with military honors next to her father and brothers.

Davis was survived by her mother, Varina Davis, who was then living in New York City with her sister Margaret (Davis) Addison Hayes and her family. Her descendants included her daughter Varina Howell Davis Hayes, who married Gerald Bertram Webb, with whom she had a daughter named Varina Margaret Webb.

Her works include the monograph *An Irish Knight of the Nineteenth Century* (1888), the novel *The Veiled Doctor* (1895), and *A Romance of Summer Seas* (1898). Literature about her includes *The Romance History of Winnie Davis* by Mary Craig Sinclair and *Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause* by Heath Hardage Lee.