Varina Davis - Confederate First Lady

Confederate First Lady

Jefferson Davis resigned from the US Senate in 1861 when Mississippi seceded. Varina Davis returned with their children to Brierfield, expecting him to be commissioned as a general in the Confederate army. He was elected as President of the Confederate States of America by the new Confederate Congress. She did not accompany him when he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama (then capital of the new nation) to be inaugurated. A few weeks later, she followed and assumed official duties as the First Lady of the independent nation.

She had continued her independent observations and greeted the war with dread, while supporting slavery and states' rights. She was known to have said that

"the South did not have the material resources to win the war and white Southerners did not have the qualities necessary to win it; that her husband was unsuited for political life; that maybe women were not the inferior sex; and that perhaps it was a mistake to deny women the suffrage before the war."

In summer 1861, Howell Davis and her husband moved to Richmond, Virginia, the new capital of the Confederacy. They lived in the Presidential Mansion during the war (1861–1865). "She tried intermittently to do what was expected of her, but she never convinced people that her heart was in it, and her tenure as First Lady was for the most part a disaster", as they picked up on her ambivalence. White residents of Richmond freely criticized Varina Davis; some described her appearance as "a mulatto or an Indian 'squaw'."

In December 1861 she gave birth to their fifth child, William Howell Davis, named for her father. (Due to his son-in-law's influence, her father was given several low-level appointments in the Confederate bureaucracy which helped support him.) The social turbulence of the war years reached the Presidential Mansion, as in 1864, several of the Davises' domestic slaves escaped. James Dennison and his wife, Betsey, who served as Varina’s maid, used saved back pay of 80 gold dollars to finance their escape. Henry, a butler, left one night after building a fire in the mansion’s basement to divert attention.

In spring 1864, their son Joseph Davis was killed in an accident at the Presidential Mansion. A few weeks later, on June 27, 1864, Varina gave birth to their last child, a girl named Varina Anne Davis, who was called Winnie. The girl became known to the public as "the Daughter of the Confederacy;" stories about her and likenesses of her were distributed throughout the Confederacy during the last year of the war. She retained the nickname for the rest of her life.