Varina Davis - Postwar

Postwar

When the war ended, the Davises fled South seeking to escape to Europe. After their capture by federal troops, he was imprisoned at Fort Monroe in Phoebus, Virginia, for two years. Varina Davis was left indigent and restricted to the state of Georgia, where her husband had been arrested. Fearing for their safety, she sent her older children to Canada under the care of relatives and a family servant. Initially forbidden to have any contact with her husband, Howell Davis worked tirelessly to secure his release. She tried to raise awareness of and sympathy for what she perceived as his unjust incarceration.

After a few months she was allowed to correspond with him. Articles and a book on his confinement helped turn public opinion in his favor. Howell Davis and young Winnie were allowed to join him in his prison cell. The family was eventually given a more comfortable apartment in the officers' quarters of the fort.

Although released on bail and never tried for treason, Jefferson Davis had temporarily lost his home in Mississippi, most of his wealth, and his U.S. citizenship. The Davis family traveled constantly in Europe and Canada as he sought work to rebuild his fortunes. He accepted the presidency of an insurance agency headquartered in Memphis. The family began to regain some financial comfort until the Panic of 1873, when the company was one of many that went bankrupt. Two years before, their son William Davis died in 1871 of typhoid fever.

While visiting their daughters who were enrolled in boarding schools in Europe, Jefferson Davis received a commission as an agent for an English consortium seeking to purchase cotton from the southern United States. He returned home. Howell Davis remained in England to visit her sister who had recently moved there, and stayed for several months. The surviving correspondence suggests her stay may have been prompted by renewed marital difficulties. Both the Davises suffered from depression due to the loss of their sons and their fortunes. She resented his attentions to other women, particularly Virginia Clay. She was the wife of their friend Clement Clay, a fellow political prisoner at Fort Monroe.

For several years, the Davises lived apart far more than they lived together. Davis was unemployed for most of the years after the war. In 1877 he was nearly bankrupt and ill. Advised to take a home near the sea for his health, he accepted an invitation from Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a widowed heiress, to visit her plantation of Beauvoir on the Mississippi Sound in Biloxi. A classmate of Varina's in Philadelphia, she had become a respected novelist and historian, and had done extensive traveling. She arranged for Davis to use a cottage on the grounds. There she helped him organize and write his memoir of the Confederacy, in part by her active encouragement. She also invited Varina Davis to stay with her.

Howell Davis and her eldest daughter, Margaret Howell Hayes, disapproved of her husband's friendship with Dorsey. After her return to the United States, Howell Davis lived in Memphis with Margaret and her family for a time. Gradually she began a reconciliation with her husband. She was with him at Beauvoir in 1878 when they learned that their last surviving son, Jefferson Davis, Jr., died during a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis. Varina became friends again with Sara Ellis Dorsey during her grieving.

Sarah Dorsey was determined to help support the former president. Before her death from breast cancer in 1879, she made over her will to leave him free title to the home, as well as to much of the remainder of her financial estate. Her Percy relatives were unsuccessful in challenging the will.

Her bequest provided Davis with enough financial security to provide for Varina and Winnie and enjoy some comfort with them in his final years. When Winnie completed her education, she joined her parents at Beauvoir. She had fallen in love when at college, but they had refused to allow her to marry the man, part of "a prominent Yankee and abolitionist family." She never married. Dorsey's bequest made Winnie the heir after Jefferson Davis. He died in 1889 and, after Winnie died in 1898, Varina Davis inherited the plantation.