Varina Davis - Widow

Widow

After her husband died, Varina completed his autobiography, publishing it as Jefferson Davis, A Memoir (1890). At first the book sold few copies, dashing her hopes of earning some income.

Kate Davis Pulitzer, a distant cousin of Jefferson Davis and the wife of Joseph Pulitzer, a major newspaper publisher, had met Varina Davis during a visit to the South. She solicited short articles from her for her husband's newspaper, the New York World]]. In 1891 Varina Davis accepted the Pulitzers' offer to become a full-time columnist and moved to New York City with her daughter Winnie, where they enjoyed its busy life. White Southerners attacked her for this move to the North, as she continued to be a public figure of the Confederacy whom they claimed for their own. While Davis and her daughter each pursued literary careers, they lived in a series of residential hotels (their longest residency being at the Hotel Gerard at 123 W. 44th Street). Varina Davis wrote many articles for the newspaper, and Winnie Davis published several novels.

In October 1902, Varina Davis sold Beauvoir to the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans for $10,000. She stipulated the facility was to be used as a Confederate veterans' home and later as a memorial to Jefferson Davis. (The SCV built barracks on the site, and housed thousands of veterans and their families. After being used for years as a veterans' home, since 1953 the house has served as a museum to Davis. Beauvoir has been designated a National Historic Landmark. The main house has been restored and a museum built there.)

Varina Howell Davis was one of numerous influential southerners who moved to the North for work after the war, who were nicknamed "Confederate carpetbaggers." Among them were the couple Roger Atkinson Pryor and Sara Agnes Rice Pryor, who became active in Democratic political and social circles in New York City. After working as an attorney, Roger Pryor was appointed as a judge. Sara Pryor became a writer, known for her histories, memoirs and novels published in the early 1900s.

In the postwar years of reconciliation, Davis became friends with Julia Dent Grant, the widow of former general and president Ulysses S. Grant, who had been among the most hated men in the South. She attended a reception where she met Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college. In her old age, she published some of her observations and "declared in print that the right side had won the Civil War."