Description
Varina Howell Davis (1826-1906) was the wife of Jefferson Davis. She had a long, turbulent life in the public eye, and she grappled all of her life with the dilemma of being married to a powerful figure whose views she did not share. Today few readers know that the Confederate First Lady was not a Confederate: she opposed secession in 1860 and believed that the South did not have the resources to win the Civil War. In her widowhood she moved to Manhattan, where she worked as a journalist until her death in 1906. She also expressed some startling views on woman suffrage and the temperance movement (in favor), and on the wisdom of fighting a war to preserve slavery (folly). Furthermore, Varina Davis was one of the most famous women of the nineteenth century. She know Robert E. Lee and Oscar Wilde, corresponded with Mary Chesnut and Christina Rossetti, and counted Joseph and Kate Pulitzer among her good friends. Her life presents some especially compelling questions to students of the humanities about the nature of public life and its demands on the family, especially the demands on wives of political figures. "First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War" was published by Harvard University Press in 2009.
