Varina

"Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history"--

"Varina Davis is a lady in any event," Southern women of the aristocratic circles of Washington told the war correspondent of the London Times who had been sent to the National Capital to report all the news he could gather concerning the secession of the Southern States from the great American Union. There was a finality in their tones and manner as if the fact settled the whole question and right of secession. And being such perfect ladies themselves, who could be a better judge of what it took to be one. . . . They further informed him that Varina was popular and had friends and social influence in Washington, adding with pursed lips that she belonged to the set they called �nice people�; not like �such people� as he had seen in the White House. Thus Mrs. Jefferson Davis was described to one who, with piqued curiosity, was soon to meet her as the First Lady of the Southern Confederacy. . . . But Varina Howell Davis came proudly to her high station. She was not without a due understanding of its significance, nor was she without the feeling that she, in some degree, deserved the distinction." --from Chapter I In this volume, Mrs. Rowland has written a charming and accurate historical narrative of the Southern Confederacy in which the wife of Jefferson Davis plays a part that holds and fascinates the reader. The narrative, written in an easy, yet frank and forceful style, denotes the work as an important contribution to American biography.

When Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy, his wife, Varina Howell Davis, reluctantly became the First Lady. For this highly intelligent, acutely observant woman, loyalty did not come easily: she spent long years struggling to reconcile her societal duties to her personal beliefs. Raised in Mississippi but educated in Philadelphia, and a long-time resident of Washington, D.C., Mrs. Davis never felt at ease in Richmond. During the war she nursed Union prisoners and secretly corresponded with friends in the North. Though she publicly supported the South, her term as First Lady was plagued by rumors of her disaffection. After the war, Varina Davis endured financial woes and the loss of several children, but following her husband's death in 1889, she moved to New York and began a career in journalism. Here she advocated reconciliation between the North and South and became friends with Julia Grant, the widow of Ulysses S. Grant. She shocked many by declaring in a newspaper that it was God's will that the North won the war. A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E. Cashin has written a masterly work, the first definitive biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Varina Davis was inhibited by her role as Confederate First Lady and unable to reveal her true convictions. In this pathbreaking book, Cashin offers a splendid portrait of a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place.

In these moving stories if Angelina Grimké Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld, Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Julia Dent grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

Biography of Varina Anne Banks (Howell) Davis (1826-1906), wife of Jefferson Davis who served as President of the Confederates States of America.