Winnie Davis

"Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis, daughter of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina Howell Davis, was born into a war-torn South in June 1864. Arriving only a month after the death of beloved Confederate hero, J.E.B. Stuart, and in the middle of a string of Confederate victories, Winnie was hailed as a blessing by war-weary southerners. Winnie, however, failed to be the good omen the South hoped would lead them to victory. After the Confederacy's surrender, Winnie spent her early life as a genteel refugee and an expatriate abroad. She returned to the South in 1886 and was christened the "Daughter of the Confederacy" by a southern culture trying to lionize their war losses. Particularly adored by Confederate veterans as the epitome of southern womanhood, Winnie became a superstar, eclipsing even the popularity of her father. Her image appeared on postcards all over the South, and her life became a repository for the collective Confederate memory. Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause by Heath Hardage Lee is the first biography about this little-known woman who served as a symbolic figure for Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and for a defeated Southern public. Her life, however, was far from idealistic. Winnie's engagement to Alfred "Fred" Wilkinson, a Syracuse, New York native with abolitionist ties, shocked her family, friends, and the Confederate veterans who idolized her. Faced with, and later haunted by, the pressures of a community who violently rejected the match, Winnie desperately attempted to reconcile her prominent Old South family history with her personal desire for New South tolerance and her later life as an author and social commentator in New York. Tragic and glamorous in turn, Winnie's life is a testament to one woman's desire to both embrace and transcend the lost cause of her inheritance. "