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 the antebellum South, white women, like black slaves, were expected to stay in 'their place.' As Joan E. Cashin, a history professor at Ohio State, writes, they 'were expected to marry young, have many children, and devote themselves exclusively to the family.' They 'did not attend universities or enter the professions, and in Mississippi, unlike New Jersey, they had never voted and were not expected... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to have the faintest interest in public life. ... In return for such self-denial, women were supposed to receive security; they gave up autonomy in exchange for protection.' Varina Howell was born into this world in 1826 and accepted its conditions, but not always happily and, as Cashin notes, with 'a series of bewildering questions' that eluded easy answers:

'If a man did not honor the sacred vows of marriage, if he neglected his wife, or failed to provide for her, what should she do? Should she defy social convention ... even at the cost of scandal, or should she submit, endure, and hope for the best, as her mother did? ... How should a woman strike a balance between devotion to others and her duty to herself? What, if anything, did a woman owe herself, in addition to what she owed family and household? These questions lingered as she approached adulthood, for she identified strongly with women but wanted the security that men, and only certain men, could deliver.'

These questions as framed by Cashin obviously are informed by contemporary feminism, but they are legitimate ones that almost certainly occurred to Varina Howell before, during and after her marriage to Jefferson Davis in February 1845 in Natchez. She was 19 years old, and he was 36. Ten years earlier he had married Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of Zachary Taylor, but she died of malaria less than three months later, a loss that left Davis 'nearly crushed with grief' and reverberated throughout the four-and-a-half decades of his marriage to Varina.

Davis — planter, soldier, politician — was a handsome, commanding man whom Varina claimed to love right up to — and beyond — his death in 1889, but he was also stern, demanding and headstrong. He accepted without question every clause of the Southern code, and he expected his wife to honor that code as well. He 'expected her to abide by his wishes, which he said was demanded by her `duties as a wife,'' and he 'did not see marriage as a partnership.' Varina by contrast 'wanted a reciprocal relationship, a companionate marriage in which husband and wife both had obligations.'

In this desire she was perhaps not quite so unusual as we might think; over the past three decades a great deal has been written about Southern women in the Civil War period, and it has left little doubt that some of them were far more restless and rebellious than their husbands and fathers would have preferred. But the case of Varina Davis takes on special meaning because she was the most prominent Southern woman of her time. For a decade and a half before the Civil War, she had accompanied her husband to Washington, where he represented Mississippi as congressman and senator, and served as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce; in 1861 he was chosen president of the Confederate States of America. She was First Lady of the new nation, a role she had not bargained for and that did not especially suit her:

'The role of the Southern `lady,' although it was only a generation old, had great political valence, and the Confederate elite expected Davis to conform to it; she should embody the values of the planter class, as her husband seemed to do. ... (But) she did not talk like a First Lady, ... for she was too well-read, too smart, and too blunt. ... (Mrs.) Davis's sense of humor, which was evident in her debut summer in 1861, also became a liability. She was a good mimic, and after she did some impersonation at a party that summer, one onlooker thought she should make such demonstrations in private.... The Confederate elite might have overlooked Mrs. Davis's shortcomings — the wrong appearance, the wrong sense of humor, the wrong manners — if she had fully supported the Southern cause.'

She did not. She supported slavery and held mostly conventional views about race for a person of her time and class, but she had not favored secession and did not believe — never believed — that the South could win the war. She had loved her years in Washington and had many close friends on the Union side — she hated every minute in Richmond, surrounded as she was by the New World's most hermetic and self-important aristocracy — and her own 'family history was intertwined with the nation's history.' The South 'was not ready to fight,' she believed, and 'the North's advantage in population and manufacturing power was immense.' The most she could muster was 'resignation, a desire to conform, and a determination to endure, with none of the fiery enthusiasm for the cause that her peers might hope for from the First Lady.'

In addition to her qualms about secession and the war, she simply had other things on her mind. Her marriage was never easy, she was frequently separated from her husband, tensions between them at times were extreme. Like many women of her period she saw too many of her children to their graves — all four of her sons died while young, her beloved youngest daughter died in her early thirties, and only her other daughter lived to mature adulthood — and struggled through serious illnesses of her own. As the Confederacy reached its final months, even the First Lady had to scramble for food, and at the end she, like her husband, was on the run.

With her husband in prison awaiting the trial that ultimately never was held, Varina was warned that white Southerners might be hostile toward her. Instead she found herself lionized:

'Now she was the wife of a prisoner whom many white Southerners saw as a martyr for his cause, which mitigated much of the animosity toward him, and her. At her New Orleans hotel, she was inundated with callers, and shopkeepers would not accept her money. The outpouring overwhelmed her. The Richmond complaints about her `crudeness' vanished, and her lack of enthusiasm for the Southern cause was forgotten or overlooked. She had become, in the latest incarnation, a symbol of the Confederacy.'

The irony of this surely amused her and may well have angered her. Certainly she showed little enthusiasm for her husband's efforts to solidify his own image as what he called 'the Representative of an oppressed people.' His self-esteem, never wanting even in the most uncertain of times, ballooned to 'leviathan proportions as he assumed a new role as symbol of the `Lost Cause,' as the Southern effort came to be called,' and he 'seemed to expect his wife to defer to him as members of the public did.' He lived a quarter-century after the war, always depending on the generosity of others, rarely holding a real job and never making anything of the ones that came his way. He fell rather foolishly in love with a woman named Virginia Clay and had a strange relationship with another named Sarah Dorsey. He almost certainly was unfaithful to Varina, perhaps often, but divorce was out of the question, and she, in any case, always did her duty, no matter how much she may have disliked it.

Her life took an interesting turn after his death. She moved to New York, which she loved, and did occasional pieces of journalism for various publications. In 1893 she 'had a friendly meeting with another famous widow, Julia Dent Grant,' and the two actually became friends. The press delighted in this, seeing the friendship as symbolic of reconciliation within the nation. Varina 'sincerely wanted whites in both regions to make peace, and she genuinely liked Julia Grant.' By contrast she remained steadfast in her dismissive views of African Americans, though Cashin suggests — probably based more in wish than in fact — that 'her residence in New York may have prompted her to question the racial views she had taken for granted for most of her life.'

There was nothing unusual about those views, and Cashin admirably refrains from judging them by today's ostensibly more elevated standards. She does fault Davis for 'a Hamlet-like indecision on the political and cultural issues of her time' but acknowledges that she faced many difficult choices over her long life — she died in October 1906 — and that 'she made many sacrifices for a cause she did not fully support and for a husband who did not fully return her love.' Cashin's book leaves no doubt that she was in fact a considerably more interesting person than her husband, and a better one as well.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at) washpost.com." Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil Waris that rare combination of a scholarly masterpiece which is also enjoyable to read. You will come away from it glad that you took the time to get to know this woman and her life.

Cashin is always sure-handed in showing us Varina Davis as a woman who kept an inner toughness while giving in to inflexible demands, a woman who endured a marriage that was "so many holocausts of herself." A signal scholarly achievement and a marvelous read!

It would be impossible to write about Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, without writing about him. These two characters make Joan E. Cashin's First Lady of the Confederacyinteresting and educational reading...Varina Davis is portrayed as a troubled woman reared on the precept that men and women have different natures, with men seeing women as chattel, only a fraction higher than slaves, with many duties and few rights. On one hand, she supported her husband, but she defied a woman's role by thinking for herself. After her husband died, she went to New York to become a journalist.

The history of complex Southern feelings about the subjugated blacks in their midst is as long as the history of slavery and segregation. New evidence of this is brought to light by Joan Cashin in First Lady of the Confederacy. Her title is somewhat misleading, as this biography of Jefferson Davis's wife encompasses far more than the four years of the war, but it does underscore the point that Varina Howell Davis was involved in internal as well as external struggles. She doesn't seem to have questioned slavery more than occasionally and half-heartedly, but she believed that secession was foolish and the war unwinnable for the Confederacy. She supported her husband unflinchingly, as was expected of wives in that time, but she disagreed with him frequently and apparently wasn't afraid to tell him so.

In prose as vivid and daring as that found in Varina's letters, Joan Cashin...has written a biography that reveals the many facets of Varina, which will bring her the attention she deserves, and which Varina herself would have probably admired...Since Cashin candidly reveals the many humiliations that Varina endured during the course of her marriage, First Lady of the Confederacyis sometimes painful to read. How, one wonders, can such a lively and curious woman be so loyal to this rigid, often arrogant man? But if one accepts Varina's rules one can only admire her good grace...Although I found myself disappointed by Varina, I was fascinated by each twist in her story, by the wonderful vignettes of people as disparate as Oscar Wilde and Judah Benjamin, and by the portrait of those tumultuous years.

Fascinating in her own right, Varina Davis was in some ways a 20th century woman out of her time. Her force of personality, dedication, and independent spirit, make her in many ways more interesting than her husband. In Joan Cashin's First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil Warwe have a biography worthy of the woman at last.

In prose as vivid and daring as that found in Varina's letters, Joan Cashin...has written a biography that reveals the many facets of Varina, which will bring her the attention she deserves, and which Varina herselfwould have probably admired...Since Cashin candidly reveals the many humiliations that Varina endured during the course of her marriage, First Lady of the Confederacyis sometimes painful to read. How,one wonders, can such a lively and curious woman be so loyal to this rigid, often arrogant man? But if one accepts Varina's rules one can only admire her good grace...Although I found myself disappointed by Varina, I was fascinated byeach twist in her story, by the wonderful vignettes of people as disparate as Oscar Wilde and Judah Benjamin, and by the portrait of those tumultuous years.

Though Davis's life reads like a tragic novel, Cashin has taken care not to romanticize her subject...Cashin has meticulously researched her subject's long life, including her move to New York after Jefferson Davis's death in 1889 and her subsequent career as a writer.

Cashin presents an engaging look at the Confederacy's first lady, who surprisingly did not believe in the Southern cause.

Cashin has done justice to this compelling figure. A respected and prolific scholar of southern women's history, Cashin spent over fourteen years researching Varina Davis, painstakingly examining print sources and combing the many archives that hold relevant manuscript material. This extraordinary effort and Cashin's skill as a historian and writer are apparent on every page of this thorough, objective, and engaging book. Cashin has been careful not to impose twenty-first-century feminist values on Varina Davis, instead establishing the historical context of social, political, and gender relations and letting the documentary evidence fill in the details of Davis's life. The result is a subtle examination of an actual person, warts and all.

A century after Varina Davis's death in 1906, Joan E. Cashin has written a masterly biography of this truly modern, but deeply conflicted, woman. Pro-slavery but also pro-Union, Davis was a fascinating woman who struggled with the constraints of her time and place. 29 halftone photos.

Joan E. Cashinis Associate Professor of <>History at Ohio State University.

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Half Breed

2. This Mr. Davis

3. Flattered and Courted

4. First Lady

5. No Matter What Danger There Was

6. Holocausts of Herself

7. Run with the Rest

8. Threadbare Great Folks

9. Topic of the Day

10. Crowd of Sorrows

11. Fascinating Failures

12. The Girdled Tree

13. Delectable City

14. Like Martha

15. At Peace

Notes

A Note on Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

Illustrations

Varina Howell, 1840s

Mr. and Mrs. Davis, 1845

Joseph E. Davis

Zachary Taylor

Franklin Pierce

Jefferson Davis, 1850s

Minna Blair

Harriet Lane Johnston

Winfield Scott

Varina Howell Davis, circa 1860

Confederate White House, 1865

The Davis children, 1860s

Ellen Barnes and the infant Winnie Davis

Varina Davis and her daughter Winnie

John W. Garrett

Margaret Howell

Jefferson and Varina Davis, 1867

Virginia Clay

Court Street, the Davis home in Memphis

Sarah Dorsey

Beauvoir

Oscar Wilde

Jefferson Davis in old age

Joseph Pulitzer

Julia Grant

Winnie Davis

Four generations of Davis women, 1905

Varina Davis, the pensive widow