Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis (June 27, 1864 - September 18, 1898) was an American author. A daughter of President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis, she became known as "Daughter of the Confederacy", for her appearances with her father on behalf of Confederate veterans' groups.
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Varina Anne Davis was born one year before the end of the American Civil War in the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. She was the second daughter and the sixth child of Varina Banks Howell Davis and Jefferson Finis Davis. The youngest, she was the only child of the family who was allowed to visit her father in Fort Monroe with her mother during his two years of imprisonment that followed the Civil War.
Varina Davis, called Winnie, was home-educated by her mother in her early years. She later accompanied her parents on their numerous journeys. At the age of twelve, she was sent to the Institute Friedländer in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied for more than five years in the renowned boarding school. Later, she attended a boarding school in Paris for a short while before returning to the United States.
During the 1880s, Davis lived with her parents in their house near Biloxi, Mississippi. Like her mother, she was active as a painter, musician and author. Under the name of Varina Anne Jefferson Davis, she published articles in periodicals, three novels and a biographical monograph. In it she declared it to be a folly to send children to Europe to be educated.
On a visit in Atlanta, Georgia in 1886, Governor John Brown Gordon anointed her as "The Daughter of the Confederacy". This title stuck, and Davis became an icon for Confederate veteran groups. Together with her aging father, she made public appearances and held speeches, and gradually acted as his representative. This was a period when Confederate groups, including women's associations, worked to memorialize the war and the cause of the South.[1]
Davis was involved in a few well known romantic relationships, but never married. In 1885-1886, she was courted by noted landscape and portrait artist Verner Moore White, but the relationship ended when White moved to Europe to further his studies in art.[2] In 1887, Davis developed a relationship with the New York attorney Alfred C. Wilkinson, whom she met in Syracuse, New York. When she announced her engagement to the "Yankee" in 1889, an outcry in the South burdened the romance. The engagement was ended soon after.
In 1891, Davis moved together with her widowed mother to New York City, where they both worked as correspondents for the New York World. The paper had first offered her mother a salary for a weekly article, and hired her under the same arrangement.
In 1898 Davis died in the home of a friend Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island after an illness of several weeks and probably related to malaria. She was 34 years old. She was buried with military honors in Richmond, Virginia, because of her service to Confederate veterans' groups, next to the grave of her father. She was survived by her mother and by her sister and her sister's family.