Winnie Davis
| Varina Ann Davis | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
June 27, 1864 Richmond, Virginia, CSA |
| Died | September 18, 1898 (aged 34) Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, USA |
| Other names | Winnie |
| Occupation | Writer |
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.
Varina Anne "Winnie" 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 F. 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. They were eventually given an apartment in the officers' quarters to use.
Winnie was home-educated by her mother and father in her early years. She later accompanied her parents on their numerous journeys. At the age of thirteen, she was sent to the Misses Friedländers School in Karlsruhe, Germany. She studied for five years in the renowned boarding school, in that time acquiring a slight German accent. Later, she studied in Paris for a short while before returning to the United States.
During the 1880s, Winnie lived with her parents at Beauvoir, their Gulf Coast estate near Biloxi, Mississippi, bequeathed to Jefferson Davis in 1878 by Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a wealthy widow and fervent supporter of the Confederacy. In 1886, Winnie and her aging father visited West Point, Georgia on a tour of the South. On April 24, 1886, Governor John Brown Gordon anointed her as "The Daughter of the Confederacy". This title stuck, and Winnie became an icon for Confederate veteran groups and an inspiration for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Together with her father, she made public appearances and speeches, and acted more and more 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. In 1888, Winnie also wrote her first book, a monograph of Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet entitled An Irish Knight of the 19th Century.
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