Varina Anne Davis

Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis (June 27, 1864 – September 18, 1898) was an American author who is best known as the youngest daughter of President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America and Varina (Howell) Davis. Born in the last year of the war, by the late 1880s she became known as the "Daughter of the Confederacy". Images of her were widely circulated when she was young, helping morale. Later in the 1880s, she appeared with her father on behalf of Confederate veterans' groups. After his death, she and her mother moved in 1891 to New York City, where they both worked as writers. She published a biography and two novels, in addition to numerous articles. Davis died from an infectious disease at age 34. Childhood 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 eventually were given an apartment in the officers' quarters to use. Winnie was home-educated by her parents 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. Daughter of the Confederacy During the 1880s, Winnie lived with her parents at Beauvoir, their Gulf Coast estate near Biloxi, Mississippi. It was bequeathed to Jefferson Davis in 1878 by Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a wealthy widow and supporter of the Confederacy. In 1886, Winnie and her aging father visited West Point, Georgia, on a tour of the South promoting his books and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.