A fine hotel from the 19th Century where Varina Davis and her daughter Winnie lived after Jefferson Davis’s death is still standing and is a vital part of its neighborhood even today.
Varina Davis was the second wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Jefferson had been married to Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of President Zachary Taylor. Sarah had died in 1835, when Winnie was only nine years old. After ten years of widowhood, the 37 year old Jefferson married the 18 year old Varina. Varina was born in Mississippi in 1826 to two people whose families could not have been less Southern. Her father William Burr Howell was born in New Jersey to her grandfather, a governor of the State of New Jersey. Her mother was born to Scotch-Irish Ulster immigrants.
Varina Davis wrote to her mother soon after she met Jefferson “He impresses me as a remarkable kind of man, but of uncertain temper, and has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me; yet he is most agreeable and has a peculiarly sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself.”
After Jefferson Davis’s death, she wrote to a friend not to let his daughter marry a widow because “I gave my best and all my life to a girdled tree.” Varina wrote to her friend not to marry a widower because she would experience what Varina had experienced that a widower was dangerous because she would be loved with “with anything less than the whole of a man’s heart.”
During Varina’s marriage to Jefferson, she had to endure long separations from her husband and frequent disagreements.
Right after they were married, Jefferson Davis was elected to Congress. She wrote that “I began to know the bitterness of being a politicians wife.” That “bitterness” she said, came from “long absences, pecuniary depletion from ruinous absenteeism, illness from exposure, misconceptions, defamation of character; everything which darkens the sunlight and contracts the happy sphere of home.”
He husband was not understanding. When she disagreed with Jefferson, he retorted that there was “something the matter” with Varina. She moved to Washington to accompany her husband.
In 1846 when the Mexican War broke out, Jefferson volunteered and was made a colonel of a Mississippi regiment. He became a national hero when he was wounded at the Battle of Buena Vista. Varina nursed him back to health. He was then immediately appointed as a senator from Mississippi and he left for Washington, leaving his 32 year old bridge behind. She wrote to him that his behavior had completely ignored her “rights as a woman and a wife.” Jefferson wrote back to her complaining of her “constant harassment, occasional reproach, and subsequent misrepresentation” upset him.
In 1851 he left his senate seat to run unsuccessfully for the governor of Mississippi. When he lost, Varina wrote “You know my heart never went with Jeff in politics or soldiering-so it does not feel sore on the subject of his defeat.” After this, the Davises were together and she began having children. Jefferson only began having children when he was in his mid-forties. They had six, three of whom were born after Jefferson reached the age of fifty. When Franklin Pierce was elected president in 1852, Varina urged Jeff not to accept a position in the new government. In 1853 he became Secretary of War without the agreement of Varina. After his stint in the cabinet he returned to the Senate where he became known as a prominent advocate for slavery, however he was a latecomer to the secessionist movement, His army career and his service to the president made his allegiance to the national government stronger than other Southern politicians. However, neither Jefferson not Varina questioned slavery as an economic or moral right.
After Abraham Lincoln was elected President, Varina was critical of those Southerners who “talked so impudently of secession.” In 1861, Jefferson Davis was offered the position of the Presidency of the Confederacy, which he apparently accepted without his wife’s agreement. During the war, she continued to care for and bare children. She offered advice on the war and politics, but her husband often ignored her.
After Jefferson Davis died in 1889, Varina and her daughter Winnie responded to a call from newspaper published Joseph Pulitzer to write articles for the New York World and moved to New York. They would live in the capital of American culture and finance until they died.
One of the places they lived was at the Hotel Gerard at 123 West 44th Street in Manhattan. That building still stands today.
Nearby lived Julia Dent Grant, Ulysses S. Grant’s widow. The two met and formed a friendship.
Varina lived in several hotels in New York City. When she died, there was a public procession through the streets of Manhattan before her cadaver was shipped to Richmond.
Right next to the apartments is the Belasco Theater. This is Broadway.
Sources:
The Marriage of Varina Howell and Jefferson Davis by Carol Blesser The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 65, No. 1 (Feb., 1999), pp. 3-40 (38 pages)
Note: All color photos of buildings in this post were taken by Patrick Young except as noted.
