Presentation for StARS Undergraduate Research Symposium for the University of Illinois and Springfield. April 2014

1. A Change of Mind or a Mind Unchained?
Varina Davis
Sabrina M. Miller – StARS Symposium
April 11, 2014
“I have asked the ever lasting hills, that in their upward yearnings seem to
touch the heavens if I, an immortal being, though clothed in womanhood,
was made for the vile purposes to which proud Southern man has doomed
me… if this graceful form, this soft and tender flesh was made to crawl and
shiver in the cold, foul embrace of Southern tyrants; and in stifled sobs, it
answered, NO!” Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Speech to the Anniversary of the
American Anti-Slavery Society- 1860

2. Unlikely Belle
• Northern lineage
• Grandfather promoted
women’s suffrage in NJ
• Whig
• Tutored at home
• Schooled formally in
Philadelphia
• Father was not financially
stable
• “Queen Varina”

3. Mrs. Jefferson Davis
• Married at 17:
Jefferson Davis was
twice her age
• Democrat
• Mother worried
about his serious
demeanor
“two people born with a different strain of blood, educated differently, and
compelled to make constant compromises of temper and mode of life.”
Davis on the first year of marriage

4. The Willfulness of Woman
“Winnie is husband’s baby and baby is your devoted
wife”
~Letter to Jefferson Davis~
• Disagreements with in-laws, especially Joseph Davis
• “Do you say, the slave is held to involuntary servitude?
So is the wife...” Alabama minister to female abolitionist
audience
• “It is impossible but that woman should feel her own
inferiority, and it is right that it should be so.” Sarah Ellis
• The Willfulness of Woman – Loaned out from Library of
Congress
• Threats of turning to alcohol and other
women

5. Reluctant Rebel
“Mrs. Davis has made herself somewhat unpopular by saying openly that
she has no personal feeling against her Northern friends, of whom she
likes to talk, and takes great interest in her welfare.” ~Margaret McLean~
• Was not a secessionist
• Departed her husband’s
inaugural address
• Did not think the South could
win
• Continued to send letters
north of Mason Dixon Line

6. Heartbreak and Breaking Free
“she wrote about Mary Queen of Scots marriages as ‘so many holocausts
of herself.”
~Biographer Joan Cashin on Davis Letters~
• Worked to free her
husband
• Financial instability
• Rumors of Infidelity
• Virginia Clay
• Sarah Dorsey

7. Independence: Life in New York
“Gentlemen of the old regime in the South would say, "A woman's name should appear in
print but twice - when she marries and when she dies.“
~ Myrta Lockett Avery ~
• Carol Berkin: Davis
“compared her deliverance
from “the torments I had
endured at Beauvoir” to the
release of the Israelites from
their bondage in Egypt.
• Writer for Pulitzer and The
New York World
• 1.5 million readers

8. Communicating with ‘The Enemy”
From “The Humanity of Grant”:
“I thank God they have laid down on the altar of our common country's good the
bitter passions engendered by our Titanic struggle…it only remains for us to do
the best for our country under the conditions which the Ruler of the world in His
wisdom allowed to prevail.”
• Condoned her daughter’s marriage
to the grandson of an abolitionist
(after the death of her husband)
• Befriended the widow of Ulysses S.
Grant
• Met with Booker T. Washington
privately; an action which indicated
that they were meeting as equals

9. Davis on Women’s Issues
• Atlanta Constitution: Women
had been sequestered in the
domestic sphere – Erroneous
• “Should Women Vote?” – Men
and women are intellectual
equals
• “I began to ponder Mrs.
Jefferson Davis' remark, that
"once our women are married,
they are like Sterne's starling -
they cannot get out." ~Mary
Craig Sinclair~
"In the 1890s it required a great deal of courage for a woman publicly to acknowledge before
an audience that she believed in suffrage for her sex when she knew the majority did not.
~ Mary Church Terrell, First African American Woman to Receive a College Degree ~