*Winner of the Colonial Dames of America Book Award*
Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis was born into a war-torn South in June of
1864, the youngest daughter of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and
his second wife, Varina Howell Davis. Occurring only a month after the
death of beloved Confederate hero general J.E.B. Stuart during a string
of Confederate victories, Winnie's birth was hailed as an omen of
victory by war-weary Southerners. But after the Confederacy's ultimate
defeat, Winnie would spend her early life as a genteel refugee and
expatriate abroad.
After returning to the South from German boarding school, Winnie was
christened the "Daughter of the Confederacy" in 1886. For Confederate
veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Winnie became an
icon of the Lost Cause, eclipsing even her father. Winnie Davis:
Daughter of the Lost Cause is the first published biography of this
little-known woman who unwittingly became the female symbol of the
defeated South.
Winnie's controversial engagement in 1890 to a Northerner lawyer whose
grandfather was a famous abolitionist and her later move to work as a
writer in New York City shocked her friends, family, and the Southern
groups who worshiped her. Faced with the pressures of a community that
violently rejected the match, Winnie desperately attempted to reconcile
her prominent Old South history with her personal desire for tolerance.
