Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause

*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, Winnies birth was hailed as an omen of victory by war-weary Southerners. But after the Confederacys 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. Winnies 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.
A biography of Varina Anne Winnie Davis, daughter of President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis and known as Daughter of the Confederacy for her work on behalf of Confederate veterans groups.