popfray.pages.dev

Varina davis black ancestry

    •

“The Forgotten First Lady:
Reinventing Varina Davis Through Her Journalism

Works Cited

AHMC - Davis, Varina, January 13, 1899, letter. Manuscript Department, Library, New York Historical Society. Print.

AHMC - Davis, Varina, March 12, 1892, letter.  New York Historical Society. Print.

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents' Wives and Their Power 1789-1961. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1990. Print.

Berkin, Carol. Civil War Wives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print.

Boller Jr., Paul F. Presidential Wives: An Anecdotal History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print.

“Books and Magazines.” Oshkosh (Wis.) Daily Northwestern 4 May 1901: 4. Print.

Caroli, Betty Boyd. First Ladies. 2nd ed. Garden City, NY: Guild America Books, 1997. Print.

Cashin, Joan E. First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Print.

Chafe, William H. The Rise and Fall of the American Century: United States from 1890-2009. New York: Oxford University Pres

    •

Face-to-Face: Varina H. Davis

Web Video Text Tracks Format (WebVTT)


WEBVTT

00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:10.000
Margaret Vining: My name is Margaret Vining and we're here beside the miniature portrait of Varina Howell - Varina Howell Davis.

00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:18.000
Margaret Vining: She was the wife of, of um, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America.

00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:29.000
Margaret Vining: I am not an art historian, I am a military historian, curator of armed forces history at the National Museum of American History.

00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:45.000
Margaret Vining: But this portrait was painted by John Wood Dodge. He worked in New York. He was famous for his miniature portraits in the mid - mid-nineteenth century.

00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:48.000
Margaret Vining: [[clears throat]]

00:00:48.000 --> 00:00:58.000
Margaret Vining: He moved to the South briefly in the 1840s and for his health to the Cumberland mountains of Tennessee.

00:00:58.000 --> 00:01:10.000
Margaret Vining: And while there, he did miniature portraits of, of u
    •
This past April marked the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. To mark the occasion, I will be writing a series of posts over the next several months about the lives of some fascinating women who made their mark during the Civil War.

Varina Howell Davis was born at her family plantation, the Briers, near Natchez, Mississippi in 1826. Although her mother, Margaret Kempe was a Southern belle and the daughter of a wealthy planter, her father, William Howell was a Yankee from New Jersey. Although he came from a distinguished family (his father served several terms as Governor of New Jersey), it wasn’t enough to overcome the stigma of being a Northerner. He also wasn’t a very good provider, over the years, he worked as a planter, merchant, cotton broker and banker but none of them panned out in the long run. Her parents had to rely on handouts from Margaret’s family to help support their eight children.

Varina’s only formal education was at Madame Greenland’s School, a prestigious academy for young ladies to Philadelphia. The academy̵

Copyright ©popfray.pages.dev 2025