Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause

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.

Heath Hardage Lee is an independent historian, biographer, and curator. She is the author of The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home.