Varina Davis

Varina Howell Davis was an American writer and the wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States. Born in Mississippi in 1826 to a family with southern and northern connections, she received an unusually broad education and married Davis in 1845. His political career brought her to Washington before secession and then to Richmond, where she served as the Confederacy’s first lady during the Civil War while managing a household exposed to military crisis, political scrutiny and repeated family bereavement.

Varina fled Richmond with her children as the Confederacy collapsed in 1865 and was captured with Jefferson Davis in Georgia. During his imprisonment she campaigned for his release and later worked to preserve and shape his public reputation. After his death in 1889, financial necessity and changing views drew her increasingly toward literary work and a more reconciliatory national outlook. She published a biography of her husband, wrote articles and eventually settled in New York City, where she became associated with literary circles before her death in 1906.

In Charles Frazier’s Varina, in 1906, an elderly Varina Howell Davis is living at a retreat in Saratoga Springs when James Blake, a Black teacher who spent part of his childhood in the Davis household, asks her to recover what she remembers of him.