The first volume of this Biography has received flattering reviews from critics on the staff of the Nation, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Boston Transcript and the London Times. Both Gamaliel Bradford and William E. Dodd have been warm in their commendation of the second volume. In this volume Mrs. Rowland had written a charming and accurate historical narrative of the Southern Confederacy in which the wife of Jefferson Davis played a part that holds and fascinates the reader. The narrative written in an easy, graceful yet frank and forceful style, places the work among the year's important contributions to American biography.
Traces the vivid lives of the wives of Theodore Weld, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant to demonstrate how their personal beliefs were overshadowed by their high-profile husbands before wartime brought them to the foreground.
"Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history"--
Varina Anne ôWinnieö 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. Born only a month after the death of beloved Confederate hero General J.E.B. Stuart during a string of Confederate victories, WinnieÆs birth was hailed as a blessing by war-weary Southerners. They felt her arrival was a good omen signifying future victory. But after the ConfederacyÆs ultimate defeat in the Civil War, Winnie would spend her early life as a genteel refugee and a European expatriate abroad. After returning to the South from German boarding school, Winnie was christened the ôDaughter of the Confederacyö in 1886. This role was bestowed upon her by a Southern culture trying to sublimate its war losses. Particularly idolized by Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Winnie became an icon of the Lost Cause, eclipsing even her father Jefferson in popularity. Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause is the first published biography of this little-known woman who unwittingly became the symbolic female figure of the defeated South. Her 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 worshipped her. Faced with the pressures of a community who violently rejected the match, Winnie desperately attempted to reconcile her prominent Old South history with her personal desire for tolerance and acceptance of her personal choices.
From a distinguished historian of the American South comes this thoroughly human portrait of the complex man at the center of our nation's most epic struggle. Jefferson Davis initially did not wish to leave the Union—as the son of a veteran of the American Revolution and as a soldier and senator, he considered himself a patriot. William J. Cooper shows us how Davis' initial reluctance turned into absolute commitment to the Confederacy. He provides a thorough account of Davis' life, both as the Confederate President and in the years before and after the war. Elegantly written and impeccably researched, Jefferson Davis, American is the definitive examination of one of the most enigmatic figures in our nation's history.
An authorized account of the Civil War, drawn from the diaries of a Southern aristocrat, records the disintegration and final destruction of the Confederacy
