The South's First Lady ; Varina Davis' Struggle with Her Public Role

Summary

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The Civil War is our Iliad and our Odyssey, the daunting tales of war and eventual reuniting. In those difficult times for our country, the roles of the presidents of the Union and of the Confederacy have been seen as the critical variables in explaining why one side triumphed over the other. Readers have numerous biographers of Mary Todd Lincoln, but this biography by Joan E. Cashin of Ohio State University, "First Lady of the Confederacy," is the first full scale study done of Varina Howell Davis.

Varina was born into a family that traced its distinguished roots to a four-term governor in New Jersey, and the name Howell is still well known there today. She was an educated, articulate woman who was never fully satisfied with her role and the definitions of her sex that predominated in the antebellum South. Varina also knew the economic difficulties that could face a family in America, and she suffered from downturns that plagued her father.

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The South's First Lady ; Varina Davis' Struggle with Her Public Role

While in Natchez, she met an attractive, older widower named Jefferson Davis who had mourned his first wife's early death, and who went into stoic isolation at the estate of his brother in the New Orleans ...

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