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Biography/History:
Varina Howell Davis, second wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, was born at Marengo Plantation, Concordia Parish, Louisiana, on May 7, 1826. She was the daughter of William Burr and Margaret Louisa Kempe Howell of Natchez, Mississippi. Davis graduated from Elizabeth Female Academy, Washington, Mississippi, in 1840. She married Jefferson Davis at her family’s Natchez home, the Briars, on February 26, 1845. The couple had six children: Samuel Emory (1852-1854), Margaret Howell (1855-1909), Jefferson, Jr. (1857-1878), Joseph Evan (1859-1864), William Howell (d.1872), and Varina Anne (1864-1898).Following the death of Jefferson Davis in 1889, Varina Davis wrote a two-volume biography entitled Jefferson Davis--Ex-President of the Confederate States, A Memoir by his Wife, which was published in 1890. After donating Beauvoir, the family’s Biloxi residence, to the state of Mississippi as a home for Confederate veterans, Davis relocated to New York City. From 1896 to 1906, Davis wrote articles for the New York Sunday World. She died in New York City on October 16, 1906.
Scope and Content:
This collection contains manuscript materials for Varina Howell Davis’s 1890 biography entitled Jefferson Davis--Ex-President of the Confederate States, A Memoir by his Wife. She wrote the book with the assistance of James Redpath, a journalist who met the Davises in the course of a writing assignment. John Dimitry, son of Professor Alexander Dimitry of New Orleans, and Nannie Davis Smith, Davis’s great niece, also assisted her with the preparation of the manuscript. The book was revised three times before its publication, and this collection contains portions of several apparently different drafts, including some of the galleys (oversize).The first series was arranged according to Varina Davis’s biography published by the Belford Company of New York in 1890. It contains some of her research materials, portions of the manuscript that did not appear in the published version, and fragments that could not be placed in the context of the work. It is arranged according the years in which the events described took place.
The third series contains a small amount of correspondence to Davis and Redpath from the Belford Company concerning the manuscript.
Series Identification: