Heath Hardage Lee epub 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.