Lecture Date: February 10, 2015
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. Born 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 a blessing by war-weary Southerners. They felt her arrival was a good omen signifying future victory. But after the Confederacy’s 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 “Daughter of the Confederacy” 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. Ms. Lee’s talk will explore Winnie’s controversial engagement in 1890 to a Northerner lawyer whose grandfather was a famous abolitionist, as well as her relationship with the family of newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer, and her career as a writer.
Lecture Photos
Speaker: Heath Lee
Heath Hardage Lee comes from a museum education, historic preservation, and writing background. She holds a B.A. in History with Honors from Davidson College, and an M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. She started her museum career at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, as the Director of Education and Programs, and has since worked as a consultant for Southern house museums such as Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee’s birthplace, and Menokin Plantation. She most recently served as the Coordinator of the History Series for Salisbury House & Gardens, a 1920s house museum in Des Moines, Iowa, where she currently lives, having moved there from her native Richmond in 2008. Ms. Lee has written for numerous magazines, newspapers and blogs, such as America’s Civil War, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Americanist Independent, Charlotte Magazine and Work Stew. Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause, her biography of Varina Anne “Winnie” Davis, is her first book. Winnie was published April 1, 2014, by Potomac Press, a division of the University of Nebraska Press.