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[ 1 ] Despite her prominent status during the Civil War and her marriage to one of the most infamous men in U.S. history, Varina Davis has all but vanished from historical memory. The wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a figure on the losing side of history, is often overlooked or considered illegitimate by historians who write about the nation’s first ladies. Even women who never held the official title, such as Martha Jefferson and Rachel Jackson, tend to be included in comprehensive books featuring first ladies, despite the fact they died before their husbands’ presidencies. Yet the life of Varina Howell Davis, a first lady during four of the most tumultuous years in U.S. history, is frequently ignored, pushing her contributions to U.S. history deeper into the forgotten past.(1) Although the post-Civil War lives of Jefferson and Varina Davis are largely disregarded in mainstream history, the end of the Civil War was far from the end of Varina’s influence on the nation. Her life with Jefferson provides her with historical status, but this study argues that the contributions she made after his death deserve closer examination and are perhaps even more important to history.
[ 2 ] Broke and widowed by 1890, the former Confederate first lady left behind the Southern life that her husband fought to preserve and moved to former enemy territory in the North for the remaining years of her life. Here, she worked for another prominent man in American history: Joseph Pulitzer. This article explores the little-known story of Varina’s career as a journalist at one of the nation’s most influential newspapers in the late 1800s, The New York World. My research investigates how Varina Davis became a journalist, what she wrote about, and how her journalism can be used to reestablish and reinvent her faded collective memory. The goal is to expand upon the limited scholarship on Varina overall, particularly in regard to her journalism.
[ 3 ] The fact that Varina has been overlooked by mainstream scholars makes it seem like she could not be representative of the American “ideals” that Janice Hume writes about when discussing the qualities essential to collective memory (Hume 184). Scholars have found that certain criteria are necessary for survival in...