Civil War Wives by Carol Berkin

Author:Carol Berkin [Berkin, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-two

“I NEVER REPORT UNFIT FOR DUTY”

Varina Begins Her Campaigns for Freedom

FOUR YEARS OF PENT-UP ANGER, worry, suffering, and sacrifice on the part of Union soldiers and their families seemed to find their release in a hatred of Jefferson Davis. This alone might have made political leaders wary of showing respect or dispensing leniency toward their most notorious prisoner. But there were larger political stakes, for Jeff was a pawn in the growing conflict between the Democrat from Tennessee who now sat in the White House and the Radical Republicans who controlled the legislature. And there were legal issues to consider: Should Jeff Davis be tried for treason? If so, should the trial take place in a civil or military court? Would such a trial, whatever its venue, open the door for a constitutional vindication of secession? While politicians, military officers, lawyers, and judges debated these thorny issues, Jeff Davis languished in prison.1

Varina was determined to get her husband out, but first she had to win her own freedom and ensure her family’s well-being. Neither task was easy. She had been sent back to Savannah and placed, in effect, under town arrest. Here she rented rooms in a hotel for herself, her four children, her sister, and a former Davis slave, Robert Brown. She had little money and few possessions, for her clothes and her children’s clothes had been ruined, confiscated, or lost; her furniture, plate, and other household possessions were scattered in Richmond. Much of what she valued at Brierfield—including their library—had been looted or destroyed. The possibility of a life of poverty weighed heavily on her mind. She worried even more desperately about her children’s health. She was certain that the humid, hot climate of the Deep South would add to the dangers posed by childhood diseases. She worried, too, about the emotional scars that her children might suffer. To her horror, occupying Union soldiers thought it was amusing to teach her three-and-a-half-year-old son, Billy, the lyrics to a song entitled “We’ll Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree.”2

The only solution, Varina decided, was to send her children far away, to Canada, where they would be safe from taunts, deprivations, and disease. She enlisted her widowed mother, Margaret Howell, to take everyone but baby Winnie to Montreal. Thus, in mid-July of 1865, Varina said her goodbyes to Maggie, Jeff, and Billy.

To the outside world, Varina seemed the strong, even haughty woman who had once been the first lady of the Confederacy. But over the ensuing months she confessed her deepening despair to her closest friends. “As for me,” she wrote to Mary Chesnut, “I have nothing—but my one little ewe lamb—my baby…. I will not go through the weary form of telling you how I have suffered… you know how I bled inwardly—and suffer more because not put in the surgeon’s hands as one of the wounded.” Yet as long as Jeff was imprisoned, as long as her family was scattered, Varina felt she could not enjoy the luxury of giving up the struggle.

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