Suprise! A new post!

It has been quite a while since my last post, I think around two months! I have been delayed for several reasons, one very important one, which I can refer you to another blog to read that wonderful story! I have been looking back over Mrs. Varina Howell Davis's memoir of her husband Jefferson Davis and really been inspired to quote some lines from Mrs. Davis's pen. She is such a descriptive writer, and the way she describes friends and aquaintsances is so charming! I wanted to just give a few examples, and even more astounding, I believe, is her memory. I believe this memoir was written well after the war, and many described here were actually people she met as early as the 1840's or 50's.

"Mrs. Gaines, then a laughing, brown-eyed little woman, unwhipped of social conventionalities, not because she did not understand them, but because she understood them and was naturally lawless, was very attentive to her feeble old hero."

Of Mr. Davis's sisters she writes, "His sisters were both like him, and were spirited, intelligent women, with strong convictions of duty and a wonderful inborn dignity that is not to be acquired by education: it is a gift."

This is quite sweet, this was a letter Mrs. Davis wrote about Mr. Davis describing him the first time she met him to her mother. She wrote:

"I do not know whether this Mr. Jefferson Davis is young or old. He looks both at times; but I believe he is old, for from what I hear he is only two years younger than you are. He impresses me as a remarkable kind of man, but of uncertain temper, and has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me; yet he is most agreeable and has a peculiarly sweet voice and a winning manner of asserting himself. The fact is, he is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk, but to insist upon a stoical indifference to the fright afterward. I do not think I shall ever like him as I do his brother Joe. Would you believe it, he is refined and cultivated, and yet he is a Democrat!"

Of arriving in Washington D.C. for the first time she writes,"How grand and blase the people all looked to these weary country girls, who had never seen anything more worldly than their domestic mothers!"

"Mr. Dallas always wore a spotless white cravat. He was tall and well proportioned, his eyes and eyebrows were quite black, and his hair, which was inclined to curl, was snowy white. There was a certain nice, delicate, sense of harmony and propriety about everything he did. For instance, if he wrote a note it was without erasures, placed in the most graceful manner on the paper, and sealed with care. He considered the peculiarities of every one as worthy of his notice, and never mortified the sensibilities of the most uneducated."

"Mr. Cass, who was a very large, fleshy person, always warm, and obliged to use a fan, which was the largest palm-leaf that I ever saw, fanned himself industriously until some one either attacked his resolutions or his political record; then, in clear, statesmanlike logic, very devoid of ornamentation or rhetoric, he said what he thought; but, if one after another sprung into the debate, the contention somewhat confused him and he was not at his best."

Of Sam Houston she writes, "His manner was very swelling and formal. When he met a lady he took a step forward, then bowed very low, and in a deep voice said,"Lady, I salute you." It was an embarrassing kind of thing, for it was performed with the several motions of a fencing lesson. If she chanced to please him, at the same or the next interview he generally took a small snakeskin pouch from his pocket and pulled from it a little wooden heart, the size of a twenty-five cent piece, and presented it with, "Lady, let me give you my heart." These hearts he whittled all day long in the Senate, and had a jeweller to put a little ring in them."

I am currently reading "Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America Part One Volume 2: A Memoir By His Wife" written by Varina Howell Davis. I have had a hard time putting it down, for Mrs. Davis has given such a lively account of the times and her husband's life, most of which I have never encountered before. Here are a few accounts given by Mrs. Davis that I found very warm and personal.

Mrs. Davis writes: "In one of the most disheartening periods of the War, when Norfolk had been evacuated and the Virginia destroyed, he (Jefferson Davis) came home, about seven o'clock, from his office, and laid down. He declined dinner, and I remained by his side, anxious and afraid to ask what was the trouble which so oppressed him. In an hour or two he told me that the weight of responsibility oppressed him so, that he felt he would give all his limbs to have someone with whom he could share it. I found that nothing comforted him, and at last picked up Lawrence's "Guy Livingstone." Knowing the he had not read it, I thought it might distract his mind. The descriptions of the horses and the beau sabreur Guy interested him at first, in a vague kind of way, but gradually he became absorbed, and I read on until the sky became gray and then pink. He was so wrapped in the story that he took no notice of time. When Guy's back was broken, and when Cyril Brandon in the interview that followed, struck him, my husband rose up, in the highest state of excitement, and called out,"I should like to have been there to punish the scoundrel who would strike a helpless man when he was down."p.301-302

Later Mrs. Davis writes,"Novels were to him only a means of driving out thoughts of more serious things."p.302

While Jefferson Davis and his wife lived in Richmond shortly after the first battle of Manassas many wounded men had been sent to the city to recover in hospitals. Mrs. Davis gives a very touching account that she witnessed. Mrs. Davis writes," Here I saw a remarkable instance of the position our private soldiers occupied at home. Some money had been sent to me from Vicksburg to relieve the "boys from Warren County." Hearing that there were several at this hospital, I walked from one end to the other and tried in vain to find a man who desired pecuniary aid. One fair-haired boy, with emaciated face and armless sleeve, looked up and whispered,"There is a poor fellow on the other side who I think will take a little, I am afraid he has no money; my father gives me all I want." I crossed the room and asked the sufferer, who had neither hand, if I could not get him something he craved. He flushed and said,"I thank you, madam, for your visit, but I do better than that poor fellow over there; he has lost his leg and suffers dreadfully." And so on to the end of the ward."p.205