Life Out of the Limelight

Margaret Davis Hayes: The Other Daughter of President Davis

By Kelly Hancock & John Coski

If you take a tour of the restored Confederate President’s House, you will learn much about President Jefferson Davis – and you will hear a lot about his endlessly fascinating wife, Varina Howell Davis, and about their youngest child, Varina Anne “Winnie” Davis, born in the White House bed chamber in 1864.

But what about the Davis’s other daughter and eldest surviving child, Margaret “Maggie” Howell Davis?

“Truth to tell, I know very little about her, aside from the dog-biting anecdote [a family story from her childhood] and general only-Davis-child-to-marryand-have-children-of-herown,” noted a long-time White House interpreter in response to that question. “My impression has always been that she was the quiet, responsible child in a family with spoiled brothers and celebrity/artsy sister.”

All the interpreters mention that Maggie was the only child to survive her parents, marry, and have children of her own. Some relate the few anecdotes we know from her childhood in the Confederate Executive Mansion or describe her adulthood in Memphis, Tennessee, her family’s move west to Colorado, or her role in uniting the Davis family in death in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery.

The relative obscurity of Maggie Davis extends beyond the walls of the house at 12th and Clay streets. In recent decades, her mother and sister have enjoyed something of a vogue, as they have been the subjects of authoritative biographies by Joan Cashin and Heath Lee and novels by Charles Frazier and Julia Oliver, as well as several exhibits and programs at the American Civil War Museum.

As the life story of Winnie Davis dramatizes, celebrity – especially when unsought and unwanted – comes at a high cost. The story of Winnie’s older sister demonstrates the costs and the benefits of living outside the limelight.

Margaret Howell Davis was born on February 25, 1855, a little over eight months after Varina and Jefferson Davis buried their firstborn child, Samuel Emory. Both parents were obviously proud of their new baby, and, by the time Maggie reached toddlerhood, each described her as smart and pretty.

Margaret Howell Davis as a toddler.

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However, in a letter to her father, shortly before Maggie’s second birthday, Varina noted, “Little Maggie is the pet and pride of the house — she is very like Ma and exceedingly pretty — and smart — but there the praise must end, for she is the worst tempered child alive and spends three hours out of four fighting.” In writing to Jefferson Davis in April of 1859, Varina noted that she “had to whip” fouryear-old Maggie “three times-since which she is perfectly biddable.” That Maggie was strong-willed does not seem to have bothered Jefferson Davis. He took special pride in her outgoing nature and called her “Polly” in honor of a favorite sister.

When the Davis family moved into the President’s House, Maggie was six years old, and by this time she was a big sister to two brothers — Jeff Jr. and Joseph, ages four and two. One more brother, William (“Billie”) and a sister, Varina Anne (“Winnie”) would be added to the family before the war was over. Maggie apparently enjoyed a typically tempestuous relationship with her famously high-spirited brother Jeff. “I miss you very much and wish you would come home,” Maggie wrote him when he was visiting his uncle, Brig. Gen. Joseph R. Davis, near the battle front in March 1865. “I am very sorry that I told you I would be glad if you would go.” After filling him in on the activities of Tippy the family terrier and sending love from other members of the household, she assured him that she was "your most affectionate Sister."

There is little that reveals how the move to a new home and the coming of war impacted Maggie, but certainly, the death of her brother Joseph on April 30, 1864, had to have been devastating. A Confederate officer, passing by just after Joseph fell from the mansion’s portico, wrote that “a little girl ran out of the house crying to the next door and pulled the bell violently.” It is not difficult to imagine the panic and desperation Maggie felt as she sought help from a neighbor since both her parents were out at the time.

Cabinet card by William Notman, Montreal, of (l-r) Jefferson Davis, Jr., Maggie Davis, William Davis, and Varina Anne “Winnie” Davis.

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Becoming a refugee at age ten, also must have left its mark. Although the flight south may have seemed like an adventure at the outset, seeing her father captured brought home the reality of the situation. Varina recalled in a1904 letter Maggie “nearly lost her senses” and then clung to her father “her arms close around his neck” as the family was transported to Macon, Georgia.

If the capture of her beloved father had been traumatic, the separation from both her parents that soon followed was more so. After military officials imprisoned Jefferson Davis at Fort Monroe, they sent Varina sent with the children to Savannah. Worried about tensions between U.S. troops and Confederate citizens as well as her own mental stability, Varina arranged for the children to live in Montreal, Canada, under the care of her mother. In September of 1865, Maggie was placed in the Convent of the Sacred Heart located at Sault-de-Recollect. The convent was described as a stately, gothic stone mansion with a large chapel.

After a month in the convent school, Maggie wrote her father, updating him on her progress, “I have the ribbon for good behavior, and my Mistress said that she was very much pleased with me for she said that I was very good and that I was trying very hard to speak French.” Separation from her family and immersion in a French-speaking environment would not have been easy, and it is telling that in this fairly short letter she repeated the phrase “Precious Father” five times.

Jefferson Davis sensed her unhappiness and wrote Varina in February 1866 that he worried about the treatment of “our nervous confiding little

daughter.” In March, after learning that her mother was coming for a visit, “Little Pollie” as she signed herself, poured out her heart, “I have prayed every night and every morning for Precious Mother and you and that we might all meet soon again and He hasgranted that I should see Mother if not you, but as I will continue to pray I hope that he will also grant that you may come to see us and live in happiness and harmony all our days together.” Jefferson Davis’s release on bail in May of 1867, brought about a brief reunion, but his trial date remained uncertain, and both he and Varina were away from their children for long periods of time. In January, anticipating her parent’s homecoming Maggie wrote, “You cannot think how anxiously we are all watching for you to come back, but I am sure I want you more than any of them.”

With no prospect of a trial in sight, the Davis family sailed for Europe in the summer. By December of 1868, Maggie was once again separated from her family — this time she was placed in the Convent of the Assumption outside of Paris, France. She wrote reassuringly to her “Darling Father,” of her visits to the Bois to Boulogne and the Arc de Triomphe, and told him, “Madame Walburge is so good to me…[she]comes every night to see if I am comfortable and every morning to see if I have a head ache and if I would like to sleep longer.”

Photograph of adolescent Maggie by Stanton & Butler, Baltimore.

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The separation may have caused not only emotional problems for Maggie but also physical. Jefferson Davis worried about his 14-yearold daughter, and, as he returned to the United States, cautioned Varina, “You will order all things for Maggie’s mental and physical good. She was nervous from her infancy and a mistake in her treatment would be to us a crowning misfortune.”

After spending the summer break with her family in London, Maggie did not return to the convent. She had developed a back ailment, and a physician advised that travel could cause complications.

“She is the happiest thing you ever saw at the prospect of staying with her ‘darling Mother’ flies at me and kisses me a dozen times a day,” Varina wrote. Giving her husband a further update, she continued, “We are very happy here in the improved health and perfect teachability of Maggie. She has improved wonderfully in her health… and perfectly happy with her governess, who is very strict, but manages to hide it in an affectionate kind of exhortation which delights Maggie beyond expression.”

“Little Pollie” concurred, telling her father in November, “I am so much better and happier at home and I have a sweet young lady for a governess.” There was one more brief separation as the family transitioned to Memphis, Tennessee, but this most difficult and formative chapter of Maggie’s life was finally over.

Maggie’s adulthood seems staid in comparison to her earlier life. On January 1, 1876, after a three-year courtship, she married Joel Addison Hayes at St. Lazarus Episcopal Church in Memphis. Known as a man of good business sense and high moral character, Addison was described as having a “rosy completion, soft blue eyes, and a drooping mustache of gold.” Addison helped his father-in-law regain control of his “Brierfield” estate, and, with Maggie, established an affectionate, quasi-parental relationship with younger sister Winnie.

Cabinet card of Joel Addison Hayes by Bingham Brothers, Memphis, inscribed “For my darling little Winnie with much love from her B[rother] Addison May 21st 1878.”

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Seven years older than Maggie, Addison was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, but by 1860 his parents had settled in Memphis, where his maternal grandfather was a professor at the Memphis Medical College. Although his father was a well-respected attorney, Addison chose to go into banking. By 1874 he was cashier of the State National Bank and well on his way to a successful career. The couple honeymooned in St. Louis, and as, a wedding gift, the Davises had a home built for them on 362 Vance Street. The house, which was brick and in the Italianate style, was described by Maggie as a “perfect gem.”

After Jefferson Davis’s Carolina Life Insurance failed in 1873 and he, then Varina, relocated to “Beauvoir” near Biloxi, Mississippi, Margaret and Addison remained in Memphis. Her troubled, but beloved, brother, Jefferson, Jr., also remained in Memphis working at Addison’s bank. To Addison and Maggie fell the anguishing responsibility of caring for her last surviving brother (Billie had died of diphtheria in 1872) as he died of yellow fever in October 1878.

Addison and Maggie resided in Memphis until April of 1885, when they moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in hopes that the drier air would be a cure for Addison’s asthma. Addison’s success continued, and he eventually became president of the First National Bank in Colorado Springs, a post he held for twenty-five years.

Joel Addison Hayes with grandchildren, ca. 1917.

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He and Maggie enjoyed life as a socially prominent couple. An unidentified writer “who loves and admires her in her far away Western home,” wrote in the Saturday Review that Maggie’s “broad charities and tireless generosity have made the name of the daughter of Jefferson Davis beloved among a once hostile people; her brilliancy and fascination have made her home the most charming in Colorado Springs, and many a lonely stranger and homeless young man will say with me “God bless our Princess,” for so we call her.”

The death of Jefferson Davis in December 1889 conferred upon his widow and two daughters a new status: living legacies of the Confederacy’s only president. Following her mother’s example, Maggie began signing her name Margaret H. Jefferson-Davis Hayes. She did what she could in her Colorado sphere to perpetuate her father’s memory. As befitted a woman of her status, she established a room in memory of Jefferson Davis at the Union Printers’ Home. She also provided for two rooms in St. Francis’ Hospital, one in memory of her firstborn son Jefferson Davis Hayes, who died in infancy, and one for her “beloved brothers.”

For better or for worse, her life out west and her involvement with her growing family limited her involvement with the bourgeoning Confederate memorial movement. This was in marked contrast to her sister, Winnie, who found herself the unwilling, but obedient, symbol of Confederate womanhood. At an appearance with her father in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1886, Senator (and former Confederate general) John Brown Gordon hail Winnie as the “Daughter of the Confederacy.” The name stuck, and its burden eventually killed her.

The profile of Margaret Davis Hayes published in “Representative Women of Colorado” (1911) featured a photograph of her wearing several of her Confederate badges and pins.

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Typical of the Davis women’s experience was the example of the American Civil War Museum’s antecedent organization, the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS), which opened the Confederate Museum in the Davis’s Richmond home in 1896. Emulating the model of other women’s preservation societies, the CMLS had enlisted prominent women from each southern state to serve as “regents,” including Winnie as regent of the Mississippi Room and Varina as regent of the “Solid South” Room.

On February 24, 1896, two days after the Museum opened, Varina wrote to her former Richmond neighbor and dear friend, Ann Crenshaw Grant, to ask a special favor. “I write to you on a matter which I could only entrust to a woman off your matchless delicacy and sacred faith, to all confidence reposed in you,” she began.

“My poor little Maggie is one of the most devoted of Southern women, and clings lovingly to all the traditions of our people. From the fact that her name is not now Davis, and her address is unknown, she has been left out of all complimentary notice of our family. Her husband who was born in Missi[ssippi] and fought there is much wounded by this, for their openly expressed opinions have been a stumbling block in his business and to her socially in that rabid northwest where his health has compelled his residence. – Do you think she could have some complimentary position given her in the Museum? Do you think it could be arranged with out any one knowing my suggestion?”

Mrs. Grant obviously shared her former neighbor’s request, as overtures of involvement soon arrived in Colorado Springs. But only after yet another tragic turn in the Davis family’s story.

After attending the United Confederate Veterans annual reunion in Atlanta in July 1898 and spending a long afternoon in a rainstorm, Winnie caught a severe cold. By the time she joined her mother at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, Winnie was ill with malarial gastritis. She died on September 18, 1898.

In the midst of tremendous public grief for the celebrated “Daughter of the Confederacy,” attention turned to the late president’s other daughter. No doubt through the influence of its president, Janet Weaver Randolph (who was also a CMLS officer) the Richmond Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy elected Maggie as an “honorary daughter” in October 1898.

“Our ‘Loved Cause’ [a short lived alternative to the name ‘Lost Cause’] is indeed sacred and inexpressibly dear to me,” Maggie wrote in thanks, “and I am prouder of being a ‘Daughter of the Confederacy’ than I would be of any title that could be conferred upon me, born as I was a daughter of the glorious south, and a daughter of my father - My one regret is that my husband’s health requires me to live so far away from my own dear people, as I am therefore debarred from active participation in the glorious unending work, you my sisters of the Confederacy carry on so untiringly.”

Her enforced geographic isolation from the South was a common complaint in Maggie’s correspondence with the leaders of the Confederate Museum. “I beg to say it would give me pleasure to serve you or the Confederate Memorial Literary Society in any way in my power, though my power is limited living as I do in a community composed of northern people,” she wrote to CMLS vice-president “Lizzie” Cary Daniel from Colorado Springs in February 1899. The CMLS named her honorary regent of the Museum’s Solid South Room. “I only wish I could do more to show the tender reverential interest the work of the memorial society inspires in me,” Maggie replied.

In addition to her symbolic role, Maggie joined, then succeeded, her mother in the work of distributing Davis family effects among the several associations dedicated to memorializing Jefferson Davis. “Mother and I expect to go very soon to Bea[u]voir to break up our old home then I suppose she will send the Museum such things a she wishes to give,” Maggie wrote in February 1899. Among the items she sent were family photos and her sister’s childhood books (“she valued them greatly and they were always tenderly cared for”) and furniture displayed now in the restored rooms of her former Richmond home.

After Varina’s death in October 1906, Maggie became the only surviving member of the immediate family, and her role expanded accordingly. In June 1907, she pulled the cord to unveil the Jefferson Davis statue on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. She also maintained a vigilant defense of her father’s reputation. In October 1907, she wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt thanking him for his public compliment of Davis’s leadership of the Mississippi Regiment in the Mexican War.

A few months earlier, Maggie had a rare opportunity to demonstrate her southern patriotism and her reconciliationist spirit in her own home city when the veterans of the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry traveled to Colorado Springs to honor their recently-paralyzed commander, Brig. Gen. William J. Palmer. One of the veterans posted in the lobby of the Antler Hotel a framed copy of Palmer’s 1865 proclamation offering a reward for the capture of Jefferson Davis and linking him with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Even before receiving Maggie’s letter of protest, Palmer removed the display. Maggie described Palmer as a “highly esteemed friend” who had expressed regret over his orders to capture Davis, and she, in turn, repeated her father’s lament about Lincoln’s assassination.

Less than three years after her mother’s death, Margaret Davis Hayes died of breast cancer on July 18, 1909. At a simple October 1909 memorial service, her ashes were interred in a grave in what become known as Davis Circle in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery. In 1911, Joel Addison Hayes commissioned George Julian Zolnay, who had sculpted memorials for Jefferson and Winnie Davis in 1899, to create one for Maggie. Upon his death in 1919, Joel Hayes’ remains also came to Hollywood, as did those of their infant son, Jefferson Davis Hayes.

Tributes poured in from around the country. An Alexandria, Virginia, newspaper praised Maggie’s “unostentatious service” and her “benefactions, always dispensed in the most quiet manner possible.” The CMLS joined dozens of other memorial associations to pass resolutions in her honor. Two months after her death, 25 southern women “scattered throughout Colorado” formed the state’s first chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Margaret Howell Davis Hayes Chapter #1228 was “named in recognition of the personal loveliness and high-toned patriotism of one whose name is enshrined in our hearts as worthy of a grand and gifted family and an exemplar of Southern womanhood….”

Margaret Hayes’ correspondence and relationship with Confederate organizations was always polite, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of her pride in her southern roots and her father’s legacy or her pleasure in being included in the work of those organizations. But she must have recognized that her role as daughter of the Confederacy’s only president would have been more oppressive and less pleasurable if she had been in her sister’s place – and that distance afforded her and her family a wider sphere of privacy denied to Winnie.

Physical distance exacerbated an emotional distance that she had long felt within her family. She enjoyed a lifelong bond with her father, but her mother’s favoritism to Winnie was obvious. Writing to Maggie on her 17th birthday, Varina cautioned, “You are your mother’s nurseling baby — & all mine — & my precious one on all the earth the dearest except two — & those you would not wish to displace — your father & your precious little beautiful sister.”

In a 1989 article (“The Daughters of Jefferson Davis: A Study in Contrast” published in The Journal of Mississippi History) historian Suzanne T. Dolensky made the case that Maggie was exceedingly jealous of Winnie. This may be an overstatement, as the sisters seemed to have had a close relationship, but Maggie occasionally betrayed some resentment. In a 1906 letter to Confederate veteran John J. Hood, she expressed regret at allowing her sister to take precedence. “[I have] quietly allowed my birth right to pass from me, until many southerners assert I am an imposter.”

As the only child to survive both her parents and all her siblings, Maggie endured a great deal of loss, but as a survivor, she produced life, four children—Varina Howell Davis, Lucy White, Jefferson Addison Hayes, and William Hayes Davis. Following the death of Jefferson Davis (while the family was gathered in New Orleans for the former president’s funeral), Varina noted that there were no sons to carry on the Davis name, so, at her urging, Maggie’s eldest surviving son, six years old at the time, consented to have his name changed from Jefferson Addison Hayes to Jefferson Addison Hayes-Davis. This was done by act of the Mississippi State Legislature on February 21, 1890. Producing descendants is Maggie’s greatest legacy.

The Confederate Museum (Museum of the Confederacy) continued its close relationship with successive generations of Maggie’s family. Maggie’s descendants contributed furnishings and objects for the 1980s restoration of the Richmond Executive Mansion, and have continued to donate family photographs and papers.

Kelly R. Hancock is the Museum’s Public Programs Manager and John M. Coski is the Museum’s Historian. They both began their Museum careers as White House of the Confederacy interpreters.