| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War. By Joan E. Cashin. (Cambridge: Belknap, 2006. xii, 403 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-674-02294-2. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-0-674-03037-4.)

Joan E. Cashin's First Lady of the Confederacy, the first biography of Varina Davis by a professional historian, tacks from Mississippi to Washington, to Richmond, to Europe, and to New York as it follows Varina Howell from her 1826 birth in Natchez, through and after her marriage to Jefferson Davis, to her death in 1906. Cashin uses the central claim that Varina Davis held "contradictory attitudes on gender, race, region, and riches, arising from both the society she lived in and the circumstances of her own family," to reveal a lot about her subject and to reinforce existing conclusions about the times in which she lived (pp. 24–25).

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