| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joan E. Cashin. The First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis's Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. 403. $29.95.

Joan E. Cashin's book is the first professional biography of Varina Howell Davis, and we are indebted to the author for this meticulously researched, compellingly written, and thoughtfully presented portrait of one of the most famous women of the nineteenth century. In reading this book, we come to understand both the power of social context to form and twist a life, at the same time that we can take heart in the way that a personality that persists can find a sort of realization in the very act of persistence. Men, particularly Davis's father, William Howell, and her husband, Jefferson Davis, created much of the form and the twisting in her life. As Cashin convincingly suggests, the bankruptcy of Davis's Natchez merchant father in her early years framed much of the rest of her life. It arguably contributed to throwing her into the arms of Jefferson Davis, a man twice her age at the time of her marriage to him in 1845 (at age nineteen), and of a considerably wealthier planter class family background.

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