Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Davis

As first ladies take a back seat to their husbands, historians usually depict figures like Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Davis gingerly. A considerable amount has been written on Mary Todd Lincoln, less so about Varina Davis. Both women have been often vilified, portrayed as overbearing, interfering, and problematic. However, both women exemplified the ways white women in positions of power negotiated their subordinate status and gender norms.

While neither leveraged their husband’s power in overt ways, both Lincoln and Davis did capitalize on their role as first lady and their status in their respective communities. As wives, mothers, and de facto leaders, Lincoln and Davis also juggled numerous roles and dealt with role conflict too. Lincoln and Davis were both relatively outspoken and socially assertive women whose inability to directly participate in the political process did not undermine their willingness to subvert patriarchal norms to influence not just their husbands, but their societies.
The historical record reveals also that both Davis and Lincoln were demonized until relatively recently. Although it would seem Davis and Lincoln might have been worlds apart socially and politically, they were certainly not. Their attitudes towards race, class, gender, and power were remarkably similar, due mainly to their being similarly endowed as highly educated and wealthy members of American society.
There was a much greater age and cultural difference between Davis and her husband than between the Lincolns; Jefferson Davis was nearly 18 years older than Varina and had been married before (Ross). Although both Mary Todd and Varina Howell had been privileged white women, Mary Todd’s family had lost their fortune and her husband’s status helped her regain access to wealth and status. Generally, though, these were women who enjoyed a fair degree of status and privilege vis-a-vis their counterparts throughout the nation—white or not.
Their respective biographies showed how white women in America negotiated new roles for themselves to wield power in a patriarchal society. Using whatever social tools available to them, both Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Howell Davis managed to subvert patriarchal gender norms in strategic and meaningful ways. Both women were highly educated and politically ambitious, both marrying their respective husbands partly because they wanted to partner with a person in a position of power. While it cannot be said definitively that access to power was the primary motivating factor in their choice of husband, it has been noted that Mary Todd Lincoln “goaded” her husband politically (Pederson 215), and Davis likewise attempted—albeit mainly unsuccessfully—to sway her husband too (Ross).
Being unafraid to disagree with their husbands in public as well as private is one of the main points of similarity between these two politically minded women. It took a tremendous amount of courage to defy a man, and to do so in public doubly so. Women in the nineteenth century had zero political agency, and were unable to make a meaningful impact on political culture. Yet they could foreseeably influence their husbands privately. While the Lincolns were mainly alike in their political inclinations, Varina Howell Davis did not necessarily believe that secession was a politically sensible solution to the north-south conflict. Davis unfortunately failed to persuade her husband; after his death she became increasingly outspoken about her disagreements with him and with the mainstream Southern gentry. Both Lincoln and Davis supported their husband’s political ambitions, but Davis did not believe in secession (Cashin). Davis had what she called a “half breed” or bi-cultural life, with friends from both sides of the north/south political spectrum (Cashin 2). Spencer points out the “remarkably contentious relationship” Davis had with her southern white compatriots after her husband’s death in 1889, prompting her moving to the North and shifting her political attitudes somewhat during the later years of her life (iii).
Even though she disagreed with her husband regarding secession, Varina Howell Davis supported slavery. In fact, Davis benefitted directly from slavery and supported the perpetuation of the institution, unlike Lincoln. Mary Todd Lincoln might not have been a premier abolitionist, but compared with Varina Howell Davis, she could be considered one. Although it would seem their political positions were antipodes, Lincoln and Davis would have at least agreed with one another that southern secession was foolish. Davis had left in the middle of her husband’s inauguration ceremony, and promptly left the south once Jefferson had died (Cashin 5). This bold expression of discontent and political disagreement was one of the only means women could use to voice their opinions publically. Lincoln was raised differently than Davis, encouraged to be more vocal when expressing her political opinions. As a child, Mary Todd was raised to speak up for herself in a company of men. Naturally she then pushed for her husband’s participation in federal politics because she herself “learned the art of politics” and engaged men of status and power as their equals and had since she was a child (Ellison 3). Ultimately both women mastered the art of subverting patriarchal power via clever political maneuvering.
The public has vilified Varina Howell Davis and Mary Todd Lincoln for their subverting patriarchal gender norms. However, the ways the public disparaged these women was different. Davis moved to New York, and was summarily criticized for her apparent betrayal of her southern roots. Yet Varina never claimed to be a hundred percent southern; she was a “half breed” with friends from both sides of the Mason Dixon line (Cashin 2). The rhetoric used against Varina Howell Davis is in many ways less vitriolic, partly because her husband occupied a peculiar position in American history: he was traitor to half the nation, and hero to the other half. Mary Todd Lincoln contended with the assassination of her husband, leading likewise to a mixed legacy. The failure of Reconstruction is in part due to that tragedy. Yet the public used one of the nineteenth century’s greatest weapons for discrediting powerful women: labeling them as crazy. Ellison, for example, shows how Lincoln “outsmarted some of the country’s best legal minds,” and was labeled insane for doing so (1). Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Todd Lincoln showed how the patriarchal institutions used the label of insanity to discredit strong, powerful women who threatened to undermine the social order.
Davis and Lincoln both experienced rampant and vitriolic criticisms, especially after Davis moved to New York (Spencer). As Ellison points out, Lincoln had so many political enemies that one of them had her committed to a mental asylum and was subsequently given a “sham trial” to discredit her (1). Women in positions of power were perceived as threats, but neither Davis nor Lincoln would back down. If she could have, Mary Todd Lincoln most certainly would have jumped in front of her husband’s bullet, just as Davis did when Union soldiers captured and shot at him (Cashin).
Both Mary Todd Lincoln and Varina Howell Davis were far more educated than even their white counterparts. In fact, Davis has been described as “supremely literate,” and was known for making oblique erudite allusions that were met with “blank stares of incomprehension” in social settings (Cashin 5). Her reputation would have inspired the same types of fears that Lincoln did, although the latter might have further raised eyebrows with her more outspoken personality. Before she met her husband, Mary Todd had attended universities, her father having started one of the first universities west of the Mississippi (Pederson). Their level of education prepared Lincoln and Davis well for society life, and for the rigorous political pressures of being a first lady.
Both women were expected to throw lavish parties, and both did. Parties were their main means of interacting with the public arena and creating podiums for them to express their political views. Davis was known for being a “brilliant conversationalist,” who much preferred urban to rural life (Cashin 3). Lincoln likewise excelled at salon politics, “pushed boundaries” and thereby “expanded the role for first lady” (Pederson 221). Granted, Davis struggled with an older and more conventional husband who did not want the type of companionate marriage that the Lincolns enjoyed. They were therefore affected totally differently by the deaths of their husbands: Davis not reacting terribly and enjoying the rest of her days in New York but Lincoln reacting by retreating totally from public life, as if in a depression.
Although their upbringings were different, both Davis and Lincoln ignored the social barriers against women participating in politics. At the same time, Lincoln and Davis were both mothers who supported their children in their own unique pursuits. Both Lincoln and Davis also experienced the tragic loss of more than one child. Lincoln and Davis also both participated in the domestic duties of the female sphere in ways that would have been expected of them in the nineteenth century. Davis herself wrote about the ways she decorated the Confederate headquarters during the Christmas of 1864, ironically in an article for The New York World (Davis).
One of the main differences in the lives of Lincoln and Davis was the ways their husband’s deaths affected them. Lincoln was devastated to a degree that left her bereft of political will; once her husband was shot she was “relegated to the position of a permanent outcast,” no longer able to leverage her husband’s power to achieve her own political ambitions (Pederson 224). Lincoln did, however, give her husband’s favorite walking stick to Frederick Douglass (Pederson). Davis fared better after her husband’s death and moved with her daughter to New York, where both women pursued writing careers. The different ways they dealt with their husband’s death may have been due to their different relationships. Unlike Lincoln, Davis was not necessarily happy in her marriage, and frequently criticized her husband. The First Lady of the North and the First Lady of the South led remarkably similar lives, had similar responses to the civil war, and similar ways of negotiating their positions of power.


Works Cited
Cashin, Joan E. “Varina Howell Davis.” Essential Civil War Curriculum. Retrieved online: http://www.essentialcivilwarcurriculum.com/assets/files/pdf/ECWCTOPICVarinaDavisEssay.pdf
Davis, Varina. “How the Davis family spent the Christmas of 1864.” The Texan Dispatch. Retrieved online: http://scvtexas.org/uploads/Camp_1325_12-16_Newsletter.pdf
Ellison, Betsy Boles. The True Mary Todd Lincoln. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014.
Pederson, William D. “Mary Todd Lincoln.” In A Companion to First Ladies. John Wiley, 2016.
Ross, Ishbel. The First Lady of the South: The Life of Mrs. Jefferson Davis. Ebook: Pickle Partners, 2016.
Spencer, Evan R. “Varina Davis, Beauvoir, and the fight for Confederate memory.” Middle Tennessee State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2015. 1605600