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.26CDin her own letters, Varina s unresolved ambivalence about thewar surfaced.She dissembled, referring to the Confederate struggleas our struggle, and sometimes she told outright lies.To a journalist,she stated that contrary to newspaper reports she had always sup-ported the Confederacy.She contradicted her statements from thepostwar years as well.After one of her cousins extolled the LostCause, she replied that she loved it too, having made such sacrificesfor it, which is at odds with her comment in 1867 that she could notlove the Confederacy as her husband did.Then she added that shecould not bear to relive the war and all the sorrow it brought in itswake.She made gnomic comments to her friend Mary Chesnut.Afterurging Chesnut to publish her wartime diary, she confided that shewas tired of recent Confederate histories because they do not wantto tell the truth or to hear it, focusing on the individual achieve-ments of each author.Which individuals, which truths, or whichachievements, she did not say, but then she concluded that since thepublic seemed to like these books, she should not criticize them;Chesnut died a year later without publishing her diary.Davis madeother cryptic statements in a letter to a namesake.She referred to her association with the Confederate cause as accidental and said thatonly a true-hearted Confederate would name a child for her afterthe glamour of success had faded out of our lives. 27In any case, she did not despise Northerners as did many whiteSoutherners.A Baltimore journalist who visited Beauvoir reportedthat she was proud of her husband s fame while censuring no one,and that she was still grateful to John Garrett for helping her familyafter the war.In her letters she sometimes disparaged individuals,240 fascinating failuressuch as a Yankee reporter who tried to interrogate her for gossipabout the Confederate leadership, comparing him to vermin, butshe remained on cordial terms with longtime friends such as MinnaBlair, to whom she sent heartfelt condolences when Montgomerydied in 1883.She had always been fond of Montgomery, she told thewidow, and praised his loyal character.Davis still correspondedwith her Northern kinfolk, including her cousin Daniel Agnew, amember of the Pennsylvania supreme court since 1863 and chief jus-tice since 1873.They agreed, as Agnew liked to say, that blood wasthicker than water.28Varina Davis developed an improbable friendship with a Yankee re-former, Frances Willard.They met in Memphis, probably in the1870s when Willard was touring the country speaking on behalfof temperance.Thirteen years younger than Davis, she came froma Midwestern Republican family.After becoming president of theWoman s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879, she advo-cated temperance as a means to protect the family, even though shedid not marry and was wholly dedicated to her career.Willard hadlost her youthful commitment to racial equality, and in her speechesin the 1880s as she tried to increase the WCTU membership in theSouth, she emphasized the shared experience of whites in both re-gions.Unable to persuade First Lady Lucy Hayes to endorse thecause, Willard converted a few women from the old planter class.Sallie Chapin of Charleston, an ex-Confederate who had published atemperance novel, became one of Willard s good friends in the orga-nization.29Willard and Davis met again in 1881 during the reformer s tour ofthe South, when Davis was visiting Memphis.The WCTU was thecountry s largest women s organization, and by the end of the de-cade it would have two hundred thousand members.In Memphis,Willard and Davis had a long talk about reform, because Davis was atthat time secretary of the local chapter of the Woman s Christian As-sociation.Willard later described Davis as gifted and one of themost radiant conversationalists she had ever met.The two womenseemed to like each other.Willard, who made friends easily, was241 fascinating failurestrim, grey-haired, blue-eyed, always soigne, with polite manners.Furthermore, both women were well read and both were famous, al-though they were of course different kinds of public figures
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