The Ethnic Origins of Confederate First Lady Varina Howell Davis , Wife of Jefferson Davis.

( Dated article from robots in masquerade dot blogspot dot com)

Picture of Jefferson Davis and his new wife Varina Howell Davis, in the 1840s

[ Please read my comment after this article from robots in masquerade ]

Mrs. Jefferson Davis, First Lady of the Confederate States of America

Whenever one is addressing a controversial topic – in this case, the Confederacy – I believe it is important to immediately explain why.

When I was a college student (at a liberal institution in NY), a Southern professor came one year to deliver a lecture about why the Confederate flag should be embraced and she was booed off stage (and off campus) immediately after she started speaking.

I think that was wrong, mostly because we are pretty lucky that we don’t live in, say the Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia , places where an individual does not even have a basic right to express their opinion or to live and practice religion (or other cultural traditions) as they choose.

Did you know that Jews aren’t even allowed to enter * Saudi Arabia?

I digress, but my basic point is that we deserve to listen to the arguments of our fellow citizens even when we do not necessarily agree with them.

So why am I tackling this subject matter? Whilst doing research for a manuscript I am working on involving an “elite plantation aristocrat”, I began studying William Kaufman Scarborough ‘s Masters of the Big House , the most thorough study of the largest slaveholders in the South in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

It was important for me to understand what life was like for individuals that owned 250 slaves or more so that I could most accurately depict the details of their lives without falling into some post-War biased recreation (like Gone With The Wind , for example).

And whilst learning more about Confederate president Jefferson Davis , I began reading about his wife, the former Varina Howell of Natchez, Mississippi, and the following picture of the bridal pair together surfaced.

A pretty benign picture, No? But something about it was very curious to me. I noticed that Mrs. Davis was much younger than her husband and rather beautiful. Certainly, this is a black and white photograph (an early one from the 1840s), but I found Mrs. Davis’s appearance to be rather singular. As a person of a mixed origin myself, my first thought was; “That woman is a quadroon!” (This is not from the original article. This is my addition because I thought Stacey Dash looks so much like Mrs. Davis) 🙂 🙂

The nose. The eyes. The lips.

Frankly, it seemed rather obvious to me.

I am not posting this in order to be scandalous or because I am attempting to show the eccentricities of the slave system in America (or the hypocrisy; both valid endeavors), I only try to shed light on something that I believe is interesting.

Obviously, this woman died one hundred years before I was born, but no picture that I have been able to find has convinced me that Mrs. Davis was 100% ‘white’ (European).

In fact, as I dug up more and more pictures of the Confederate First Lady, especially those showing her in later age, I was even more convinced that the lady has Black African (if not American Indian) origin.

So who was Varina Howell Davis?

Varina Howell was born in Natchez, MS to planter William Burr Howell and wife Margaret L. Kempe in 1826. Natchez was a bastion of the Southern elite prior to the Civil War, and it belonged to the big three centers of wealth in the South, which also included the important cities of Charleston, South Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Natchez was a center for cotton export and trade. One peculiar fact about Natchez, however, was that (unlike New Orleans and Charleston), many of the Natchez-area planters and residents had origins in the Northern states ; Varina’s father, for example, was a native of New Jersey, and her grandfather served as Governor of New Jersey after the American Revolution.

Miss Howell grew up in luxury at her father’s plantation, called the Briers, in Natchez, and attended an aristocratic boarding school in Philadelphia.

Her life was not without its troubles, however. When Varina was a girl, her father lost big in the crash in the Southern economy of 1837-1842 and their family home and slaves were all repossessed by debt collectors; things were not put to rights until Varina’s maternal family came to the rescue and used their wealth to repurchase what had been taken.

Jefferson Davis met miss Howell in 1835 and they were married in an allegedly humble affair at the Briers in 1845, with only immediate family and close friends in attendance.

A larger affair planned for 1844 had been cancelled for unknown reason and replaced with the hushed affair of 1845.

Digging into Varina’s genealogy, there is no attested references to any individuals of non-European origin, and based on names and what we know about the individuals in her family tree, there is no reason to believe that she was not 100% ‘white’, other than the evidence of our eyes.

William Burr Howell was certainly of European origin and that leaves Varina’s mother as the possible source of non-white origin. We know that Varina’s maternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant named Colonel Joseph Kempe, but little is known about the maternal grandmother.

The difficulty here is that there are multiple reasons to explain Varina Howell’s dark and rather yellow complexion : she could be of African or Indian origin, she could simply have a tan, or she could have Southern European origin (Black Irish, Spanish, or Italian, for example).

There is little worse than engaging in idle speculation without the evidence to back it up and without detailed genealogical data about the Kempe family, I do not have much in the way of evidence, besides photographs.

So you, dear reader, are left to make a decision for yourself.

Take a look at the wife of President Jefferson Davis in the pictures below and ask yourself: Is this a ‘white’ woman?

What are the implications of a First Lady of the Confederacy with African origins?

What is the likelihood in a part of the country where some districts were 60-80% Black that everyone that was “white” was actually white?

Mrs. Davis is on the far right, holding infant.

Jefferson Davis, Jr. He looks more like Mrs. Davis than his father. * That is not true. I have been in Saudi Arabia, and there were many Jews with me at the place where I was (Chiniquy). Chiniquy’s note below: Mrs Davis late in her life was a strong supporter of the African American leader, Booker T. Washington . I don’t know if Mrs Davis, found out at this late stage of her life, or perhaps she had always been aware that, she had African ancestry . (The following is another article on the same subject is from http://www.originalpeople.org/jefferson-davis-wife-mixed/ Mrs Davis and I believe this is her son SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Oct 13, 2014, 1:32 PM ET

By CHRIS CAROLA Associated Press A century and a half after Confederate officer James Malbone wrote his Civil War diary partly in code, a couple of Yankees have figured out why he took the precaution: He liked to gossip. Sprinkled amid entries on camp recipes and casualties are encrypted passages in which Malbone dishes on such juicy topics as a fellow soldier who got caught in bed with another man’s wife. Malbone also writes about meeting the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and describes her looks in an apparent echo of rumors at the time that she may have been of mixed race . “That’s pretty shocking,” said Kent D. Boklan, the Queens College computer science professor and former National Security Agency cryptographer who deciphered Malbone’s code with little difficulty. “It’s a military diary and you expect military information, but you don’t expect the first lady of the Confederacy to make an appearance in this diary.” According to Boklan, Malbone’s encrypted entry about Varina Howell Davis describes her as “ dark complected ” with “ very very brown skin dark eyes” and “high cheek bones wide mouth.” Davis’ wife was a well-educated woman for her time, and as a result, was the target of “all kind of gossipy innuendos from the ladies” in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, according to Sam Craghead of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. Malbone, a lieutenant with the 6th Virginia Infantry Regiment, was severely wounded in the arm at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. Assigned to light duty behind the lines, he used a leather-bound pocket diary to jot down his thoughts and even a poem. Many of the entries were in a code he devised himself, consisting of a variety of symbols, including punctuation marks and a dollar sign, that corresponded to letters of the alphabet. Other entries — names of deserters, costs of supplies — were written in plain text because the diary would have been submitted to his superiors so they could copy the information for their official records, according to Jim Gandy, librarian at the New York State Military Museum. Gandy said the journal probably came into the possession of a New York soldier at the end of the war and wound up in the state’s vast collection. It is the only Confederate diary in the museum. There is no record there of Malbone’s ultimate fate. It wasn’t until 2012 that a museum volunteer discovered the diary was written partly in code. The museum contacted Boklan, who had broken Union and Confederate codes used in other documents, and he completed the deciphering after working on it for a week in January. “Technically, this is not very hard to break,” Boklan said. “There were some odd things. With a little bit of work and patience everything worked out.” (End of article from robots in masquerade) ( Chiniquy’s comments below) Many Caucasian Americans today, have African ancestry. The majority of them are not even aware of it. Here is a picture of three mixed race slaves from New Orleans in the 19th century. The boys name was Charley Taylor. His father was Alexander Withers: There was so much race mixing during the time of American slavery; that it was not uncommon to see slaves with blonde hair and blue eyes. During the 1940s, the blonde hair, blue eyes African American leader of the NAACP; Walter White wrote: “Every year, thousands of light skinned Negroes “cross over” and live their lives as white people. “ Photo of Walter White and his family in Georgia. I am sure that the majority of these people who “ Crossed Over, “ never told their spouses or children, that they were of African descent. In fact many of these ‘crossed over white’s’ children, became more racist against people of African descent than other Caucasians. The reason they became more racists was because these “Cross Overs” fathers and mothers; made sure that they didn’t do or say anything, that would make other Caucasians suspect that they were of African descent. They made sure that they didn’t listen to music by African Americans ; that they didn’t eat food that was stereotyped as “ Negro food ” (watermelon, fried chicken etc.); that they didn’t read Negro newspapers or go to movies with African American actors etc. etc.. This rigid pattern against doing anything that would be perceived as, what people of African descent would do; in time made their offspring develop a dislike for people of African descent and everything considered “black.” Over the past 40 years since I have lived in the United States of America; I have met many Caucasian racists that I knew were of African descent. Some of them have even been leaders of local KKK or skinhead groups. A few years ago I read about a Caucasian racist, who was trying to create an ‘ all white’ city. He found out through a DNA test that he had African ancestry 🙂 I would caution any Caucasian who has a deep seated hatred for people of African descent; to question where that hatred came from 🙂 Most likely some of their recent ancestors, were African Americans who were “passing” as ‘whites’ 🙂 As an example is the mulatto J. Edgar Hoover, the former Director of the FBI . READ ABOUT HIM AT: https://chiniquy.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/j-edgar-hoover-had-black-ancestors/ Hoover, hated his fellow African Americans with a passion. He never wanted any of his associates in the FBI or the government, to suspect that he was mixed race. So he was extremely biased against his own people. Many of the present day descendants of these passing white, have now inherited the same problem, that many people of African descent in Europe and the Americas suffer from: Dislike of their own African ancestry. READ ALSO: WAS ELVIS PRESLEY OF MIXED RACIAL HERITAGE? https://chiniquy.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/elvis-presley-was-of-mixed-racial-heritage/ (Click on the link below for an article about African American Soldiers in The American Civil War) African Americans must understand, that it was their ancestors who really freed their people from slavery. Their vast military contributions in this war has been purposely hidden in our history books. Biographers Nicolay and Hay wrote that: President Lincoln took many opportunities to remind Northerners of the debt they owed to African American soldiers . And according to an historical researcher name Jerry Young : “Abraham Lincoln said that without these men we could have very easily lost the war .” See the article below: https://chiniquy.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/the-american-civil-war/

The painting sketch below was done by Frederic Remington of an actual “Buffalo Soldier.” Remington rode with them and was familiar with their heroic exploits.

(Comment below was made to the first article about Mrs Davis, from robots in masquerade on their website)