Varina Anne "Winnie" Davis was born one year before the end of the American Civil War in the White House of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.

The youngest, she was the only child of the family who was allowed to visit her father in Fort Monroe with her mother during his two years of imprisonment that followed the Civil War.

[1][page needed] During the 1880s, Winnie lived with her parents at Beauvoir, their Gulf Coast estate near Biloxi, Mississippi.

It was bequeathed to Jefferson Davis in 1878 by Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey, a wealthy widow and supporter of the Confederacy.

In 1886, Winnie and her aging father visited West Point, Georgia, on a tour of the South promoting his books and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

This title stuck, and Winnie became an icon for Confederate veteran groups and an inspiration for the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which formed in 1894.

Confederate groups, including women's associations, worked to fund and organize cemeteries, memorialize the war and its soldiers, and honor the "Lost Cause" of the South.

Jefferson Davis died shortly before the announced wedding date, and mourning custom required postponing the nuptials for a year.

More importantly, her husband had left the widowed Varina in financial difficulties, and she worried that Wilkinson would be unable to support Winnie.

[1][page needed][4] By 1891, Varina Davis moved with her daughter to New York City, deeming the climate of Mississippi unhealthy.

[1][page needed] In July 1898, Winnie Davis became deathly ill. She had been soaked in a rainstorm at a Confederate Veterans' Reunion in Atlanta, Georgia, then traveled by train to meet her mother in Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island.

Her mother arranged for her daughter to be buried in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery, with military honors because of her service to Confederate veterans' groups.