She had many questions to ask; no sooner were they alone in their railway compartment than Winnie turned to Miss Mason: “At last I see a Southern woman! Now I can learn all that happened to my parents just after the war, when I was a baby. Miss Em, what did Papa do just after the war—just after Richmond fell? What happened to my papa then?” Miss Emily caught her breath! “Winnie, what your papa did not think best you should know, I must decline to tell you. You will soon see him in France.” Winnie took small interest in acquiring Parisian graces. “Miss Em, what are papa’s favourite songs?” Miss Mason sought faithfully to turn her attention to chansons of the day and to operatic airs in vogue. “But I am only going to sing to papa. I am going to the plantation—to Beauvoir. How shall I need to sing opera airs there? Tell me, dear Miss Em, the songs my father loves!”
“When I met her father,” Miss Mason says, “I ventured to question him concerning Winnie’s ignorance of his prison life, expressing surprise that he had not claimed the sympathy of his child. ‘I was unwilling to prejudice her,’ he said, ‘against the country to which she is now returning and which must be hers. I thought that but justice to the child. I want her to love her country.’”
THE DAUGHTER OF THE CONFEDERACY
Winnie (Varina Anne), youngest child of Jefferson Davis;
born in Richmond, Va., June 27, 1864, and died at
Narragansett Pier, R. I., September 18, 1895.
General John B. Gordon gave her the
above title by which she was known.
Years later, in Georgia, Veterans gathered to hear her father speak, greeted Winnie’s appearance with ringing cheers. General John B. Gordon, placing his hands on her shoulders as he drew her forward, said: “Comrades! here is our daughter, the Daughter of the Confederacy!” She lived much in the North and died there. An escort from the Grand Army of the Republic bore her remains from the hotel at Narragansett Pier to the railway station; in New York, a Guard of Honour from the Confederate Veterans and the Southern Society received her and brought her to Richmond, and Richmond took her own. North, South, East and West sent flowers to deck the bier of the Daughter of the Confederacy, and the North said: “Let us be brothers today in grief as we were only yesterday brothers-in-arms at Santiago.”
Men in blue followed Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee and Joe Wheeler to their graves; Joe Johnston and Buckner were Grant’s pall-bearers. Our dead bind us together. The voices of Lee, our Beloved, Davis, our Martyr, Stephens, our Peacemaker, Grady, our Orator, of Hampton, Gordon and all their noble fellowship, have spoken for true Unionism; blending with theirs is the voice of Grant, in his last hours at McGregor, the voice of McKinley in Atlanta, the voice of Abraham Lincoln, as, just before his martyrdom, he stood pityingly amid the ruins of Richmond.
When President McKinley declared that the Confederate as well as the Federal dead should be the Nation’s care, he said the right word to “fire the Southern heart,” albeit our women were not ready to yield to the government their holy office. The name of Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, is a household word in the South because of his tributes to Lee when Virginia thought to place Lee’s statue in Washington. The names of Col. W. H. Knauss, of Columbus, and W. H. Harrison, of Cincinnati, and of others of the North should be, for the pious pains they have taken to honour our dead who rest in Northern soil. In Oakwoods Cemetery, Chicago, stands the first Confederate Monument erected in the North; the Grand Army of the Republic, the Illinois National Guards, the City Troop, the Black Hussars, took part with the Confederate Veterans in its dedication. After Katie Cabell Currie, of Texas, and her aides had consecrated the historic battery given by the Government, the Guards paid tribute by musket and bugle to Americans who died prisoners at Camp Douglas. A sectional bond exists in the National Park Military Commission, on which Confederate Veterans serve with Grand Army men; General S. D. Lee, Commander-in-Chief of the U. C. V., is Chairman of the Vicksburg board of which General Fred Grant is a member. When Judge Wilson on behalf of Bates’ Tennesseeans presented the Confederate Monument at Shiloh to the Commission, General Basil Duke accepted it in the name of the Nation.
When President Roosevelt and Congress sent Dixie’s captured battle-flags home, the Southern heart was fired anew. In all our history no more impressive reception was given to a President than when on his recent visit to Richmond, Mr. Roosevelt was conducted by a guard of Confederate Veterans in gray uniforms to our historic Capitol Square. In other Southern cities he found similar escort. Earlier, when he visited Louisville, a Confederate guard attended him, General Basil W. Duke, who followed Mr. Davis’s fortunes so faithfully, being on conspicuous duty.