Michelle Obama is not the first African American First Lady. |
The Ethnic Origins of Confederate First Lady Varina Howell Davis, Wife of Jefferson DavisWhenever 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 mixed origin myself, my first thought was: "That woman is a quadroon!" 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 a later age, I was even more convinced that the lady has Black African (if not American Indian) origin. So who was Varina Howell Davis? Mrs. Davis is on the far right, holding the infant. Jefferson Davis, Jr. He looks more like Mrs. Davis than his father. NOTE: The Civil War was instigated because of the invention of the cotton gin by a cotton slave. Slavery was becoming illegal because of the Haitian revolution and the 1807 slave act of the British Monarchy. Slavery is wrong and many people at the time organized a movement to get rid of it...mostly white people, but rich plantation owners did not want it to end. This is why Nat Turner was a blessing for the wealthy plantation owner, it legalized slavery until 1865. The average broke and extremely poor white American did not have plantations. Who do you think benefited from both sides of the war? Rise Of The Black Messiah | Pawns and Rebels - By Dawid Yacob Maccabeus |