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Transcription: [00:14:41]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
...more than anything else. When he was unwell or travelling, Varina worked constantly with, um [[stutters]] his, the President's trusted advisor, Judah Benjamin.

[00:14:52]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Benjamin was first the Secretary of War and then Secretary of State in the new Confederate administration.

[00:15:01]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
He and Varina had a special relationship. She could not talk to anyone about her husband as she could to him.

[00:15:12]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Um, he treated her as, as an equal.

[00:15:17]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
They were very closely associated during the Richmond ordeal by fire. Beginning as a teenage wife,

[00:15:25]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Varina Davis had now partnered in the U.S. House of Representatives; a failed candidacy for, uh Governorship of Mississippi,

[00:15:35]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Um, which he narrowly lost; nursed a wounded war hero, from the war with Mexico; partnered in the U.S. Senate;

[00:15:48]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
the U.S. Secratary of War; and now First Lady of the short-lived Confederate States of America.

[00:15:57]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
She had given birth to six children between 1852 and 1864, by which time she was 38 years old.

[00:16:07]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Only her second child, Margaret Howell Davis, lived longer than she did, survived her.

[00:16:15]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Yet, her regional identity was never firmly fixed. She grew up in the South, was educated in the North and South, had relatives in both regions,

[00:16:25]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
married into the planter class and spent most of the fifteen years before the Civil War in Washington D.C. as a, um, uh wife of a member of Congress.

[00:16:34]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
As First Lady, her broadly American outlook and her education and intelligence gave her inside advantages that no other politicians' wives had.

[00:16:45]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Still, she encountered a lot of pressure to follow the conventional rule of- role of southern lady, not a well-established tradition.

[00:16:56]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Um, just as they do today, people critiqued her appearance and her every move and most often found her wanting.

[00:17:06]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Confederate elites found much to [[stutters]] criticize. They might have overlooked her shortcomings - her appearance, her sense of humor, her unladylike manners -

[00:17:20]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
if she had fully supported the Southern cause.

[00:17:22]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
In the terrible days after the war while Varina was, um, under town arrest in Savannah.

[00:17:31]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
The desperate, she desperately tried to get help from old friends to get Jefferson out of jail.

[00:17:38]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Out of the prison in Fortress Monroe in Virginia where he was incarcerated.

[00:17:44]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Writing to a friend while he remained in prison, she said, "I never report unfit for duty."

[00:17:51]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Duty at that time meant waging a campaign for his, for her husband and herself, she agitated for better care for him while he was in prison.

[00:17:59]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
And she wrote letters to everyone she thought might assist her, demanding an audience with President Andrew Johnson.

[00:18:07]
{SPEAKER name="Margaret Vining"}
Her efforts were instrumental in getting him released.

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-07-22 12:50:48 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-07-22 13:09:51