“If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: ‘Died of a Theory.’” 

—Jefferson Davis 

The Hugh Moss Comer House 

In his day, Hugh Moss Comer (1842-1900) was an extremely active businessman in Savannah. He was a cotton merchant, owned a fertilizer company, as well as a construction firm. He also served as the President for both the Central of Georgia Railroad and the Savannah Cotton Exchange. A busy man. 

His elegant home built in 1880 and located in Savannah’s Historic District on the corners of Bull and Taylor streets, is best known for an 1886 visit by Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederate States of America. 

The noteworthy visit by Davis was occasioned on the Centennial Celebration of the Chatham Artillery, which was one of the oldest and most distinguished military units in the United States. 

It was reported that thousands of former Confederate officers, soldiers, and their family members attended the celebrated event. 

Perhaps the more interesting visitor on this occasion, who accompanied Jefferson Davis to Savannah, was his youngest daughter, Varina Anne Davis, known to her close friends and family as “Winnie.” 

Winnie Davis was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1864, near the end of the Civil War. She was the sixth child born to the only First Lady to serve the Confederacy: Varina Banks Davis. Not long after Winnie’s birth, Jefferson Davis and his family were on the run after the fall of Richmond and the ultimate defeat and surrender by General Robert E. Lee to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. 

The dramatic capture of Jefferson Davis soon followed, and he would unceremoniously go on to serve two years imprisonment following the Civil War. During his time of incarceration, Winnie was the only one of his children allowed to visit their father at the prison. 

To be precise, according to an article entitled The Daughter of the Confederacy: Her Life, Character, and Writings written in 1899 by University of Mississippi Professor Chiles Clifton Ferrel, Winnie was the only child Davis wished to have visit him in prison because she was too young to remember the experience. 

What Winnie was doing in Savannah, while traveling with her father, was playing her distinguished part in the furtherance of the ‘new narrative’ about the ‘old Southern effort’ in the American Civil War — that being: the promotion of a theory that became known as the ‘Lost Cause’ of the Confederacy. 

Specifically, by the late 1880s, Winnie Davis became well known and beloved across the South as the ‘Daughter of the Confederacy.’ Her story is interestingly told in Heath Hardage Lee’s excellent biography Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause. Winnie’s life story is quite a thoughtful read. 

The ‘Lost Cause’ movement was led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, among other civic and political groups, dedicated to portraying the Confederacy’s cause as noble and heroic. It inspired the construction of many Memorials throughout the South dedicated to honor Confederate soldiers, to include The Confederate War Memorial in Forsyth Park, which I painted in Postcards from Savannah #4. 

Savannah was a city of the Old South and was long presided over by people in keeping with that era.