Widow Sarah Dorsey invited former Confederate President Jefferson Davis to stay at Beauvoir, her 608-acre cotton plantation in Biloxi, Mississippi. She provided a cottage for Davis to live in with his wife, Varina, and their daughter, Winnie.

Sarah, a novelist and author of biography of Louisiana Governor Henry Watkins Allen, aided Davis in writing his memoir. She organized notes and took dictation. Davis’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in 1881, two years after Sarah died.

Sarah willed her plantation to Davis and his daughter, Winnie.

The Davis family moved into the main house after the inheritance, where Davis lived until his dead in 1889. Varina wrote Jefferson Davis: A Memoir (1890) and then moved to New York City with her daughter in 1891.

After Winnie died in 1898, Varina owned Beauvoir. She sold a large portion to the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It was to be a home for Confederate veterans and widows and then as a memorial to Davis.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans built a hospital, 12 barracks, and a chapel. About 2,500 veterans and their families lived there from 1903 to 1957.

Today this site is a Confederate Soldier Museum. Visitors will also see the former Confederate Veterans’ Home, cottage plantation home, the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library and Museum, historic Confederate cemetery with a Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

“Beauvoir (Biloxi, Mississippi,)” Wikipedia, 2017/07/04

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauvoir_(Biloxi,_Mississippi).