Domesticating Jefferson Davis

Abstract

Days after his release from prison in 1867, Jefferson Davis arrived in Montreal with his wife, Varina, to join their children and extended family. Soon after, the Davis clan presented themselves to William Notman, Canada’s foremost photographer. The resulting portraits deftly reframed the failed leader as a dedicated family man and sought sympathy and kinship through his children. This article examines the production and circulation of Notman’s images of the Davis family to flesh out the visual history of the Lost Cause. I argue that the project of historical revisionism began much sooner than commonly assumed and relied on the most innocuous of forms, family photographs. The portraits encapsulate a vision of the family that Varina had been actively cultivating and point toward the role of women in leveraging the political power of family photography. From a contemporary perspective, these portraits also disrupt Canada’s progressive self-presentation in the context of U.S. slavery and direct attention to the continental imprint of White supremacy.