Varina had little choice in the matter. Theirs was a marriage rife with subterranean tension. Davis was a creature of the planter aristocracy, patriarchal in the extreme, a trait made even more pronounced by the nearly two-decade difference in their ages. They had married in 1845, when she was eighteen years old and he thirty-seven. She caught a glimpse of this aspect of him during their courtship. “He impresses me as a remarkable kind of man,” she told her mother, “but of uncertain temper, and has a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which
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