Jim Limber’s 1864 Christmas
2 January 2010
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I hope you have been surrounded by loved ones and enjoyed your most memorable Christmas ever. As I was pondering the ingredients that make Christmases memorable, I decided to share this heartwarming story of Jim Limber’s 1864 Christmas in the Confederate White House. For the orphaned six-year old mulatto boy adopted by President and Mrs. Jefferson Davis, it must surely have been the most memorable Christmas in his young life.
On the morning of February 15, 1864, Mrs. Varina Davis, wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, had concluded her errands and was driving her carriage down the streets of Richmond on her way home. She heard screams from a distance and quickly went to the scene to see what was happening.
Mrs. Davis saw a young mulatto child being abused by an older black man. She learned the child’s free black mother was dead. Outraged, she immediately put an end to the beating and shocked the man by forcibly taking the child away. She took the child to her carriage and with her to the Confederate White House.
Arriving home Mrs. Davis and maid ‘Ellen’ gave the young boy a bath, attended to his cuts and bruises and fed him. The only thing he would tell them is that his name was Jim Limber. He was happy to be rescued and was given some clothes of the Davis’ son, Joe, who was the same size and age.
The Davis family was visited the following evening by a friend of Varina’s, noted Southern Diarist–Mary Boykin Chesnut–who saw Jim Limber and wrote, “He was eager to show me his cuts and bruises, he was dressed in Joe’s clothes and happy as a lord.”
Jefferson Davis filed the boy’s free papers and he became a beloved playmate for their children and a member of the family. He was an accepted member of the children’s “Hill Gang” and enjoyed the same privileges as the Davis children.
Although the fate of the Confederacy looked bleak, Christmas 1864 was memorable for the Davis family and probably the best Christmas Jim Limber would ever have. For once he was surrounded by a family who cared for him. A Christmas tree was set up in Saint Paul’s Church, decorated, and gifts placed beneath it for orphan children.
A year later, nine-year-old Margaret Davis wrote to her younger brother, Jeff, who was spending time with the army, relaying that “Jim Limber sends his love to you.”
When Varina and her children fled southward from Richmond in April 1865, Varina included Jim Limber in her reports to her husband about the family. On April 19, 1865: “The children are well and very happy; they play all day…Billy & Jim fast friends as ever…”
Varina and the children were by the side of Jefferson Davis at his capture near Irwinville, Georgia, and again the family was separated. Jefferson Davis was taken to Virginia to spend two years in prison.
Varina and her children were taken to Macon, Georgia and later to Port Royal outside of Savannah.
At Port Royal, their Union escort, Captain Charles T. Hudson, made good at his earlier threats to take Jim Limber away from the Davis family. Rather than give him over to a Federal officer she judged untrustworthy, Varina placed him in the care of an old army friend, Gen. Rufus Saxton, who was at Hilton Head.
She later wrote, “A note was written to General Saxton and the poor little boy was given to the officers of the tugboat for the General, who kindly took charge of him. Believing that he was going on board to see something and return, Jim quietly went, but as soon as he found he was going to leave us he fought like a little tiger and was thus engaged the last we saw of him.” This emotional, painful scene was Varina’s last glimpse of Jim.
However, Elizabeth Hyde Botume, a Boston woman who came south to teach the freedmen on the South Carolina sea islands, became acquainted with Jim Limber. She wrote, “President Davis was to him the one great man in the world. Mrs. Davis had given him the kindly care of a mother, and he had for her the loving devotion of a child.”*
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