I can't find anything online about what the contemporaries of Varina Davis thought of her appearance, but this is what she looked like in a photograph with her husband Jefferson Davis: http://i.imgur.com/2yuRpBN.jpg
Based on her appearance I'm just speculating she was partly black, which is interesting considering her position in a movement that was trying to defend the enslavement of blacks. What do you guys think about this topic?
Nobody can prove so, so there is really no way of answering this without extensive conjecture and theory.
Her father was the son of the New Jersey Governor, her mother was the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner.
Her grandmother was a Scottish-Irish descendent immediately from her own parents.
The only opportunity for this to be true is if her parents knew she was the daughter of one of their slaves as the result of an affair/slave rape and kept it secret. It is possible, but really not likely.
Her portraits reflect a very pale olive skin. Her nose actually reflects a bit of Scottish ancestry, with the flared nostrils. Welsh lips can often appear that shape.
But, Confederate citizens and soldiers are known to have gossiped about her appearance, one saying she was "very very dark skinned", yet all photographs and portraits reflect a pale white skin.
All of this is conjecture by various amateur researchers . Nobody actually knows which leaves this as a truly unanswerable question.
Officially, there is no reason to believe she was anything other than white unless she was an illegitimate child.
Varina Davis was very much white.
Her family had moved to Mississippi from New Jersey where her paternal grandfather had been governor, and he mothers family had moved from planter country in Virginia.
They came from Scots and Scots-Irish stock.
