In the postwar years of reconciliation, Davis became friends with Julia Dent Grant, the widow of former general and president Ulysses S. Grant, who had been among the most hated men in the South. She attended a reception where she met Booker T. Washington, head of the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college. In her old age, she published some of her observations and "declared in print that the right side had won the Civil War."[11]