Beyond the Battlefield The Confederacy

of the memory of the war as far as popular literature was concerned needs to be placed in the broader context of a Civil War memorializing process that was not, in itself, overtly masculine, indeed in some senses distinctly feminized but from a Southern perspective.
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The general understanding of white Southern women’s Civil War as a negotiation between the pull of tradition and the forces of change Thomas
Brown observes, was a powerful framework of memory that would adapt readily to a broader vision of modern womanhood It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that the landmark modern study of American women was Anne Firor Scott’s The Southern Lady From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–
1930, which appeared in 1970. Scott’s pathbreaking study of the emergence of the Southern belle from the chrysalis of the antebellum cult of true womanhood into the wider social and political world of the New South,
a process for which the Civil War acted as catalyst, was the opening shot in what has become a veritable salvo of studies of the Southern white woman.
Emphasizing the trauma and upheaval of the war on Southern women’s lives,
but also the resourcefulness with which some of these women faced invasion and the loss of home and husband, Scott introduced the Southern belle to the historiography at a time when women’s history was a relatively new subject. In the decades since, those historians who took up her baton have focused on the Southern woman’s contribution to the Confederate war effort and the postwar cult of the Lost Cause. In studies that explore the Civil
War as a crisis in gender to an exploration of the persistent postwar influence of “Dixie’s daughters historians have located the Southern woman firmly at the heart of Civil War America.
“Defeat and postwar conditions in the South undermined the patriarchy,”
Scott observed, but the full extent to which this was already undermined during the war itself has been the focus of studies by, among others, LeeAnn
Whites, Catherine Clinton, and Drew Gilpin Faust, all of whom have significantly advanced our understanding of the subtle—and more obvious
—shifts in gender relations that the pressures of war produced. The focus of many of these studies has been the planter class, the elite women of the
South who had the most to lose, and lost it, in the course of the Civil War.
The historiography in this case has taken, in part, a source-driven direction,
but is also the result of a determination both to highlight Southern women’s role during the war and to construct something positive out of their experiences in the form of a New Woman narrative that could interpret the conflict as one in which more than the slaves were liberated. In this regard,
the women’s Civil War story, at least in its Confederate construction, has served to reinforce the broader interpretation of the war as America’s very bloody transition to modernity, a theme that Faust has explored in her study of mortality and its meaning during the war. It has also provided a wealth of evidence for the existence of an enduring Confederate/Southern nationalism
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that both aided the South incoming to terms with defeat and entrenched it in a worldview at odds with that of the nation as a whole. In addition, the rather downbeat assessment of women’s activities in regard to any hands-on support for Confederate troops has resulted in far less interest in Southern women’s battlefield experiences—be it as nurses or, more rarely, as combatants than in the gender implications fora society influx between 1861 and, virtually destroyed by 1865, and seeking to reconstruct itself—to a great extent in its antebellum image—in the years following the war.
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This is not to suggest that no Southern woman was to be found near a battlefield. Whites highlights a couple of examples of women warriors,
whose behavior, perhaps more so the esteem in which it was held, suggested an apparent breakdown of gender conventions altogether but these isolated cases hardly started a trend. No more did the dramatic exploits of
Confederate female spies, such as Belle Boyd, whose ability, as Faust describes it,“to live in two genders and two worlds of gender relations simultaneously”
hardly represented the norm for Southern women. Loreta Velazquez, the
Cuban woman who straddled the gender divide as both female spy and male soldier, Harry T. Buford, fascinates those searching for challenges to conventional norms. Her story, in all its ambiguities, may reveal an individual capable of transcending both gender and race, and the identities predicated on these apparent fixtures, but she remains as elusive a figure to historians as she must have been to her contemporaries. Whether fabricated or real, the figure of Velazquez points toward the existence of alternatives, even in an environment as apparently traditional as the nineteenth-century South. In the traditional role of nurses, Southern women’s experience was mixed. On the one hand, they fared rather better than their Northern sisters by achieving official recognition with the 1862 Hospital Bill, an important statement,”
Faust observes, of Confederate policy concerning the relationship of the state to its female citizens on the other, the apparent unwillingness of
Southern women to volunteer in the numbers required—which in many ways paralleled the problems Robert E. Lee encountered with military recruitment—was a source of frustration to dedicated nurses such as Kate
Cumming, who perceived such reluctance as a major factor in Confederate defeat. Historians have concurred with Cumming. Rable, for one, has shown that disillusion set in as the war progressed. Increasingly, Southern women wrote to request the return of their husbands or sons from the army, mostly on the grounds of economic need, frequently because the soldier in question was underage. He recounts the story about the dead letter bag in a post office in Richmond, in which almost all the letters from wives to their soldier husbands advised desertion. Although this story is doubtless anecdotal, Rable reminds us that women had contributed to the decline of Confederate military power and that from the outset they had both sustained and undermined the war effort.”
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Faust took up Rable’s argument when she suggested, perhaps provocatively, that it may well have been because of its women that the South lost the Civil War To paraphrase George Pickett’s explanation for his famous charge’s failure at Gettysburg, the Union army had a lot more to do with the
Confederacy’s defeat than did its women. Yet Faust is making an important,
if somewhat overstated, point. In the process of persuading Confederate women to support the war effort, southerners constructed a discourse about women’s place in Confederate society which emphasized women’s patriotism but, more significantly, glorified its sacrificial aspects. Recent scholarship suggests that the notion of sacrifice produced renewed enthusiasm for the cause rather than defeatism. Jackie Campbell, for example, has explored the reaction of Confederate women to Sherman’s march through the Carolinas. She shows how, so far from undermining their support for the war, direct contact with the enemy merely stiffened their resolve. As
Union troops invaded their territory, ransacked their homes, and threatened their families, Southern women became evermore vituperative towards them and increasingly supportive of the Confederacy. In many cases, Campbell shows, the hard hand of war served as a prop to patriotism unlike Rable and Faust, she maintains that Southern women grew more, not less, resolute as the conflict progressed. The link between patriotism and sacrifice,
however, although viewed from a different angle, remains. The Confederate woman, indeed, was expected not merely to make personal sacrifices for the war effort but also to celebrate and sanctify the martyrdom of others.”
Mourning in the Confederacy was not just an individual reaction to loss but
“a significant social, cultural, and spiritual duty Women’s grief, in essence,
sanctified the Confederate cause, and established the centrality of women’s role in Confederate national identity. This narrative’s deference to women’s importance Faust argues, fitted neatly with an emergent twentieth-century feminist historiography eager to explore women’s contributions to past events previously portrayed from an exclusively male point of view This women-centered narrative is, she stresses, as much a fabrication as its exclusively male-focused variant, and one that we need to dispel in order to better understand Confederate women’s experiences.
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Yet, if anything, the woman-centered narrative is becoming more firmly entrenched in the historiography of the Civil War generally, and specifically in studies that explore the Lost Cause. Through its rise, the reconfiguration of the South’s antebellum gender norms can most clearly be traced. Fora slaveholding woman Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observed, the self came wrapped in gender, and gender wrapped in class and race but such a self could not be sustained in the face of war. In ladyhood southern women accepted gender subordination in exchange for continuing class and racial superiority Faust explains, but their understandings of that bargain . . changed profoundly in the course of the war At its most basic level, the
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antebellum gender barrier was breached by the absence of men, more fundamentally by the realities of life in their absence, and fell altogether with the emancipation of the slaves, on whose labor, on whose very existence, the notion of the Southern lady had been predicated. Scott, Clinton, Whites, and
Faust, in particular, have traced this process as it developed in relation to slave management, to violence, to the rise of female organizations, and especially in the context of burying and commemorating the Confederate dead. Initially, Southern women were faced with stark reminders of all they could not do under the gender conventions of their day the importance of violence in the antebellum South, and then the organized violence of the war itself, not only excluded women but undermined their effectiveness in controlling a slave population long held in check only by the threat of violence. Initial support for the war effort, which stretched as far, according to Laura Edwards, as encouraging militarism in children was couched within antebellum gender conventions, and understood as such by both men and women. Whites has explained how patriotism took on a peculiarly domestic cast for Confederate women, in that it was a continuation, and an extension of, their normal household tasks. The Southern soldier, she argues, had to recognize, if only unconsciously, the extent to which his manhood and independence was relational—a social construction built upon the foundation of women’s service and love, out of the fabric of his women’s dependence Yet, as the war went on, as sacrifice for the family became sacrifice of the family, Southern women were forced toward new understandings of themselves and toward reconstructions of the meanings of Southern womanhood that would last well beyond the Confederacy’s demise.”
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It was in the postwar world that this reconstruction had its most visible and lasting impact. Whites’s analysis of the Confederate commemorative tradition reveals how it was the very exclusion of Southern women from the male world that enabled them to construct an alternative arena for the reconstruction of self-worth in the face of the very real public defeat they had suffered Although a public manifestation of the fraternal bond,”
Whites shows that the Confederate memorial tradition actually empowered a particularly female experience of the white familial bond . . . the act of mothering the dead, she reveals, emerged . . . as the basis upon which a viable post-Confederate tradition could be built Whites’s interpretation of the gendered nature of the commemorative impulse has influenced a range of studies, from Karen Cox’s study of the ways in which the United
Daughters of the Confederacy positioned themselves as the keepers of the flame of Confederate culture, through William Blair’s trenchant analysis of the memorial tradition, to Scott Poole’s exploration of the persistence of a conservative ideology in postwar South Carolina. The growth of the
Ladies’ Memorial Association in South Carolina according to Poole,“reveals
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the ways that women shaped the aesthetic of defeat while showing how class and gender conjoined in the celebration of the Lost Cause Unwilling to acknowledge openly that the war had transformed Southern gender relations, southerners “divinized women able to approximate the antebellum ideal. The women of South Carolina who, sequestered by wealth, could still represent the ideal of the Old South naturally became the keepers of its hearth fires but, more significantly, played a central role in Southern conservatism’s challenge to modernity In some senses, then, the historiography reveals that Southern women did represent the weeping widow”
paradigm, but in their sorrow they shed no tears of penitence as Poole has astutely observed, but rather inaugurated a process of, in Blair’s pithy phrase,
“guerrilla warfare through mourning Their cause may have been lost,
but the Southern elite white woman had certainly ensured that neither it,
nor she, would be forgotten by history.
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