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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2019
This essay examines the letters and diaries of elite South Carolina women from September 1860 to February 1861, during which the state seceded and eventually helped found the Confederacy. Women used emotional and religious language to express their own political consciousness without transgressing their proper societal roles. Examining their fears and anguish as Abraham Lincoln's election, and then secession, approached, I argue that women astutely anticipated war and violence in ways often more prescient than their male counterparts as they were unfettered by masculine ideals of honor. This emotions history shines necessary light on women during secession, a topic often overlooked by scholars of secession.
1 Brevard Diary, 9 Nov. 1860, in Brevard, Keziah Hopkins, A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard, 1860–1861, ed. Moore, John Hammond (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992) (hereafter Plantation Mistress), 49–50Google Scholar.
2 See Jones-Rogers, Stephanie, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for white women as active participants in the economy of slavery.
3 For the perception of the ideal southern lady in the antebellum south see Barbara Welter's classic essay “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, 18 (Summer, 1966), 150–74Google Scholar. See also Cott, Nancy, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1935, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It was nigh impossible for a woman to meet all these expectations for perfect womanhood; however, many strove to emulate this pious, domestic woman to the best of their ability.
4 Stowe, Steven M., Keep the Days: Reading the Civil War Diaries of Southern Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 For more on the epistolary tradition and women's writings see Gilroy, Amanda and Verhoeven, W. M., eds., Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000)Google Scholar; Favret, Mary, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics, and the Fiction of Letters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For more on female friendship during the period see Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relationships between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs, 1, 1 (Autumn, 1975), 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 For works on the long history of disunion see Freehling, William W., The Road to Disunion, Volume I, Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Finkelman, Paul and Kennon, Donald R., eds., Congress and the Emergence of Sectionalism: From the Missouri Compromise to the Age of Jackson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Varon, Elizabeth, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1759–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For works on 1860 see Detzer, David, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 2001)Google Scholar; Freehling, William, The Road to Disunion, Volume II, Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
7 Channing, Steven, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Norton & Co., 1974)Google Scholar; Woods, Michael E., Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Elizabeth Varon's Disunion! discusses gender, but her study ends in 1859 before secession. For an excellent examination of gender and disunion during Bleeding Kansas see Etcheson, Nicole, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004)Google Scholar.
9 McDonnell, Lawrence T., Performing Disunion: The Coming of the Civil War in Charleston, South Carolina (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 18–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Sally Baxter Hampton to Anna Baxter, 11 Jan. 1861, in A Divided Heart: Letters of Sally Baxter Hampton, 1853–1862, ed. Hampton, Ann Fripp (Columbia, SC: Phantom Press Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar (hereafter A Divided Heart), 97.
11 See Berry, Stephen, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Stowe, Steven, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Greenberg, Kenneth, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Proctor, Nicolas, Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2002)Google Scholar.
12 Foundational works on antebellum southern women include Clinton's, Catherine The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1984)Google Scholar; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar. For works that span the antebellum era and continue into Reconstruction see Bynum, Victoria E., Unruly Women: The Politics of Social & Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Glymph, Thavolia, Out from the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. Neither Bynum nor Glymph dwell much on secession. For works on Civil War women in the South see Faust, Drew Gilpin, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Whites, LeeAnn, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Rable, George C., Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989)Google Scholar; McCurry, Stephanie, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
13 Corbin, Alain, Time, Desire, and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 186Google Scholar.
14 Stowe, Keep the Days, 4–5, 22. Stowe is explicit on the unique nature of women's diaries, writing, “It matters that the diarists are women, not men,” because women had a “talent for sympathy and an affinity for all things moral” (x).
15 Fox-Genovese, 247–48.
16 Rosenwein, Barbara, “Worrying about Emotions History,” American Historical Review, 107, 3 (June 2002), 821–45, 843CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, defines emotional communities as “precisely the same as social communities,” but the researcher must examine what emotional communities “define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”
17 For works on politics and emotions history see Matt, Susan and Stearns, Peter, eds., Doing Emotions History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Reddy, William M., The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eustace, Nicole, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Stearns, Peter N. and Stearns, Carol Z., Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America's History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Rosenwein, Barbara, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Hoggett, Paul and Thompson, Simon, eds., Emotion, Politics and Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar.
18 Nicole Eustace, “Emotions and Political Change,” in Matt and Stearns, 163–83, 175.
19 Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict, 7.
20 Woods's examination of grief, mourning, and Christian resignation after secession is the subject of ibid., chapter 7.
21 Though Brevard was a member of the Presbyterian church in Columbia, she also often mourned the decline of a local Baptist church and helped to pay the pastor's salary. She also gave $20 a year to the Congaree Mission of the Methodist Church just outside Columbia. Brevard herself did not go to church frequently, though the content of her diary is very religious. Plantation Mistress, 12.
22 Stephen Berry notes a surprising lack of attention to the election of 1860 in early fall amongst the southern population as a whole. See Berry, All That Makes a Man, 163.
23 The concept of cross-hatching, also called a crossed letter, is a letter that contains an additional set of writing over the original at a right angle. This was done to avoid using extra pieces of paper, saving money on paper and postal charges. Here, however, it indicates the length of Martha's letter to her sister and the extent to which she contemplated these issues.
24 Martha Roberts Hartscene to Susan L. Burn, 5 Sept. 1860, Burn Family Papers, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, SC (hereafter SCL). Hartscene mistakenly sources this passage to the book of Daniel, rather than David.
25 Leonard, Bill J., Baptists in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 55–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Faust, Mothers of Invention …,180.
27 For more on navigating women's diaries while paying mind to the “trivia” of everyday entries, see Stowe, Keep the Days, 12.
28 Brevard Diary, 12–14 Oct. 1860, 1 Nov. 1860, Plantation Mistress, 38–40, 47.
29 Brevard Diary, 24 Oct. 1860, Plantation Mistress, 43.
30 Ibid.
31 Brevard Diary, 1 Nov. 1860, Plantation Mistress, 24.
32 Brevard Diary, 14, 21 Oct. 1860, Plantation Mistress, 40, 42.
33 Brevard Diary, 2 Nov. 1860, Plantation Mistress, 47.
34 Eleanor Boggs to “Sister,” 22 May 1861, Boggs Family Papers, 1824–1998, SCL.
35 Bacot Diary, 12 Dec. 1860, in A Confederate Nurse: The Diary of Ada Bacot, 1860–1863, ed. Berlin, Jean V. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar (hereafter A Confederate Nurse), 19–20.
36 See Miller, Randall M., Stout, Harry S., and Wilson, Charles Reagan, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Faust, Drew Gilpin, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)Google Scholar.
37 Death was a constant companion for southern women, with most of their young years spent in a constant state of pregnancy. This put a strain on the health of both mother and child, and the infant mortality rate was 18% in 1860. On average, a white woman in 1860 gave birth five times in her life. See Michael Haines, “Fertility and Mortality in the United States,” in Robert Whaples, ed., EH.Net Encyclopedia, 19 March 2008; Jabour, Anya, Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 69Google Scholar.
38 See Miller, Stout, and Wilson; Faust, This Republic of Suffering.
39 Susan Burn to Charles Burn, 29 Nov. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL, original emphasis.
40 Flora Burn to Charles Burn, 9 April 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL.
41 See Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood.”
42 See Jabour, 15, for perceptions of adulthood in elite southern women. Jabour argues that time of life is a more useful distinction for southern women than urban versus rural, planter versus professional class, and Upper versus Lower South.
43 Ibid., 17, 221.
44 “Ella” to Hattie Palmer, 13 Aug. 1860, Palmer Family Papers, 1812–1979, SCL.
45 See, in particular, Drew Gilpin Faust, “‘Without Pilot or Compass’: Elite Women and Religion in the Civil War South,” in Miller, Stout, and Wilson, 255.
46 Philip E. Porcher to Elizabeth Palmer Porcher, 5 Dec. 1856, 10 Dec. 1856, in Towles, Louis B., ed., A World Turned Upside Down: The Palmers of South Santee, 1818–1881 (Columba: University of South Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar (hereafter The Palmers), 204–5.
47 Sarah Dogan to Emma Dogan, 15 April 1860, Arthur, Dogan, and Herndon Family Papers, SCL.
48 Sally Baxter Hampton to the Baxter Family, 10 Dec. 1860; Sally Baxter Hampton to Anna Baxter, 11 Jan. 1861; Sally Baxter Hampton to George Baxter, 22–23 Dec. 1860, A Divided Heart, 72, 98, 83.
49 Faust, Mothers of Invention, 10–11.
50 Berry, All That Makes a Man, 131.
51 Sally Baxter Hampton to the Baxter Family, 10 Dec. 1860, in A Divided Heart, 73.
52 Bacot Diary, 19 Jan 1861, in A Confederate Nurse, 26.
53 Ibid., 12 Dec. 1860, 19.
54 Ibid., 19 Jan. 1861, 25–26.
55 South Carolinians were not the only women to write lengthy political letters and then demur that they had no political opinion in the close of the letter. For another example, as well as support for my argument that expressing political opinions during secession was a break from tradition, see Jabour, Scarlett's Sisters, 221.
56 John Austin Best to Selena Best, 18 Dec. 1860, Best and Hext Papers, SCL.
57 Edward L. Wells to Mrs. Thomas L. Wells, 1 Jan. 1861, Smith and Wells Papers, 1856–1907, SCL.
58 Stowe, Keep the Days, 4, 22.
59 Esther Simons Palmer to Harriet R. Palmer, 7 Feb. 1856, in The Palmers, 197.
60 Caroline Howard Gilman to “Children,” 24 Dec. 1860, Caroline Howard Gilman Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC (hereafter SCHS).
61 See Wells, Jonathan Daniel, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 105–7Google Scholar. Gilman paid close attention to the business and fiscal aspects of her literary career.
62 Sally Baxter Hampton to George Baxter, 23 Dec. 1860, in A Divided Heart, 84, original emphasis.
63 Diary writers contended with a larger audience than themselves, but mostly with a mind to their death, a later publishing date, or posterity. Letter writers experienced a more immediate consideration of publication, as many “eyewitness” letters were published in newspapers during secession and the Civil War. There are some exceptions, however, in which diary excerpts are published in papers. See Stowe, Keep the Days, 22.
64 Sally Baxter Hampton to Samuel B. Ruggles, 5 Jan. 1860, in A Divided Heart, 89.
65 Faust argues that women were more pragmatic about the prospects of war and more willing to express their fears than the men in their life, because male honor prevented them from expressing anything other than romantic excitement for battle. See Faust, Mothers of Invention, 13. See also Berry, All That Makes a Man; Greenberg, Honor and Slavery; Proctor, Bathed in Blood.
66 Sarah Burn to Charles Burn, 12 Nov. 1860, 6 Dec. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL, original emphasis.
67 Berry, 172.
68 Susan Burn to Charles Burn, 24 Nov. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL.
69 Jabour writes that the coming of the Civil War was a time for relaxed courtship rules, and thus a brief moment of sexual freedom, especially for young women. See Jabour, Anya, “‘Days of Lightly-Won and Lightly-Held Hearts’: Courtship and Coquetry in the Southern Confederacy” in Berry, Stephen, ed., Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 95–121Google Scholar.
70 Babe Sims to Hattie Palmer, 10 Dec. 1860, in The Palmers, 277–79.
71 The convention later moved to Charleston fears of smallpox in Columbia, the state capital.
72 Tri-weekly South Carolinian, “To Mr. C. H. Suber, Member from Newberry,” from “The Ladies,” 15 Dec. 1860, SCL.
73 Channing, Crisis of Fear, 285.
74 Susan Burn to Charles Burn, 25 Dec. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL.
75 Hattie Palmer Diary, 11 Jan. 1861, in The Palmers, 285–86.
76 Brevard Diary, 14 Nov. 1860, in Plantation Mistress, 51.
77 Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, 223.
78 Sally Baxter Hampton to Samuel B. Ruggles, 14 Dec. 1860, Sally Baxter Hampton Papers, SCL.
79 Adele P. Allston to Charles Allston, 15 Nov. 1860, Allston Family Papers, SCL.
80 Babe Sims to Hattie Palmer, 10 Dec. 1860, in The Palmers, 277–79.
81 Anna E. Kirkland to Harriet Palmer, 24 Nov. 1860, in The Palmers, 274–76.
82 Brevard Diary, 9 Nov. 1860, in Plantation Mistress, 50.
83 Ibid., 12 Dec. 1860, 19–20.
84 Tri-weekly South Carolinian, 5, 16 Jan. 1861, SCL.
85 See Woods's chapter “Mourning and the Mobilization of Reluctant Secessionists, 1860–1861,” in Woods, Emotional and Sectional Conflict in the Antebellum United States, 217–31.
86 Caroline Howard Gilman to “Children,” 20 Jan. 1861, Caroline Howard Gilman Papers, SCHS.
87 Susan Burn to Charles Burn, 25 Dec. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL, original emphasis.
88 Adele P. Allston to Charles Allston, 16 Jan. 1861, Allston Family Papers, SCL.
89 Brevard Diary, 8, Jan. 1861, in Plantation Mistress, 69–70.
90 Susan Burn to Charles Burn, 6 Dec. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL.
91 Sally Baxter Hampton to Samuel Ruggles, 5 Jan. 1861; Sally Baxter Hampton to Anna Baxter, 11 Jan. 1861, in A Divided Heart, 91, 97.
92 For more on secession and perceptions of time see Berry, All that Makes a Man, 164.
93 Caroline Howard Gilman “To My Dear Children,” Dec. 30, 1860, Caroline Howard Gilman Papers, SCHS.
94 Brevard Diary, 6 Jan. 1861, in Plantation Mistress, 68–69; Mary Hort Diary, Dec. 1860, SCL.
95 Sally Baxter Hampton to Lucy Baxter, 18 Jan. 1861, in A Divided Heart, 100.
96 Bacot Diary, 24 Jan. 1860, in A Confederate Nurse, 26–27.
97 Ibid., 24 Feb. 1860, 27–28.
98 Babe Sims to Hattie Palmer, 6 Feb. 1861, in The Palmers, 289–91.
99 Stowe, Keep the Days, 150.
100 Martha Hartscene to Susan L. Burn, 5 Sept. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL.
101 Babe Sims to Hattie Palmer, 10 Dec. 1860, in The Palmers, 277–79.
102 Ibid., 12 Dec. 1860, 19–20.
103 Berry, All That Makes a Man, 164.
104 Susan Burn to Charles Burn, 25 Dec. 1860, Burn Family Papers, SCL.
105 Caroline Howard Gilman to “My Dear Children,” 30 Dec. 1860, Caroline Howard Gilman Papers, SCHS.
106 Brevard Diary, 8 Nov. 1860, in Plantation Mistress, 49.
107 Hattie Palmer Diary, 4 Jan. 1861, in The Palmers, 283.
108 Brevard Diary, 24 Dec. 1860, in Plantation Mistress, 62–63.
109 Sally Baxter Hampton to George Baxter, 22 Dec. 1860, in A Divided Heart, 79–83.
110 Sally Baxter Hampton to Samuel B. Ruggles, 1 Jan. 1861, in A Divided Heart, 85–88.
111 Bacot Diary, 28, 31 Dec. 1860, in A Confederate Nurse, 21–23.
112 For work on the sentimental novel see Kelley, Mary, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America” Journal of American History, 83, 2 (Sept. 1996), 401–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moss, Elizabeth, Domestic Novelists in the Old South: Defenders of Southern Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Baym, Nina, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.
113 See Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar.
114 Godey's Lady's Book, 61 (Dec. 1860), Irving Rare Books Collection, Columbia, SC.
115 Godey's Lady's Book, 63 (Dec. 1861), Irving Rare Books Collection, Columbia, SC.
116 For more on Godey's nationalism and editor Sarah Hale's own politics see Sommers, Joseph Michael, “Godey's Lady's Book: Sarah Hale and the Construction of Sentimental Nationalism,” College Literature, 37, 3 (Summer 2010), 43–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tonkovich, Nicole, Domesticity with a Difference (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997)Google Scholar.
117 Stowe, Keep the Days, 48.
118 Caroline Howard Gilman to “My Dear child,” 24 April 1861, Caroline Howard Gilman Papers, SCHS.
119 Samuella Palmer to Hattie Palmer, 15 April 1861, in The Palmers, 296.