This chapter examines the literary afterlives of white Confederates' household possessions, especially those damaged during military invasion, or degraded by the impoverishment experienced by elite white southerners in the Civil War’s aftermath. It argues that, alongside emancipation's arrival, the military incursion into southern plantations and wealthy households altered the premises of white possession beyond recall. The damaged objects left behind became more than just traces of enemy invasion to the privileged slaveholding women left to pick up the pieces. As these women revealed in their private journals, their own belongings represented a threat to the forms of selfhood and racial pedigree that had defined their antebellum lives. In exploring how ex-Confederate women, writing during Reconstruction, used fiction to reorganize and display their sullied possessions, this chapter outlines a material history integral to the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth more recognizably reified by monuments to the Lost Cause.

In the 1860’s, Candida manumitted Gabriela and gave her a letter of freedom. Armand nevertheless contested this manumission. He argued that married women were illegally incapable of giving manumission to their slaves without their husband’s consent. Faced with this resistance to her freedom, Gabriela resorted to the courts. She brought two lawsuits against Armand—a civil one and a criminal one, for the crime of reducing a free person to slavery. Gabriela lost both lawsuits. Judges accepted Armand’s argument that a married woman was legally incapable of manumitting a slave without the explicit authorization of her husband, who was the legal administrator of her property. Thus, Brazilian courts nullified Gabriela’s manumission because a married woman had granted her freedom. Gabriela’s judicial struggle was not unique. By analyzing Gabriela’s judicial trajectory, this chapter will address broader questions regarding enslaved women’s access to courts and the role of law in the outcome of judicial claims for freedom in a patriarchal society.