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The Grieving Process of Confederate Widows

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The Grieving Process of Confederate Widows View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository A PAST STILL LIVING: THE GRIEVING PROCESS OF CONFEDERATE WIDOWS Ashley Michelle Mays A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Joseph T. Glatthaar W. Fitzhugh Brundage William L. Barney Donald G. Mathews Molly Worthen ©2014 Ashley Michelle Mays ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Ashley Michelle Mays: A Past Still Living: The Grieving Process of Confederate Widows (Under the direction of Joseph T. Glatthaar) The American Civil War destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and tore asunder the fabric of northern and southern society. In order to understand the long-term consequences of this war, this dissertation examines the way in which death transformed the lives of one group of survivors, Confederate widows. These widows faced staggering emotional consequences because they not only lost a partner and a companion but also a sense of stability in their lives. As widows shouldered the responsibility for their families' survival, a rush of conflicting emotions threatened to overwhelm them. This emotional turmoil encouraged widows to cling to their identities as wives while their social position as widows determined the avenues available to them in the postwar period. No matter how widows felt, Southern communities' cultural prescriptions for grieving shaped the way in which widows expressed their grief. Through letters and ceremonies friends, family, and even strangers comforted widows by demonstrating that their husband had died a good death. In the process, communities encouraged widows to curtail their grief in public. Widows outwardly conformed while relying on a reciprocal relationship with friends and family for companionship and for financial support, a tenuous safety net. Nevertheless, widows often found themselves unable to extinguish their often-conflicting feelings about their loss. As a result, a tension arose between Confederate widows and their communities over the appropriate way to express grief. iii Ultimately, this dissertation argues that widows and their communities engaged in a dialectical conversation over the expression of emotion that would shape the postwar South. Because widows could not express their grief publicly, they wrestled with their complex feelings about loss privately in an introspective cycle that isolated widows from their friends, family, and even their religious beliefs. Since widows' memories of the war proved to be inseparable from their grief, widows recorded their memories privately by writing memoirs and by preserving their husbands' possessions, rather than participating heavily in Confederate memorialization. As a result, the collected memory of the Civil War in the postwar South did not include widows' unique interpretations of wartime loss and thereby sterilized the memory of the war. iv To my family v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project has benefitted from more helping hands and minds than I can name. I would particularly like to thank my advisor, Dr. Joseph T. Glatthaar, for his untiring support for my education and for this project. His advice and suggestions have helped me to become a better writer than I thought I could be. I would also like to thank my other committee members, Dr. W Fitzhugh Brundage, Dr. William Barney, Dr. Donald G. Mathews, and Dr. Molly Worthen. It has been an honor to work with each of them. Many of the ideas for this project arose out of conversations with my committee members and with my colleagues in the History Department at UNC. I am also grateful to the amazing staff in the History Department, who always seem to know the answer to any question. Any argument is only as good as the evidence that supports it, so I owe a great debt to the people and the institutions that have made my research possible. Fellowships available through the UNC History Department, including the George B. Tindall Fellowship, the Mowry Dissertation Fellowship, and the Raymond Faherty Research Grant for Military History, together allowed me to expand the scope of my research beyond North Carolina to consider Confederate widowhood across the South. I am also grateful to the staff at those archives who have not only kept these valuable records safe but also helped guide me to useful collections. I would like to especially thank the staff at the Southern Historical Collection, who patiently dealt with my many questions as I first began to research and who introduced me to the collection that really began this entire project. Also, I owe a great deal of gratitude to the Virginia Historical Society. Thanks to the Frances Lewis Fellowship in vi Gender and Women's Studies, I was able to research in their rich collections and gain access to numerous collections, without which this dissertation would be much poorer. Words cannot express how much I have appreciated my family's support. My parents inspired my love of learning at a young age and have made every effort to help me reach my educational goals. Any success that I have began with their guidance and their example. Since my wife and I moved to North Carolina, we have been grateful for my entire extended family who have been incredibly supportive as well and helped us feel truly at home. My wife actually deserves a good deal of the credit for the final product, though none of the blame. Not only was she willing to marry a graduate student studying widowhood, she has also read and improved every page of this dissertation. My ideas always became clearer through our conversations. Finally, I would be remiss without thanking my daily writing partner, my dog Onyx. I have found it much easier to write about grief with her sitting next to me. Ultimately, the stories that unfold in the following pages are not my stories—they belong to the widows who originally lived them, felt them, and recorded them. I have tried to narrate their words faithfully in order to understand the historical significance of their experiences. I hope that the reader will learn as much from them as I have. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS..............................................................................................x INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 Historiography .........................................................................................................3 Organization and Method ......................................................................................19 CHAPTER 1: LOSS ..........................................................................................................24 Separation ..............................................................................................................27 Bridging the Distance ............................................................................................36 Bonds of Marriage .................................................................................................50 Conclusion .............................................................................................................64 CHAPTER 2: DEATH RITUALS.....................................................................................66 Notification ............................................................................................................70 Mourning ...............................................................................................................77 The Funeral ............................................................................................................81 Conclusion .............................................................................................................94 CHAPTER 3: CONDOLENCE LETTERS.......................................................................96 Traditional Condolence Letters .............................................................................99 The Rise of Death Letters ....................................................................................114 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................128 CHAPTER 4: GRIEF.......................................................................................................130 Redemptive Grief.................................................................................................133 viii Compounding Grief .............................................................................................137 Bridging Over Grief.............................................................................................146 Mental Health ......................................................................................................154 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................164 CHAPTER 5: LIVING ....................................................................................................166 Availability ..........................................................................................................169 Networking ..........................................................................................................175 Housing................................................................................................................179
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