Untitled MS, , N.D., Rebecca Latimer Felton Papers, UGA
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
BLOOD AND IRONY Blood Irony Southern White Women’s &Narratives of the Civil War, – The University of North Carolina Press . © The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Designed by Kristina Kachele Set in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gardner, Sarah E. Blood and irony: Southern white women’s narratives of the Civil War, – / Sarah E. Gardner. p. cm. Based on the author’s doctoral thesis, Emory University. Includes bibliographical references and index. --- (cloth: alk. paper) . Confederate States of America—Historiography. United States—History—Civil War, –— Historiography. Southern States—Intellectual life—– . Group identity—Southern States— History. United States—History—Civil War, –—Personal narratives, Confederate. United States—History—Civil War, –— Literature and the war. American literature— Women authors—History and criticism. Women and literature—Southern States—History. Southern States—In literature. Group identity in literature. I. Title. . .''—dc Contents Acknowledgments, ix . Everywoman Her Own Historian, . Pen and Ink Warriors, –, . Countrywomen in Captivity, –, . A View from the Mountain, –, . The Imperative of Historical Inquiry, –, . Righting the Wrongs of History, –, . Moderns Confront the Civil War, –, . Everything That Rises Must Converge, Notes, Bibliography, Index, Illustrations Loula Kendall Rogers, , Loula Kendall Rogers, ‘‘A Fifteenth Amendment Taking His Crops to Market,’’ ‘‘Glendaire,’’ ‘‘The Negro Quarters at Glendaire,’’ ‘‘‘Allow me,’ said Captain Thomas,’’ Mary Noailles Murfree, ‘‘In a massive Elizabethan chair...,’’ General James and Helen Dortch Longstreet, , Ellen Glasgow, ‘‘There was a niche in a small alcove,’’ ‘‘Betty,’’ ‘‘[Christopher] stood, bareheaded,’’ Mary Johnston, ‘‘The Lovers,’’ ‘‘Stonewall Jackson,’’ ‘‘The Bloody Angle,’’ Helen Dortch Longstreet, , Acknowledgments This project began as a doctoral dissertation at Emory University under the di- rection of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. It benefited immeasurably from her attentive reading, keen historical sense, and many helpful suggestions. Betsey continues to be an important mentor and friend; I cannot possibly thank her enough for all that she has done for me over the years. I also thank Patrick Allitt, Dan Carter, Eugene D. Genovese, Jack Kirby, Michael O’Brien, and James Roark, all of whom read all or portions of this work and offered insightful criticism. Many archivists and librarians have provided me with much-needed assis- tance. I would like to single out the staffs at the Atlanta History Center, Duke University, Emory University, the Southern Historical Collection, and the Uni- versity of Virginia for their help along the way. I am particularly indebted to David Moltke-Hansen, who listened to me drone on about his project during my stays in Chapel Hill. Ginger Cain, Barbara Mann, Linda Matthews, Naomi Nelson, and Kathy Shoemaker proved important allies while I worked in Emory University’s Special Collections and offered me steady employment during those lean graduate school years. I am grateful to the American Historical Association, the Manuscript Society, and Duke University for partially funding my research. Many friends and family members offered me invaluable moral support. Susan Anderson and Mark Ledden were always ready to suggest diversionary tactics to draw me out of the library. Jeff Young made sure that I returned to my work. Vate Powell provided places for me to stay during my research trips to Boston, Charlottesville, and New York. More important, he has seen me through rough times, and for that I am forever grateful. Margaret Storey and Jonathan Heller ix both gracefully withstood my slovenly tendencies and my long-suffering devo- tion to the Cleveland Indians. Their culinary skills, witty breakfast table banter, and continued friendship have served me well. Houston Roberson has proven a great friend and the best road-trip companion a scholar could want. Mary Ann Drake provided me with sage advice on making the transition from graduate student to faculty member and colleague. I thank her for her constant support over the years. I thank my friends at Manuel’s Tavern for always leaving a space for me at the table on Sunday nights. I especially thank Anastasia Christman and her parents, Michael and Joann Jackson, for always being there for me and guid- ing my way. Finally, I thank my parents, Ann L. Gardner and the late Donald C. Gardner, who have placed a great deal of faith in my abilities to do good work. My colleagues in the history department at Mercer University surely deserve some kind of award for refraining from pestering me about the inordinately long time it has taken me to finish this project. Many of my former students failed to show similar restraint and shamelessly questioned whether I would finish this book in their lifetimes. Tothem all I am grateful—for obviously different reasons. I have received a great deal of assistance from the staff at the University of North Carolina Press. Ellen D. Goldlust-Gingrich copyedited my manuscript with great care. I would especially like to thank Pam Upton, who helped me finalize my manuscript, and David Perry, who stuck with this project. My greatest debt surely belongs to Todd Leopold, who has lived with this project almost as long as I have. Although I have not always followed his sug- gestions for ‘‘improving’’ my manuscript, I have benefited from his counsel and his companionship more than he realizes. x i Introduction Everywoman Her Own Historian ‘‘HewasthecavalrygeneralJebStuart....Idanced a valse with him in Baltimore in ’,’’ and her voice wasproudandstillasbannersinthedust. — , Flags in the Dust The speaker was Virginia Du Pre, the eighty-year-old woman who fondly re- members General Jeb Stuart in William Faulkner’s novel, Flags in the Dust. Her interest in the story of the dashing Confederate officer is deeply personal, for it tells not only of Stuart’s bravery in the face of fifteen thousand Yankees but also of her brother Bayard Sartoris’s ‘‘brief career’’ as a cavalryman in the Con- federate Army. Aunt Jenny had first told her story in , and she had subse- quently told it many more times—‘‘on occasions usually inopportune.’’ Indeed, as Aunt Jenny grew older, ‘‘the tale itself grew richer and richer, taking on a mel- low splendor like wine; until what had been a hair-brained prank of two heedless and reckless boys wild with their open youth, was become a gallant and finely tragical focal point to which the history of the race had been raised from out the old miasmic swamps of spiritual sloth by two angels valiantly and glamorously fallen and strayed, altering the course of human events and purging the souls of men.’’ Faulkner correctly understood the importance of stories to southern culture. More important, he understood the crucial role women played as dis- seminators of southern stories of the Civil War. ‘‘Years ago we in the South made our women into ladies,’’ he explained elsewhere. ‘‘Then the War came and made the ladies into ghosts. So what else can we do, being gentlemen, but listen to them being ghosts.’’1 Indeed, Faulkner knew that Aunt Jenny’s version of the story of Jeb Stuart, Bayard Sartoris, and the ‘‘anchovies’’ remained uniquely her own. Although evocative, Aunt Jenny’s tale remains eclipsed by a more familiar tale of the Civil War. Nine years after Aunt Jenny told her story in Flags in the Dust, Margaret Mitchell, following in the long line of southern white women who penned narratives of the Civil War, introduced Scarlett O’Hara to American audiences in her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Gone with the Wind. That Scarlett so ably and so fully captured the imagination of the national reading public was no minor literary coup for the numerous southern white women who had been telling their tales of the war as early as the Federal reinforcement of Fort Sumter in . What had started out as an attempt to tell a distinctly southern story of the war had evolved, by Scarlett’s incarnation, into a remarkably suc- cessful effort to tell the national story of the war. Indeed, the southern story had become the national story, with Scarlett O’Hara displacing Henry Fleming, John Carrington, Basil Ransom, and even Aunt Jenny as the character whose stories the nation was reading.2 This book explores the emergence of a discourse that permitted Mitchell’s story to attain cultural hegemony by chronicling the efforts of countless southern white women who actively competed for the historical memory of the Civil War during the first seven decades following Appomattox. The narratives of these diarists, novelists, historians, and clubwomen built the stage on which Scarlett would be the star. Midway through the Civil War, a Virginia woman nervously awaited news about the besieged city of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Knowing that other women through- out the South shared her anxiety, Judith McGuire readily assumed that they, like she, sought comfort from wartime tensions by recording their experiences. More to the point, she predicted that ‘‘almost every woman of the South...willhave her tale to tell when this ‘cruel war is over.’’’ Knowing also that the tide had begun to turn against the South, she bemoaned that these war narratives would stand as the sole remnant of the Confederate civilization that surrounded her. McGuire did not doubt southern women’s ability or authority to chronicle the Civil War, but she regretted the reduction of vibrant experiences to mere narrative: ‘‘The i life of too many will be, alas! as a ‘tale that is told’; its interest, its charm, even its hope, as far as this world is concerned, having passed away.’’ Virginia’s Cornelia Peake McDonald echoed McGuire’s concern.