Construction of Ethnicity in the Civil War

CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNICITY IN THE CIVIL WAR DIARIES OF SOUTHERN WOMEN By DANA WILLIAMS McMICHAEL Bachelor of Arts Oklahoma Christian University Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 1983 Master of Arts Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, North Carolina 1986 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August, 2002 -.-;I nesis r;.-ooz.p 0 \\01L CONSTRUCTION OF ETHNICITY IN THE CIVIL WAR DIARIES OF SOUTHERN WOMEN Dissertation approved: De~ Graduate College 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation director, William Decker, for his careful reading, insightful suggestions, and steady encouragement My heartfelt gratitude goes to my husband, B. J. McMichael, for his constant help and reassuring presence, and to our sons, David and Jonathan, for their patience. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I INTRODUCTION: · "I WOULD DIE WITHOUT SOME MEANS OF EXPRESSING MY FEELINGS" ....................................... 1 II "FREE, WHITE, AND TWENTY-ONE": REPRESENTATIONS OF SELFAND SLAVE IN THE DIARIES OF CONFEDERATE WOMEN ................ 27 Textual Encoding of Ethnic Attitudes ........................ 29 Changing Attitudes .............................................. 5 5 Attitudes Toward Slavery in Mary Chesnut's Civil War Diary ........................................ 62 Conclusion ....................................................... 73 III "I CAN WRITE AND THINK MYSELF INTO A FEVER ABOUT MY BROTHER": THE CONVERGENCE OF NATIONALISM AND GENDER ......... 82 Interaction Between Writing and Ethnic Formation ....... 87 Southern Ethnicity in the Diary of Ellen Renshaw House. 115 Conclusion .........................................· ............. 134 IV "I SHALL HAVE TO READ TO BE COMFORTED": INTERTEXTUAL INFLUENCES ON PERCEPTIONS OF ETHNICITY ........................................................ 147 Religious Influences .......................................... '.152 Journalistic Influences ........................................ 184 Literary Influences. 210 Conclusion... .. 226 V "AS A DISCOURAGER OF SELF-CONCEIT THERE IS NOTHING LIKE AN OLD DIARY": EDITORIAL INTERVENTION IN CONFEDERATE WOMEN'S DIARIES ........................... 248 IV Chapter Page An Editor's Influence ......................................... 249 The Author as Editor .......................................... 257 The Diary of Emma LeConte: A Case Study ............. 266 Conclusion ...................................................... 278 VI CONCLUSION: "RIVERS DEEP & STRONG HAS BEEN SHED & WHERE ARE WE NOW?" ........................................ 286 REFERENCES .....................................................................................292 V CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION "I Would Die Without Some Means of Expressing My Feelings" I initially approached this study through my interest in abolitionist literature, particularly the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. Their texts presented me with an old enigma: How could any right-thinking person believe slavery justifiable? Because the institution of slavery is so obviously evil from a late twentieth century perspective, the challenge seemed to rest in recreating the slaveholder's hermeneutic circle. How did the slaveholder position himself or herself in relationship to the slave? Out of what historical, religious, and social milieu did the slaveholder construct meaning? What factors would effectively create a fissure in a thought-system which endorsed slavery? The Civil War diaries of Confederate women allow me to address many ofmy concerns. They represent a coherent geme, written by a group affiliated by race, time period, region, politics, social class, religion, and gender. The majority of the diarists write with the express purpose of recording the events and impact of the war on their personal fortunes, and so they pen the stories of their days with an eye toward history and a clear sense of future readers, characteristics which have endeared their texts to historians seeking to reconstruct the Civil War world. 1 Unlike the aloof, fragile blossoms of antebellum lore, these writers express anger and belligerence at the war's progress as sons and brothers are maimed and killed, and property is destroyed or confiscated. Many of the women write from occupied territory; the recurrent confrontation with Union soldiers, slaves, and former slaves gives these women a unique perspective, one which allows them to repeatedly test the validity of their beliefs in a way 1 2 unavailable to the bulk of Northerners and Southern men. The physical violence and emotional desolation of the War force these women to question their received attitudes toward ethnicity, gender, and class, causing them to reevaluate what it means to be a Southern White Lady. Because periods of war inevitably cause social and political upheaval, I believe this set of autobiographical writings provides a unique opportunity to study the relative coherence as well as the gradual transformation of the world view of individual women. Frank Shuffelton, in his introduction to A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, makes an observation concerning ethnicity in early American texts which seems equally applicable to these Confederate diaries: "the 'qualifying energy' of ethnicity implicates it always in struggles for control over narratives, over values, over the self, and thus ethnicity is not to be ascribed only to someone who is culturally other than a hegemonic group but is operative within the narratives, the values, and the selves of the dominant group as well" (8). Thus, a study of these women's autobiographical writings not only uncovers the writers' perceptions of the African slave or Union soldier, but demonstrates their continually shifting construction of their own identities. While each woman's diary bears her unique psychic imprint, when read as a set, these texts reveal recurrent patterns. The circumstances of civil war assault these women's sense of who they are and how they stand in relationship to others; they respond to the uncontrollable changes in their status, physical surroundings, daily routine, material wealth, and family relationships by turning to a world they can control-their diaries. I want to explore the rhetorical strategies these writers employ in constructing their identities, focusing primarily on their evolving attitudes toward their own and 3 other's ethnicity. This direction allows me to address my original questions concerning attitudes toward slavery, while creating space for inquiry into other aspects of ethnicity. For instance, how does. gender interact with the construction of an ethnic identity? More specifically, how does it enhance, intensify, or otherwise transform an identity based on region and class? What manner of literacy does diary keeping represent, and how does this form of literacy influence the diarist's perceptions of ethnic identity? What rhetorical patterns emerge as significantly connected to the formation of ethnic identity? What shared assumptions do these various writers employ to create meaning out of experience? How does the publication of these texts, along with certain editorial glosses, promote particular ethnic agendas? These women diarists face a frontal attack to their cherished belief in Southern white superiority. As the Confederacy grinds toward its eventual defeat, slaves run away and are liberated; Union soldiers march into parlors uninvited; generals order loved ones to distant battlefields. Despite-or perhaps because of-the lack of control over the massive changes bombarding their lives, these diarists create portraits of empowerment which gradually emerge in texts where the story's ending is truly unknown, 2 so that the actual process of keeping the diary affects the writer's ethnic identity. Within the pages of their journals, the disloyal slave is always the anomaly and the Yankee soldier is always bested in an argument. Close attention to the texts reveals that these women ' uniformly focus on themes designed to regain the power wrested away from them by the failing fortunes of war. Because this study focuses on the literary rather than historical aspects of Confederate Civil War diaries, 3 a survey of critical work treating women's life writings 4 will help contextualize my subsequent observations. Women's autobiographical writings were overlooked and undervalued in the few critical appraisals of English-language autobiographies prior to 1980. This situation has been remarked upon so often now that their disenfranchisement has become a truism. One of the earliest scholars to comment on the glaring absence of women's autobiographical writings from the critical arena was Estelle Jelinek in "Women's Autobiography and the Male Tradition" (1980). 4 After noting that " 'insignificant' ... expresses the predominant attitude of most critics toward women's lives" ( 4 ), Jelinek concludes that the majority of "objective" critical theories regarding autobiography are not applicable to women's autobiographical writings (5), an insight which leads her to discuss the differences between men's and women's autobiographical writing. Jelinek identifies the first important gendered difference as the attitude toward history: male autobiographers perceive their texts as "a mirror of [their] era," while female autobiographers "rarely mirror the establishment history of their times" (7). Instead of emphasizing the public aspect of their lives, they "concentrate

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