Southern White Widows and the "Lost Cause"

In his 1881 memoir The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government”, Jefferson Davis wrote that he honored women’s sacrifice in the late war for Confederate independence. In her new book, Prof. Elder (Converse University), argues that the Civil War left the South a place of grieving and healing long after the fighting ended in 1865.

Approximately three million men fought in the war, on both sides, of whom it’s estimated 750,000 died, leaving some 200,000 widows. Love and Duty looks at the emotional and political relationship between Southern women and the late Confederacy. The expectations for white widowhood was one of grateful tears, positive memories, and support for the cause. Elder argues that only with all of this, would their husbands live forever. She further emphasizes that women played a significant role in society, helping build the myth of the “Lost Cause” and in “restoring Southern society after war and Reconstruction.

In the postwar era unreconstructed Confederates championed an image of white widowhood, the young wife who selflessly transferred her monogamous love from her dead husband to the deathless cause for which he'd fought. Death forced all Confederate widows to reconstruct their lives, but only some would choose to play a role in reconstructing the nation. A close look reveals that these women spent their new cultural capital with great shrewdness and variety. Aware of the social status gained in widowhood; they used that status on their own terms, turning mourning into a highly politicized act in the battle to confirm the Confederacy's legitimacy.

Elder researched letters between spouses during the war, as well as personal diaries, post war letters, scrapbooks, and applications for widow’s pension. Drawing on these materials, as well as songs, literary works, and material objects such as mourning gowns, and drawing on the work of Stephanie McCurry, Drew Gilpin, Thavolia Glymph, and Victoria Ott, she explores white Confederate widows' stories, examining the records of their courtships, marriages, loves, and losses, often detailing the wretched lives of these women, a subject that has rarely been addressed, and certainly needs to be told.

Elder draw several important conclusions.

Firstly, she demonstrated that war changed the way women in the South were looked upon, compared with the antebellum period. Secondly,, she suggests that emotions mattered, and war widows and widows’ communities, leveraged emotion to gain influence with unreconstructed Confederate leadership and Southern society. Third, Elder reveals that Southern widows made an important contribution to reshaping the nation in the aftermath of war, perhaps even more than that by some early histories and soldiers’ memoirs.

This book is about emotions, love, victory, loss, trauma, cultural change, social upheaval, and grieving white women of all classes in the erstwhile Confederacy and the Border States.

A volume in the UNC series "Civil War America", Love and Duty, which offers readers a thoughtful exploration of widowhood in the post bellum period, is well-written and a delight to read, and makes a significant contribution to the study of the Civil War and its aftermath.

This reviewer recommends Love and Duty for anyone with an interest in the era of the Civil War.

Note: Love & Duty is also available in hard cover and e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium