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The Homefront in Black and White

Wood, Kirsten E.

Reviews in American History, Volume 30, Number 1, March 2002,

pp. 39-50 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/rah.2002.0023

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rah/summary/v030/30.1wood.html





Reviews in American History 30 (2002) 39–50 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

THE HOMEFRONT IN BLACK AND WHITE

Kirsten E. Wood

Laura F. Edwards. Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in theCivil War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. x + 271. Illustrations,notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

Alice Fahs. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South,1861–1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xi + 410 pp.Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Lyde Cullen Sizer. The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil

War, 1850–1872. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi +348pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95

(paper).

In 1882, Walt Whitman observed that “the real war will never get in thebooks.”1 As if volume alone could prove him wrong, novelists, amateurhistorians, and scholars have produced book after book on the Civil War, over2,700 in the last six years, according to Books in Print.2 Until recently, however,most such books addressed only certain aspects of the bloody conflict, namelythe military and the political. By exploring the homefront and its complexrelationship to military events and national politics, the three books at issuehere contribute to ongoing efforts at reversing this trend: Sizer’s and Fahs’smonographs treat Civil War-era literature, while Laura Edwards’s synthesisexplores southern women’s experiences.3

Besides their common attention to non-military aspects of the war, the

three books share similar approaches to politics. Much as they consider thewar as more than the sum of its battles, they define politics to include familialrelationships and popular culture as well as formal partisan and electoralproceedings. Edwards demonstrates that “the household stood at the juncturebetween private and public life” and that “domestic relations were insepara-bly connected to civil and political rights” (p. 3–4). Sizer and Fahs make asimilar argument, demonstrating how wartime writing and reading promptedindividuals—women, men, and even children—to rethink their relationshipto the nation, often in highly personal terms. These historians also share



REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 200240

another theoretical premise: that single texts (or events and relationships, inEdwards’s case) contain multiple meanings. Drawing on George Lipsitz, Sizerargues that “genre implies no inherent message” and that women’s writingscontained many, often contradictory threads (p. 7). Similarly, Fahs cites MaryPoovey’s observation that texts “‘always produce meanings in excess of’”their “‘explicit design’” (p. 122). Edwards, meanwhile, teases out similartensions in the documents of social history, exposing the lacunae and diverse

meanings of anecdotes gleaned from court records, diaries, and letters.Sizer’s book encompasses two projects. The first is to investigate “political

issues” in northern women’s writings between 1850 and 1872. The secondconstitutes an “intellectual portrait” of nine popular women writers, mostlywhite and middle class: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Lydia MariaChild, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Ellen Watkins Harper, Gail Hamilton (akaMary Abigail Dodge), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, andElizabeth Stuart Phelps.4 Sizer situates these writers within the history ofnineteenth-century reform, the woman’s suffrage movement, and Americanletters.

The initial chapter does a marvelous job of comparing professional writerswith ordinary women who never wrote for publication. Household responsi-bilities repeatedly broke into women’s time for writing, whether they did so

for publication or for their own amusement. As Harriet Beecher Stoweobserved, “‘nothing but deadly determination enables me ever to write; it isrowing against wind and tide’” (p. 20). While professional writers “went on toexperience lives more like that of a ‘free woman’ in the 1850s and 1860s,” theylike other women of their class never escaped domestic duties (p. 21).Accordingly, they differed significantly from male writers, who had no needto steal time from the daily business of feeding, clothing, and cleaning theirhouseholds.

In part because of the conditions in which they wrote, Sizer identifieswomen’s writing as “political work.” Women’s writings were overtly politicalwhen they spoke to topics of national importance, such as slavery and Union.They constituted political work in another sense as well: Sizer argues thatwomen writers “intended to move their readers” and believed that “minds

can be worked on by words, stories, and images” (p. 4–5). From the first shotat Fort Sumter until well after the surrender at Appomattox, they viewed theirown morally inspired writings as political acts that could shape the war ’sgoals, progress, and meanings. The war pushed older writers to “a moreactive politics” and it emboldened “a younger generation coming of age” (p.15). Northern women writers’ new confidence persisted after the war,notwithstanding male-authored war histories that represented women asspectators or defined their war work as a temporary, aberrant excursionbeyond their properly domestic spheres.



41WOOD / Homefront in Black and White

Before the war, abolitionists constituted a small portion of the northernpopulation, but quite a substantial fraction of the most politicized—andfamous—women writers. Accordingly, political women’s writings often con-cerned slavery. Over the course of the war, and particularly from 1863 on,however, issues other than slavery and race became increasingly evident inwomen’s writings, most notably labor and women’s rights. After emancipa-tion, the issues of racial justice lost much of their motivating power for white

northern women, who had trouble imagining free blacks as anything resem-bling equals. By the time Reconstruction ended, the northern reform commu-nity had splintered over black suffrage. But the declining importance of racialissues in white women’s writings was as much a matter of generation asracism, Sizer observes. The war ’s mounting financial and emotional costspoliticized far more northern women qua women than emancipation everhad. Their own war experiences prompted them not only to mourn theirlosses but also to celebrate their achievements and, increasingly, rebuke those(mostly men) who held them back.

At times, fictional characters merely reflected what female nurses, forexample, were already doing, but literary creations also helped to shape whatothers thought appropriate for and required of women in wartime. Somescrutinized the deplorable effects of war among widowed, orphaned, and

working women, expanding on an antebellum reform tradition of middle-class interest in labor conditions. Others found more exciting and positivefaces to the war ’s disruptions. Sensationalist stories of female spies andsoldiers showed how women could turn the war into a liberating adventure,even if such stories put heroines in sexual jeopardy and generally ended byrestoring them to domestic settings. By war ’s end, a few writers even began torepresent remunerative work as not only legitimate for women in extremis, butalso fulfilling and even noble in itself.

After the war, women’s histories and personal narratives worked againstthe flowing tide of male- and military-centered histories which eventuallydominated popular knowledge of the war. In their histories, women authors“looked to the past as a way of getting their due in the present” (p. 196). Whilemale historians generally interpreted women’s war work as exceptional and

temporary, female writers saw it as a means to justify future advances.Claiming that women had proved their competence to participate in publicmatters, many began to endorse women’s rights, even if they did not becomesuffrage activists. A few, such as Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, andElizabeth Stuart Phelps, also began “an interclass exploration of the positionof women in society” (p. 200).

Yet while this war-inspired evolution suggests some profound changes inwomen’s politics, Sizer questions the “transformative” power that writersbegan assigning to the war almost as soon as it began. She maintains that the




war worked no revolution in “social reality,” and women continued to have “fewoptions for employment or for public or political power.” However, theynonetheless “came to believe that they had an acknowledged stake in a nationalordeal,” and substantial numbers equated that stake with the vote (p. 4). Lesspositively, northern women writers continued to deploy the exclusionaryrhetoric of womanly compassion and female moral authority. As it had doneduring the war, this rhetoric purported to create unity among women, but

served to exclude those who did not meet shifting but still rigid standards ofrespectability.

Examining many of the same texts as Sizer, Alice Fahs’s The Imagined CivilWar explores the content of popular literature and its rapidly changingmarkets in the Union and the Confederacy. Within the category of popularliterature, Fahs includes “war poetry, sentimental war stories, sensational warnovels, war humor, war juveniles, war songs, collections of war-relatedanecdotes, and war histories,” all of which have, she argues, been “dis-missed” because of their popular label (p. 1). Much of this writing had littleliterary merit, yet popular did not automatically mean lowbrow, becauserevered writers like Louisa May Alcott and William Gilmore Simms oftenpublished in these widely available and widely read formats. Whatever itsquality, popular literature offers an invaluable resource for assessing the

cultures of publishing, commerce, and war, because it was so widely availableand read.

Fahs argues that popular war literature helped shape “a cultural politics ofwar” and nationalism: as purchasers and readers, Unionists and Confederatesinterpreted, experienced, and even possessed the war (p. 1). In the process,they also reconfigured their relationship to the nation. Perhaps one of mostimportant functions of popular war literature was to make sense of unfath-omable carnage. Civilians consumed countless sentimental narratives aboutdying soldiers. In the face of mass death and the regimentation of military life,these stories insisted on “the primacy of the individual experience” (p. 92).Depictions of soldiers’ dying for their country also “provided a new way ofunderstanding a previously abstract nationhood” (p. 119). These tales’ wide-spread popularity suggests that the sentimental values which Sizer associates

with northern, middle- and upper-class women actually enjoyed muchbroader currency, shaping northern men and white southerners of both sexesas well. Fahs likewise broadens Sizer’s observations about women’s wartimesuffering, noting the widespread popularity of texts in which female charac-ters demand recognition for their emotional suffering and their financiallosses. As early as the fall of 1861, authors began to suggest that “a centralmeaning of the war was women’s domestic suffering” (p. 132). As in manycases, southern literature differed slightly from the dominant northern ver-sion; Fahs notes that southern texts “rarely claimed that women’s wounds




were the equivalent of men’s,” but they too “created striking portrayals of thewounds war inflicted on women” (p. 138).5

Sensational literature offered up a very different interpretation of the war ’shazards, but with a similar investment in individual experience. Instead offocusing on death and loss, sensationalist texts offered up titillating stories ofadventure and excitement. Here, men and boys had wild adventures involv-ing violence, gambling, drink, and sometimes even sex, which put them well

beyond the pale of sentimental morality. Sensational literature also suggestedthat thrilling, individualistic adventures constituted a primary means ofcontributing to the nation and experiencing citizenship. As both the contentand political slant of sensationalism suggests, male characters dominated thissubgenre, but female characters sometimes shared in the war’s “transforma-tive possibilities” (p. 255). In northern versions, heroines sought out adven-tures as “daughters of the regiment,” soldiers, or spies. Instead of beingpunished for their exploits, they generally won the esteem of their lovers andleading military men alike. By contrast, southern heroines “were only rarelypictured entering the public sphere of the hospital or battlefield, much less . . .actually engaging in battle” (p. 255). In reality, of course, southern womenlived so much closer to the battle that they were far more likely thannortherners to have sensational wartime adventures, but unlike fictional

heroines, they rarely enjoyed those experiences.In most of the northern literature and all of the southern, however, the war

offered no such liberatory potential for black characters. Instead, fictionalblacks tended to remain loyal to whites, resist emancipation (in southernstories), and require white leadership (in both northern and southern vari-ants). As imagined by white authors, most black speech included the cheapmisspellings and overstated dialect common to minstrelsy. Such distortionsappeared even in writings that promoted emancipation. However, onceAfrican Americans began to become soldiers—and especially after the storiedattack on Fort Wagner—northern publications promulgated more favorableimages of black heroism. Fahs is careful not to overstate her case here. Toshow the limits to praise of black soldiers, she cannily exposes the tensionbetween newspaper images of uniformed black soldiers, for example, and

texts that often undercut the visual evidence of their courage and manliness.Like Sizer, Fahs also shows how after Appomattox, the war become morenarrowly construed, as postwar historians and politicians suggested that only“[white] men’s experiences in battle counted as the ‘real’ war” (p. 317).Reinforcing the limited nature of black emancipation, Fahs follows herdiscussion of African Americans with chapters on humor, sensationalism, andjuvenalia, genres that tended to reify stereotypes of black ignorance, feckless-ness, and literally slavish loyalty to “their” whites. Nonetheless, wartime repre-sentations of blacks were “a transformative moment in American cultural




politics,” that inaugurated “an expanded realm of imaginative freedom” forblacks as well as whites (p. 16).

Although demeaning blacks constituted a key element of wartime humor,it was not the most important aspect of the genre. Some writers made themost of the humorous opportunities that war itself provided, mocking blindpatriotism and refusing to treat either soldiers or civilians with “reverentialsolemnity” (p. 211). More rarely, they used humor to critique the war ’s

conduct and goals. Apparently most interesting to Fahs, some also attackedthe commercialism of the war itself. Many wartime authors rebuked profi-teers, but humorists were unusual in attacking the proliferation of patrioticparaphernalia and ever-more elaborate mourning objects and burial servicesas “cultural profiteering” (p. 208).

As the humorous critiques of profiteering suggest, wartime literature wasas much a matter of commercialism as of nationalism and entertainment. Inthe North, both illustrated paper and book publishing flourished during thewar, alongside traditional newspapers. Books published by subscription wereoften expensive works intended for parlor tables; people bought them asmuch for their display value as for their content. Accordingly, savvy canvass-ers approached the leading families in a community first, and once theysigned on, others quickly followed. Fahs also explores children’s access to

books. Northern adults ordered entertaining juvenalia for their sons and,more rarely, daughters. Children also traded books among themselves. In hisdiary, eleven-year-old Grenville Norcross recorded that he loaned Kate Sharp

to a friend and occasionally exchanged reading material with “‘W. Thompson’sservant girl’” (p. 272). In contrast to northern juvenalia, Confederate offeringswere largely limited to textbooks, a genre supposedly more germane to theserious business of nation-building.

Although Fahs spends most of her time on northern literature, because theNorth simply had more of it, she manages to shed new light on the South ’sregional identity. She argues that the South and the North had a “set of sharedliterary sensibilities that overrode even the divisions of war” (p. 5). Thesimilarities between northern and southern popular literature owed much tothe underdevelopment of southern publishing and writing: much like other

areas of industrial and cultural production, the South lagged well behind theNorth in its publishing houses, printers, newspapers, literary magazines, andfull-time authors.

During the war, southern editors, publishers, and authors labored mightilyto create a distinctively southern literature, hoping to foster patriotism andwin subscribers. To a limited extent, they succeeded. Confederates avidlyconsumed whatever news they could get and contributed countless instancesof “patriotic poetry” to the newspapers, which remained the South’s primaryavenue both for war information and for creative representations of it (p. 29).




However, the South failed to develop a distinctive and independent litera-ture, for both material and ideological reasons. Short of paper, type, skilledmanpower, and money, southern publishers could not compete with theNorth in terms of quantity or production value. Ideologically, Confederateauthors had the disadvantage of trying to define their nation in opposition tothe Union while sharing so many of its values. As an example, Fahs cites the“Starry-Barred Banner,” a Confederate hymn that depended on Union sym-

bols and the shared past of the United States before secession (p. 77). Southernprint culture failed to supplant everything white southerners shared withnortherners, but this does not mean that the two regions were culturally thesame. Against considerable odds, southern authors and publishers managedto “produce imagined differences” that helped support the war effort, eventhough southerners returned to their former literary dependency on theNorth after the war’s end (p. 9).

Fahs’s and Sizer’s books largely reinforce each other ’s interpretations, butthey also suggest some areas for further inquiry. Fahs argues that men as wellas women participated in sentimental culture. This raises the possibility thatnorthern middle-class white men and women shared so much, culturally andpolitically, that to distinguish among authors (or readers) by gender mayexaggerate or essentialize differences.6 But Sizer argues that even if male and

female writers imagined similar possibilities for their female characters, theyhad begun at different starting positions, and they very likely saw somewhatdifferent political implications in their imaginings. Sizer presents very goodevidence that northern women writers created a distinctive interpretation ofthe war, but we need to be extraordinarily careful in locating the origins oftheir politics when they shared so much of both with middle-class northernmen and even with wealthy southerners.

Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is an entirely different sort of book: asynthesis of social history. Based on Edwards’s own primary research and thework of other scholars, it is an engaging, concise—under 200 pages—surveyof elite white, “common white,” free black, and enslaved women from theantebellum South through the end of Reconstruction. With this book, Edwardsseeks to make a burgeoning monographic literature available to non-special-

ists. In particular, she wants to bring the findings of southern women’shistory into the classroom. Facilitating both comparative and chronologicalscrutiny, she divides the book into three chronological sections: “before,”“during,” and “after.” Each section contains three chapters, one each forplanter women, “common whites” and free black women, and enslaved (orfreed) women.

Edwards’s ambition reaches well beyond exposing students to the evolv-ing differences among southern women. She seeks also to illustrate how thewar and Reconstruction look different when we include women and, more




importantly, cannot be properly understood without them. She makes per-haps the clearest case for this point in the postwar period. As she observes,historians long interpreted Reconstruction in terms of “institutional partypolitics” or “economic change and emancipation” (p. 150). Since women didnot vote and belong to parties or, supposedly, own property and work forwages, they rarely appeared in this literature. But in fact, during and afterReconstruction, government officials, jurists, legislators, landowners, vigilan-

tes, and freedpeople themselves openly battled to reconstruct labor relations,family life, and gender roles. In this period, the intersection of domesticconcerns and public policy generated infinite flashpoints in southern house-holds and communities. And once we see this, Edwards suggests, we see thatwomen were not only involved, but aggressively and persistently so. Edwardsthus provides a grim, “on the ground” counterpoint to the literary battlesover the war’s meanings and the nation’s future that Fahs and Sizer explore.

For white southern as well as northern women, the war created newopportunities as well as hazards. Some embraced these opportunities reluc-tantly, others eagerly. Early in the war, slaveholding women often fretted attheir passive role and longed for some way to express their patriotism. KateStone “saw war as a heroic adventure, where it was possible for individuals toalter the course of history” (p. 70). (Although Edwards suggests the naïveté of

this attitude, Fahs and Sizer help us understand where women like Stonemight have gotten their ideas about the war.) As more and more of theirmenfolks went to war, elite and “common” women alike shouldered theresponsibilities of household mastery and wage work, because they had littleor no choice. For many, these responsibilities were not entirely new; before1861, many women became householders pro tem thanks to their husbands’absences or deaths. During the war, however, the scale of these activitiesincreased dramatically, but the cultural support for them lagged far behind.Necessity prompted a whole host of inventions, from ersatz coffee and ink tonew justifications for women’s work beyond their own households. Yet whitesouthern women only rarely used the war as northern women did: as anopportunity to imagine new ways of being, whether as women or as citizens.In fact, dire economic necessity proved at least as transformative as the

experience of managing in men’s absence. Elite women learned—or failed tolearn—that they could not necessarily rely on their men to protect andprovide for them. Need prompted growing numbers of young women fromhumble and even privileged backgrounds to seek waged work. While thiswork generally entailed “low pay and drudgery,” it eventually gave somewomen new independence (p. 170). By the turn of the century, southernwage-workers were beginning to participate in commercial entertainmentsand even labor actions, much like their northern counterparts. And whilemost white southern women staked no claim to political rights in the years




following the war, they nonetheless pursued their “distinct conceptions oftheir rights as women, the rights of their families, and the shape of southernsociety” (p. 188).

For black women throughout Civil War America, popular culture andpersonal experience alike told a very equivocal story. None could doubt thetremendous importance of converting the North’s war for Union into a warfor emancipation. As Fahs points out, even the mainstream Harper’s Weekly

predicted in early April 1861 that the “‘practical effect”’ of the war must be“‘to liberate the slaves’” (p. 48). But Edwards notes that slaves anticipatedLincoln, forging emancipation with their feet and their newly overt unwill-ingness to obey their owners. The postwar period confirmed what free blacksbefore the war had discovered: freedom from legal slavery by no meansmeant freedom from violence, want, degradation, and separation from family.In fact, southern whites so hedged in black freedom that northern writers’imaginative creations can seem wildly optimistic by comparison, despite theirracism. However, freed women resisted white oppression as doggedly as theyhad done during slavery, and with greater resources. They appealed toFreedmen’s Bureau officials to protect them against abusive spouses or torecover children apprenticed to whites against their will. They also sought towrest control over their own labor out of whites’ hands, and they “insisted on

public acknowledgement of their respectability” (p. 159). Like “commonwhite” women, they held their husbands and fathers “to their obligations toprovide and protect” (p. 159). For African-American women in particular,these efforts were never-ending and often unavailing, but “the very act oftrying was important” in establishing “a legacy of struggle” (p. 148).

Throughout, Edwards deftly uses individual women to give subtlety andtexture to her generalizations. For her planter women, she draws heavily onGertrude Thomas’s and Kate Stone’s diaries, illustrating how two womenwith distinctly different personalities and experiences made sense of war,death, emancipation, and Confederate defeat. Among her “common whites”is Sarah Guttery, whom Edwards quite brilliantly brings to life using U. S.Pension Bureau Records. With two out-of-wedlock children, Guttery repre-sented all that the planter class found vile about ordinary white women. But

within her community, she “‘bore a good name,’” largely because sheremained in her father ’s household and supported herself and her children(p. 44). This good name enabled her to get help from her neighbors when shesought to claim her son’s pension in 1879. Federal officials were tempted todismiss her claim on the grounds of her immorality, but those who knew herassured them she had been a hard-working and responsible woman eversince her children’s birth. An equally vivid example of women’s negotiationswithin their communities concerns the freedwoman Bella Newton. When awhite man assaulted Newton’s children in 1869, she first acted “in keeping




with antebellum traditions”: she publicized her grievance in the neighbor-hood, and then agreed to drop the issue when he paid her $1.00 and somebacon (p. 125). But afterwards, she decided to file charges against him, a riskyaction which she could never have taken as a slave. While we might expectthat such a charge would go nowhere, Alexander Noblin was indicted.(Edwards does not know whether he was convicted.)

Edwards’s chapter on enslaved women is solid but somewhat less exciting.

Here, she uses Harriet Jacobs’s narrative of her life in slavery to illuminateslave women’s priorities and choices, and some readers may find the choicerather predictable. Jacobs’s historical and literary significance is incontrovert-ible, but historians use her so often that readers might be forgiven for thinkingthat hers is the only recoverable story of being female and enslaved in theAmerican South. Since Edwards makes a point of commenting on the scarcityof sources for common white and black women, her recourse to Jacobs seemsa lost opportunity to introduce an undoubtedly wide audience to one or moreof the other women who wrote about their lives as slaves.

As befits a synthesis aimed at non-specialists, historians versed in southernwomen’s history will find little surprising in Edwards’s account. Specialistsare also likely to find little to complain about in this masterful weavingtogether of many different studies, which neither elides nor bogs down in

interpretive differences. A possible concern, however, stems from her group-ing of southern women, in particular the category “common whites.” In herdefinition, this group encompasses landless poor whites, yeomen, and allslaveholders who were not planters. This broad category serves to point outthat only the small planter elite even approached the standards of luxury thatpopular imagination tends to associate with the Old South. However, most ofthe information about slaveholding itself appears in the chapters on elitewomen. Accordingly, general readers might misread the observations aboutplanters as applying to all slaveholders—the exact opposite of Edwards’sintention—while the “common whites” seem more impoverished than middleclass. This problem is most evident in the antebellum chapters, however, andin the context of undergraduate classes, at least, could provoke fruitfuldiscussions on the evolution of class and rank distinctions in the nineteenth-

century South.Southern historians may also question Edwards’ decision to use Gone With

The Wind as a framing device. Edwards clearly intends to debunk themoonlight and magnolias image of the Old South so often associated—withonly partial justice—with Mitchell’s novel. But in referencing the novel, doesshe simply give it new life? Perhaps under the influence of Fahs ’s investiga-tion of the book business, I wondered whether using Melanie and Scarlett hadbeen a marketing rather than analytical strategy. Outside of academia,Americans are likelier to read about the Civil War than about nearly any other




historical topic, but most Civil War books focus on “battles and politics,”narrowly defined (p. 2). Books like James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom

have sales figures vastly greater than works of homefront history. But if the300-plus people who wrote reviews of Gone With The Wind on Amazon.com’swebsite are any indication, the novel is still far more popular, tugging atreaders’ imaginations and probably shaping at least some of their ideas aboutthe South.7 Framing her book as a response to Mitchell’s novel may, therefore,

be a good way to attract the wide, popular audience Edwards seeks. And onceshe has their attention, she stands an excellent chance of inspiring somereaders to delve into the many excellent monographs on southern women, orat least to question the prominence of battles, generals, and politicians in CivilWar history.

Walt Whitman to the contrary, extraordinarily diverse interpretations ofthe war began to emerge during the conflict itself. In published and unpub-lished writings, speeches, and behavior, Americans North and South assertedtheir own versions of the war ’s costs, gains, and meanings. As Fahs and Sizerdemonstrate, it was only after the war that amateur and professional histori-ans in the North redefined the conflict so narrowly that only its military andmasculine aspects seemed to be the “real” war, a trend which continued wellinto the twentieth century. Similarly, Edwards suggests how in the post-

Redemption South the mythos of heroic gentlemen-soldiers and patrioticbelles came to obscure the history—and persistence—of dissent, desertion,and rebellion by common whites and blacks. In one sense, these three books,like other works of homefront history, represent a new approach to the CivilWar, one bearing the impress of the late-twentieth-century interest in feminist,multivocal, bottom-up history. In an equally important sense, they represent areturn to the ways that Americans actually experienced the war. The historian’sjob is arguably not to recreate every last voice, event, and nuance, but todistill. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that a fragmented picture withno single dominant perspective is surely truer to the contemporary experi-ence and meanings of the war than an overarching master narrative couldever be.

Kirsten E. Wood, assistant professor, Florida International University, is theauthor of “‘One Woman so Dangerous to Public Morals’: Gender and Powerin the Eaton Affair,” Journal of the Early Republic (1997), and is completing amonograph on slaveholding widows in the American Southeast between theRevolution and the Civil War.

1. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, as quoted in Louis P. Masur, ed., “The Real War WillNever Get in The Books”: Selections from Writers during the Civil War (1993), 281.

2. This likely conservative figure comes from Books in Print online.




3. For homefront histories, see, for example, Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention:Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996); George Rable, Civil Wars:Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (1989); LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as Crisis inGender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (1995).

4. Southworth, Harper, and Davis came from the Upper South.5. In this sense, Confederate women’s “tendency to see the war in terms of their own

families’ interests” and expectation that military policy should respond to their needsreflects a much broader pattern of responses to the war, not something distinctive to thesouthern homefront (Edwards, p. 87).

6. Here Fahs bears out the work of southern historians like Cynthia Kierner and Marli

Weiner, who argue for the importance of domesticity and sentimentalism to antebellumslaveholding society. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South (1998);Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–1880 (1998).

7. The episodic flurries of postings to H-South on “GWTW” suggests that historiansthemselves are still somewhat at a loss to account for both the novel’s and the book’spopularity within and beyond the United States.

Documents

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