Prominent Civil War Wives

The stories of prominent Civil War wives shed much light on the history of a divided nation. Angelina Grimké Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant each held a peculiar position in their society. They were situated in that ill-defined place between the powerful and the anonymous, the famous and the ordinary. Their lives were in many ways privileged. But in other ways, those lives were anomalous. Through their marriages to influential reformers, politicians, and generals, they had access to the seats of power but no power themselves. Their intimate relationships gave them a unique perspective on the decisions and events that changed their world, and their marriages gave them intimate knowledge of the men who made those decisions and shaped those events. Still, those marriages created barriers to their autonomy that only catastrophe or widowhood could possibly overcome. Their privileged yet restricted lives tell us much about their era.

As individuals, these three women differed greatly in personality, character, temperament, and intellect. The winds of change that blew within their lifetimes carried them down quite different paths. The paths they chose, and the paths chosen for them by their husbands, illustrate both the limitations and the possibilities for middle-class married women in an age that saw both reform and reaction, rapid change and a rising nostalgia for the past.

Almost by accident, Angelina Grimké, a slave-holder’s daughter from South Carolina, became one of the most renowned and controversial abolitionist orators. She had come north as a young woman, leaving her home and its many comforts because she could not condone the slavery on which they were based. When she wrote a letter of support to the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the anti-slavery leadership embraced her and catapulted her to public notice. How could they resist a Southerner who proclaimed to audiences in New England and New York “I have seen it . . . I have seen it” in her testimony against slavery? But Grimké was not just a Southerner, she was also a woman. As she gained a voice, she spoke out more boldly on the rights—and the obligations—of women to participate in public, moral campaigns. But the abolitionist leadership, socially conservative on matters of gender roles, shrank from the controversy her feminism provoked. Her racial radicalism disturbed them even more, for Grimké viewed the end of slavery as only a first step, not the culmination of a just cause; for her, racial equality was the only truly moral goal. Even her future husband, the great abolitionist orator Theodore Weld, criticized her for speaking and writing on subjects that were best left to men. The criticism she endured, not simply from those who opposed the abolitionists but from many of its leading lights, gives us a new perspective on the limits of the radical vision of the anti-slavery movement.

Varina Davis, circa 1860s. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07786].

Weary of the controversy swirling around her, and deeply hurt by the criticism from within the movement’s ranks, Angelina turned her attention to a new cause whose battles could only be waged in the most private of arenas. With the same ferocious determination that had fueled her public speaking and writing, Mrs. Theodore Weld resolved to prove that a woman who had led a remarkable public life could lead an unremarkable married life. Until her old age, Angelina Grimké Weld struggled to find fulfillment in domestic duties and responsibilities; in this she failed. Her husband continued to find purpose in a movement that moved from the margins to the center of political life once the Radical Republicans took up the cause of abolition, but never asked his wife to join him in the public sphere. He attributed her increasing anomie to a “nervous personality,” common, he noted, in the female sex. Thus Angelina watched as history passed her by, rejoicing that the Civil War had liberated African Americans and mourning that the limits of Reconstruction had insured their inequality. Only in her old age did she find a way to combine...