Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children (review)

Southern children experienced the horrors and hardships of the Civil War as a daily reality. As the title of Anya Jabour's Topsy-Turvy indicates, children of the region experienced disruptions wrought by war that transformed their lives in ways that would resonate long into their adult years. Using a lively mixture of anecdotal evidence from diaries, letters, memoirs, and WPA slave narratives, to name a few sources, Jabour challenges readers to think of these children beyond a monolithic age group whose members shared similar experiences. Rather, she encourages readers to look at the varying experiences of the children based on their racial, class, and gender identification. In doing so, a richly diverse tapestry of wartime agency among southern youth emerges.

Jabour's study joins a growing body of scholarship that uses age as a category of analysis when examining the Civil War. Studies such as James Marten's examination of northern and southern youths in The Children's Civil War (2000) and Edmund L. Drago's state study of white, slaveholding children in Confederate Phoenix: Rebel Children and Their Families in South Carolina (2008) bring into high relief how age shaped the way in which Americans navigated the events of war. Jabour focuses on the South, contending that children within the region experienced the war "in an especially profound and personal way" (10).

Jabour begins by demonstrating that southern children responded to the war in ways that reflected cultural identities that took shape long before the first shots at Fort Sumter. These cultural identities were "firmly grounded in the rigid hierarchies and day-to-day realities of the Old South" (14). One's position within the hierarchy, whether enslaved or free, slaveholding or nonslaveholding, ultimately dictated the way that children would view the coming conflict and the events playing out in their region. Jabour emphasizes the centrality of race in determining power and status for these youths. Education in various forms played a crucial part in helping children internalize the hierarchical nature of southern, slaveholding society. From the formal education of slaveholding daughters to the informal education of enslaved youths, children absorbed the message of power, dependence, and privilege. Parental influence also shaped the ways children viewed slavery, secession, and war; yet while she recognizes this influence, Jabour's account reveals that children were agents capable of determining their own perspectives.

Jabour likewise offers a significant analysis of how children dealt with the daily realities of war. As the conditions of the Confederate South worsened—as evidenced in household disruptions, separation of loved ones, and economic hardships—southern children called upon the features of their youth culture to ease the emotional turmoil wrought by war. An interesting point of Jabour's study is her analysis of children's play and work. Children's play sometimes mimicked adult roles, allowing children to adapt better to the unstable environment of the wartime South. Assuming new work roles likewise prepared southern youth for their future roles in the postwar period. Jabour's inclusion of the runaway and refugee experience illuminates the importance of singling out race and class when exploring childhood experiences. For enslaved youths, the war offered an opportunity for freedom, but, at times, this came at a cost to their personal safety. Children of planter families underwent a different form of disruption when invading armies forced them to flee their homes. But despite clear differences in status, both groups turned to the security of family members to ease fear and anxiety.

Defeat of the Confederacy brought on a new set of circumstances for southern youths as emancipation transformed the slaveholding South. Former slave children experiencing the transition into freedom encountered a new form of personal freedom in formal education. Children of the former slaveholding class found that education, too, helped rebuild their families in the wake of economic devastation. Jabour's final chapter raises important questions about...