Elizabeth Rhodes: An Alabama Woman's Religious Beliefs During the Civil War

Elizabeth Rhodes: An Alabama Woman’s Religious Beliefs During the Civil War THERE ARE DARK CLOUDS OVERSPREADING our National Horizon and we cannot yet know whether the fringes of prosperity will dispel them and the bright rays of peace and happiness once more beams upon us, as whether they will grow darker and denser until proved out in wars and bloodshed on our once prosperous and happy nation. Time alone can unfold these things. We can only wait and pray God to overrule all things for His glory and the good of mankind .1 So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Alabama woman, Elizabeth Rhodes, on December 31, 1860, as the Civil War loomed on the horizon. The outbreak of the conflict threw the lives of many ordinary people into confusion and chaos. Religion played a major role in the way Americans experienced the war and its devastation. Religion had long been a constant in the lives of antebellum Americans, especially in the South, but the Civil War thrust it even more to the center of their lives. Women throughout the country, like Rhodes, realized that J E N N I F E R N E W M A N T R E V I Ñ O Jennifer Newman Treviño is currently at the University of Texas-Pan American. She received her PhD from Auburn University in May 2009. Much of the research in this article is part of her current book manuscript on Alabama women’s religious beliefs and Confederate identity during the Civil War. She wishes to thank everyone who has helped her with this article, including Wayne Flynt and Kenneth Noe for their suggestions and advice as well as the editors of the Alabama Review for their assistance. She would especially like to thank her family and her husband, Ethan, for their help and support. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 62nd annual meeting of the Alabama Historical Association in Tuscaloosa on April 25, 2009. 1 Elizabeth Rhodes Diary, December 31, 1860, Elizabeth Rhodes Diaries, vols. 1–5, transcripts in the author’s possession (hereafter cited as Elizabeth Rhodes diary). Vols. 1–5 are at the Carnegie Library, Eufaula; original handwritten diaries are at the Shorter Mansion T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 244 they could do nothing to control the events set in motion by the secession of the southern states following Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860. Although women across the country faced similar uncertainties, Rhodes’s diary before and during the Civil War provides insight into the way one Alabama woman experienced the conflict. She ardently supported Alabama’s right to secede from the Union, yet she worried about how the war would affect her, her family , and the society and institutions with which she had grown up. In time of crisis she turned to her faith and religious convictions to back her belief in the Confederacy and to sustain her through the struggles that lay ahead. Important long before the outbreak of the war, religion became an increasingly prominent part of daily life for women such as Rhodes once the war broke out. Women were considered to be more religious in nature than their male counterparts. Women’s beliefs were not only shaped by the social structure around them, but also became part of their personal identities while reinforcing socially dictated qualities such as submission and sacrifice. Faith thus provided support for southern women while simultaneously mandating their subordination to men.2 As the country set on a path toward war, southerners turned to their religious convictions to sanction their actions and justify their beliefs. and Museum, Eufaula. I closely compared the originals with the transcripts and found them to be accurate, hence I have cited the transcripts because they are more accessible than the originals. The original spellings and grammatical construction used by Elizabeth Rhodes are retained in this paper without the use of “sic.” 2 Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York, 1982), 95; Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and...