Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863–1866 ed. by Timothy J. Williams and Evan A. Kutzler (review)

“I am caught at last, my darling Mollie, and that too when I thought I was all safe & sound.” So began Captain George Washington “Wash” Nelson Jr.’s October 28, 1863 letter to his fiancée, Mollie Scollay. Only a week earlier, the pair had been strolling together in Mollie’s hometown of Middle-way, Virginia. Now, Wash was a prisoner of the Union army. Although he was optimistic about his chances in a prisoner exchange, he warned her, “we may not hear from each other for a long time” (43–44).

Wash Nelson would spend the rest of the war in various Union prisons. At times, as he predicted, the lines of communication between he and Mollie did fracture, but despite the obstacles they faced, the pair remained devoted to one another. Their letters, sometimes passionate, sometimes cautious and coded, provide a glimpse into the impact of imprisonment on relationships in the Civil War era. For this reason alone, their writings would be worthy of study by historians, especially as we strive to learn more about the intimate lives of those on both the battlefield and home front. However, when combined with Wash’s unpublished postwar memoir, as they are in Prison Pens: Gender, Memory, and Imprisonment in the Writings of Mollie Scollay and Wash Nelson, 1863–1866, they also contribute to the growing field of scholarship on Civil War memory.

While Wash’s loving and effusive letters to Mollie reveal how he drew strength from her support, his memoir, editors Timothy J. Williams and Evan A. Kutzler argue, never mentions Molly and instead “is a drama between a man and his male captors” (33). His memoir, entitled “A Dark Record of Suffering and Oppression,” foreshadows the development of the Lost Cause ideology by former soldiers in the years following the war and Reconstruction. Williams and Kutzler urge readers to carefully compare Wash’s letters and their description of his wartime experience with his memory as revealed in his memoir. “Both what Wash mentions and omits are important,” they state (119). Immediately striking, for instance, is how he repeatedly downplays his suffering when writing to Mollie, yet features his misery prominently in his memoir. There, he describes a litany of trials, including bouts of abuse, dehydration, scurvy, and hunger—even killing and eating prison cats when desperate. Presenting this memoir with his wartime letters, Williams and Kutzler let readers decide whether he was hiding such details from his sensitive, future bride or whether he dwelt upon them in his memoir to vilify his wartime and now postwar oppressors.

Williams and Kutzler have done an excellent job editing this collection, providing an almost overwhelming amount of background data in their thorough introduction and copious footnotes. They also provide succinct and well-written summaries of the recent literature on women’s roles in the war, masculinity in the mid-nineteenth century, Civil War prisons, the South’s honor culture, religion, education, the Lost Cause—even the history of the postal service. Their efforts mean that these letters and memoir could be used by almost anyone, regardless of their prior knowledge of the era and scholarship. Finally, despite the fact that the two lovers’ letters were often restricted to a page by prison regulations (a fact of which Mollie often complained), they sparkle with personality and life. In one letter, Wash urged Mollie to write longer letters; however, before it was sent, a Union officer wrote to warn Mollie not to do so. Upon receiving the letter and note, she wrote in the margin, “You hateful dog! What business had you writing on my letter,” a largely therapeutic statement since she did not resend the letter (64–5). Reading her intimate thoughts and her anger at having to share them with Union officials, I cannot help...