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MARY ANN MOSELEY AND BENJAMIN BAIRD WERE MARRIED IN January 862.Their wedding took place less than a year after Benjamin enlisted in Company G, 2st Virginia Infantry—perhaps theirs was a marriage that was influenced by the heady romanticism that inspired many a southern union in the early days of the war. Mary Ann undoubtedly recognized, at least in the abstract, that the conflict could claim her new husband. She most likely did not expect to lose him, however, and she could not have foreseen his death occurring within the same year they married. Although Benjamin saw little action during his service, he died soon after he joined the Confederate ranks, a victim of disease like so many other Civil War soldiers. Widowed at only twenty-four, Mary Ann had few options for survival open to her. After learning of Benjamin’s death, she tried to make it on her own and continued living in the house she and her husband had “shared.” Sometime before 880, however, Mary Ann moved in with her widowed mother, Lucy Moseley.The two widows struggled together until Lucy’s death several years later. In the 880s, during the flush of reform that engulfed the United States and stimulated federal intervention on behalf of some of the “worthy” poor, southern states initiated efforts to provide assistance to their “worthy” poor, whom they emphatically defined as Confederate veterans and their widows. In 888 Mary Ann Baird applied for and received a Confederate pension from the state of Virginia. The paltry thirty-dollar -per-year pension undoubtedly provided some economic comfort, and it must have given her some solace after having her provider and protector “And for the Widow and Orphan”: Confederate Widows, Poverty, and Public Assistance JENNIFER LYNN GROSS 209 taken from her almost thirty years earlier. She collected her annuity until she died in 94. While it lasted, the Civil War laid waste to the South’s economic and social landscape and claimed the lives of at least 260,000 white men, among them Benjamin Baird. The wartime deaths of so many men created a new class of southern women—women like Mary Ann Baird—left without traditional male protectors and providers. Although it is virtually impossible to determine just how many southern women were widowed by the Civil War, it is likely that there were tens of thousands of them, often with fatherless children (defined by the state as “orphans”).2 These manless women, no longer part of traditional households, had to become the heads of and providers for their families, confronting new social, legal, and financial responsibilities as they struggled to survive in a patriarchal society in which women were expected to be helpmates for husbands, not heads of families. Family wealth amassed before the husband’s death certainly contributed to the economic support of many Confederate widows during the war and in the years afterward. Yet many of the wives of yeoman and even wealthy Confederates who died experienced economic instability. Mary Ann Baird’s situation paints a revealing picture of Confederate widowhood. The 860 census identifies her future husband as a farmer and the owner of three hundred dollars of real estate. She is listed as a resident in the household of her widowed mother—a farmer with one thousand dollars in real estate. Before the war, then, both Mary Ann and Benjamin would have been classified as part of the yeoman class.3 Despite that prewar status and ownership of land, the 870 census reveals that Mary Ann Baird had “no property”and before 880 was forced to move back in with her mother. After her mother’s death, Mary Ann moved into the home of two relatives of her deceased husband, both tenant farmers. Several years before her own death, she again moved, this time to live with a nephew, J. E. King. Such residence with family members by such women as they became older was not unique to Confederate widows. But Mary Ann’s descent from the ranks of the yeomen landholders to the landless poor was more familiar than not to many Confederate widows and can be explained by two primary factors: the physical ramifications of the war on the South and the region’s existing social and legal structures. The sheer physical and economic devastation of the war itself, along with a dearth of opportunities for gainful employment and unfair inheritance laws and practices, often...

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