Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War

3. The Self-Sufficient Daughter

 4HE 3ELF3UF½CIENT $AUGHTER ON THE EVE OF THE CIVIL WAR, Isabella (“Belle”) and Anna Mason Smith had little notion that the impending conflict would turn their once comfortable world upside down. The two young women were the daughters of the well-known planter William Mason Smith and his wife Eliza Middleton Huger Smith of South Carolina. Belle, born in 1847, and Anna who came along two years later, were the older daughters of the Smith’s six children. As members of a wealthy slaveholding family, the young women enjoyed all the luxuries bestowed upon children of the elite social class, including a formal education, fashionable clothes, and numerous invitations to social engagements. Their father’s death in 1851 had disrupted their family circle and left their mother a widow with six children. The Smith sisters, however, were too young to remember the event and spent the remainder of their childhood surrounded by their mother, siblings, and extended kin. Yet the young women would soon exchange the carefree days of winters at “Smithfield,” the family’s plantation in the Beaufort District, and summers at the family home in Charleston, for a life of uncertainty, fear, and isolation. Federal occupation of Port Royal in November of 1861 forced the family to abandon their South Carolina domiciles for a refugee home in Greenville. At first, the move hardly disrupted the lives of the two young daughters. Despite bouts of home sickness, they mostly enjoyed visits with family and were invited to a number of social engagements in the community. Their lives soon took a dramatic turn in June of 1864 when news that William, their oldest brother, had been wounded during the Battle of Cold Harbor reached the refugee household. Eliza Smith left to nurse William, leaving her two teenage daughters to assume the responsibilities of the home and family. Gradually, they learned to manage domestic affairs, taking 73 care of the household finances and caring for the younger children. Both Anna and Belle experienced some resistance from their mother, who was unable or unwilling to recognize her daughters’ ability to handle adult responsibilities. Neverthless, despite her opposition, Eliza had little choice but to entrust the young women with caring for the home in her absence. The daughters likewise were left no alternatives but to do their part in sustaining the family through the remainder of the war.1 The transition of the Smith sisters from dependent daughters to autonomous managers of the home and family exemplified the transition of the generation of women coming of age in the Confederacy. Before the war, age and class allowed young women of the middling and elite slaveholding classes to avoid wage-earning work and the household responsibilities reserved for older kin and slaves. But the war transformed their roles within the home, and economic necessity propelled them into the southern workforce. They acquiesced, sometimes reluctantly, to their new responsibilities out of a sense of duty. As their fathers and brothers sacrificed on the battlefront, and their mothers struggled to manage the household in their absence, southern daughters came to accept that they too must make sacrifices. They believed that their contributions to the household economy in the form of labor would help the family survive the war intact and preserve the security of their home. The sense of self reliance that came from their work in and, sometimes, out of the home did lead to tensions in households on occasion, as parental authority seemed distant or removed from the home. The demise of slavery, moreover, disrupted their dependence upon household servants and brought them to question the loyalty and necessity of slavery. Young women’s sense of autonomy gained through the reorientation of familial roles in Confederate households, however, failed to produce any fundamental change in their perceptions of patriarchal power. Contrarily, they took on new responsibilities in an effort to preserve their racial and class privilege, believing that when the war ended they would return to their prewar roles and relationships in the home. The irony of young women’s situation was evident by the end of the Civil War. Southern daughters had gained a sense of autonomy from patriarchal dependency through their efforts to sustain the domestic economy. The absence of fathers and brothers in slaveholding families forced a redistribution of power and labor in the household. Mothers both on the The Self-Sufficient Daughter 74 plantations and in the cities found themselves thrust into traditionally...