Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War

2. The Politicized Belle

 4HE 0OLITICIZED "ELLE IN THE UNION-OCCUPIED CITY OF KNOXVILLE, Tennessee , a federal officer approached nineteen-year-old Ellen Renshaw House about her apparent patriotism for the Confederate cause. He asked if she believed that “reconstructing the Union” would ever be possible. She called the idea “simply ridiculous,” and argued that “southern children hated the Yankee nation from the time they were born, and the hatred grew with their growth and strengthened with their strength.” This and similar declarations by House soon earned her a measure of notoriety among the occupiers. Eventually, a Union general sent word to her parents that she would be banished from town unless she tempered her behavior. She insisted, however, that “the only thing I have ever done was to wave to our poor fellows as they were going north to prison.”1 In actuality, House had done more than just wave to Confederate soldiers . She worked with others in Knoxville to collect blankets and other goods for prisoners of war, visited prisoners in the hospital, and brazenly spoke her mind to Union soldiers. House went too far, however, when she insulted the wife of an officer. Officials retaliated by ordering her to leave Knoxville. Although her mother wanted to go with her, House chose to go by herself, eventually making her way to Eatonville, Tennessee, where she continued to aid the Confederate war effort.2 Although House was eventually sent away for her actions, her age and gender allowed her to defy the enemy and aid the Confederacy for over a year. Seventeen when the war broke out, she had matured into a young adult by the time the Yankees occupied Knoxville in 1863; but she was still considered a young woman, unmarried and under the protection of her family. She used this fact to escape punishment, until the occupiers’ patience ran out altogether. The decision to exile House, furthermore, 35 shows that the occupiers recognized the political power of young women and held them accountable for their actions. House too understood the political significance of her support for the war and flaunted her banishment like a badge of honor. Although few young women received such severe punishment for their patriotism, House’s sentiments exemplified the extent to which teenage daughters would defend the southern cause. House and her peers heeded the calls for Confederate patriotism and joined their mothers in the civic world of war work. Their loyalism, however , stemmed from reasons quite different from those of the older generations of women. Unlike their mothers and other female kin, these youths awaited the realization of the roles that parents, educators, and clergy taught them to expect, and the outcome of the war would help them achieve it. To shirk their duty to the Confederate cause for which so many of their male kin were dying thus would threaten to derail their plans for the future. This effort to ensure a traditional path to womanhood encouraged civic involvement and outspoken support for the Confederate cause. As a result, women coming of age in wartime found their own political voice. Their youth permitted a degree of freedom in their patriotic expressions much greater than that permitted their mothers and older female kin. Their mothers saw their primary responsibility as being to the survival and protection of the family while their daughters, because of their age and position in the family, were free from such concerns. They manifested their political engagement through their knowledge of military battles and leaders, their clothing, their social activities, their relationships with peers, and their interactions with Union soldiers. While these young women gained a new political identity by participating in public events and speaking out in defense of the Confederacy, they were not seeking to overturn the conventions of the antebellum past but rather to conserve them. The environment that permitted young women to participate in politics and civic affairs was one in which the lines between public and private life were blurred. Historians have shown that the war often heightened women’s civic activism and created new spaces in which they could express their political beliefs. The politically charged atmosphere that war produced allowed public affairs to invade the domestic arena, while the civic domain became a place of informal political exchanges. Likewise, within the home, women often hosted social activities during which they The Politicized Belle 36 expressed their political views. Women’s political participation took place in the domestic setting where they...