Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia

Introduction

1 Introduction In 1861 and 1862, James Redd,William Dix, and Joseph miller enlisted in the Confederate Army from Pittsylvania County and Danville,Virginia.So too did george and James, the husbands of Barsheba Adams and Jane Smith. By the end of the war, Smith’s and Adams’s husbands were dead, Redd had been wounded, and miller had lost his leg and spent a year as a Union prisoner of war. By 1870, Dix’s family had lost 80 percent of their 1860 wealth, nearly $10,000. Beset with financial difficulties for many years, Dix attempted suicide . for these five soldiers and their families, the Civil War had brought significant consequences. yet none of the members of these veteran families passively accepted their lot.They each employed strategies intended to maintain or reconstruct their families during and after the conflict. During the war, James Redd appealed for assistance to a member of the local elite, while Barsheba Adams and Jane Smith turned to their churches and families for emotional support . After the war, mt. Hermon and Kentuck Baptist churches also provided the widows with financial assistance. In the aftermath of William Dix’s suicide attempt,his family sent him to Virginia’s Western Lunatic Asylum,from which he returned nineteen months later, apparently recovered. Joseph miller turned to the state of Virginia for an artificial limb as well as for financial support, eventually gaining a pension in the later years of the nineteenth century. In the first years of the twentieth century, James Redd entered the Lee Camp Soldiers’ Home, a state-supported home for disabled and elderly Confederate veterans. Like thousands of Pittsylvania’s veteran families, these men and women looked for ways to cope with the consequences of the Civil War that often transcended the structure of their families.1 The goals of this study are twofold. first, it assesses the short- and longterm impact of the war on Confederate veteran families of all classes in Pittsylvania County and Danville, Virginia. Those families whose husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons served in the Confederate Army were affected demographically , economically, emotionally, and psychologically for the rest of their lives by what can be described as the human impact of the Civil War. Second, this book explores an array of strategies employed by those families to deal with the 2 take care of the living war’s consequences, including reorganizing and reconstructing the household, turning to local churches for emotional and economic support, pleading with local elites for financial assistance or positions, sending psychologically damaged family members to a state-run asylum, and looking to the state for direct assistance in the form of replacement limbs for amputees, pensions, and even state-supported homes for old soldiers and widows. Although these strategies or institutions for reconstructing the family had their roots in previous practices , the extreme need of veteran families brought on by the scope and impact of the Civil War required an expansion beyond anything previously seen, eventually resulting in a wide-ranging state social-welfare system. This work sits at the crossroads of three vibrant fields of scholarship: the social and cultural history of Civil War soldiers, the role of gender and family in the Civil War era, and the study of Southern social welfare. Scholars in the first area have described the difficult living and fighting conditions, debated the motivations of soldiers in enlisting, and catalogued the diseases, wounds, and deaths experienced. In studies of Civil War veterans, those historians have emphasized the roles of postwar organizations, military homes, and soldiers’ pensions.2 Historians examining the Southern household during the Civil War and Reconstruction have made clear that the conflict and emancipation significantly affected gender roles and relations—though these historians have debated the long-term effects of these events—and shaped a Southern transition from a potentially multiracial household to a more exclusive white family.3 The final field has been defined in recent years by Elna green’s two edited volumes and her sweeping analysis of two hundred years of Richmond’s welfare history.green and other scholars have connected the history of Southern social welfare to the larger American narrative, arguing that the South’s approach to assistance to the needy was uniquely Southern, though heavily influenced at times by trends in American society.4 In building on the scholarship and approaches of these three fields, this work contributes to the larger discussion in several key ways. first, given that families were the fundamental...