Children and Youth during the Civil War Era

8. Love in Battle: The Meaning of Courtships in the Civil War and Lost Cause

| 125 8 Love in Battle The Meaning of Courtships in the Civil War and Lost Cause Victoria E. Ott In 1911, Emma Riely Macon published her remembrances of life in the Union-occupied town of Winchester, Virginia. Born in 1847, young Macon experienced the Civil War as a teenage youth coming of age in a secessionist, slaveholding household. Her narrative, an ardent defense of the Confederate South in the postwar years, retold accounts of her interaction with Union soldiers. She depicted an internal struggle between remaining loyal to the Confederate cause and the desire to pursue romantic relations amid a dearth of southern gentlemen. Her notion of patriotic duty meant making the needed sacrifices, even declining social activities so common to young women her age. This was a difficult feat for someone in her stage of life, as she recalled. One evening a Union officer, a man of similar socioeconomic status and respectable reputation, approached her with an invitation for a sleigh ride through the city. The request, one of many invitations she received from Union soldiers, tested her sense of loyalty. “It was oftentimes hard to resist,” she wrote, “and required all the loyalty I could bring to bear to do so.” When the officer suggested that she conceal her identity behind a veil, she responded that “her conscience would be behind that veil” and declined his invitation. She reminded readers that a true Confederate daughter struggled with such temptations on a daily basis: “What a severe test it was to my loyalty and devotion to my country to be able to resist my enemies when I might have enjoyed so many privileges dear to a young girl’s heart.”1 Understandably, Macon’s attempts to reject potential courtship activities in the grim environment of the Civil War South emerged from her devotion to the Confederate cause. Southern daughters who came of age in the Confederacy held tight to the gender ideals and racial ordering of the slaveholding culture. As young children reared in the Old South, they learned from their parents, teachers, and ministers to accept the feminine ideal that 126 | Victoria E. Ott heralded domesticity and maternity as the epitome of womanhood. And, from their earliest recollections, these daughters identified with the privileged class and delighted in the trappings of an elite, youth culture, including embellished fashion, private education, and participating in an array of social engagements. They had come to anticipate that they would one day assume their positions as wives, mothers, and slave mistresses, allowing them to retain their elite identity with all its trappings. Courtships as the process of finding a potential mate and maintaining elite kinship ties served as a means for young women to secure this cultural script.2 Unfortunately for these youths, the sectional conflict, wrapped, as it were, in the institution at the center of their way of life, threatened to eclipse their efforts to pursue a life course of privilege. The movement to abolish slavery challenged the continuation of the economic and social status of their families. The secession of the southern states and the formation of the Confederacy did, however, provide hope for the preservation of their life course and ultimately their sense of self. For this age-group in the formative stages of development, the Confederate cause meant nothing short of preserving their class and racial privilege. In demonstrating their allegiance to the Confederate cause, southern daughters turned to the primary feature of their youth culture: courtships. They transformed their romantic relationships into political expressions that were unique from those of their older, married female kin. Their courtship activities, moreover, helped sustain patriotic sentiment toward the southern cause in the face of growing economic, political, and social dissent. The effort to find continuity with the Old South past remained in the years following Confederate defeat. Young women, now adults, remained devoted to the traditional values and offered up their own version of the southern experience in hopes of venerating the region but also to advocate a return to the gender ordering of the antebellum period. Courtship stories likewise became the basis on which this group of southern youths constructed their own image, separate from that of older women of the war years, in the language and symbols of the postwar narrative that touted the Confederate mission as a noble cause. Concentrating on the lives of young women from slaveholding, secessionist families coming of age in a time of great regional strife over slavery’s expansion into the...