In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction If southern women writing Civil War novels during the war experienced uncertainty about their future, they at least still wrote without the bitter knowledge of defeat that accompanied the end of armed conflict between North and South. As a result, they could fashion hopeful conclusions to their narratives that envisioned a victory designed to preserve their society’s way of life. Southern women writing after Appomattox had no such illusions. James M. McPherson succinctly calculates the economic toll of the war on the South by writing that: . . . contrary to predictions, the South was not only invaded and conquered, it was utterly destroyed. By 1865, the Union forces had . . . destroyed two-thirds of the assessed value of Southern wealth, two-fifths of the South’s livestock, and one-quarter of her white men between the ages of twenty and forty. More than half the farm machinery was ruined, and the damage to railroads and industries was incalculable. While total Northern wealth increased by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent. (Ordeal 476) While the material losses associated with the collapse of the Confederacy were devastating, southern whites were also thoroughly demoralized by their defeat and the end of the slave-labor system that had long sustained not only the economic but also the social fabric of their society. Although President Abraham Lincoln had developed a formal plan for reunification of the country in 1863, members of Congress did not agree on a vision for the postwar South, which increased the sense of frustration and confusion that characterized life in the former Confederacy. Andrew Johnson, who had assumed the presidency upon the assassination of Lincoln on 14 April 1865, interpreted the Constitution to give his office full power over Reconstruction . Accordingly, while Congress was in recess during the summer of 1865, he 52 Novels from Reconstruction acted unilaterally to institute his own plan for reunification and amnesty. Under Johnson’s terms, with which all former Confederate states complied by December 1865, the southern states retained their constitutional rights and were required merely to revoke their ordinances of secession, nullify their war debts, and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which had abolished slavery. Although high-ranking Confederates and southerners owning taxable property valued at more than $20,000 were exempted unless they successfully petitioned the government, most white southerners received full amnesty and a return of all property except slaves in exchange for pledging an oath of allegiance. Radical Republicans took exception to Johnson’s plan, which “put enormous authority back in the hands of white Southerners, but without any provisions for black civil or political rights. Johnson . . . openly encouraged the South to draft its notorious Black Codes, laws enacted across the South by the fall of 1865 that denied the freedman political liberty and restricted their economic options and physical mobility.” In contrast to Presidential Reconstruction , the Radical Republican “ideology was grounded in the notion of an active federal government, a redefinition of American citizenship that guaranteed equal political rights for black men, and faith in free labor in a competitive capitalist system” (Blight 45, 47). In 1866, this concept of equality before the law was formalized and supported by the Fourteenth Amendment, which eliminated race as a factor in determining citizenship, as well as by the renewal of the Freedman’s Bureau over Johnson’s veto and the passage of the country’s first civil rights act. In the ensuing years, Reconstruction continued to be a much contested struggle over divergent ideas, interests, and collective memory, and government coercion was often required to move the nation toward unification . At stake in this contest “were fundamentally different conceptions of the war’s results, and especially of the place of the freedman in the new policy. Much hinged on this evolving core memory of the war” (Blight 54). The South romanticized the institution of slavery, and the North congratulated itself on the role it had played in liberating the slaves. Otherwise, however, the dominant white narratives in both the North and South emphasized the war itself—rather than slavery—as the traumatic, rupturing event in the nation’s history, even though they offered differing interpretations of the event and its consequences. Although they had no vote or formal political voice, women in both sections of the country played an important role in developing these competing responses to the threatened sense of collective identity that the war had created. Southern white women, in particular, were moved to respond to...

Share