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Chapter 4 Mary Anne Cruse’s CAMERON HALL: A STORY OF THE CIVIL WAR I am too sick at heart to write any more. —Emma LeConte1 Born in 1825, Mary Anne Cruse grew up in urban affluence in Huntsville, Alabama, rather than on a rural plantation. Her family did not own slaves; however, “their income, local political participation, and their affiliation with the local Episcopalian Church placed the family in the center of Huntsville society ” (Arnston 67). Huntsville was located in Madison County, which before the war had the largest slave population in the state, but it also owed its rapid growth during the years leading up to the Civil War to the commercial development associated with industrialization, especially in cotton and transportation . Completed in 1857, the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, which ran through Huntsville, was the first railway to link the Atlantic seacoast and the lower Mississippi River. As a result, Huntsville was poised to become a center for the cotton textile industry after the war, as industrialization and the end of slavery created a new economy and social structure in the South.2 Cruse, who also ran a private school in her home, began writing children’s books in 1854. Cameron Hall: A Story of the Civil War was her only adult novel. Although Cruse states in the preface that she completed this novel “several months before the termination of the war,” it was not published by J. B. Lippincott of Philadelphia until 1867. Further, its dark conclusion, which acknowledges the inevitability of the South’s defeat, strikingly distinguishes it from southern novels published during the war (1). One of the most popular southern novels about the war that was published during Reconstruction, 80 Novels from Reconstruction Cameron Hall depicts the lives of a plantation family in Hopedale, Virginia; however, it also resonates with the experiences of its author in Huntsville, which was occupied by Federal troops during much of the war. In characterizing her approach in developing the narrative, Cruse writes that “all exaggeration has been avoided, and a middle ground has been taken.” Satisfied with the outcome, she claims to have created “a truthful picture . . . not only of scenes and events which occurred immediately around the author’s home, but also of the inner thoughts and feelings, the hopes and expectations, in a word, the animus of the Southern heart” (1). Cruse’s sense of horror at the realities of war and her bitterness toward the North both register strongly in Cameron Hall, which rings with its partisan views and refuses any conciliatory moves. Cruse uses liberal doses of Lost Cause rhetoric to present a pro-Confederate perspective on the cause, course, and outcome of the war, as well as its devastating impact on the South. At the end of the novel, only a few characters survive to face the challenges of Reconstruction. Through her depiction of the particular strengths of these survivors, as well as the characteristics and deaths of their loved ones, Cruse not only mourns the passing of the Old South and the tragic costs of the Civil War but also the burden of an uncharted future. Cameron Hall opens in the late 1840s with descriptions of the ancestral plantation home for which the novel is named and the family that resides there. Foreshadowing its fate, the Hall is depicted as “old fashioned in the meaning of that word in this country of rapid progress and development.” Built by the current owner’s grandfather, it is regarded “in this new world of ours as a very old mansion.” Although outdated, the Hall still affords “both present enjoyment and pleasing memories to all who participated in them,” but its future seems uncertain even before the war begins, suggesting the precarious situation of the entire region it symbolizes (Cameron Hall 7). Even as the novel serves to defend the hierarchical institution of slavery, Cruse also suggests that the South’s conservative worldview and agrarian economy are out of step not only with the North’s progressive capitalism and unfolding industrialism but also with its own best interests. As Robert Hunt observes, “Cameron Hall creates a plantation whose dominant characteristic is total tranquility; its chief virtues are ease and quiet isolation” (17). Built on the traditional values of piety, morality, and paternalism, Cameron Hall, its inhabitants, and their way of life are vulnerable in their isolation and take no proactive measures to protect themselves. Henry Cameron, his invalid wife, and their four children—George, Julia, Walter...

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