Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861

Chapter 5: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Waiting for the Verdict

Chapter 5 Rebecca Harding Davis’s WAITING FOR THE VERDICT Justice is pictured blind, and her daughter, the Law, ought at least to be color-blind. —Albion Tourgée (qtd. in Elliott 2)1 Born on 24 June 1831, during a visit to the home of her maternal aunt and uncle in Washington, Pennsylvania, Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis spent the early years of her life in Big Spring (now Huntsville), Alabama. The Hardings moved to the newly chartered steel manufacturing town of Wheeling, Virginia, in 1836, where Davis grew up in middle-class security as the oldest of the family’s five children. Although she resided with her aunt and uncle in Pennsylvania for three years, while attending Washington Female Seminary, Davis returned to Wheeling after graduating as valedictorian in 1848 and then subsequently began her writing career under the apprenticeship of Archibald Campbell, who was editor of the Wheeling Intelligencer. After contributing editorials, reviews, and poems to the Intelligencer for a number of years, Davis was catapulted to success as an author of fiction when Atlantic Monthly published her first submission, “Life in the Iron Mills,” as its lead story in April 1861 and contracted her to write exclusively for them for the next six years. “Life in the Iron Mills,” which focuses on the abuses of industrial capitalism, established Davis as a writer who would repeatedly address controversial issues that affected both northern and southern readers during the last half of the nineteenth century.2 The publication of “Life in the Iron Mills” coincided with the advent of the Civil War, and Davis witnessed much of the turmoil of the country’s division when Wheeling became the location of two conventions that eventually 98 Novels from Reconstruction resulted in the separation of the western portion of the state of Virginia from the eastern portion that seceded from the Union. Wheeling was an obvious site for the formal rending of the state. The town “flanked the North and South; it had an active slave trade, yet, located across the river from the free state of Ohio, it also had become a station on the underground railroad and was picked by John Brown as a site for his insurrection” (Pfaelzer, “Common Stories” xxi). Although she moved to Pennsylvania after her marriage to Lemuel Clarke Davis in 1863, Davis observed the early days of the war firsthand from the windows of her family’s home, which was just across the street from the home claimed by General William S. Rosecrans as his command post during the Union occupation of Wheeling. In her autobiography, Bits of Gossip, which was not published until 1904, she recollects: The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were seized by one army or the other, or your shop or manufactory was closed, your trade ruined. . . . Below all the squalor and discomfort was the agony of suspense or the certainty of death. (116–17) Davis’s antebellum southern roots and wartime experiences on the literal border between North and South balanced her northern influences, making her uniquely qualified to write about the inequities of gender, race, and class that she observed in both regions without the sectional animosity that marks much of the literature of this time period. Reflecting her commitment to the power of literature to expose injustice and inspire reform, she made slavery and the war the subject of some of her most important fiction. Davis diverges from the example of most white women writers of this period , who Jane Tompkins claims confronted slavery only within the “‘closet’ of the heart” in sentimental fiction that “blots out the uglier details of life and cuts experience to fit a pattern of pious expectation” (151). Instead, Davis’s Civil War fiction of the 1860s attempts to move beyond stereotypes and conventions to represent the consequences of slavery on both black and white identity. Although this writing is marred by her own ambivalence about the humanity of black Americans and the ultimate outcome of the war and Reconstruction in 99 Rebecca Harding Davis’s WAITING FOR THE VERDICT terms of race relations, it is also innovative and progressive in...