Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South (review)

For many decades Southern novelists have insisted that understanding families is crucial to understanding the South. Only in the past thirty or so years, however, have scholars turned systematic attention to examining Southern families' structure and dynamics and the interaction of historical forces and families. This volume furthers that analysis.

Drawing from a 1998 conference on the Civil War at the University of Richmond, editor Catherine Clinton has assembled twelve articles that assess the impact of that conflict on Southern families. Stressing the diversity of Southerners, the authors focus on families scattered from Virginia to Texas who defy stereotypes: those of freedmen and freedwomen, slaveholding East Tennesseans, Jewish converts (both black and white) to Christianity, German immigrants, as well as yeomen and planters of varied wealth and prominence. The volume emphasizes that while human beings may partake of a common calamity, no single generalization can capture the particulars of that ordeal nor glibly summarize its effects on individuals and families.

The best of the essays offer inventive and perceptive analyses informed by a deep humanity. Illustrative of those qualities is Michael P. Johnson's article tracing freedpeoples' efforts to locate missing kinfolk through advertisements in the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Christian Recorder. Although almost a third of those placing notices had been apart from family for over twenty years, they persisted in their often fruitless efforts to find loved ones.

While Johnson stresses reunion, Michelle A. Krowl reminds us that not all family members necessarily wanted to be reunited; some used wartime chaos as an easy exit. In Virginia, Krowl finds the interference of the military and various government entities both a help and a hindrance to black family stability. The army impressed black men but also tried to reunite black families under males, whom it sought to reinforce as patriarchs—a status that contradicted more egalitarian relationships under slavery. Both Krowl and Donald R. Shaffer argue that scholars have been too quick to emphasize the universality of slaves' legalizing their marriages after slavery. Indeed, more informal arrangements persisted for several decades after the war and, in Shaffer's words, "compet[ed] for adherents" with legal marriage.

E. Susan Barber and Jennifer Lynn Gross bookend the life course of marriage in their studies of courtship and widowhood, respectively. Barber finds that Richmond offered an abundance of men and marriages during the war, while out in Brunswick county, only 30 percent of Gross' sample of seventy widows remarried. Over time Confederate widows became enshrined as the Confederacy's "good angels."

Other convincing articles focus on the significance of evangelicalism in understanding Southerners' response to war. Views of heaven loomed large. Ted Ownby perceptively analyzes numerous writings to argue that patriarchy was absent from Southerners' ideas of heaven, which emphasized the warmth and closeness of families. In a haunting narrative, Daniel W. Stowell follows the fortunes of Eliza Fain of East Tennessee through family separation and loss of property, slaves, and the Confederacy, yet he finds her strength in her religious faith. Faith, as well as sociology, played a role in the conversion of both black and white Southern Jews, according to Lauren F. Winner. As marginalized persons in Southern society, some Jews hoped to gain respectability through conversion, but they were as often inspired by genuine religious conviction. Similarly, Anne J. Bailey studies another group of outsiders—a family of German immigrants (the Coreths) to the Texas hill country—who sought to prove their "Southerness" by serving in the Confederate army but who became estranged from the Confederate cause. Yet, as Bailey notes, to refuse to fight offered no viable option either; the Coreths were caught.

Unfortunately, not all the articles are as convincing. Amy E. Murrell argues that Confederate citizens' petitions to the government reflected not discontent but rather "negotiation" predicated on...