Grander in Her Daughters: Florida's Women during the Civil War (review)

Noting that Florida usually appears in studies of the Civil War only in relation to salt making, cattle production, blockade running, and the small battles of Olustee and Natural Bridge and is essentially absent from studies of the history of women, Tracy C. Revels sets out to contribute to the social history of the Civil War and of the state of Florida by telling the story of its women during the war years.

In addition to her focus on gender, Revels has paid attention to race, class, town/country distinctions, and Confederate/Unionist/neutral political stance. Beginning by painting a picture of Florida as a frontier area on the eve of secession, she describes—often in the words of the women themselves—Florida women's experiences, hardships, hopes and fears, contributions to the war effort, struggles to hold family together, and in some cases inability to find sufficient food. The reader comes to know Confederate plantation mistresses and town dwellers, Unionist women of all classes, and slave and free black women. A central theme of this book is that some Florida women "eagerly and aggressively supported the Confederate cause, but others were a mixture of the traumatized, the apathetic, and the vehemently opposed. . . . Eventually, even the hottest female firebrands extinguished the Confederate flame, called for peace, and pondered what insanity had motivated them from the start" (xii–xiii). Other lesser themes emerge throughout the work.

Revels has grounded her study in a wide variety of solid primary sources—manuscript collections in Florida's libraries, newspapers, the WPA slave narratives, some military records, and published letters, memoirs, and other records produced by Federal and Confederate soldiers and Florida's white and black men and women. Thoughtful utilization of these primary sources and the classic as well as recent secondary literature on the history of Florida, the history of Southern women, and the Civil War in Florida has resulted in an excellent study of Florida's women during the Civil War. It is possible that others may be able to add to this portrayal by utilizing more systematically the published official records of the Union and Confederate armies and navies, by exploring U.S. army and treasury records in the National Archives, by utilizing the Papers of Jefferson Davis (1971- ) and other sets of published papers, or by seeking additional correspondence or other manuscripts in repositories outside Florida, but the groundwork has been laid and a strong structure has been built.

Grander in My Daughters is an important contribution to the growing literature on Unionists in the Confederacy and adds to our understanding of the interactions between U.S. occupying forces and Confederate civilians, slaves, and Unionist white civilians. As a study of women on the home front, it details the experiences of Florida elite women but adds little to the usual picture of active support of the Confederacy during the first two years of the war. It adds considerable information regarding understudied Unionist plain folk and elite women and informs us of the great variety of experiences and responses to the wartime conditions faced by slave women and, to a lesser extent, free women of color. Finally, this study provides additional evidence in support of the growing consensus that white Confederate women of all classes, even as early as the second year of the war, began calling on husbands and sons to come home: fearing the death of their loved ones and being overwhelmed by their expanded responsibilities, experiencing increasing hardships (especially among "crackers" and those of middling means), fearing for their own safety due to visits from Yankee and Confederate soldiers and the general lack of law and order, and (among planter women) fearing what increasingly surly and angry slaves might do...