Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia (review)

One hundred and fifty years later, historians like Jeffrey McClurken rightfully remind us that there is more to tell about the Civil War and its aftermath. In Take Care of the Living, McClurken assesses the human impact of the war on Confederate veterans and their families and explores the various strategies they employed to deal with the war's often harsh consequences. In focusing on Pittsylvania County and its county seat of Danville, Virginia, McClurken has chosen well. Pittsylvania County is, in many respects, representative of Virginia and the Confederacy, for the county did not see Union soldiers for extended periods of time, it was not ravaged extensively by the misfortunes of battle, and it sent a majority of its available white men off to fight the war. Four-fifths of the men of military age served in frontline duty. One out of four of them died. Half survived to return home, but only after being wounded, falling seriously ill, or being imprisoned. These staggering, yet typical, statistics allow McClurken to assess the social experience of these Confederate veterans and their families as they faced a wide scope of financial, physical, and psychological challenges.

Whereas many studies of the postwar era focus on the impact of emancipation, the political consequences of the war and its outcome, McClurken explores how families coped with the human consequences of the war. McClurken shows that as traditional relief strategies failed, veteran families increasingly turned to the state for support and assistance. In an ever-widening outward reach, Confederate veterans looked first to the family and home, the traditional unit of financial and emotional support. They moved in with extended members of the family, took in boarders, and used family members for additional means of income. The stress placed on the family unit led families to look to the community for support, namely, churches and individual local elites. Pittsylvania families turned to men like William T. Sutherlin, an elite Confederate veteran who managed to hold on to his wealth and status, for financial assistance. The state took on more responsibilities, providing artificial limbs for amputees, supporting mental asylums for those with psychological problems and soldiers' homes for veterans, and ultimately establishing a state pension system.

McClurken's findings are based on his analysis of a series of linked databases, one on the more than three thousand Confederate soldiers from the city of Danville and the surrounding county and the other on their families. To build these databases, McClurken culled material from military and pension records, the 1860 and 1870 population censuses, letters, diaries, and church and mental institution records. This quantitative research provides a solid foundation for assessing the economic impact of the war on the families of Confederate soldiers who were wounded or killed as compared to the families of soldiers who were not. His evidence indicates that having someone come back from the war wounded, sick, or otherwise damaged was almost as financially devastating as having that person die.

Pittsylvania blacks would not have been Confederate veterans and thus fall outside the realm of his study per se; however, McClurken makes no concentrated attempt to address issues such as how Pittsylvania County families coped with the loss of their labor source or their capital investment. Such discussion would have contributed to a more complete picture of the human impact of the war. Nonetheless, Take Care of the Living represents the most complete community-based study of how Confederate veteran families adjusted in the postwar South.

McClurken acknowledges the limits of his sources and samples, and he does not overstep or overgeneralize. Unfortunately, this sometimes leaves the reader desiring more. Did local elites, who like William Sutherlin managed to maintain their wealth and status through the war, assist Confederate veterans and their families? How did denominations other than the Baptists respond to the increased need for financial and emotional support? At the same time...