The Rhetoric of Rebel Women: Civil War Diaries and Confederate Persuasion by Kimberly Harrison (review)

During the U.S. Civil War, Northern women stereotyped Southern women’s speech as crude and shrill. Although desperate Southern women might occasionally exhibit rhetorical behavior that fit this stereotype, in their diaries, middle and upper-class Confederate women represent themselves as holding to Southern values of honor and womanhood despite having to bear alone the burdens of family life without their men. Florida International University associate professor of English Kimberly Harrison reveals this and more to readers of rhetoric and Civil War history, having analyzed more than 100 diaries of these white women who often lived through Union occupation of their towns, lands, and homes. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women comes on the heels of Harrison’s edited diary of Priscilla Bond (A Maryland Bride in the Deep South, 2006), with its highly praised scholarly introduction and notes.

Only a few Northern women came face-to-face with Confederate soldiers raiding their homes and pantries, but many Southern women negotiated life under enemy occupation of their towns, lands, or homes. Doing so changed their speech and writing, necessarily increasing focus on the rhetoric they used in public and in private as a way to protect themselves and their families. Often their private diaries served as sites for reflecting on the audiences for their language and the rhetorical concepts of the most prudent attitudes and behaviors involving speaking and writing.

Early on, Harrison makes clear how a broad vision of rhetoric serves to help her understand these women’s texts, asking, “What did they say? In which contexts did they speak or remain silent? What do their rhetorical choices, or at least their recounting of their choices, tell us about how they defined their wartime roles?” (xvi). She uses the concept of “self-rhetoric” throughout to describe women’s cultivation of agency and rhetorical self as performed in the diary-writing (15). Classical conceptions of ethos and rhetorical decorum (19) also thread through her chapters, along with the notion of prudence, the wisdom of public rhetoric, and action in various contexts. The persuasion of the title is sometimes directed at Union soldiers and sometimes at themselves, but ultimately at God, for the South was deeply Christian, as it is today.

The Rhetoric of Rebel Women analyzes more than 100 personal diaries of white women obtained from archives or media collections across the South. This ambitiously large number of artifacts shows the influence of social science methods, yet the book itself is overwhelmingly humanistic, the chapters following a more rhetorical or literary fashion with themes and pertinent examples. The order is approximately chronological, with chapters congealing around audiences (Union soldiers, family members, slaves, community members, men away at war, the diarists themselves, even God) or prominent themes relevant to the formation of Southern women’s or Confederate identity. This theme of identity is a productive one for rhetorical analysis, as evidenced in her treatment of identity formation as that of “Southern honor,” which she points out is highly rhetorical and central to Southern culture. This rhetorically intense concept “required self-persuasion and representation, community agreement and audience acceptance” (19). She links this self-rhetoric to ethos, decorum, or what is fitting in rhetoric, making it a key analytic for her readings. This helps elucidate the gender complexities of being a Southern “lady” who needs protection while she herself becomes her family’s or even the South’s protector when facing Union men.

In Harrison’s introduction, she notes that in histories of nineteenth-century rhetoric, the South is underrepresented so that she intends her book, in part, to fill a gap. However, she is also correcting the record or challenging stereotypes that Southern women’s Civil War rhetoric was either too passive or too “shrewishly patriotic,” even profane. Her work brings the women’s writing into the fuller context of Southern nationalism, in rhetorical contexts that were often filled with tension and danger...