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83 3 Guarded Tongues/Secure Communities: Rhetorical Responsibilities and “Everyday” Audiences �In June 1864, twenty-year-old Pauline DeCaradeuc turned to her diary after an absence of several days. Despite high wartime prices and shortages of food and other necessities, her family had opened their home near Aiken, South Carolina, to relatives and friends who were refugees. Yet with a house full, DeCaradeuc was challenged in meeting her responsibilities to her guests and family. Mourning the death of two brothers and, more recently , a former beau in the war, she longed for the privacy and space within which to deal with her grief. As she explained in her diary, “Our family is some days numbered at sixteen, thirteen being now the usual number and I feel so like quiet, and only home around; it’s unamiable to feel so, but tho I never show it, I feel it. I write a heap here of what no one could dream I ever felt. [. . .] My heart most usually bleeds inwardly, and this Journal is the only thing in this world that ever gets a peep into it, it’s a comfort for me to write here sometimes; my desk is so private, so entirely my own.”1 For DeCaradeuc, her diary served as a private space in a home crowded with fearful and anxious refugees, a repository for the emotions she did not want to show publicly. As an elite Southern daughter, DeCaradeuc’s domestic responsibilities were to assist in maintaining as comfortable and peaceable a home as possible, despite wartime hardships, and her diary assisted her in doing so by providing audience for words she silenced publicly. Not every Southern woman came face-to-face with Union soldiers, but most did take on wartime rhetorical responsibilities within their homes and communities, locations often transformed by war. As previous chapters illustrate, boundaries between the public and the private and between the personal and the political, never as clear as one might assume, blurred � Guarded Tongues/Secure Communities � 84 even further within Southern homes during wartime. For some privileged Southern white women, bearing domestic hardship well was cast as a patriotic duty, with the Southern media often instructing women in domestic wartime behavior.2 Praised for their self-sacrifice, they were likewise condemned when seemingly forgetting their wartime responsibilities. The flippant poem “Ella Nocare,” for example, portrayed a “false woman’s” forgetfulness of her husband’s sacrifice on the battlefield in favor of parties and overspending. Likewise, a published letter attributed to a Southern woman cautioned against “sinful vanity” and “sinful levity,” instructing fellow Confederate women to remember the sacrifices of the “mothers of the Revolution.”3 Even without the presence of Union forces, women were encouraged to remember their national troubles and to act accordingly to support the Confederate war effort by performing their duties at home. At times, the Southern home was a space in which to communally generate and sustain Confederate identity and allegiance, often through literacy acts. Diarists wrote of reading patriotic speeches and literature to and with others. New Orleans resident Julia Le Grand, for example, chronicled her reading of Northern congressman and Southern sympathizer Clement Vallandigham’s anti-Union speeches to other women as they spent an evening in the parlor. “[W]‍e were all profoundly affected,” she reported. In South Carolina, Emma Holmes also read to her aunts “the splendid speech of Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, Representative of Lincoln’s Congress, delivered in Congress last week against the usurpations of Lincoln.” Holmes, while born into an elite Charleston family, began to experience economic hardship during the war, especially after her family home was destroyed by fire in December 1861. Yet, even after this significant loss and subsequent relocation as a refugee to the small inland town of Camden, Holmes continued to participate in communal and patriotic reading. She described meetings with her book club in which the women read aloud patriotic novels such as Beverly Tucker’s Partisan Leader, which, although written before the war, imagined Southern secession and thus was reprinted and well-circulated after war began. Likewise, Virginia’s Sue Richardson, as outlined in the previous chapter, read with her family The Life of Stonewall Jackson while Union soldiers dined in their home, and in east Tennessee, young Myra Inman’s sister read the same book aloud to her mother. Mary Chadick in Alabama noted staying up late with her husband, a Presbyterian minister and Confederate officer, reading The Partisan: A Tale of...

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