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25 1 Dangerous Words/Domestic Spaces: Invading Union Forces and Southern Women’s Rhetorical Efforts in Self-Protection �Union soldiers were a primary audience for Southern white women during the war and one that understandably caused them much fear and concern. While the Civil War was described throughout the Confederacy as one fought by Southern white men to protect home and hearth, women who were left alone on the home front were increasingly called upon to become their own protectors. Virginian Mary Eliza Powell Dulany stepped into this role after her husband left their large farm in the northern part of the state to serve in the Confederate army. When Confederate forces fell back in the spring of 1862, leaving the area open to Union occupation, Dulany’s husband wrote to his wife encouraging her to flee their home since it was located on a major thoroughfare frequently used by both armies and thus a likely target for plunder by soldiers living off the land. Yet, twenty-six-year-old Dulany confided in her diary, “I have determined to stand my ground.” Soon, she faced a barrage of frequent and unwelcomed visits by Union troops seeking food, supplies, and livestock. Dulany’s role as family protector was clear. As she explained in her diary, “If I pretend to keep the farm, the only way to do so is positively and firmly to resist the foragers when they come, or the place would soon be stripped of every thing we could subsist on.”1 In the Southern code of honor, as historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown explains , women “should have little cause to defend themselves” as that was “a male imperative.” And LeeAnn Whites describes antebellum Southern society as governed by the expectation of “gender quid pro quo between white men and women” in which women received paternalist protection in exchange for obedience and subordination. The Civil War disrupted such arrangements, as Dulany and her fellow Southerner Grace Brown Elmore � Dangerous Words/Domestic Spaces � 26 of South Carolina soon realized. Elmore noted her surprise at how quickly the social structure upon which she had depended had changed: “How queer the times—the women cant count on the men at all to help them they either laugh at us, or when they speak seriously ’tis to say they know not what to advise, we must do the best of our ability, but one thing they insist upon and that is to get away from the Yankee if possible.”Most women, however, as Dulany made clear, could not simply “get away” from Union forces without risking home and possessions, and many were not prepared to take such risk, in spite of advice from their men to flee.2 In carrying out Northern military strategy, Union forces were dispatched to both eastern and western portions of the Confederacy in an attempt to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond and the primary Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers with the goal of dividing the new nation. Much of the South was invaded. Some women, such as those in south Louisiana, experienced most of the war years under military occupation as New Orleans fell in April 1862, soon followed by the state capital of Baton Rouge, both of which remained under Union control throughout the conflict, along with much of the southern part of the state. Those civilians who lived near strategically significant areas, such as Dulany, whose home was near a road used by both armies, were likely to come in frequent contact with their enemy. Others experienced extended bombardments, as in Vicksburg, Mississippi, where a forty-six-day siege drove some residents from their homes to survive in caves until the firing ended. And still others lived in areas, such as Winchester, Virginia, subject to frequent raids that resulted in the city changing hands numerous times throughout the war. Residents near the vicinity of the desired Union prize of Richmond often heard battles nearby and saw troops passing through their towns, yards, and homes. For Virginia resident Ella Washington, a young mother and Confederate soldier’s wife living near the Confederate capital, the movement of troops outside her door became the norm, as did the sound of battle. “The drums beating constantly as usual this evening and night,” she wrote. “I get so tired of the everlasting tum tum.”3 Once Union soldiers arrived in a city or town, they often made their way into private homes to search for Confederate soldiers or arms, to set up...

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