The Big House after Slavery: Virginia Plantation Families and Their Postbellum Domestic Experiment

TWO. Keeping Up Appearances A Crisis of Status in Virginia's Postwar Plantation Households

54 two Keeping up appearances A Crisis of Status in Virginia’s Postwar Plantation Households I n฀ the฀ spring฀ of฀ 1883,฀ lila hubard filed for divorce from her husband, William, a member of a wealthy buckingham County planter family. how and when their marital troubles began is not clear, but in the divorce proceedings both lila and William claimed that the other had neglected spousal responsibilities. family members recalled William’s troubles with drinking and physical abuse, noting in particular one episode a few years after the war when William got “beastly drunk, went about the house in his shirttail—fell down in the parlor and went to sleep with his head in the fire place.” the next morning William angrily took hold of his wife and “choked her severely,” even though she was caring for their fiveweek -old baby. lila’s divorce attorneys, however, chose not to focus their case on such appalling incidents of abuse. instead, they argued that lila Keeping Up Appearances 55 deserved a divorce because William was not a good provider and therefore not a satisfactory husband. “they tried to make it appear that William’s table was miserably scant[,] his children dressed in old Calicoes[,] etc and lila miserably clad,” William’s brother robert reported after attending the court hearing. similarly, William’s allies alleged that lila had not fulfilled her obligations as a nurturing and submissive wife. they attempted to cast lila as a shrew by testifying that she was “not patient and forbearing” when she suspected William of drinking.1 the marriage of William and lila hubard ended at least in part because both spouses could no longer endure the strain of a difficult postwar situation . the couple had settled down onto their own plantation in Nelson County—a valuable farm property given to them by William’s father— near the close of the war, but William quickly became disenchanted with farming under the free labor system. in 1867, he turned his attention away from the plantation and invested in a local merchandise business. Within a year, however, his business venture had failed, and William returned to planting. he also began drinking heavily. his alcohol abuse only made his financial problems worse, since his drinking binges prevented him from effectively managing plantation operations. at one point, William’s brothers contemplated intervening by hiring a foreman or overseer to live on the premises and to conduct the sale and delivery of plantation products, while lila would retain the “keys to the corn house” and supervise all business orders. William’s brothers believed that a “strong and brave white man” was needed to restore order on the plantation and to exercise authority over William, who had lost all sense of mastery himself.2 in such an arrangement, lila would also have held a rather powerful position on the plantation. though a capable overseer would have brought her considerable aid, lila was the one who would have had control over all business decisions and access to goods made on the plantation. the exercise of that much power by a married woman—whose husband was still sane and present—was far from customary in the nineteenth-century south. William’s brothers likely never followed through with their plan, but hubard family postwar letters show that some shift in work responsibilities did take place on the troubled plantation and that these changes increased the value of lila’s contributions to the household. lila, like many other women from elite virginia families, put herself to work for the benefit of the plantation. she proudly reported her hard work in the kitchen garden, 56 The Big House after Slavery where she grew enough produce to feed her family and bring in a little extra money to help with household finances.3 lila, however, also struggled to come to terms with the harsh realities of the postwar world. she could not surrender her desire to live as a member of the elite, in the lavish manner to which she had been accustomed. both she and William continued to believe that the aesthetic appearance of their home and surrounding property was an important marker of their class status. after they lost their home to a fire in the early 1870s, William purchased Montezuma, a 540-acre estate, for his family. he and lila appreciated its beautiful yard, its “commanding . . . view up and down [the] James river,” its “splendid shade...