Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931): "I Will Have to Say 'Damn!' Yet, Before I Am Done with Them"

147 Eliza Frances Andrews (1840–1931) “I Will Have to Say ‘Damn!’ Yet, Before I Am Done with Them” christopher j. olsen    Eliza Frances Andrews was the sort of educated, witty, and independent, stereotype-flouting woman about whom historians seem to love reading and writing. It is easy to be engaged by someone who notes casually that a friend “has lent me Les Miserables in French, which I read whenever I can steal a moment during the week.” She was also blissfully condescending and a miserable racist. Her published works are filled with the bitterness that a generation of southern whites held toward all things Yankee; when she edited and published her wartime diary in 1908 there was little forgiveness, even forty-three years after Appomattox. In 1865 she expressed nothing but hatred for northerners and almost nothing but contempt for freedpeople. She wished every “wretched Yankee ” “had a strapping, loud-smelling African tied to him like a Siamese twin.” “Oh, how I hate them!” she concluded, “I will have to say ‘Damn!’ yet, before I am done with them.” Her feelings toward Yankees and African Americans mellowed just slightly with age, although her racism was undiluted. The visceral hatred of northerners, so evident in 1865, evolved into a deeper resentment, even half-pity, over their “arrogance” at believing they could transform the nation and African Americans simply by making them voters. Certainly the two emotions fed each other: she hated Yankees for winning the war and imposing emancipation and the Fifteenth Amendment; free African Americans were a constant reminder of defeat and northern power. The “passion and fury” of Reconstruction, she concluded, had led to the great “fatal mistake” of black eliza frances andrews From War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl. Courtesy of UNC University Library. Eliza Frances Andrews 149 male suffrage, which “injected a race problem into our national life,” and she predicted a race war that would make “the tragedy of the Civil War [seem like] child’s play.” Certainly some educated white southerners made peace with defeat and worked for reconciliation with the North and a patriotic reunion. Andrews was not one of them.1 In so many ways the Civil War shaped her entire adult life, upsetting all the normal expectations for a woman of her class and education, and leaving memories that never faded. The night Georgia seceded from the Union remained a vivid moment, even after forty-eight years. “I shall never forget that night when the news came that Georgia had seceded,” she wrote in 1908. “[T]he people . . . were celebrating the event with bonfires and bell ringing and speech making,” but her father “shut himself up in his house, darkened the windows, and paced up and down the room in the greatest agitation.” He paused occasionally, she recalled, to shout “Poor fools!”2 Her father’s Unionism and her own fanatical Confederate patriotism, the unfiltered excitement of the moment and all of the cataclysmic changes that followed undoubtedly kept those moments so fresh in her mind. The history of Georgia’s women in the nineteenth century was dominated by the Civil War and Reconstruction. Unlike its most famous heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, the revolutionary changes of these years simply overwhelmed many whites, who never adjusted to some of the new realities. The war ended slavery and devastated much of the planter class, overturning the traditional hierarchies of race and class. Then the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed black men the right to vote and in less than a decade whites were faced with slaves-become-Congressmen. The conflict killed more than one-fourth of the white men between seventeen and fifty, and in some areas simply erased the basic structure of society and threw into chaos the most fundamental social and economic relationships. White men also faced the psychological damage that came from losing the war and failing to defend their society or protect and provide for their women and children. The effects of these blows to the South’s collective male ego are now being examined seriously by historians, but it may be sufficient simply to consider the impact of these failures on southern gender relations. Southern white women, in turn, took on the task of revitalizing the male psyche for the entire region, in part through the literature and imagery of the “Lost Cause.”3 The course of these tumultuous years—particularly the emotions and attitudes of southern...