Heroines of Dixie (review)

Book Reviews463 These things he did while remaining a charming person, a devoted husband, a scholar and gentieman of power, grace, and high ideals. Mr. Gibson's biography sheds little new light on this distinguished man, but the story is told in a straightforward and pleasant manner. For Civil War experts , there is very little more than the skirmish and capture at Manassas. But this biography does illuminate some of the problems of military medicine, and tells how science has contributed to the health of our army and our people, and to what a large degree this was the achievement of Sternberg. William B. Bean, m.d. Iowa City, Iowa. Heroines of Dixie. Edited by Katharine M. Jones. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1955. Pp. xiv, 430. $5.00.) notwithstanding ITS TTTLE and occasional pieces of fulsome phrasing in the introductory sections, this book belongs with modern compilations of primary material such as Henry Steele Commager's The Blue and the Gray, not with older volumes like Matthew Page Andrews' Women of the South in War Times, which consists largely of reflections by the editor. Miss Jones prints excerpts from letters, journals, and memoirs, grouped according to a chronological scheme and briefly annotated. The plan, of course, has some disadvantages: the writers come and go without one's getting the deep sense of a changing individual experience that the best of the published journals give. But the book offers material not easily found and, beyond this, pictures the suffering and action of a multitude of Confederate women. The heroines of Dixie are here assumed to be white Confederate sympathizers: Miss Jones includes nothing like Charlotte Fenton's account of her teaching at Port Royal and her glimpses of Negro women there and in Beaufort. But otherwise the range of temperament and condition is wide, largely because she has found a good deal of unpublished material in state archives and university libraries. The fourth section, for example, prints excerpts from the well-known memoirs of Cornelia McDonald, Constance Cary, Sarah Morgan, and Belle Boyd, hitherto unpublished letters from Elizabeth Harding (director of a huge plantation and wife of a general), letters from other women running plantations or farms in their husbands' absence, a passage from the manuscript diary of Betty Herndon Maury (daughter of the distinguished oceanographer) , an illiterate protest written by a mother to the Confederate government concerning the conduct of generals and surgeons, and a touching note from a woman in the Alabama back country, telling her "Dier husban" of the children, the crops, the animals, and her feelings. The whole section, indeed the whole book, is a most interesting study in language. Few of these women—Augusta Jane Evans is not surprisingly an exception—write in ornate and stereotyped phrases. The accomplished women among them write an easy prose. All of them speak of what they have seen, in sharply observed detail. They write much of feeling, but not vaguely or sentimentally. 464civil war history Some conceive of their lives as part of history, dramatic history beginning in their own time. Even the most sophisticated do not think in the manner of a twentieth-century woman like Pearl Buck, who reflects while hiding from a mob of Chinese Communists that she cannot escape "history"—referring to all that Europeans have done in Asia for generations. No passage in Heroines of Dixie questions the institution of slavery (Constance Cary's anti-slavery views are not mentioned). But there are imaginative and thoughtful women in this book, women who use their minds honestly. Mary Ann Loughborough wonders at the ladies who all cried, "Oh, never surrender!" for, she says, "After the experience of the night [under fire at Vicksburg], I really could not tell what . . . my opinions were." They read and reflect. Sara Rice Pryor recalls a friend who taught her to live without provisions, and who "kept me a living soul' in other and higher ways. She reckoned intellectual ability the greatest of God's gifts. . . . Her talk was a tonic to me." Thus the book reminds us that these women were not intellectually fragile. There is, at least in the published memoirs, still more in this vein that...