Confederate Women (review)

284BOOK REVIEWS not develop Caimes's advocacy of a "Mississippi Compromise," which prevented G. W. Curtis from advising Harper and Brothers to publish The SL·ve Power in the United States. Though urging moral support for the North but fearing the techniques of despotism, Cairnes concluded that the North should not conquer the Confederacy but should hem it in east of the Mississippi, isolating the South until slavery had disappeared. Mrs. Weinberg's untimely death unfortunately prevented revision of the whole work and addition of further notes before publication. For example, in the title and elsewhere, Elliott is misspelled with one "t". Joseph M. Hernon, Jr. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Confederate Women. By Bell Irvin Wiley. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1975. Pp. 179. $10.95.) For the most part the "Confederate women" in this little volume from the pen of an old master are of a special type. Mary Boykin Chesnut and Virginia Tunstall Clay were born within two years of each other, one in the Carolina low country, the other in the Alabama black belt. Each married a man eight years her senior who was already on the way to becoming a successful politician. Both loved the social-political whirlpool of Washington in the 1850's; both were intelligent , charming, politically astute—and childless. Bom a hundred years later each would have been a thoroughly liberated woman, possibly a politician in her own right. Even in the middle of the nineteenth century the yearning was visible, as Virginia Clay donned her sunbonnet and went vigorously campaigning for her husband's election to the Congress or as Mary Chesnut gathered political intelligence for the Senator's use. Bom instead in the 1820's, each was to some degree victim of the social expectations which set firm boundaries to "woman's place," and indulged women in ways that were destructive to them. Nowhere are the bad effects of such indulgence more apparent than in Virginia Clay's insistence upon spending money her husband simply did not have and in her total failure to use her talents effectively when the family faced ruin during Reconstruction. The damage to Mary Chesnut's personality was more subtle, but is apparent in many entries in the famous diary. In spite of Bell Wiley's diligent research, Chesnut-watchers are still in the dark as to what happened after the war (and the diary) ended. Her life is a story the last chapter of which has been most regrettably lost. Wiley's third character, Varina Howell Davis, had a somewhat different life experience. Married at nineteen to the thirty-seven BOOK REVIEWS285 year old Jefferson Davis, her maturation took place as a wife and mother. The urge to reach beyond the domestic sphere led her to perform all sorts of administrative chores when he was a United States senator, and to take an active part in political decisions when he was president of the Confederacy. At 63, after Davis's death, she built a career of sorts as a writer for the New York World, and lived until eighty, much praised for the brilliance of her conversation. As a person whose fate was inextricably blended with that of the Confederacy , as a mother five of whose six children died in her lifetime, she was victim of far more than her southern lady upbringing. Yet the evidence of her last seventeen years suggests that she might have been a far more balanced personality with a modicum of freedom from the bonds of social custom. A final chapter recapitulates the general experience of southern women of all classes during the war, and will make a useful assignment in a variety of history courses. The important contribution of this volume, however, is the considerable light it throws on the social consequences of narrow sex role definitions. Anne Firor Scott Duke University The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant) Edited by John Y. Simon. Introduction by Bruce Carton, with a preliminary essay by Ralph G. Newman. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975. Pp. 346. $12.50.) Rarely does the wife of a famous man emerge from her husband's shadow. (Seldom does a Dolly...