The Homefront in Black and White

Wood, Kirsten E.

Reviews in American History, Volume 30, Number 1, March 2002,

pp. 39-50 (Review)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/rah.2002.0023

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/rah/summary/v030/30.1wood.html

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 THE HOMEFRONT IN BLACK AND WHITE

Kirsten E. Wood

Laura F. Edwards. Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the
Civil War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. x + 271. Illustrations,
notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

Alice Fahs. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South,
1861–1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xi + 410 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95.

Lyde Cullen Sizer. The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil
War, 1850–1872. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xvi +
348pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95
(paper).

In 1882, Walt Whitman observed that “the real war will never get in the
books.”1 As if volume alone could prove him wrong, novelists, amateur
historians, and scholars have produced book after book on the Civil War, over
2,700 in the last six years, according to Books in Print.2 Until recently, however,
most such books addressed only certain aspects of the bloody conflict, namely
the military and the political. By exploring the homefront and its complex
relationship to military events and national politics, the three books at issue
here contribute to ongoing efforts at reversing this trend: Sizer’s and Fahs’s
monographs treat Civil War-era literature, while Laura Edwards’s synthesis
explores southern women’s experiences.3
Besides their common attention to non-military aspects of the war, the
three books share similar approaches to politics. Much as they consider the
war as more than the sum of its battles, they define politics to include familial
relationships and popular culture as well as formal partisan and electoral
proceedings. Edwards demonstrates that “the household stood at the juncture
between private and public life” and that “domestic relations were insepara-
bly connected to civil and political rights” (p. 3–4). Sizer and Fahs make a
similar argument, demonstrating how wartime writing and reading prompted
individuals—women, men, and even children—to rethink their relationship
to the nation, often in highly personal terms. These historians also share
Reviews in American History 30 (2002) 39–50 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
40 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2002

another theoretical premise: that single texts (or events and relationships, in
Edwards’s case) contain multiple meanings. Drawing on George Lipsitz, Sizer
argues that “genre implies no inherent message” and that women’s writings
contained many, often contradictory threads (p. 7). Similarly, Fahs cites Mary
Poovey’s observation that texts “‘always produce meanings in excess of’”
their “‘explicit design’” (p. 122). Edwards, meanwhile, teases out similar
tensions in the documents of social history, exposing the lacunae and diverse
meanings of anecdotes gleaned from court records, diaries, and letters.
Sizer’s book encompasses two projects. The first is to investigate “political
issues” in northern women’s writings between 1850 and 1872. The second
constitutes an “intellectual portrait” of nine popular women writers, mostly
white and middle class: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Lydia Maria
Child, E. D. E. N. Southworth, Ellen Watkins Harper, Gail Hamilton (aka
Mary Abigail Dodge), Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.4 Sizer situates these writers within the history of
nineteenth-century reform, the woman’s suffrage movement, and American
letters.
The initial chapter does a marvelous job of comparing professional writers
with ordinary women who never wrote for publication. Household responsi-
bilities repeatedly broke into women’s time for writing, whether they did so
for publication or for their own amusement. As Harriet Beecher Stowe
observed, “‘nothing but deadly determination enables me ever to write; it is
rowing against wind and tide’” (p. 20). While professional writers “went on to
experience lives more like that of a ‘free woman’ in the 1850s and 1860s,” they
like other women of their class never escaped domestic duties (p. 21).
Accordingly, they differed significantly from male writers, who had no need
to steal time from the daily business of feeding, clothing, and cleaning their
households.
In part because of the conditions in which they wrote, Sizer identifies
women’s writing as “political work.” Women’s writings were overtly political
when they spoke to topics of national importance, such as slavery and Union.
They constituted political work in another sense as well: Sizer argues that
women writers “intended to move their readers” and believed that “minds
can be worked on by words, stories, and images” (p. 4–5). From the first shot
at Fort Sumter until well after the surrender at Appomattox, they viewed their
own morally inspired writings as political acts that could shape the war’s
goals, progress, and meanings. The war pushed older writers to “a more
active politics” and it emboldened “a younger generation coming of age” (p.
15). Northern women writers’ new confidence persisted after the war,
notwithstanding male-authored war histories that represented women as
spectators or defined their war work as a temporary, aberrant excursion
beyond their properly domestic spheres.
WOOD / Homefront in Black and White 41

Before the war, abolitionists constituted a small portion of the northern

population, but quite a substantial fraction of the most politicized—and
famous—women writers. Accordingly, political women’s writings often con-
cerned slavery. Over the course of the war, and particularly from 1863 on,
however, issues other than slavery and race became increasingly evident in
women’s writings, most notably labor and women’s rights. After emancipa-
tion, the issues of racial justice lost much of their motivating power for white
northern women, who had trouble imagining free blacks as anything resem-
bling equals. By the time Reconstruction ended, the northern reform commu-
nity had splintered over black suffrage. But the declining importance of racial
issues in white women’s writings was as much a matter of generation as
racism, Sizer observes. The war’s mounting financial and emotional costs
politicized far more northern women qua women than emancipation ever
had. Their own war experiences prompted them not only to mourn their
losses but also to celebrate their achievements and, increasingly, rebuke those
(mostly men) who held them back.
At times, fictional characters merely reflected what female nurses, for
example, were already doing, but literary creations also helped to shape what
others thought appropriate for and required of women in wartime. Some
scrutinized the deplorable effects of war among widowed, orphaned, and
working women, expanding on an antebellum reform tradition of middle-
class interest in labor conditions. Others found more exciting and positive
faces to the war’s disruptions. Sensationalist stories of female spies and
soldiers showed how women could turn the war into a liberating adventure,
even if such stories put heroines in sexual jeopardy and generally ended by
restoring them to domestic settings. By war’s end, a few writers even began to
represent remunerative work as not only legitimate for women in extremis, but
also fulfilling and even noble in itself.
After the war, women’s histories and personal narratives worked against
the flowing tide of male- and military-centered histories which eventually
dominated popular knowledge of the war. In their histories, women authors
“looked to the past as a way of getting their due in the present” (p. 196). While
male historians generally interpreted women’s war work as exceptional and
temporary, female writers saw it as a means to justify future advances.
Claiming that women had proved their competence to participate in public
matters, many began to endorse women’s rights, even if they did not become
suffrage activists. A few, such as Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, and
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, also began “an interclass exploration of the position
of women in society” (p. 200).
Yet while this war-inspired evolution suggests some profound changes in
women’s politics, Sizer questions the “transformative” power that writers
began assigning to the war almost as soon as it began. She maintains that the
42 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2002

war worked no revolution in “social reality,” and women continued to have “few
options for employment or for public or political power.” However, they
nonetheless “came to believe that they had an acknowledged stake in a national
ordeal,” and substantial numbers equated that stake with the vote (p. 4). Less
positively, northern women writers continued to deploy the exclusionary
rhetoric of womanly compassion and female moral authority. As it had done
during the war, this rhetoric purported to create unity among women, but
served to exclude those who did not meet shifting but still rigid standards of
respectability.
Examining many of the same texts as Sizer, Alice Fahs’s The Imagined Civil
War explores the content of popular literature and its rapidly changing
markets in the Union and the Confederacy. Within the category of popular
literature, Fahs includes “war poetry, sentimental war stories, sensational war
novels, war humor, war juveniles, war songs, collections of war-related
anecdotes, and war histories,” all of which have, she argues, been “dis-
missed” because of their popular label (p. 1). Much of this writing had little
literary merit, yet popular did not automatically mean lowbrow, because
revered writers like Louisa May Alcott and William Gilmore Simms often
published in these widely available and widely read formats. Whatever its
quality, popular literature offers an invaluable resource for assessing the
cultures of publishing, commerce, and war, because it was so widely available
and read.
Fahs argues that popular war literature helped shape “a cultural politics of
war” and nationalism: as purchasers and readers, Unionists and Confederates
interpreted, experienced, and even possessed the war (p. 1). In the process,
they also reconfigured their relationship to the nation. Perhaps one of most
important functions of popular war literature was to make sense of unfath-
omable carnage. Civilians consumed countless sentimental narratives about
dying soldiers. In the face of mass death and the regimentation of military life,
these stories insisted on “the primacy of the individual experience” (p. 92).
Depictions of soldiers’ dying for their country also “provided a new way of
understanding a previously abstract nationhood” (p. 119). These tales’ wide-
spread popularity suggests that the sentimental values which Sizer associates
with northern, middle- and upper-class women actually enjoyed much
broader currency, shaping northern men and white southerners of both sexes
as well. Fahs likewise broadens Sizer’s observations about women’s wartime
suffering, noting the widespread popularity of texts in which female charac-
ters demand recognition for their emotional suffering and their financial
losses. As early as the fall of 1861, authors began to suggest that “a central
meaning of the war was women’s domestic suffering” (p. 132). As in many
cases, southern literature differed slightly from the dominant northern ver-
sion; Fahs notes that southern texts “rarely claimed that women’s wounds
WOOD / Homefront in Black and White 43

were the equivalent of men’s,” but they too “created striking portrayals of the
wounds war inflicted on women” (p. 138).5
Sensational literature offered up a very different interpretation of the war’s
hazards, but with a similar investment in individual experience. Instead of
focusing on death and loss, sensationalist texts offered up titillating stories of
adventure and excitement. Here, men and boys had wild adventures involv-
ing violence, gambling, drink, and sometimes even sex, which put them well
beyond the pale of sentimental morality. Sensational literature also suggested
that thrilling, individualistic adventures constituted a primary means of
contributing to the nation and experiencing citizenship. As both the content
and political slant of sensationalism suggests, male characters dominated this
subgenre, but female characters sometimes shared in the war’s “transforma-
tive possibilities” (p. 255). In northern versions, heroines sought out adven-
tures as “daughters of the regiment,” soldiers, or spies. Instead of being
punished for their exploits, they generally won the esteem of their lovers and
leading military men alike. By contrast, southern heroines “were only rarely
pictured entering the public sphere of the hospital or battlefield, much less . . .
actually engaging in battle” (p. 255). In reality, of course, southern women
lived so much closer to the battle that they were far more likely than
northerners to have sensational wartime adventures, but unlike fictional
heroines, they rarely enjoyed those experiences.
In most of the northern literature and all of the southern, however, the war
offered no such liberatory potential for black characters. Instead, fictional
blacks tended to remain loyal to whites, resist emancipation (in southern
stories), and require white leadership (in both northern and southern vari-
ants). As imagined by white authors, most black speech included the cheap
misspellings and overstated dialect common to minstrelsy. Such distortions
appeared even in writings that promoted emancipation. However, once
African Americans began to become soldiers—and especially after the storied
attack on Fort Wagner—northern publications promulgated more favorable
images of black heroism. Fahs is careful not to overstate her case here. To
show the limits to praise of black soldiers, she cannily exposes the tension
between newspaper images of uniformed black soldiers, for example, and
texts that often undercut the visual evidence of their courage and manliness.
Like Sizer, Fahs also shows how after Appomattox, the war become more
narrowly construed, as postwar historians and politicians suggested that only
“[white] men’s experiences in battle counted as the ‘real’ war” (p. 317).
Reinforcing the limited nature of black emancipation, Fahs follows her
discussion of African Americans with chapters on humor, sensationalism, and
juvenalia, genres that tended to reify stereotypes of black ignorance, feckless-
ness, and literally slavish loyalty to “their” whites. Nonetheless, wartime repre-
sentations of blacks were “a transformative moment in American cultural
44 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2002

politics,” that inaugurated “an expanded realm of imaginative freedom” for

blacks as well as whites (p. 16).
Although demeaning blacks constituted a key element of wartime humor,
it was not the most important aspect of the genre. Some writers made the
most of the humorous opportunities that war itself provided, mocking blind
patriotism and refusing to treat either soldiers or civilians with “reverential
solemnity” (p. 211). More rarely, they used humor to critique the war’s
conduct and goals. Apparently most interesting to Fahs, some also attacked
the commercialism of the war itself. Many wartime authors rebuked profi-
teers, but humorists were unusual in attacking the proliferation of patriotic
paraphernalia and ever-more elaborate mourning objects and burial services
as “cultural profiteering” (p. 208).
As the humorous critiques of profiteering suggest, wartime literature was
as much a matter of commercialism as of nationalism and entertainment. In
the North, both illustrated paper and book publishing flourished during the
war, alongside traditional newspapers. Books published by subscription were
often expensive works intended for parlor tables; people bought them as
much for their display value as for their content. Accordingly, savvy canvass-
ers approached the leading families in a community first, and once they
signed on, others quickly followed. Fahs also explores children’s access to
books. Northern adults ordered entertaining juvenalia for their sons and,
more rarely, daughters. Children also traded books among themselves. In his
diary, eleven-year-old Grenville Norcross recorded that he loaned Kate Sharp
to a friend and occasionally exchanged reading material with “‘W. Thompson’s
servant girl’” (p. 272). In contrast to northern juvenalia, Confederate offerings
were largely limited to textbooks, a genre supposedly more germane to the
serious business of nation-building.
Although Fahs spends most of her time on northern literature, because the
North simply had more of it, she manages to shed new light on the South’s
regional identity. She argues that the South and the North had a “set of shared
literary sensibilities that overrode even the divisions of war” (p. 5). The
similarities between northern and southern popular literature owed much to
the underdevelopment of southern publishing and writing: much like other
areas of industrial and cultural production, the South lagged well behind the
North in its publishing houses, printers, newspapers, literary magazines, and
full-time authors.
During the war, southern editors, publishers, and authors labored mightily
to create a distinctively southern literature, hoping to foster patriotism and
win subscribers. To a limited extent, they succeeded. Confederates avidly
consumed whatever news they could get and contributed countless instances
of “patriotic poetry” to the newspapers, which remained the South’s primary
avenue both for war information and for creative representations of it (p. 29).
WOOD / Homefront in Black and White 45

However, the South failed to develop a distinctive and independent litera-

ture, for both material and ideological reasons. Short of paper, type, skilled
manpower, and money, southern publishers could not compete with the
North in terms of quantity or production value. Ideologically, Confederate
authors had the disadvantage of trying to define their nation in opposition to
the Union while sharing so many of its values. As an example, Fahs cites the
“Starry-Barred Banner,” a Confederate hymn that depended on Union sym-
bols and the shared past of the United States before secession (p. 77). Southern
print culture failed to supplant everything white southerners shared with
northerners, but this does not mean that the two regions were culturally the
same. Against considerable odds, southern authors and publishers managed
to “produce imagined differences” that helped support the war effort, even
though southerners returned to their former literary dependency on the
North after the war’s end (p. 9).
Fahs’s and Sizer’s books largely reinforce each other’s interpretations, but
they also suggest some areas for further inquiry. Fahs argues that men as well
as women participated in sentimental culture. This raises the possibility that
northern middle-class white men and women shared so much, culturally and
politically, that to distinguish among authors (or readers) by gender may
exaggerate or essentialize differences.6 But Sizer argues that even if male and
female writers imagined similar possibilities for their female characters, they
had begun at different starting positions, and they very likely saw somewhat
different political implications in their imaginings. Sizer presents very good
evidence that northern women writers created a distinctive interpretation of
the war, but we need to be extraordinarily careful in locating the origins of
their politics when they shared so much of both with middle-class northern
men and even with wealthy southerners.
Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is an entirely different sort of book: a
synthesis of social history. Based on Edwards’s own primary research and the
work of other scholars, it is an engaging, concise—under 200 pages—survey
of elite white, “common white,” free black, and enslaved women from the
antebellum South through the end of Reconstruction. With this book, Edwards
seeks to make a burgeoning monographic literature available to non-special-
ists. In particular, she wants to bring the findings of southern women’s
history into the classroom. Facilitating both comparative and chronological
scrutiny, she divides the book into three chronological sections: “before,”
“during,” and “after.” Each section contains three chapters, one each for
planter women, “common whites” and free black women, and enslaved (or
freed) women.
Edwards’s ambition reaches well beyond exposing students to the evolv-
ing differences among southern women. She seeks also to illustrate how the
war and Reconstruction look different when we include women and, more
46 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2002

importantly, cannot be properly understood without them. She makes per-

haps the clearest case for this point in the postwar period. As she observes,
historians long interpreted Reconstruction in terms of “institutional party
politics” or “economic change and emancipation” (p. 150). Since women did
not vote and belong to parties or, supposedly, own property and work for
wages, they rarely appeared in this literature. But in fact, during and after
Reconstruction, government officials, jurists, legislators, landowners, vigilan-
tes, and freedpeople themselves openly battled to reconstruct labor relations,
family life, and gender roles. In this period, the intersection of domestic
concerns and public policy generated infinite flashpoints in southern house-
holds and communities. And once we see this, Edwards suggests, we see that
women were not only involved, but aggressively and persistently so. Edwards
thus provides a grim, “on the ground” counterpoint to the literary battles
over the war’s meanings and the nation’s future that Fahs and Sizer explore.
For white southern as well as northern women, the war created new
opportunities as well as hazards. Some embraced these opportunities reluc-
tantly, others eagerly. Early in the war, slaveholding women often fretted at
their passive role and longed for some way to express their patriotism. Kate
Stone “saw war as a heroic adventure, where it was possible for individuals to
alter the course of history” (p. 70). (Although Edwards suggests the naïveté of
this attitude, Fahs and Sizer help us understand where women like Stone
might have gotten their ideas about the war.) As more and more of their
menfolks went to war, elite and “common” women alike shouldered the
responsibilities of household mastery and wage work, because they had little
or no choice. For many, these responsibilities were not entirely new; before
1861, many women became householders pro tem thanks to their husbands’
absences or deaths. During the war, however, the scale of these activities
increased dramatically, but the cultural support for them lagged far behind.
Necessity prompted a whole host of inventions, from ersatz coffee and ink to
new justifications for women’s work beyond their own households. Yet white
southern women only rarely used the war as northern women did: as an
opportunity to imagine new ways of being, whether as women or as citizens.
In fact, dire economic necessity proved at least as transformative as the
experience of managing in men’s absence. Elite women learned—or failed to
learn—that they could not necessarily rely on their men to protect and
provide for them. Need prompted growing numbers of young women from
humble and even privileged backgrounds to seek waged work. While this
work generally entailed “low pay and drudgery,” it eventually gave some
women new independence (p. 170). By the turn of the century, southern
wage-workers were beginning to participate in commercial entertainments
and even labor actions, much like their northern counterparts. And while
most white southern women staked no claim to political rights in the years
WOOD / Homefront in Black and White 47

following the war, they nonetheless pursued their “distinct conceptions of

their rights as women, the rights of their families, and the shape of southern
society” (p. 188).
For black women throughout Civil War America, popular culture and
personal experience alike told a very equivocal story. None could doubt the
tremendous importance of converting the North’s war for Union into a war
for emancipation. As Fahs points out, even the mainstream Harper’s Weekly
predicted in early April 1861 that the “‘practical effect”’ of the war must be
“‘to liberate the slaves’” (p. 48). But Edwards notes that slaves anticipated
Lincoln, forging emancipation with their feet and their newly overt unwill-
ingness to obey their owners. The postwar period confirmed what free blacks
before the war had discovered: freedom from legal slavery by no means
meant freedom from violence, want, degradation, and separation from family.
In fact, southern whites so hedged in black freedom that northern writers’
imaginative creations can seem wildly optimistic by comparison, despite their
racism. However, freed women resisted white oppression as doggedly as they
had done during slavery, and with greater resources. They appealed to
Freedmen’s Bureau officials to protect them against abusive spouses or to
recover children apprenticed to whites against their will. They also sought to
wrest control over their own labor out of whites’ hands, and they “insisted on
public acknowledgement of their respectability” (p. 159). Like “common
white” women, they held their husbands and fathers “to their obligations to
provide and protect” (p. 159). For African-American women in particular,
these efforts were never-ending and often unavailing, but “the very act of
trying was important” in establishing “a legacy of struggle” (p. 148).
Throughout, Edwards deftly uses individual women to give subtlety and
texture to her generalizations. For her planter women, she draws heavily on
Gertrude Thomas’s and Kate Stone’s diaries, illustrating how two women
with distinctly different personalities and experiences made sense of war,
death, emancipation, and Confederate defeat. Among her “common whites”
is Sarah Guttery, whom Edwards quite brilliantly brings to life using U. S.
Pension Bureau Records. With two out-of-wedlock children, Guttery repre-
sented all that the planter class found vile about ordinary white women. But
within her community, she “‘bore a good name,’” largely because she
remained in her father’s household and supported herself and her children
(p. 44). This good name enabled her to get help from her neighbors when she
sought to claim her son’s pension in 1879. Federal officials were tempted to
dismiss her claim on the grounds of her immorality, but those who knew her
assured them she had been a hard-working and responsible woman ever
since her children’s birth. An equally vivid example of women’s negotiations
within their communities concerns the freedwoman Bella Newton. When a
white man assaulted Newton’s children in 1869, she first acted “in keeping
48 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2002

with antebellum traditions”: she publicized her grievance in the neighbor-

hood, and then agreed to drop the issue when he paid her $1.00 and some
bacon (p. 125). But afterwards, she decided to file charges against him, a risky
action which she could never have taken as a slave. While we might expect
that such a charge would go nowhere, Alexander Noblin was indicted.
(Edwards does not know whether he was convicted.)
Edwards’s chapter on enslaved women is solid but somewhat less exciting.
Here, she uses Harriet Jacobs’s narrative of her life in slavery to illuminate
slave women’s priorities and choices, and some readers may find the choice
rather predictable. Jacobs’s historical and literary significance is incontrovert-
ible, but historians use her so often that readers might be forgiven for thinking
that hers is the only recoverable story of being female and enslaved in the
American South. Since Edwards makes a point of commenting on the scarcity
of sources for common white and black women, her recourse to Jacobs seems
a lost opportunity to introduce an undoubtedly wide audience to one or more
of the other women who wrote about their lives as slaves.
As befits a synthesis aimed at non-specialists, historians versed in southern
women’s history will find little surprising in Edwards’s account. Specialists
are also likely to find little to complain about in this masterful weaving
together of many different studies, which neither elides nor bogs down in
interpretive differences. A possible concern, however, stems from her group-
ing of southern women, in particular the category “common whites.” In her
definition, this group encompasses landless poor whites, yeomen, and all
slaveholders who were not planters. This broad category serves to point out
that only the small planter elite even approached the standards of luxury that
popular imagination tends to associate with the Old South. However, most of
the information about slaveholding itself appears in the chapters on elite
women. Accordingly, general readers might misread the observations about
planters as applying to all slaveholders—the exact opposite of Edwards’s
intention—while the “common whites” seem more impoverished than middle
class. This problem is most evident in the antebellum chapters, however, and
in the context of undergraduate classes, at least, could provoke fruitful
discussions on the evolution of class and rank distinctions in the nineteenth-
century South.
Southern historians may also question Edwards’ decision to use Gone With
The Wind as a framing device. Edwards clearly intends to debunk the
moonlight and magnolias image of the Old South so often associated—with
only partial justice—with Mitchell’s novel. But in referencing the novel, does
she simply give it new life? Perhaps under the influence of Fahs’s investiga-
tion of the book business, I wondered whether using Melanie and Scarlett had
been a marketing rather than analytical strategy. Outside of academia,
Americans are likelier to read about the Civil War than about nearly any other
WOOD / Homefront in Black and White 49

historical topic, but most Civil War books focus on “battles and politics,”
narrowly defined (p. 2). Books like James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom
have sales figures vastly greater than works of homefront history. But if the
300-plus people who wrote reviews of Gone With The Wind on Amazon.com’s
website are any indication, the novel is still far more popular, tugging at
readers’ imaginations and probably shaping at least some of their ideas about
the South.7 Framing her book as a response to Mitchell’s novel may, therefore,
be a good way to attract the wide, popular audience Edwards seeks. And once
she has their attention, she stands an excellent chance of inspiring some
readers to delve into the many excellent monographs on southern women, or
at least to question the prominence of battles, generals, and politicians in Civil
War history.
Walt Whitman to the contrary, extraordinarily diverse interpretations of
the war began to emerge during the conflict itself. In published and unpub-
lished writings, speeches, and behavior, Americans North and South asserted
their own versions of the war’s costs, gains, and meanings. As Fahs and Sizer
demonstrate, it was only after the war that amateur and professional histori-
ans in the North redefined the conflict so narrowly that only its military and
masculine aspects seemed to be the “real” war, a trend which continued well
into the twentieth century. Similarly, Edwards suggests how in the post-
Redemption South the mythos of heroic gentlemen-soldiers and patriotic
belles came to obscure the history—and persistence—of dissent, desertion,
and rebellion by common whites and blacks. In one sense, these three books,
like other works of homefront history, represent a new approach to the Civil
War, one bearing the impress of the late-twentieth-century interest in feminist,
multivocal, bottom-up history. In an equally important sense, they represent a
return to the ways that Americans actually experienced the war. The historian’s
job is arguably not to recreate every last voice, event, and nuance, but to
distill. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that a fragmented picture with
no single dominant perspective is surely truer to the contemporary experi-
ence and meanings of the war than an overarching master narrative could
ever be.

Kirsten E. Wood, assistant professor, Florida International University, is the

author of “‘One Woman so Dangerous to Public Morals’: Gender and Power
in the Eaton Affair,” Journal of the Early Republic (1997), and is completing a
monograph on slaveholding widows in the American Southeast between the
Revolution and the Civil War.

1. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, as quoted in Louis P. Masur, ed., “The Real War Will
Never Get in The Books”: Selections from Writers during the Civil War (1993), 281.
2. This likely conservative figure comes from Books in Print online.
50 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2002

3. For homefront histories, see, for example, Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention:
Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996); George Rable, Civil Wars:
Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (1989); LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as Crisis in
Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (1995).
4. Southworth, Harper, and Davis came from the Upper South.
5. In this sense, Confederate women’s “tendency to see the war in terms of their own
families’ interests” and expectation that military policy should respond to their needs
reflects a much broader pattern of responses to the war, not something distinctive to the
southern homefront (Edwards, p. 87).
6. Here Fahs bears out the work of southern historians like Cynthia Kierner and Marli
Weiner, who argue for the importance of domesticity and sentimentalism to antebellum
slaveholding society. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South (1998);
Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–1880 (1998).
7. The episodic flurries of postings to H-South on “GWTW” suggests that historians
themselves are still somewhat at a loss to account for both the novel’s and the book’s
popularity within and beyond the United States.