The Rebel Wife (37 page)

For women, black and white, the latter half of the nineteenth century also left many promises unfulfilled. The woman’s movement and its one-time ally, the abolitionist movement, became estranged. Movement leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were often hostile to the guarantee of civil rights for uneducated freedmen when educated women were denied the vote. White male legislators were not interested in guaranteeing voting rights for women; most insisted that women’s voices were heard through their male protectors in the “traditional” way. But regressive politics did nothing to stem the realities of economic and social oppression faced by women, particularly in the South, where they endured the hardships brought on by four years of destructive, bloody war. The plucky Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
is a jazz age creation projected against an Old South screen. The real voices of women who lived in the period, however, became a literary phenomenon long before Scarlett was imagined. Journals, diaries, memoirs, and books of letters flooded the literary market of the late nineteenth century, bringing to a hungry reading audience the real-life heroines of the Civil War along with their disappointments, humiliations, fears, and bravery.

Alongside the true-life accounts of the Civil War, fiction writers from the South added their voices to the great chorus that declaimed what the war had been about and what had been lost. These voices, as much as legislation and jurisprudence, influenced public opinion. The literature of the South achieved a national profile through the regionalist movements of the late nineteenth century. Writers like the Virginian Thomas Nelson Page and the Georgian Joel Chandler Harris wrote prolifically on the “Old South” and the “War of Northern Aggression.” In spite of other perspectives, the charm of the “lost cause” captivated a national audience.
Gone with the Wind,
a great book in many ways, was the high point of a literature that emphasized white Southern culture and lampooned African-Americans.

Since the 1920s, at least, a growing chorus of contrary voices in literature has changed the landscape. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance and white writers like Julia Peterkin took a closer look at the myths constructed around African-American life in the South. Writers of the Southern Renaissance dealt with the legacy of slavery, deploying themes of race and injustice, innocence and depravity, the macabre and the grotesque, as they developed the Southern Gothic tradition. William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Harper Lee among many others could simply look in their backyards to find the strange dichotomies of Southern life on full display.

Today many novelists have continued to deconstruct those myths, like Alice Randall in
The Wind Done Gone
. But many of those traditions persist. My hope is that my novel serves as another perspective in the reconception of the aftermath of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. In the development of this story, I have used as broad a variety of resources as possible. My youth in Huntsville, Alabama, amid the beautifully preserved vestiges of the antebellum era, was a starting point. Since then, I have used works of fiction and nonfiction to tap into the spirit of the time as well as historical monographs detailing many different aspects of Southern life. Newspapers, journals, and lifestyle magazines played a critical part in my research. And most of all, the voices—through diaries, letters, and memoirs—of the women of the time were fundamental to the creation of Augusta. A sampling of these works can be found in the Bibliography on page 289.

The research for this book spanned many years, in some ways my entire life. I relied on primary sources, such as newspapers, fashion and news magazines, and books from the period. I also relied on a large variety of secondary sources, both fiction and nonfiction. Below is a list I have compiled for those who have a further interest in reading the period.

The most well-known and worthwhile diary of the period is probably Mary Chesnut’s, edited by C. Vann Woodward. Chesnut was not the only person to record her thoughts and feelings. Add to that the letters, memoirs, and oral histories that we have left from that time, and you could spend many years delving into the lives of the women and men who fought and lived through the tremendous upheavals of the nineteenth century.

Boney, F. N.
A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished
. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969.

Chappell, Frank Anderson.
Dear Sister: Civil War Letters to a Sister in Alabama.
Huntsville, Alabama: Branch Springs Publishing, 2002.

Clay-Clopton, Virginia.
A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama
. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.

Cumming, Kate.
The Journal of a Confederate Nurse
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.

Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
New York: Tribeca Books, 2011.

East, Charles, ed.
Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman
. New York: Touchstone Books, 1992.

Jacobs, Harriet
. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001.

Kemble, Frances.
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839
. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Myers, Robert Manson, ed.
The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War
. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1972.

Rosengarten, Theodore.
Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter with the Plantation Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890)
. New York: McGraw Hill, 1987.

Ryan, Patricia H., ed.
Cease Not to Think of Me: The Steele Family Letters
. Huntsville, Alabama: Huntsville Planning Department, 1979.

Smedes, Susan Dabney.
Memorials of a Southern Planter
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Sutcliffe, Andrea, ed.
Mighty Rough Times, I Tell You
. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, 2000.

Tourgée, Albion W.
The Invisible Empire: A Concise Review of the Epoch
. Ridgewood, New Jersey: Gregg Press, 1968.

Watkins, Sam R.
Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War
. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Woodward, C. Vann, ed.
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981.

Woodward, C. Vann, and Muhlenfield, Elisabeth, eds.
The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Modern Reading

These works of more recent vintage provide diverse and changing perspectives on the Civil War, slavery, and the legacy of the nineteenth century.

Bradley, David.
The Chaneysville Incident
. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

Faulkner, William.
Absalom, Absalom!
New York: Vintage International, 1990.

__________.
Go Down, Moses
. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.

Frazier, Charles
. Cold Mountain
. New York: Grove Press, 1997.

Jones, Edward P.
The Known World
. New York: Amistad, 2003.

Mitchell, Margaret.
Gone with the Wind
. New York: Macmillan, 1936.

Peterkin, Julia.
Black April
. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927.

__________.
Green Thursday.
Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

__________.
Scarlet Sister Mary
. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.

Randall, Alice.
The Wind Done Gone
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Styron, William.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

Period Fiction and Poetry

The short list below proves that even in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there was disagreement on what the war was about and what its legacy should be.

Cable, George Washington.
Old Creole Days
. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Chesnutt, Charles W.
The Marrow of Tradition
. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Evans, Augusta Jane.
Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

Perkerson, Medora Field.
White Columns in Georgia
. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1952.

Preston, Margaret J.
Beechenbrook: A Rhyme of the War
. Baltimore: Kelly & Piet, 1866.

Weeden, Howard, and Harris, Joel Chandler.
Bandanna Ballads Including Shadows on the Wall
. New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899.

Battles of the Western Theater

Castel, Albert.
Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864
. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Cozzens, Peter.
The Battles for Chattanooga: The Shipwreck of Their Hopes
. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

__________.
The Battle of Stones River: No Better Place to Die
. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

Daniel, Larry J.
Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War
. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Foote, Shelby.
The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign
. New York: Modern Library, 1995.

Sword, Wiley.
The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin & Nashville
. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Political History

Bailey, Hugh C.
John Williams Walker: A Study in the Political, Social and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest
. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1964.

Budiansky, Stephen.
The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox
. New York: Viking, 2008.

Craven, Avery O.
The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953.

Current, Richard Nelson.
Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Dorman, Lewy.
Party Politics in Alabama from 1850 Through 1860.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.

Fisher, Noel C.
War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869
. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Foner, Eric.
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877
. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Foote, Shelby.
The Civil War: A Narrative
. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.

Gallagher, Gary W.
The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat
. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Gillette, William.
Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Going, Allen Johnston.
Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874–1890
. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1951.

Freehling, William W.
The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

__________.
The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Groce, W. Todd.
Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870
. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.

Hahn, Steven.
The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Holt, Michael F.
The Political Crisis of the 1850s.
New York: Wiley, 1978.

McPherson, James M.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Oakes, James.
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

Potter, David M.
The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861.
New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Sydnor, Charles S.
The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819–1848
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948.

Thornton, J. Mills, III.
Politics and Power in a Slave Society
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Wiggins, Sarah Woolfolk.
The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881
. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991

Woodward, C. Vann.
The Burden of Southern History
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.

__________.
Origins of the New South, 1877–1913.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.

Slavery and Race

Bay, Mia.
The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925
. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Dray, Philip.
Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Frederickson, George M.
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914
. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Genovese, Eugene D.
The Political Economy of Slavery.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.