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This elegantly written biography depicts the combined effect of social structure, character, and national crisis on a woman’s life. Mary Greenhow Lee (1819–1907) was raised in a privileged Virginia household. As a young woman, she flirted with President Van Buren’s son, drank tea with Dolley Madison, and frolicked in bedsheets through the streets of Washington with her sister-in-law, future Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow. Later in life, Lee debated with senators, fed foreign emissaries and correspondents, scolded generals, and nursed soldiers. As a Confederate sympathizer in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces’ dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was finally banished. Lee’s personal history is an intriguing story. It is also an account of the complex social relations that characterized nineteenth-century life. She was an elite southern woman who knew the rules but who also flouted and other times flaunted the prevailing gender arrangements. Her views on status suggest that the immeasurable markers of prestige were much more important than wealth in her social stratum. She had strong ideas about who was (or was not) her “equal,” yet she married a man of quite modest means. Lee’s biography also enlarges our view of Confederate patriotism, revealing a war within a war and divisions arising as much from politics and geography as from issues of slavery and class. Mary Greenhow Lee was a woman of her time and place — one whose youthful rebellion against her society’s standards yielded to her desire to preserve that society’s way of life. Genteel Rebel illustrates the value of biography as history as it narrates the eventful life of a surprisingly powerful southern lady.
As a Confederate sympathizer in the hotly contested small border town of Winchester, Virginia, she ran an underground postal service, hid contraband under her nieces' dresses, abetted the Rebel cause, and was finally banished."--Jacket.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award “McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read.” —Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic “McCurry challenges us to expand our definition of politics to encompass not simply government but the entire public sphere. The struggle for Southern independence, she shows, opened the door for the mobilization of two groups previously outside the political nation—white women of the nonslaveholding class and slaves...Confederate Reckoning offers a powerful new paradigm for understanding events on the Confederate home front.” —Eric Foner, The Nation “Perhaps the highest praise one can offer McCurry’s work is to say that once we look through her eyes, it will become almost impossible to believe that we ever saw or thought otherwise...At the outset of the book, McCurry insists that she is not going to ask or answer the timeworn question of why the South lost the Civil War. Yet in her vivid and richly textured portrait of what she calls the Confederacy’s ‘undoing,’ she has in fact accomplished exactly that.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, New Republic “A brilliant, eye-opening account of how Southern white women and black slaves fatally undermined the Confederacy from within.” —Edward Bonekemper, Civil War News The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. When the grandiosity of Southerners’ national ambitions met the harsh realities of wartime crises, unintended consequences ensued. Although Southern statesmen and generals had built the most powerful slave regime in the Western world, they had excluded the majority of their own people—white women and slaves—and thereby sowed the seeds of their demise. Wartime scarcity of food, labor, and soldiers tested the Confederate vision at every point and created domestic crises to match those found on the battlefields. Women and slaves became critical political actors as they contested government enlistment and tax and welfare policies, and struggled for their freedom. The attempt to repress a majority of its own population backfired on the Confederate States of America as the disenfranchised demanded to be counted and considered in the great struggle over slavery, emancipation, democracy, and nationhood. That Confederate struggle played out in a highly charged international arena. The political project of the Confederacy was tried by its own people and failed. The government was forced to become accountable to women and slaves, provoking an astounding transformation of the slaveholders’ state. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
During the American Civil War, southern white women found themselves speaking and acting in unfamiliar and tumultuous circumstances. With the war at their doorstep, women who supported the war effort took part in defining what it meant to be, and to behave as, a Confederate through their verbal and nonverbal rhetorics. Though most did not speak from the podium, they viewed themselves as participants in the war effort, indicating that what they did or did not say could matter. Drawing on the rich evidence in women’s Civil War diaries, The Rhetoric of Rebel Women recognizes women’s persuasive activities as contributions to the creation and maintenance of Confederate identity and culture. Informed by more than one hundred diaries, this study provides insight into how women cultivated rhetorical agency, challenging traditional gender expectations while also upholding a cultural status quo. Author Kimberly Harrison analyzes the rhetorical choices these women made and valued in wartime and postwar interactions with Union officers and soldiers, slaves and former slaves, local community members, and even their God. In their intimate accounts of everyday war, these diarists discussed rhetorical strategies that could impact their safety, their livelihoods, and those of their families. As they faced Union soldiers in attempts to protect their homes and property, diarists saw their actions as not only having local, immediate impact on their well-being but also as reflecting upon their cause and the character of the southern people as a whole. They instructed themselves through their personal writing, allowing insight into how southern women prepared themselves to speak and act in new and contested contexts. The Rhetoric of Rebel Women highlights the contributions of privileged white southern women in the development of the Confederate national identity, presenting them not as passive observers but as active participants in the war effort.
The final volume in this comprehensive history of Confederate Virginia examines the end of the Civil War in the Old Dominion. By January 1865, most of Virginia's schools were closed, many newspapers had ceased publication, businesses suffered, and food was scarce. Having endured major defeats on their home soil and the loss of much of the state's territory to the Union army, Virginia's Confederate soldiers began to desert at higher rates than at any other time in the war, returning home to provide their families with whatever assistance they could muster. It was a dark year for Virginia. Virginia at War, 1865 presents a striking depiction of a state ravaged by violence and destruction. In the final volume of the Virginia at War series, editors William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. have once again assembled an impressive collection of essays covering topics that include land operations, women and families, wartime economy, music and entertainment, the demobilization of Lee's army, and the war's aftermath. The volume ends with the final installment of Judith Brockenbrough McGuire's popular and important Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War.
For sheer bravado and style, no woman in the North or South rivaled the Civil War heroine Rose O’Neale Greenhow. Fearless spy for the Confederacy, glittering Washington hostess, legendary beauty and lover, Rose Greenhow risked everything for the cause she valued more than life itself. In this superb portrait, biographer Ann Blackman tells the surprising true story of a unique woman in history. “I am a Southern woman, born with revolutionary blood in my veins,” Rose once declared–and that fiery spirit would plunge her into the center of power and the thick of adventure. Born into a slave-holding family, Rose moved to Washington, D.C., as a young woman and soon established herself as one of the capital’s most charming and influential socialites, an intimate of John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, and Dolley Madison. She married well, bore eight children and buried five, and, at the height of the Gold Rush, accompanied her husband Robert Greenhow to San Francisco. Widowed after Robert died in a tragic accident, Rose became notorious in Washington for her daring–and numerous–love affairs. But with the outbreak of the Civil War, everything changed. Overnight, Rose Greenhow, fashionable hostess, become Rose Greenhow, intrepid spy. As Blackman reveals, deadly accurate intelligence that Rose supplied to General Pierre G. T. Beauregard written in a fascinating code (the code duplicated in the background on the jacket of this book). Her message to Beauregard turned the tide in the first Battle of Bull Run, and was a brilliant piece of spycraft that eventually led to her arrest by Allan Pinkerton and imprisonment with her young daughter. Indomitable, Rose regained her freedom and, as the war reached a crisis, journeyed to Europe to plead the Confederate cause at the royal courts of England and France. Drawing on newly discovered diaries and a rich trove of contemporary accounts, Blackman has fashioned a thrilling, intimate narrative that reads like a novel. Wild Rose is an unforgettable rendering of an astonishing woman, a book that will stand with the finest Civil War biographies.
When the South fired the first shot of the Civil War in April 1861, hundreds of volunteers flocked to answer President Lincoln's call to arms, anxious to defend their country and uphold the sanctity of the Union. Among these first volunteers was Robert H. Milroy. Determined to obtain a military education and denied his wish to attend West Point, Milroy had at last secured a position to attend Captain Partridge's Military Academy at Norwich University in Vermont. After graduating, however, he was thwarted time and again in his desire for a military career, quickly discovering that military appointments tended to favor West Point graduates. A fervent abolitionist and dedicated patriot, Milroy craved military action and viewed the Civil War as his long-awaited opportunity to achieve the glorious reputation he so ardently desired. Compiled from primary sources such as Milroy's correspondence and the letters of those who knew him, this biography details the life and times of General Robert H. Milroy. Although perhaps not one of the major players on the stage of Civil War drama, Milroy was one of the staunchest defenders not only of the Union but of the Emancipation Proclamation as well. Focusing primarily on Milroy's Civil War career, this work serves to provide information about lesser known operations in western Virginia during 1861 and 1862 as well as illustrate the bonds that formed between commanders and their men. It also provides a case study of how an abolitionist general enforced his will in various regions throughout the Confederacy. Appendices contain a portion of Milroy's unfinished autobiography and a list of troops commanded by Milroy in combat.
Explains the reasons for the large Irish emigration, and examines the problems they faced adjusting to new lives in the United States.