The Civilians’ War: Letters from Charlestonian Women, 1861-1865
Faculty Mentor Scott Peeples and Student Kara Mirmelstein
 |
| A letter written to Susan from Harriott, dated April 1862 |
Synopsis
Letter-writing played a vital role in upper-class Confederate women’s lives during the American Civil War. As Drew Gilpin Faust and other historians have demonstrated, these letters add layers of understanding about civilians’ perceptions of fighting and living conditions. In this project, however, we focused on the letters themselves: how the correspondence among Confederate women served as a mechanism of support, and how their tone and rhetoric both mirrored and shaped these women’s identities. We examined the act of writing and the products of this labor, analyzing the role of letters in the lives of several aristocratic Charlestonians, mainly Caroline Gilman, Susan Matilda Middleton and Harriott Cheves Middleton.
Research at the South Carolina Historical Society
 |
| Fireproof Building, South Carolina Historical Society heritagefederation.org/images/ schist-ext_sm.jpg |
What the Research Reveals
Caroline Gilman moved from Boston with her husband when he was made pastor at the Unitarian Church in Charleston. Letters she wrote to her children, who lived in the north, are preserved in the archives at the South Carolina Historical Society. Although her husband died in 1858, Gilman remained in the South throughout the war. In fact, throughout her letters, she asserts great allegiance to the Confederacy during all of the fighting. An accomplished writer, Gilman wrote the juvenile magazine The Rose Bud starting in 1832 and running up until the attack on Ft. Sumter.
Exiled from Charleston for most of the war, Susan and Harriott Middleton, unmarried cousins in their early 30s, engaged each other in a comprehensive dialogue. The Middletons’ voluminous correspondence (approximately 350 pages of single-spaced typescript, mostly unpublished), exhibits a surprising awareness of the political and military developments during the war. Their letters exist in a gray area between the personal and social realms: they were addressed to the individual, but were commonly read aloud in the home among the family, as a form of entertainment and emotional support as well as communication. Even with the well-known desire for news, both women approach writing apologetically, worrying that their words are indulgent, boring, and troublesome for their audience: “How I am prosing on,” writes Susan, “almost forgetting it is my pen, not my tongue, that is in motion, and that reading is a more troublesome active occupation than listening.” The inevitable response to every letter is gratefulness punctuated by requests for more: “You certainly must be called the princess of letter writers,” Harriott tells Susan. “Each one is generally pronounced the most delightful.”
Throughout the letters, Harriott Middleton repeatedly refers to herself and her writing as “stupid,” despite the fact that her prose style is, by any standards, fluid and intelligent. Yet “stupid,” if we take it as Harriott means it, connoting dullness or mental sluggishness rather than idiocy, does in fact characterize these women’s wartime experience. As upper-class unmarried females, they were highly educated and well informed but frustratingly inactive, except for their copious letter-writing. While they were deeply affected by the war, they remained, at least until 1865, sheltered from it, coming into contact mainly with visiting officers and of course newspapers. Their writing shows the effects of their “redundant” status; perhaps as compensation for feelings of guilt over their relative safety and comfort, they express unqualified confidence and pride in the Confederacy, displaying no uncertainty, no feelings of regret or gentleness as a contrast to the violence and destruction all around them.
At the same time, their writing reveals much grief, even anger, but little fear. Writing mainly from Columbia and Flat Rock, NC, they relate and respond to nearly constant rumors of a Northern invasion of Charleston, and go from discussing dances their younger sisters attend in their hometown to describing the destruction caused by bombardments. They report on horse thieves, the behavior of liberated slaves, and the loss of loved ones. And yet they both meet unhappy possibilities—and realities—with a philosophical distance, even fatalism. In early 1862, before she has moved from Charleston, Susan writes to Harriott, “It has been such a very lovely day. Standing among the ruins, near the Circular Church, with the soft mist over every thing it was hard to believe that we were not in Rome!” Two years later, as she begins to realize the South will lose the war, Harriott tells Susan, “As for peace, my mind does not take it in nor do any pleasant visions accompany the idea. I am deeply penetrated by the feeling that . . . life is a scene of probation—burdened with cares and anxieties, and if for a short space we seem to have reached a bright spot, there comes some blighting calamity or the grave receives us.” This apparent stoicism, we believe, also stems from their position in Southern society, where they are not expected to make decisions or to act.
Plans for Distribution
We have written a presentation proposal which we will submit to the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, which is organizing a conference in April 2008.