Drew Gilpin Faust

An extremely grim, if absorbing, book. Faust takes a look at how both sides in the American Civil War treated the issue of their dead; he focuses mostly, though not exclusively, on the dead soldiers. The book marches through a logical progression, to wit: Dying, Killing, Burying, Naming, Realizing, Believing and Doubting, Accounting, and Numbering. One of the strongest things I got out of the book is how the war changed the way the United States dealt with its war dead; granted, the other show more wars previous to this (and subsequent to it) did not have the ferocious levels of dead that the Civil War did, it still strikes one that it was not just societal changes that made the treatment of the dead different. Technology, both in the killing and the recovery of the dead, had changed much. (After all, the railroads could send the boys to war, and bring their remains back.) The selection of illustrations is well-chosen. For the most part, Faust avoids trendy buzzwords in historiography (though gender stuff crops up a few times). Another thing, while I think of it, that crops up is how well Walt Whitman comes off in the book. The level of care he gave to wounded and dying soldiers says much about the man's basic decency; and of course, it enriched his own understanding and writing. A number of other reviews comment on how grim the book is. Undeniable, given the subject matter. If you can stick it, though, it's a good read. Recommended. show less

Excellent and very well-written research and scholarship. Says a few things that need to be said about the institution of slavery, and the true nature of the Confederacy.[return][return]First of all, set aside any "romantic" Scarlett O'Hara-style notions of Confederate ladies as spunky gals who would do anything to support their Boys in Grey, protect their children, and maintain their "way of life." Based on the fantastic array of letters, journals and other writing from every corner of the show more Confederacy, most of these women were whiny, pathetic and unbelievably lazy. Their social standing meant everything, and their social standing was based upon being weak and fragile "ladies," capable of doing nothing that could be described as real work.[return][return]That included looking after their own children. Lizzie Neblett, cited in the book's description as "a housewife facing a life of physical labor for the first time," is forced to look after her own children, when her slaves run away, and writes unapologetically about beating her 10-month-old daughter.[return][return]There were exceptions, of course, women who were prepared to risk social ostracism as nurses, joining the ranks of common women and slaves who were considered suitable for such lowly, "demeaning" work. Women who felt liberated by the disruption of the paternalistic system of the antebellum South, as they had to take responsibility for their lives for, perhaps, the first time. Women who began, however, haltingly, to recognize that the evil of slavery had brought them to this.[return][return]I have one (relatively minor) criticism: the subtitle, I think, could be misleading. The women Faust focuses on are the women of the slave-holding elite, whose who, in their own eyes, were the "aristocracy" of the South. Their attitude to ordinary, working class Southerners is very revealing of the con that this "masterclass" of slaveowners managed to perpetrate: pursuading those they considered their social inferiors to fight and die for a system that held them down. show less

In her study, Faust focuses narrowly on women from the slave-holding stratum of Southern society, the elite, during the American Civil War. Her point of view is the way in which these women--pre-and post-war--viewed themselves, and the consequences of changes in those views brought on by the war.

Pre-war, elite Southern women defined themselves, not as women, but as “ladies”, which involved definite and rigid preconceptions of race, class, and gender. White was superior to black, the show more upper socio-economic class was dependent on slave labor which women took for granted, and being a woman from an elite background meant near-total dependency on and submission to men as the superior gender.

But practically from the beginning of the war, the definition of what it meant to be a “lady” became impossible to maintain. An extraordinarily high number of white Southern men went off to war, leaving behind, in the case of the elite slaveholding-families, women who were unequipped by training or emotional background to oversee plantations of slaves, for example, and to cary out hitherto unimaginable tasks such as spinning and weaving the cloth that pre-war had been scorned as fit only for slaves but was now essential due to the Union blockade. Few had any idea how to cook even the simplest meals.

Faust exhaustively looks at the massive disruptive effects that the depopulation of the South of white men meant to women. One of her most telling phrases is that pre-war elite women had an unconscious contract with men--submission and dependency in exchange for men’s support and protection. As the war progressed and the suffering and fear went on, as the losses mounted, women felt betrayed--the contract had been broken. But what Faust makes clear is that this did not lead to a demanding of rights or increased independence in the way it had already started in the North on the part of southern elite women; “progress” is usually never linear, and this was no exception. There were shifts, there were consequences, but there was backing and filling as well.

In reality, almost every aspect of elite female life was torn asunder by this one primary cause--the lack of white males to carry out the perceived responsibilities of their class. Faust looks into all these aspects in chapters on women’s frustration with restriction in actions due to gender expectations; the whole complicated issue of slavery and women’s ambivalent attitude towards the institution; the desperate economic conditions that forced these women to do the unthinkable--take positions outside the home for paid wages; the strains that the war’s demands on women placed on their marriages; women’s relations with one another; their reading and literary aspirations; the change in attitudes towards God and religion as the war ground on; attitudes towards Yankee men; a striking chapter on the symbolism of clothing ; the shift, if not entirely conscious, from the assumption of abnegation and self-sacrifice in the cause of patriotism to a consideration of women’s own needs and rights; the role women played, in their increasing insistence that their men return from the carnage, in the Southern military defeat.

An excellent epilogue on what Faust calls the burden of Southern history revisited, gives a brief look at the results of these powerful shifts in women’s attitudes on, in particular, the suffragette movement in the South. In her last chapter, Faust makes an excellent case that the suffragette movement in the South had different roots than that of the North, and grew out of women’s disdain for the men who had failed to protect them and by women’s sense of their own limitations, far, far different from their Northern counterparts. But, in one of her most striking conclusions, a real eyebrow raiser, Faust argues that women’s desperate need for some return to the old order where being a “lady” meant a certain status caused elite Southern women to support even more strongly than the men the suppression of African-American men, in particular. Women were a powerful driving force committed to black disenfranchisement.

All throughout the book, Faust uses extensive quotes from hundreds of letters, diaries, and memoirs of Southern elite women drawn from all over the Confederacy. The best known of these is South Carolinian Mary Chestnut’s diaries. But by the time the book is finished, we feel as if we have met and gotten to know women like Sarah Morgan from Louisiana, Mary Lee from Virginia, Lizzie Neblett from Texas and scores more.

Which rings up the question of Faust’s writing style, which is superb. The best way that I can describe is to call it “quiet”--there is nothing shrill or edgy about it Yet, Faust is never, ever dull. The only quibble I have--and it is truly minor--is that when she deviates from the solid, powerful evidence of women’s own writings and speculates on psychological effects from feminist principles, the book loses impact. Fortunately those instances are few.

Included are a number of excellent photographs and reproductions of drawings from periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly. The photographs help to bring to life such women as Mary Lee, Sarah Morgan, and Kate Stone, and are welcome touches.

This is a superb book and should not be limited in interest just to American Civil War readers. Anyone who is interested in women’s history and roles will find a wealth of information in a book that is scrupulously researched and written in an extremely accessible way. Highly recommended. show less

By focusing on the shared experience of death and loss Gilpin Faust frames the Civil War as a national experience rather than one of just North vs South. The author shows how the unprecedented carnage of modern warfare necessitated a shift in American understanding of death and dying that has pervaded the culture since. I can't help but read this account of crisis shaping culture in light of the current pandemic, especially the numbing effect of numbers.

Quote: "Americans had not just lost show more the dead; they had lost their own lives as they had understood them before the war." show less