The War the Women Lived

Female Voices from the
Confederate South

Edited by Walter Sullivan
Foreword by George Core
J.S. Sanders & Company, $24.95

ISBN 1-879941-30-9

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Review by David Madden

Of all America's wars, the Civil War has produced, by far, the greatest volume of published, and not yet published, memoirs by women. Walter Sullivan, a native of Nashville, scholar of Southern literature, author of three novels, and professor of English and creative writing at Vanderbilt, draws on the letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs of 23 women, whose ages ranged from 13 to 58 the day Edmund Ruffin fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. The 31 narrative sequences are arranged chronologically, from the first months of anticipated, decorous victory to Sherman's epic firestorm to the sea. As George Core, editor of the distinguished literary journal The Sewanee Review, promises in the foreword, each entry is a fast-paced story, so that the book may be read as an informal history or a loosely constructed novel.

Sullivan draws on many perspectives: young and old women, wives, daughters, sweethearts, nurses, teachers, slave managers, refugees, couriers, smugglers, and spies. The war the women lived is viewed from many vantage points: balconies and porches and parlors, but also hospitals, prisons, ships on the home front, behind the lines, and battlefields. Like the Chorus in Euripides's The Trojan Women, these testimonial voices bear witness.

They are not passive witnesses but take-charge women whose deeds are the basis of their words, written on the scene, often rewritten, recollected in the tranquility of later years. They speak of a sense of land and property and of the very important relationships among family members. A few seemed to welcome a sense of danger. Some were critical of their leaders.

Context is provided by passages that set the historical scene; brief biographies of the women; and an epilogue that tells, as in Victorian novels, how the women's lives turned out. Sullivan's choices strike a balance between familiar voices and those that are not often heard. He provides a bibliography of the complete works from which the entries were extracted; among the most memorable are Sarah Morgan's, Mary Chesnut's, Belle Boyd's, Phoebe Pember's, and Loreta Janeta Valesquez's.

These Southern ladies-a word more appropriate to the time than women-write not only with grace and felicity but with forcefulness, intelligence, wit, humor, and pathos. Modern readers may wonder sometimes whether under all the rhetorical phrases, the suffering is real or partly an occasion for stylistic indulgence. But words, said Emerson, are actions. The women cling to the oratorical rhetoric of religion and politics, drawn from the Bible and Sir Walter Scott, that came out of the mouths of the fire-eaters who espoused secession and stirred up war fever.

To move us to listen to these Southern ladies, Sullivan, Core, and some reviewers describe them with such words as courage, compassion, inventiveness, honor, devotion, patriotism, intelligence, and generosity. But while trying to believe and behave as they always had, these women forged new facets of their identities in the furnace of war.

Part of the value of this book lies in a dark side that is now clear to us. It is only human for women who experience terror, humiliation, deprivation, death, danger, and hardships, to express also the bitterness, doubt, obstinacy, and self-centeredness necessary in the forging of steel magnolias. Not all were Melanies; some were Scarletts. What you cannot overcome, you must undergo. Listen to the collective voices Sullivan provides; then, to grasp the full range of implications of those voices, turn to Professor Drew Gilpin Faust's complex but very readable study, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, $29.95, 0-8078-2255-8). She deals with all the problems posed by Sullivan's choices.

David Madden is director of the United States Civil War Center. His Civil War novel, Sharpshooter, will be published next fall.

©1996, ProMotion, inc.

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