1. Stanford E. Moses Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter SHC).
2. Moses Papers, 9, 16, 47–48.
3. Moses Papers, 54, 55.
4. Moses Papers, 30, 32–33.
5. Moses Papers, 25, 70.
6. Judith Lee Hallock, ed., The Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 157, 85.
7. Hallock, Civil War Letters, 161–62.
8. Hallock, Civil War Letters, 44–45.
9. Mary Ann Cobb to Howell Cobb, December 9, 1860, quoted in William B. McCash, Thomas R. R. Cobb: The Making of a Southern Nationalist (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983), 193.
10. Thomas Cobb to Mary Ann Cobb, February 11, 1861, Thomas R. R. Cobb Papers, Hargrett Library, University of Georgia (unless otherwise noted all references are to this collection); Thomas Cobb to Mary Ann Cobb, February 15, 1861; Tom Watson Brown, “The Military Career of Thomas R. R. Cobb,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 1961, 344–62.
11. Thomas Cobb to Mary Ann Cobb, March 19, 1862.
12. Because this book addresses in loose ways the question of “why they fought,” it is important to clearly define this question at the outset. “Why they fought” is in fact two questions, depending on who is meant by they. Where they are North and South, the separate political and cultural entities, the question can be equally rendered: What caused the war? Why did the two sides come to blows? The answer to this question is relatively straightforward. Disagreements over the right of slaveholding caused secession; disagreements over the right of secession caused the war. Thus slavery was, if not the direct cause of the war, the precipitating, the root, cause. Only since the war has there been any concerted attempt to deny this commonsense fact. What is less clear, however, is the answer to another version of “why they fought,” where they refers to the millions of civilians in a democratic country who willingly endured hardship and death to become killers of their former countrymen. It is to this important question that this book is in part addressed. Readers interested in other perspectives should begin with James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
13. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and Anne Frior Scott, “Women in the South,” in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham, ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 454–509.
14. See especially Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15. While the literature on Southern masculinity is somewhat thin, much has been written on manhood in the Victorian period more generally. See, for instance, Leonard Ellis, “Men among Men: An Exploration of All-Male Relationships in Victorian America” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982); Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Nicole Etcheson, “Manliness and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1790–1860,” Journal of the Early Republic, 1995, 59–77; David G. Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993).
16. Henry Craft Diary, June 26, 1848, Craft, Fort, and Thorne Family Papers, SHC.
17. Here my perspective has been informed by emotional history (or emotions history as some prefer). So described, emotional history is in its infancy, though it clearly feeds on the more mature disciplines of psychohistory, intellectual and cultural history, conceptual history, gender and family history, and histories of mentalite. The first use of the term emotional history that I have found is Burton Raffel, “Emotional History: An Exploratory Essay,” Biography, 1984, 352–62; and Raffel, American Victorians: Explorations in Emotional History (Hamden: Archon, 1984). Though Raffel notes in his introduction to American Victorians that “emotional states progress, and change, with time,” he does not go on to develop the idea. A professor of English, Raffel has been rightly criticized for inattention to the historical forces that shape the way emotions are felt and expressed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns did not even feel it necessary to recognize Raffel’s attempts in their “Introducing the History of Emotion,” Psychohistory Review, 1990, 263–91. In the same volume, John E. Toews offers a criticism of the Stearns proposal, “Cultural History, the Construction of Subjectivity and Freudian Theory: A Critique of Carol and Peter Stearns’ Proposal for a New History of the Emotions,” Psychohistory Review, 1990, 303–18. Peter Stearns has gone on to refine his thinking in American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994) and An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998), edited with Jan Lewis. See also Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
18. Carol Bleser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 150.
1. Anna to Lord, June 22, 1849, Thomas Butler King Papers, SHC. For a solid biography of Thomas Butler King, see Edward M. Steel Jr., T. Butler King of Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1964). On the King family, see Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Stephen W. Berry, “More Alluring at a Distance: Absentee Patriarchy and the Thomas Butler King Family,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, Winter 1998, 863–96.
2. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 31.
3. Beverly Scafidel, “The Letters of William Elliott” (Ph.D. diss., University of South Carolina, 1978), 500–501.
4. James L. Petigru to Philip Porcher, June 16, 1851, in James Petigru Carson, ed., Life, Letters, and Speeches of James Louis Petigru, The Union Man of South Carolina (Washington: W. H. Lowdermilk, 1920), 289–90.
5. Steel, T. Butler King of Georgia.
6. Harvey Jackson, ed., Letters from Alabama, Chiefly Relating to Natural History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 156, 88; Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South, 131.
7. It has never been particularly clear what Aaron Burr was intending to do. Perhaps he wasn’t himself sure. Interested readers should start with Thomas Perkins Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954). On John Murrell, see James Penick Jr., The Great Western Land Pirate: John A. Murrell in Legend and History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981). On the filibustering forays, see particularly Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Charles L. Dufour, Gentle Tiger: The Gallant Life of Roberdeau Wheat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); and Charles Henry Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
8. “Manifest Destiny of the World: Its Republic and Its Empire,” Southern Literary Messenger, September 1859, 207–9.
9. “Manifest Destiny of the World,” 207; “A Few Thoughts on Southern Civilization,” Russell’s Magazine, December 1857, 218.
10. “Characteristics of Civilization,” Russell’s Magazine, November 1857, 97; “A Few Thoughts on Southern Civilization,” 224; Edward Alfred Pollard, “Hints on Southern Civilization,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1861, 308–11.
11. The impact of classical education on Southern manhood has yet to be fully plumbed. Wayne K. Durrill makes a good start in “The Power of Ancient Words: Classical Teaching and Social Change at South Carolina College, 1804–1860,” Journal of Southern History, 1999, 469–98. On classical education in the period more broadly, see Bruce A. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986). The study of Southern education more generally begins with Walter J. Fraser Jr., R. Frank Saunders Jr., and Jon Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). For more on the South’s sense of history, see James Britton, “The Decline and Fall of Nations in Antebellum Southern Thought: A Study of Southern Historical Consciousness, 1846–1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1988).
12. George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951), 79; William C. Preston to Waddy Thompson, September 7, 1853, William C. Preston Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. On the South’s enthusiasm for and success in railroad building, see David L. Carlton, “The Revolution from Above: The National Market and the Beginnings of Industrialization in North Carolina,” Journal of American History, 1990, 445–75; W. Kirk Wood, “U. B. Phillips and Antebellum Southern Rail Inferiority: The Origins of the Myth,” Journal of Southern History, 1987, 173–87; Lacy K. Ford Jr., “Yeoman Farmers in the South Carolina Upcountry: Changing Production Patterns in the Late Antebellum Period,” Agricultural History, 1986, 17–37. Particularly germane to the discussion is Ford’s contention that the coming of the railroads in the 1850s marked a substantial change in the lives of Southern yeomen, who began to drift from a policy of agricultural self-sufficiency to raising cash crops for market. James Oakes catalogues other fundamental changes in the South in the late antebellum period in “From Republicanism to Liberalism: Ideological Change and the Crisis of the Old South,” American Quarterly, 1985, 551–71.
13. James Everett Kibler Jr., ed., “The First Simms Letters: ‘Letters from the West’ (1826),” Southern Literary Journal, 1987, 81–91; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
14. John Shofner to Michael Shofner, August 28, 1834, Michael Shofner Papers, SHC.
15. William Elliott to Ann Elliott, September 3, 1858, in Scafidel, “Letters of William Elliott,” 914–15.
16. Robert Morrison to James Morrison, May 31, 1853, in Robert Hall Morrison Papers, SHC; “The Days We Live In,” Southern Literary Messenger, December 1854, 758.
17. “The Mothers and Children of the Present Day,” Southern Literary Messenger, May 1856.
18. James Henry Hammond to Harry Hammond, July 16, 1859, in Carol Bleser, ed., The Hammonds of Redcliffe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 68; William Elliott to William Elliott Jr., June 19, 1849, Scafidel, “Letters of William Elliott,” 579; William Elliott to Phoebe Elliott, April 26, 1854, Scafidel, “Letters of William Elliott,” 765.
19. Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, ed., The Journals of Josiah Gorgas (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 17.
20. Joseph G. Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches (New York: Appleton, 1853), 227; Woodward, Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, xxxiv.
21. J.E.B. Stuart to his cousin Bettie Hairston, October 28, 1853, in Peter W. Hairston, ed., “J.E.B. Stuart’s Letters to His Hairston Kin, 1850–1855,” North Carolina History Review, 1974, 304.
22. “Leaves from a Dreamer’s Diary,” Russell’s Magazine, October 1858, 30, 32.
23. John M. Lincoln to cousin Sue Heiskell, November 12, 1857, Edward Marvin Steel Papers, SHC.
24. April 18, 1849, entry in Everard Baker Diary, SHC.
25. Richard Smith Elliott, Notes Taken in Sixty Years (St. Louis: R. P. Studley, 1883), 3.
26. Anna King to Florence King, August 7, 1851, King-Wilder Papers, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah; William Gilmore Simms quoted in John McCardell, “Poetry and the Practical: William Gilmore Simms,” in Michael O’Brien and David Moltke-Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 204.
27. Wallace Cumming to Harriet Alexander, August 6, 1852, Alexander-Hillhouse Papers, SHC; Scafidel, “Letters of William Elliott,” 497–98.
28. Giles J. Patterson, Journal of a Southern Student, 1846–48, with Letters of a Later Period (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1944), 51.
29. “Modern Oratory,” Southern Literary Messenger, June 1852, 370.
30. Boston Daily Star, November 25, 1845, 2. For newspaper editorials detailing Poe’s Lyceum appearance, see Kent P. Ljungquist, “Poe’s ‘Al Aaraaf’ and the Boston Lyceum: Contributions to Primary and Secondary Bibliography,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 1995, 199–216. For more background on the incident, consult Katherine Hemple Prown, “The Cavalier and the Syren: Edgar Allan Poe, Cornelia Wells Walter, and the Boston Lyceum Incident,” New England Quarterly, 1993, 110–23.
31. “Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1854, 250, 252; Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 34. Poe was skeptical about progress, but he could never fully shake the grandiosity of ambition ushered in by the romantic movement. The result was a man tragically at war with himself, given over to vain imaginings that were at once splendid and fantastic, morbid and doomed. In this, of course, he was anticipated by Byron: “The way to riches, to Greatness, lies before me,” the poet wrote to his mother at age fifteen. “I can, I will cut myself a path through the world or perish.” Most helpful in my readings of Poe were David Leverenz, “Poe and Gentry Virginia: Provincial Gentleman, Textual Aristocrat, Man of the Crowd,” in Ann Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds., Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 79–108; Scott Peeples, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (New York: Twayne, 1998); Louis D. Rubin, The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Larzer Ziff, “The Self Divided by Democracy: Edgar Allan Poe and the Already-Answered Question,” in Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (New York: Viking, 1981), 67–86; J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself,” American Literary History 8, no. 3 (1996): 533–51; Lawrence Frank, “‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50, no. 2 (1995): 168–88; Burton R. Pollin, “A New Englander’s Obituary Eulogy of Poe,” American Periodicals 4 (1994): 1–11; Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66, no. 2 (1994): 239–73; James Livingston, “Subjectivity and Slavery in Poe’s Autobiography of Ambitious Love,” Psychohistory Review 21, no. 2 (1993): 175–96; “A Posthumous Assessment: The 1849–1850 Periodical Press Response to Edgar Allan Poe,” American Periodicals 2 (1992): 6–50; John Cleman, “Irresistible Impulses: Edgar Allan Poe and the Insanity Defense,” American Literature 63, no. 4 (1991): 623–40; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Fettered Mind: Time, Place, and the Literary Imagination of the Old South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 74, no. 4 (1990): 622–50; Shawn Rosenheim, “The King of ‘Secret Readers’: Edgar Poe, Cryptography, and the Origins of the Detective Story,” English Literary History 56, no. 2 (1990): 375–400; Kenneth Alan Hovey, “Critical Provincialism: Poe’s Poetic Principle in Antebellum Context,” American Quarterly 39, no. 3 (1987): 341–54; Michael Lawrence Burduck, “Phobic Pressure Points in Poe: The Nineteenth-Century Reader and His Fears” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mississippi, 1984); Richard Godden, “Edgar Allan Poe and the Detection of Riot,” Literature and History 8, no. 2 (1982): 206–31, 272; Barnaby Conrad, “Genius and Intemperance,” Horizon 23, no. 12 (1980): 33–40; C. Hugh Holman, “Another Look at Nineteenth-Century Southern Fiction,” Southern Humanities Review 14, no. 3 (1980): 235–45; Jack Kaufhold, “The Humor of Edgar Allan Poe,” Virginia Cavalcade 29, no. 3 (1980): 136–43; J. Gerald Kennedy, “Poe and Magazine Writing on Premature Burial,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1977, 165–78; Stuart Levine, “Poe and American Society,” Canadian Review of American Studies 9, no. 1 (1978): 16–33; Allan Smith, “The Psychological Context of Three Tales by Poe,” Journal of American Studies 7, no. 3 (1973): 279–92; Charles L. Sanford, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Blight upon the Landscape,” American Quarterly 20, no. 1 (1968): 54–66; Claude Richard, “Poe and the Yankee Hero: An Interpretation of Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” Mississippi Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1968): 93–109; Madeleine B. Sterne, “Poe: ‘The Mental Temperament’ for Phrenologists,” American Literature 40, no. 2 (1968): 155–63; Miriam Weiss, “Poe’s Catterina,” Mississippi Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1966): 29–33; Joseph M. Garrison Jr., “The Function of Terror in the Work of Edgar Allan Poe,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 136–50; Curtis Dahl, “The American School of Catastrophe,” American Quarterly 11, no. 3 (1959): 380–90.
Long after his death, Poe was generating ambivalent column inches for the Southern Literary Messenger and other antebellum magazines. For contemporary reviews and opinions of Edgar Allan Poe, see especially John Moncure Daniel, “Edgar Allan Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, March 1850, 172–87 (“Among all his poems, there are only two or three which are not execrably bad. The majority of his prose writings are the children of want and dyspepsia, of printer’s devils and of blue devils.”); “Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1854, 249–53 (“Surely none of the hybrids which geology has dug out of the graves of Chaos and exhibited to our shuddering view is half so strange a compound as was Edgar A. Poe.”); “Edgar Allan Poe,” Ladies’ Repository, July 1859, 419–23 (“Edgar Allan Poe was incontestably one of the most worthless persons of whom we have any record in the world of letters.”); P. Pendleton Cooke, “Edgar Allan Poe: His Literary Merits Considered,” Southern Literary Messenger, January 1848, 34–38 (“That he [Poe] would be a greater favorite with the majority of readers if he brought his singular capacity for vivid and truthlike narrative to bear on subjects nearer ordinary life, and of a more cheerful and happy character, does not I think admit of a doubt.”); John Reuben Thompson, “The Late Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, November 1849, 694–97 (“It is remarkable… that a mind so prone to unrestrained imaginings should be capable of analytic investigation or studious research. Yet few excelled Mr. Poe in power of analysis or patient application. Such are the contradictions of the human intellect. He was an impersonated antithesis.”); “The Raven—By Edgar A. Poe,” Southern Literary Messenger, November 1857, 331–35 (Poe’s scribblings sound “like the utterances of a full heart poured out—not for the sake of telling its sad story to a sympathizing ear—but because he is mastered by his emotions and cannot help giving vent to them.”); and W. W. Kinsley, “The Province of Gloom in Literature,” Ladies’ Repository, January 1862, 45–47 (Poe “lived a life whose wickedness was equaled only by its melancholy; he came upon the very confines of moral sentiment without having one ray of its celestial light warming his heart.”).
32. Bleser, Secret and Sacred, 263.
1. Poe explored the reverie of doomed ambition in much of his work. See especially J. Gerald Kennedy, “The Violence of Melancholy: Poe against Himself,” American Literary History, 1996, 533–51; and Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature, 1994, 239–73. Quotes here come from Poe’s Tamerlane. Interestingly, there are some strikingly similar lines in Tamerlane and Hamlet. Guildenstern’s comment, “Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream” (2.2) is echoed by Poe: “Yet more than worthy of the love / My spirit struggled with, and strove, / When, on the mountain peak, alone, / Ambition lent it a new tone— /…/ That was new pleasure—the ideal, / Dim, vanities of dreams by night— / And dimmer nothings which were real— / (Shadows—and a more shadowy light!).”
2. Henry Hughes Diary, May 21, 1848, April 30, 1848, and March 4, 1849, Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Remarkably, Hughes even dreamed of a return to Tamerlane’s mountain, to a time before the bugle had awakened him. “O Ambition,” he lamented. “My hand clenches, my brow knits, I groan in Spirit. The name of a great man, an allusion to glory, makes my heart sink and [my] blood flow back until I almost faint. Would I were a Shepherd boy, remote from the busy haunts of men…. Oh, Oh! Let me not be compelled to live forever. Let me forever sleep and dream not.” Hughes Diary, February 25, 1849, and January 14, 1849.
3. Hughes Diary, January 9, 1853.
4. Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan and Party Chaos, 1857–1859 (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), 287–88; Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 164–65; John Holt Merchant Jr., “Laurence M. Keitt: South Carolina Fire-Eater” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1976), 160–73; William Henry Trescott to William Porcher Miles, February 7, 1858, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC. Although it is difficult to piece together the true facts of the altercation, it seems probable that Grow knocked the (already tipsy) Keitt to the floor. “No harm came of the quarrel & consequent row in the House,” noted Josiah Gorgas in his diary. “Mr. K[eitt] made a full apology, but has no recollection of being knocked down by Grow as asserted by the letter writers. He is a good deal laughed at by the opposition press, because his friends assert that he stumbled & fell.’ “Josiah Gorgas to wife, February 26, 1858, in Wiggins, Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 16. Keitt, of course, had earlier distinguished himself for his involvement in Preston Brooks’s caning of Charles Sumner. When Brooks first hatched the idea, Keitt begged to be allowed to carry it out. Brooks of course refused, but Keitt was nearby when Brooks began his assault, and made sure the “licks were well laid on” by threatening any man who moved to interrupt the flogging. Keitt helped Brooks dress a wound above his eye inflicted by the recoil of the cane, and both congressmen resigned their seats in protest—only to be resoundingly reelected. For a sustained treatment of the caning, see Harlan Gradin, “Losing Control: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Breakdown of Antebellum Political Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1991). The only sustained treatment of Keitt that has been published is a prosopographical chapter on him and Louis Wigfall in Eric H. Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 160–94.
5. Merchant, “Laurence M. Keitt,” 15.
6. Laurence Massillon Keitt to Susan Sparks, January 20, 1855, Special Collections Library, Duke University (hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all references are to this collection); Keitt to Sparks, March 16, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, February 14, 1855.
7. Keitt to Sparks, February 14, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, January 20, 1855.
8. Merchant, “Laurence M. Keitt,” 206–7; Harper’s Weekly, December 22, 1860, 802.
9. Merchant, “Laurence M. Keitt,” 14–16; Keitt to Sparks, January 20, 1855.
10. Keitt to Sparks, September 19, 1855; Merchant, “Laurence M. Keitt.”
11. James Everett Kibler Jr., Poetry and the Practical (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 6–7, 15, 17, 88–94. Scholars interested in Simms should begin with Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); John McCardell, “Poetry and the Practical: William Gilmore Simms,” in O’Brien and Moltke-Hansen, Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, 186–210; John Caldwell Guilds, ed., “Long Years of Neglect:” The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988); John Caldwell Guilds, Simms: A Literary Life (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992); and John Caldwell Guilds and Caroline Collins, eds., William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997). Simms was often little more than a forge, churning out a regional literature that is marred equally by his hurry, his petulance, his grinding discipline, and his inability to forget himself when he wrote of others. (Simms himself seemed to understand this. His self-composed epitaph reads: “Here lies one who after a reasonably long life, distinguished chiefly by unceasing labors, left all his better works undone.”) In fairness, it should be noted that Simms had moments, rare but delightful, when he wrote with verve and lilt and brooded with deep passion on the problems that beset his region and his country. Never did he do so better than in Poetry and the Practical.
The poetic proclivity of antebellum Southerners has yet to be fully explored. In the pages of the South’s literary magazines, a battle was being waged between romantics and classicists, and the poetics of Simms and Keitt needs to be understood in this context. Both Simms and Keitt fell somewhere in the middle, exploring classical themes with a romantic flourish. Scholars wishing for a start on this subject might begin with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Fettered Mind: Time, Place, and the Literary Imagination of the Old South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 1990, 622–50; Edd Parks, Henry Timrod (New York: Twayne, 1964); Edd Winfield Parks, The Essays of Henry Timrod (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1942); Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990).
12. Keitt to Sparks, September 19, 1855. While it is difficult to prove that Keitt read these lectures, there is some circumstantial evidence to support the theory. On October 22, 1855, Keitt wrote to Sue: “I do not know when Simms will be at Darlington C[ourt]. H[ouse]. Sometime in the winter. He came to see me in Charleston, but I was ill from exposure, as I had gone down in the night train from Barnwell. The talk between us was general. He has just written me a letter, but all he says is that he will be over here in a few weeks. Pray go to hear him, for his lectures are admirable.”
13. Kibler, Poetry and the Practical, 88; Keitt to Sparks, October 13, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, April 30, 1856; Keitt to Sparks, June 19, 1856.
14. Keitt to Sparks, April 30, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, undated June 1855. Again, when laid side by side, Keitt’s extended romantic diatribe against stagnation (as revealed in his letters to Susan Sparks) and Simms’s Poetry and the Practical yield many points of agreement. Keitt’s sense of politics as epic poem, for instance, almost certainly drew on Simms’s work: “The soul of art is Imagination! That high reaching genius which perpetually craves to soar—to spread abroad the wing of conquest—to cast over all things the eye of discovery—to penetrate the depths of matter,—to explore the mysteries of space; and by lifting the soul of man in search, urge upon him the sleepless necessity which makes him rejoice forever in the development of his own wondrous powers! What you have done—what you are—is due wholly to this own faculty. It is the soul of all the rest. The race is simply brutal, until spiritualized by this crowning gift, and the radical differences existing between men and races, are due to the unequal distribution of it in their allotment! This faculty has been your pioneer, has hewn out your way through rock and forest, has taken for you the seals from off the mysterious portals of the deep. It has informed your courage, your enterprise—lighted up your whole career, so that, though you may not have written, you have lived a glorious epic poem!” Here poetry has burst its confines as we understand them. Simms is calling for a poetry of practice, wherein men live out their imaginations, build their dreams, and found, thereby, a Civilization. Keitt was seduced by just such a romantic project, and we must therefore take seriously his claim to be living an epic poem.
15. Keitt to Sparks, June 6, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, July 11, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, undated June 1855.
16. Keitt to Sparks, July 29, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, July 11, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, January 20, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, June 6, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, undated June 1855; Keitt to Sparks, July 29, 1855. Keitt’s discussion here suggests that we should study the impact of Europe’s 1848 revolutions on the American psyche, with particular attention to how American disintegration, in the form of sectionalism, was folded into a growing sense that the entire Atlantic world was poised on the brink of revolutionary consolidation.
17. Keitt to Sparks, September 11, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, May 29, 1856. As might be expected, Keitt saw the Sumner caning not merely as a blow for proslavery forces but as further fuel for his coming apocalypse: “Brooks that day flogged Sumner of Massachusetts, and he did it well and soundly. He combined in happy proportions freedom of speech and freedom of the cudgel. Sumner had slandered Judge Butler in his absence. The feeling is pretty much sectional. If the northern men had stood up, the city would now float with blood. The fact is the feeling is wild and fierce. The Kansas fight has just occurred and the times are stirring. Everybody here feels as if we are upon a volcano. I am glad of it, for I am tired of stagnation” (Keitt to Sparks, May 29, 1856).
18. Keitt to Sparks, undated February 1855; Keitt to Sparks, May 3, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, March 9, 1855.
19. Keitt to Sparks, undated February 1855.
20. Keitt to Sparks, undated February 1855; Keitt to Sparks, February 14, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, March 16, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, May 3, 1855.
21. Keitt to Sparks, May 9, 1855.
22. Keitt to Sparks, April 13, 1856; Keitt to Sparks, June 19, 1856; Keitt to Sparks, May 9, 1856; Keitt to Sparks, May 30, 1856; Keitt to Sparks, undated June 1855; Keitt to Sparks, May 30, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, May 9, 1855.
23. Keitt to Sparks, September 26, 1855; Keitt to Sparks, February 2, 1856.
24. Keitt to Sparks, undated June 1855; Keitt to Sparks, November 8, 1855.
25. Keitt to Sparks, February 17, 1856.
26. Keitt to Sparks, July 7, 1856.
27. Hubert H. McAlexander, “Flush Times in Holly Springs,” Journal of Mississippi History, 1986, 1–13; Henry Craft Diary, July 30, 1848, Craft, Fort, and Thorne Family Papers, SHC (hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all references are to this collection). Also on the history of Holly Springs, see William Baskerville Hamilton, Holly Springs, Mississippi, to the year 1878 (Holly Springs: Marshall County Historical Society, 1984). For other contemporary perspectives on Mississippi’s startling transformation from frontier to cotton kingdom, see J.F.H. Claiborne, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory, and State: With Biographical Notices of Eminent Citizens (Jackson: Power & Barksdale, 1880); and Percy L. Rainwater, ed., Random Recollections of Early Days in Mississippi, by H. S. Fulkerson (Baton Rouge: Otto Claitor, 1937). For secondary sources, consult John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest: Mississippi, 1770–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); and Bradley G. Bond, Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). On the effect of these changes on the aboriginal population, see Daniel H. Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” Journal of American History, 1985, 297–317.
28. Henry Craft Diary, April 8, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, April 11, 1849.
29. Henry Craft Diary, April 28, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, April 30, 1848.
30. Henry Craft Diary, April 30, 1848.
31. Henry Craft Diary, May 4, 1848.
32. Henry Craft Diary, July 12, 1848.
33. Henry Craft Diary, July 30, 1848.
34. Henry Craft Diary, October 29, 1848.
35. Henry Craft Diary, April 8, 1848.
36. Henry Craft Diary, April 8, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, May 9, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, April 28, 1848.
37. Henry Craft Diary, April 30, 1848.
38. Henry Craft Diary, June 25, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, June 26, 1848. On the fondness of romantics for overindulging in the mourning of a beautiful woman, see much of Poe and Michael O’Brien, “Politics, Romanticism, and Hugh Legare: ‘The Fondness of Disappointed Love,’” in his Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 57–83.
39. Henry Craft Diary, April 30, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, June 26, 1848. Clearly, Henry Craft suffered from some form of depression or melancholia that went well beyond his mourning for Lucy. Today such problems can be treated, but in the nineteenth century feelings of self-loathing and unworthiness became self-perpetuating as depressed men and women blamed themselves for being abnormal. For a longer view on the history of depression, see Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to the Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Aaron T. Beck, John Paul Brady, and Jacques M. Quen, The History of Depression (New York: Psychiatric Annals, 1977).
40. Henry Craft Diary, June 25, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, July 2, 1848.
41. Henry Craft Diary, July 2, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, June 26, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, July 12, 1848.
42. Henry Craft Diary, June 25, 1848; Henry Craft to Matt, February 3, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, October 8, 1848.
43. Henry Craft Diary, October 29, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, November 3, 1848.
44. Henry Craft Diary, June 26, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, October 8, 1848.
45. Henry Craft Diary, August 28, 1859.
46. Henry Craft Diary, October 25, 1860; Henry Craft Diary, May 20, 1860.
47. Henry Craft Diary, August 12, 1860.
48. Henry Craft Diary, December 30, 1860; Henry Craft Diary, August 19, 1860.
49. Henry Craft Diary, December 2, 1860.
50. Henry Craft Diary, August 12, 1860.
51. Henry Craft Diary, August 19, 1860; Henry Craft Diary, May 2, 1859; Henry Craft to sister, February 3, 1848; Henry Craft Diary, August 12, 1860.
52. Henry Craft Diary, December 30, 1860; Henry Craft Diary, December 31, 1860.
1. Childs, Rice Planter and Sportsman, 71–72; Charles L. Dufour, Gentle Tiger: The Gallant Life of Roberdeau Wheat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 75; “Courtship Made Easy,” Southern Literary Messenger, July 1857, 14.
2. Carson, Life, Letters, and Speeches of James Louis Petigru, 246.
3. Lord King to brother Thomas Butler King Jr., January 31, 1858, Thomas Butler King Papers; “Courtship Made Easy,” 18; the man is identified only as “Alexander,” in “Courtship Made Easy,” 13–14.
4. F. W. Shelton, “On Old Bachelors,” Southern Literary Messenger, April 1853, 223–28; “Courtship Made Easy,” 15.
5. Harriet Alexander to William Cumming, August 4, 1852, Alexander and Hillhouse Family Papers, SHC; Toosie (last name unknown) to Lordy King, Thomas Butler King Papers. On letter writing as genre, see Lenore Hoffman and Margo Culley, eds., Women’s Personal Narratives: Essays in Criticism and Pedagogy (New York: Modern Language Association, 1985); Steven M. Stowe, “The Rhetoric of Authority: The Making of Social Values in Planter Family Correspondence,” Journal of American History, 1987, 916–33, and “Singleton’s Tooth: Thoughts on the Form and Meaning of Antebellum Southern Family Correspondence,” Southern Review, 1989, 323–33. On letter writing and courtship, see Stowe, Intimacy and Power; and Dykstra, Searching the Heart.
6. Wes Halliburton to Juliet Halliburton, April 17, 1861, John Wesley Halliburton Papers, SHC.
7. Harry St. John Dixon Diary, June 6, 1861, SHC; Wes Halliburton to Juliet Halliburton, April 30, 1861.
8. Wes Halliburton to Juliet Halliburton, April 3, 1861, April 14, 1861.
9. George Peddy Cuttino, ed., Saddle Bag and Spinning Wheel, Being the Civil War letters of George W. Peddy, M.D., Surgeon, 56th Georgia Volunteer Regiment, C.S.A., and his wife Kate Featherston Peddy (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1981), 175; William M. Cash and Lucy Somerville Howorth, eds., My Dear Nellie: The Civil War Letters of William L. Nugent to Eleanor Smith Nugent (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 100.
10. William W. Hassler, ed., The General to His Lady: The Civil War Letters of William Dorsey Pender to Fanny Pender (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 185–86, 122.
11. Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 25–26; Cuttino, Saddle Bag and Spinning Wheel, 25–26; Hassler, General to His Lady, 57–58, 43–44, 45–46. William Nugent’s sense that his wife could be an iconoclast to the religion he made of her is echoed by Laurence Keitt: “I go soon away, and to a tempest-swept arena where the fierce storm spirit will be unchained, and where I shall meet the conflict now with a steadier eye and a stronger arm, and will clutch the laurel of victory with a readier grasp because of you. My triumphs now—if any such I win—will be for you and mainly because of you. Then, dear Sue, be not an iconoclast to my heart and trouble not and deface not its best image” (Keitt to Sparks, November 8, 1855, Laurence Keitt Papers).
12. Rev. R. Q. Mallard to Mary Sharpe Jones, November 3, 1856, in Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 2590; George Fitzhugh, “The Women of the South,” DeBow’s Review, August 1861, 148, 152. Scholars interested in the life of antebellum Southern women should begin with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Slavery and rural isolation, FoxGenovese believes, defined Southern women’s experience in ways significantly different from that of their Northern counterparts. While granting the major thrust of recent historiography—that Southern women’s involvement in politics, reform, education, and unruliness needs to be taken seriously—this book places the stress where Fox-Genovese placed it—on the harrowing confinement of the planter woman’s sphere, a confinement that could be compensated for, but never fully assuaged, by associational involvement and a few trips to town. (For a very thoughtful review of Fox-Genovese’s book, see Suzanne Lebsock, “Complicity and Contention: Women in the Plantation South,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 1990, 59–83).
13. Laura Cole to her cousin, Cecelia, undated, Brumby and Smith Family Papers, SHC, 59.
14. Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 58; Cuttino, Saddle Bag and Spinning Wheel, 184, 133; Harriet Alexander to William Cumming, October 12, 1852, Alexander and Hillhouse Family Papers.
15. Anna Page to Hannah Page, March 1, 1823, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Thomas King, June 9, 1842, Thomas Butler King Papers.
16. Anna King to Thomas King, April 11, 1850, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Lord King, July 11, 1849, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Lord King, September 24, 1848, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Florence King, January 14, 1852, King-Wilder Papers, Georgia Historical Society–Savannah; Anna King to Florence King, December 14, 1851, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Florence King, February 29, 1852, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, October 5, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers, SHC.
17. Anna King to Florence King, undated 1851 or 1852, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Lord King, May 15, 1849, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Lord King, June 12, 1849, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, June 15, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, June 19, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, June 26, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers; Anna King to Florence King, October 14, 1851, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Florence King, November 13, 1851, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, September 22, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers; Anna to Florence, undated 1851 or 1852, King-Wilder Papers.
18. Anna King to Hannah Couper, July 10, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers; Anna King to Thomas King, June 25, 1848, Thomas Butler King Papers.
19. Anna King to Florence King, September 22, 1851, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, December 21, 1856, William Audley Couper Papers.
20. Anna King to Thomas King, April 7, 1848, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Thomas King, June 9, 1842, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Florence King, August 21, 1851, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, July 3, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers; Anna King to Hannah Couper, September 25, 1852, William Audley Couper Papers.
21. Anna to Floyd and Tip, January 21, 1859, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Georgia King, July 8, 1859, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Thomas King, April 2, 1859, Thomas Butler King Papers.
22. Anna King to Thomas King, April 2, 1859, Thomas Butler King Papers; Anna King to Georgia King, June 25, 1859, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Georgia King, July 19, 1859, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Georgia King, July 30, 1859, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Georgia King, August 10, 1859, King-Wilder Papers; Anna King to Florence King, December 14, 1851, King-Wilder Papers; Florence King to Floyd King, May 25, 1860, Thomas Butler King Papers.
23. On Sarah Ann Haynsworth Gayle, see Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 1–35; Mary Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (New York: D. Appleton, 1905), 124; Caroline Gilman, Recollections of a Southern Matron, 160. On the marriage of Benjamin and Elizabeth Perry, see Carol K. Bleser, “The Perrys of Greenville: A Nineteenth-Century Marriage,” in Walter Fraser, ed., The Web of Southern Social Relations, 72–89. On the gendered experience of time, see Steven M. Stowe, “City, Country, and the Feminine Voice,” in O’Brien and Moltke-Hansen, Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston, 295–324.
24. Susan Cornwall Diary, March 18, 1857, SHC; Cornelia Spencer Diary, undated July 1865, SHC; Sarah Morgan Diary, May 23, 1862, in Charles East, ed., The Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 83; Laura Cole to her cousin, Cecilia, undated, Brumby and Smith Family Papers, SHC, 58. Ms. Cole’s disgust with the crimson velvet riding dress is echoed by an unidentified Selma diarist in Michael O’Brien’s An Evening When Alone: “This afternoon has been greatly enlivened by the visit of a dutch pedlar! with silks and satins for sale, I was called upon for my opinion, I thought they were all hideous but did not say so before the soi-distant Polonois—and duly assisted Mary in choosing a small shawl[. T]his is quite an event, and will be very useful in furnishing us with a subject for conversation for one week at least—we are in the habit here of making the most of these matters” (paperback edition), 131. My point, again, is not remotely to suggest that all women were unhappy. Rather, female unhappiness was a kind of emotional style that all women recognized as a grim potential. Elodie Todd, for instance, did not like to cry because she thought it might be habit-forming and take her down the very female road of indulgent loneliness and helpless fretting. “I regard my grief as too sacred to be seen by every eye,” she noted, “and am selfish enough to enjoy it entirely alone when I have the inclination to indulge [in tears] which I very seldom do as I think matters will not be improved, and I have a great dread of an unhappy person who is a tax on any one, and you know the habit might increase. I am afraid of being like Mrs. Hardie, not only miserable myself but causing those around me to be so too” (Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, May 27, 1861, Nathaniel Henry Rhodes Dawson Papers, SHC).
25. Georgia King to Richard Cuyler King, May 14, 1860, Thomas Butler King Papers; East, Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, 352–53.
26. O’Brien, An Evening When Alone, 135; Scafidel, “Letters of William Elliott,” 792; Tristram Skinner to Eliza Harwood, May 10, 1841, Skinner Family Papers; O’Brien, An Evening When Alone, 138.
27. O’Brien, ed., An Evening When Alone, 78; Elliott Ashkenazi, ed., The Civil War Diary of Clara Solomon: Growing up in New Orleans, 1861–1962 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Virginia Ingraham Burr, The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1848–1889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
28. East, Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, 248–49, 155–56.
29. O’Brien, ed., An Evening When Alone, 137, 135.
30. Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, 25; East, Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan, 155; Sarah Wadley Diary (typescript), SHC, 119–20.
31. Margaret Ann (Meta) (Morris) Grimball Diary, March 15, 1861 and March 20, 1861, SHC; Elizabeth Clitherall Diary, November 20, 1860, SHC.
1. William Elliott, Carolina Sports by Land and Water: including incidents of devil-fishing, wild-cat, deer and bear hunting, etc. (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859); William Elliott to Ann Elliott, August 27, 1855, Scafidel, “Letters of William Elliott,” 820–21.
2. On Southerners as Victorians, see Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). In the introduction, C. Vann Woodward notes, “The term ‘Victorian’ in the general title is to be understood as more than a chronological designation, or one taken to suggest conventional notions of propriety, authority, and prim conduct. ‘Victorian’ South differed from Victorian England and Victorian New England.” (xxi). See also “Rediscovering the Victorians,” Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1997, 15–55.
3. R.F.W. Allston to Ben Allston, February 25, 1852, Allston Papers, South Carolina Historical Society.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 29, 1849, David Outlaw Papers, SHC (hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all references are to this collection); David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, July 28, 1848. On the general tenor of the House during the debates that would culminate in the Compromise of 1850, see Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978); Edwin Charles Rozwenc, The Compromise of 1850 (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1957); and Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Outlaw’s assessment that “negroes” constituted the “everlasting topic” of debate before the assembly echoes that of Thomas Hart Benton, senator from Missouri, who likened the omnipresence of the slavery issue in 1848 to a biblical plague: “You could not look upon the table but there were frogs. You could not sit down at the banquet table but there were frogs. You could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs. We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us.”
7. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 3, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 5, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 20, 1848; Emily Outlaw to David Outlaw, January, 19, 1850. Outlaw’s particularities on the subject of vanity and pride put one in mind of Jane Austen’s musings on the same: “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonimously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinions of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us” (Pride and Prejudice, Penguin Classics, 20). If Outlaw read Austen, he does not mention it.
8. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 6, 1850; Emily Outlaw to David Outlaw, May 28, 1852; Emily Outlaw to David Outlaw, January 29, 1850.
9. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 4, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, July 24, 1850.
10. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 16, 1847; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 12, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, July 27, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 12, 1848.
11. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 8, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, May 23, 1850.
12. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 7, 1847; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 10, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, undated January 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 7, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 14, 1847; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 16, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 14, 1847.
13. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 13, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 1, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 15, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 4, 1849; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, May 5, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, undated January 1848.
14. A delightful study of crusty (small-r) republicanism is Harry L. Watson, “Squire Oldway and His Friends: Opposition to Internal Improvements in Antebellum North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review, 1977, 105–19.
15. Mrs. Clay’s famous study of Washington in the period, it should be remembered, was written after the fact, with that peculiar romantic hindsight Southerners brought to the examination of all things antedating the Unpleasantness. In her memory, at least, Washington was a resplendent court at “the very apex of its social glory.” Fewer states meant fewer representatives, making society “correspondingly select.” Moreover, she noted, “many distinguished men… retained their positions in the political foreground for… many years,” and when they finally died or retired their sons often succeeded them, “inheriting, in some degree, their ancestors friends” and creating “a social security” that lent “charm and prestige to the fashionable coteries of the Federal centre.” Troubled by the irksome instabilities of the democratic process, Mrs. Clay chose in retrospect to emphasize the degree to which the political cream rose to the top and stayed there. True courtiers, after all, cannot be swanking about the backcountry prostrating themselves for votes when they need to be composing bad poetry for the court belles. Virginia Tunstall Clay, A Belle of the Fifties; Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853–66 (New York: Doubleday, 1905), 28, 29, 86, 87. For other contemporary perspectives on Washington society, see T. C. DeLeon, Four Years in Rebel Capitals: An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy, from Birth to Death; From Original Notes, Collated in the Years 1861 to 1865 (Mobile: Gossip Printing Company, 1892); Francis J. Grund, ed., Aristocracy in America. From the Sketchbook of a German Nobleman (London: R. Bentley, 1839); John von Sonntag de Havilland, A Metrical Description of a Fancy Ball Given at Washington, 9th April, 1858 (Washington: F. Philip, 1858); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, with an introduction by James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Elizabeth Lomax, Leaves from an Old Washington Diary, 1854–1863 (Mount Vernon: Golden Eagle, 1941); Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (New York: W. A. Houghton, 1886); Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (New York: Scribner, 1906); and Anne Hollingsworth Wharton, Social Life in the Early Republic (Williamstown: Corner House, 1970).
16. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 21, 1847; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, July 3, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 12, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 7, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 6, 1847; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 27, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 14, 1850.
17. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 21, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 7, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 7, 1849; Virginia Tunstall Clay, A Belle of the Fifties, 37; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 26, 1848.
18. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 12, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 5, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 27, 1849; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 15, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 27, 1849.
19. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 7, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 16, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 18, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 18, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 16, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 10, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 18, 1851; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 11, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 11, 1851; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 16, 1847; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 25, 1850.
20. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 6, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 11, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 3, 1849; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, February 11, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 12, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 30, 1849; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 7, 1850.
21. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, January 18, 1851; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, August 10, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 26, 1848.
22. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 16, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 26, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 16, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, July 27, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 4, 1849.
23. David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 16, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, December 8, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 16, 1850; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, March 17, 1848; David Outlaw to Emily Outlaw, June 25, 1850. Given Outlaw’s sense that he was himself defiled by his association with Washington, much might be made of the fact that he appears to have been a chronic bather. Even in the dead of winter he tended to bathe in cold water and in the summers he took a “shower bath every morning” and washed himself “from head to foot with cold water” every afternoon. I have resisted interpreting these habits for want of evidence but merely mention Outlaw’s belief that “it is a real luxury to feel that you are clean.” Certainly Outlaw was not the only one to feel the stink of the city upon him. As a friend wrote William Porcher Miles in 1858, “Don’t let Washington spoil you. I am afraid that continual intercourse with those abolitionists will hurt any decent man and that the Halls of congress are like a dirty privy, a man will carry off some of the stink even in his clothes” (Benjamin Evans to William Porcher Miles, March 4, 1858, William Porcher Miles Papers, SHC).
24. Harry St. John Dixon Diary, June 29, 1860, Harry St. John Dixon Papers, SHC (hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all references are to this collection); Richard Dixon to Harry Dixon, November 4, 1860; Dixon Diary, August 29, 1860; April 12, 1860. Harry tells the story of his father’s childhood in a long diary entry. The entry is not dated but runs from page 66 through page 71 of the second volume of the diary.
25. Dixon Diary, August 30, 1860; Dixon Diary, June 9, 1860.
As the watch chain vignette suggests, even the greatest macrohistorical events (like John Brown’s raid) are experienced in deeply personal, highly individualized ways by those who live through them. This is not at all to suggest that generalizations cannot be drawn about how a society reacts as a whole. In the case of John Brown’s raid this has been done quite effectively in Steve Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Norton, 1970). Rather, it is to note that it is important to be ever mindful that a collection of individual responses always comprises the larger one.
The Dixon diaries resonate with the stories of gamboling boyhood written by Mark Twain and with Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin’s study of the psyche of young masters. Scholars interested in this subject should consult: Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991) and Chris Mayfield, ed., Growing Up Southern: Southern Exposure Looks at Childhood, Then and Now (New York: Pantheon, 1981). On the history of childhood more generally in the period, see Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic, 1977) and Robert Hamlett Bremner, Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. 1, 1600–1865 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).
26. Dixon Diary, March 27, 1860; April 12, 1860.
27. Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, March 3, 1860; Dixon Diary, July 27, 1860; July 29, 1860; April 24, 1860.
28. Dixon Diary, April 1, 1860.
29. Dixon Diary, April 12, 1859; April 13, 1859; April 3, 1860; March 18, 1860.
30. Dixon Diary, May 25, 1859; July 24, 1860; November 26, 1859.
31. Dixon Diary, August 20, 1860; June 8, 1859; September 7, 1860; April 27, 1860; October 24, 1859; June 25, 1859.
32. Dixon Diary, July 10, 1859; September 16, 1860; June 27, 1860; March 22, 1860; August 14, 1860.
33. Dixon Diary, March 3, 1860.
34. Dixon Diary, April 8, 1860; May 31, 1860.
35. Dixon Diary, May 21, 1859; April 15, 1859; April 24, 1859; May 7, 1859; May 11, 1859; May 3, 1859; May 16, 1859.
36. Dixon Diary, October 24, 1859; October 27, 1859; November 18, 1859.
37. Dixon Diary, March 9, 1860.
38. Dixon Diary, April 19, 1860; April 20, 1860; May 9, 1860; August 5, 1860.
39. Dixon Diary, June 19, 1860; June 20, 1860; April 7, 1860; May 5, 1860.
40. Dixon Diary, September 15, 1860; September 17, 1860.
41. Dixon Diary, September 18, 1860; September 21, 1860.
42. Dixon Diary, September 26, 1860; September 27, 1860.
43. Dixon Diary, October 23, 1860; December 22, 1860; June 19, 1861.
44. Dixon Diary, October 21, 1860; Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, February 10, 1861; Julia Dixon to Harry Dixon, March 20, 1861; Dixon Diary, January 24, 1861. On how sons at college related to their fathers in the South, see Jon L. Wakelyn, “Antebellum College Life and the Relations between Fathers and Sons,” in Walter J. Fraser Jr., R. Frank Saunders Jr., and Jon Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations. On Charlottesville in the period, see Virginius Dabney, Mr. Jefferson’s University: A History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981).
45. Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, April 28, 1861; Dixon Diary, November 24, 1861; December 23, 1860; November 15, 1860.
46. Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, December 16, 1860; Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, May 5, 1861; Richard Dixon to Harry Dixon, April 27, 1861; Dixon Diary, June 19, 1861; Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, March 22, 1861; Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, May 5, 1861; Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, April 17, 1861.
47. Dixon Diary, April 27, 1861; October 27, 1860; December 24, 1860.
48. Dixon Diary, April 27, 1861; May 13, 1861; April 26, 1861.
1. The literature on secession is almost as vast as the literature on the war itself and cannot be surveyed here. Scholars interested in gendered reads of secession should begin with Christopher J. Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and the Antiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2. Meta Grimball Diary, January 30, 1861; Margaret Ann (Meta) Morris Grimball Diary; William Bingham to his cousin, Mag, December 22, 1860, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC; Joan Cashin, Our Common Affairs, 281; Martin Crawford, ed., William Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 23.
3. Richard B. Harwell, ed., “Louisiana Burge: The Diary of a Confederate College Girl,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 1952, 144–49.
4. Mark Twain, “Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” 866; Eggleston, A Rebel’s Recollections, 21; C. O. Bailey to Charley, February 24, 1861, James B. Bailey Papers, SHC; John Henderson to Archibald Henderson, January 13, 1861, John Steele Henderson Papers, SHC; Cashin, Our Common Affairs, 286; J. G. deRoulhac Hamilton, ed., The Papers of Randolph Abbott Shotwell (Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929), 40.
5. Vignette of Keitt’s receiving secession news appears in Reminiscences of Peace and War by Mrs. Roger A. Pryor (New York, 1905), quoted in Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., Prologue to Sumter: The Beginnings of the Civil War from the John Brown Raid to the Surrender of Fort Sumter, Woven into a Continuous Narrative by Philip Van Doren Stern (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 180; Lord King to Thomas Butler King, April 7, 1848, Thomas Butler King Papers; Henry Lord Page King Diary, April 25, 1860, Thomas Butler King Papers; Edward G. Butler to Mary Susan Ker, January 2, 1861, Mary Susan Ker Papers, SHC; Daniel Hamilton to son, November 10, 1860, Ruffin, Roulhac, and Hamilton Family Papers, SHC.
6. William Thomson Sr. to William Thomson Jr., November 23, 1860, William Sydnor Thomson Papers, Emory University (all further notes will refer to this collection); Thomson Jr. to Thomson Sr., November 29, 1860; Thomson Sr. to Thomson Jr., December 3, 1860; Thomson Jr. to Thomson Sr., December 22, 1860; Thomson Sr. to Thomson Jr., December 27, 1860.
7. Thomson Jr. to Thomson Sr., February 2, 1861; Thomson Jr. to “my dear Kind friend,” February 1, 1861; Thomson Sr. to Thomson Jr., December 27, 1860; Thomson Sr. to Thomson Jr., January 9, 1861; Thomson Jr. to Thomson Sr., March 24, 1861; Thomson Sr. to Thomson Jr., March 15, 1861; Thomson Sr. to Thomson Jr., March 10, 1861.
8. Meta Grimball Diary, December 29, 1860; James Petigru Carson, ed., Life, Letters, and Speeches of James Louis Petigru, 370–71.
9. William to Fanny Pender, May 18, 1861, in Hassler, The General to His Lady, 23; Quoted in introduction to “Dear Mother: Don’t grieve about me. If I get killed, I’ll only be dead”: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War (Savannah: Beehive, 1977), x.
10. Eggleston, Rebel’s Recollections, 21, 33; John Kent Folmar, ed., From That Terrible Field: Civil War Letters of James M. Williams, Twenty-First Alabama Infantry Volunteers (University: University of Alabama Press, 1981), 1; Hassler, General to His Lady, 12; John Rozier, ed., The Granite Farm Letters: The Civil War Correspondence of Edgeworth and Sallie Bird (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 30. Little can be conclusively proven about an increase in the number of men who availed themselves of prostitutes in the heady atmosphere of the early war. Though official records were kept on incidents of venereal disease, they are spotty, particularly for the Confederacy. Victorian propriety and obvious issues of shame ensure that most references to the subject are veiled at best. Still, one notes in women’s correspondence, particularly, oblique references to the excesses of camp life. “Sad hearts are many about here,” noted a member of the Lenoir family, even “if they should escape being killed, I fear most of our young men will be ruined. Camp life is not at all conducive to religion or morality” (“R.N. Tellinghart” to cousin “Aunt Sade,” April 12, 1861, Lenoir Family Papers, SHC. Names are in quotes because it is suspected that they are nicknames of Lenoir family members). “I shall be thankful for this excitement & camp life to cease,” noted Georgia King, “thank God! since Mally [her brother] is more happy he does not seem to care to go to the camp now. At one time I felt like cursing the camp from my own heart” (Georgia King to Lord King, March 16, 1861, Thomas Butler King Family Papers, SHC). Still more evidence can be found in the correspondence of men who, while assuring their wives of their own moral probity, did not shrink from charging their fellows with loose living: “If every one loved home and their family as I do,” wrote Winston Stephens to his beloved, “there would not be so much room for complaint among the sex you belong to, but some are destitute of all honor to their Wives, or love of home as I have evidence of here in many cases. Men come here and forget the embraces of their dear Wives and throw themselves away upon the common strumpet, but My Dear ‘though I say it that should not say’ you may trust your old man as God knows my marriage vow has been kept and I have never felt the least inclination to break it so help me God.” Quote from Arch Frederic Blakey, Ann Smith Lainhart, and Winston Bryant Stephens Jr., eds., Rose Cottage Chronicles: Civil War Letters of the Bryant-Stephens Families of North Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), 92–93.
11. Charles W. Turner, ed., My Dear Emma: War Letters of Col. James K. Edmondson, 1861–1865 (Verona: McClure, 1978), 99; Judith Lee Hallock, ed., The Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 24.
12. Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 182–83; Bell Irvin Wiley, ed., “This Infernal War”: The Confederate Letters of Sgt. Edwin H. Fay (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 209.
13. Hallock, Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, 30; “Dear Mother: Don’t grieve about me. If I get killed, I’ll only be dead,” 257; Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 118–19; Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 26.
14. For a sound discussion of Confederate tactics and strategy, see Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Confederacy Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
15. Hallock, Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, 16, 35; Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 97.
16. “Dear Mother: Don’t grieve about me. If I get killed, I’ll only be dead,” 21; Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 91; Hallock, Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, 131; Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 127–32, 300–302, 51.
17. Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 132; Hallock, Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, 44–45.
18. Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 203; Guy R. Everson and Edward H. Simpson Jr., eds., “Far, Far from Home”: The Wartime Letters of Dick and Tally Simpson Third South Carolina Volunteers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 214; Blakey et al., Rose Cottage Chronicles, 229.
19. Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 156; Alto Loftin Jackson, ed., So Mourns the Dove: Letters of a Confederate Infantryman and His Family (New York: Exposition, 1965), 30.
20. “Dear Mother: Don’t grieve about me. If I get killed, I’ll only be dead,” 30; Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 61; Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 204; “Dear Mother: Don’t grieve about me. If I get killed, I’ll only be dead,” 314.
21. Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 338–39; Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 128–29; R. Lockwood Tower, ed., Lee’s Adjutant: the Wartime Letters of Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, 1862–1865 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 71. On the process by which men anchored their patriotism in romantic love, see Stephen W. Berry, “When Mail Was Armor: Envelopes of the Great Rebellion, 1861–1865,” Southern Cultures, Fall 1998, 69–71.
22. Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 211; Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 118.
23. Hallock, Civil War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, 144; Cuttino, Saddle Bag and Spinning Wheel, 54; Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 68, 121.
24. Everson and Simpson, “Far, Far from Home,” 215; Blakey et al., Rose Cottage Chronicles, 252–53; Rozier, ed., The Granite Farm Letters, 191; Folmar, From That Terrible Field, 70.
25. It is not exactly clear how the Capertons and Kings were acquainted, but the families were often in each other’s company throughout the 1850s.
26. John Floyd King to Lin Caperton, August 4, 1861, Thomas Butler King Papers (all further citations refer to this collection); Floyd to Lin, November 28, 1861; Lin to Floyd, September 15, 1861.
27. Floyd to Lin, February 14, 1860; Floyd to Lin, November 27, 1861; Floyd to Lin, January 9, 1862; Floyd to Lin, December 3, 1861.
28. Floyd to Lin, January 5, 1862; Floyd to Lin, November 27, 1861; Floyd to Lin, December 3, 1861.
29. Everson and Simpson, “Far, Far from Home,” 14–15, 141.
30. Everson and Simpson, “Far, Far from Home,” 199, 259, 241.
1. Wiley, “This Infernal War,” 292.
2. Cash and Howorth, My Dear Nellie, 164–65; Blakey et al., Rose Cottage Chronicles, 310. Winston Stephens was killed on March 1, 1864, during some skirmishing near Tallahassee. A few days later Tivie bore his only child, a boy.
3. William C. Davis, A Government of Our Own: The Making of the Confederacy (New York: Free Press, 1994); Virginia K. Jones, ed., “A Contemporary Account of the Inauguration of Jefferson Davis,” Alabama Historical Quarterly 23 (1961): 273–77.
4. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, October 22, 1861, Nathaniel Henry Rhodes Dawson Papers, SHC (hereafter, unless otherwise noted, all references are to this collection).
5. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, December 8, 1861.
6. Nathaniel Dawson to Joel Matthews, April 11, April 26, May 30, and November 10, 1861, all in N.H.R. Dawson Papers, Special Collections Library, Duke University.
7. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 26, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, May 9, 1861.
8. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, April 1, 1862; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, October 13, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, July 23, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel, May 9, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, June 12, 1861.
9. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, September 1, 1861. See also Norman F. Boas, “Unpublished Manuscripts: Recollections of Mary Todd Lincoln by Her Sister Emilie Todd Helm; An Invitation to a Lincoln Party,” Manuscripts 43, no. 1 (1991): 23–34. For more on the Mary Todd Lincoln and her Confederate relations, see Justin G. Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972); and Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1987).
10. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln.
11. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, November 9, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, July 23, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, August 4, 1861.
12. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, September 29, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, December 22, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, January 5, 1862. On Selma during the period, see Claude C. Grayson, Yesterday and Today; Memories of Selma and Its People (New Orleans: Pelican, 1948); John Hardy, Selma: Her Institutions and Her Men (Selma: Bert Neville and Clarence DeBray, 1957); Walter Mahan Jackson, The Story of Selma (Birmingham, 1954); and Selma and Dallas County: 150 years (Selma: Selma and Dallas County Chamber of Commerce, 1969). On the Confederate home front in Alabama generally, see William Warren Rogers Jr., Confederate Home Front: Montgomery during the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
13. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, September 13, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 18, 1861.
14. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, October 7, 1861.
15. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, October 16, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, July 14, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 23, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 24, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, November 7, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, September 16, 1861. I want to restate that I am not remotely suggesting that Dawson had any, even latent, homosexual tendencies. Rather, it is my intention to suggest that, given their touchiness, men’s relationships with one another were often cramped and awkward. Historians researching the history of homosexuality are often apt to force it into places it doesn’t belong, and I don’t wish to be counted in their number. In About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York: Meridian, 1991), Martin Duberman recounts the story of James Henry Hammond and Thomas Wither’s playful exploration of each other’s erections, suggesting that this should be regarded as a homosexual encounter. Rather, I think the vignette suggests so raucous a sense of heterosexuality that it burst over and through “normal” confines without so much as a hiccup (Martin Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence,” in About Time, 3–23).
16. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, November 25, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 30, 1861.
17. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, November 2, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 20, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, October 22, 1861.
18. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, August 18, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, October 22, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 30, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 30, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, August 4, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 28, 1861.
19. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 17, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 18, 1861.
20. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, December 11, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, January 24, 1862.
21. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, December 8, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, March 15, 1862; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, July 14, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 2, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 14, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 19, 1861.
22. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, May 19, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, December 15, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, November 2, 1861.
23. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, August 4, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, July 7, 1861.
24. Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, December 15, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, May 15, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, November 9, 1861; Elodie Todd to Nathaniel Dawson, October 20, 1861.
25. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, August 21, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 17, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 20, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, April 26, 1861.
26. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 19, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 15, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 6, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, April 10, 1862; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, July 2, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, November 21, 1861.
27. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, July 21, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, August 29, 1861.
28. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, July 2, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, December 18, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, January 8, 1862; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, August 21, 1861.
29. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, November 2, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, April 2, 1862; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, November 27, 1861.
30. Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 30, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, May 29, 1861; Nathaniel Dawson to Elodie Todd, June 26, 1861.
31. Details of Oglethorpe’s rise and fall are drawn from the introduction of Spencer B. King, Jr., ed., Rebel Lawyer: Letters of Theodorick W. Montfort, 1861–1862 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1965), 1–18.
32. King, Rebel Lawyer, 9 n. 29. For a detailed account of the Union army’s successful campaign against Pulaski, see Herbert M. Schiller, “Sumter Is Avenged”: The Siege and Reduction of Fort Pulaski (Shippensburg: White Mane, 1995).
33. King, Rebel Lawyer, 53, 59, 61.
34. King, Rebel Lawyer, 49.
35. King, Rebel Lawyer, 66–68.
36. King, Rebel Lawyer, 52, 55, 57–58, 61, 75.
37. King, Rebel Lawyer, 55.
38. King, Rebel Lawyer, 56.
39. King, Rebel Lawyer, 65, 71–72.
40. Thomas Cobb to Mary Ann Cobb, February 21, 1861, June 23, 1862, March 12, 1862, Thomas R. R. Cobb Papers.
41. Thomas Cobb to Mary Ann Cobb, March 16, 1862, Thomas R. R. Cobb Papers.
1. Merchant, “Laurence M. Keitt,” 351.
2. Laurence Keitt to Susan Keitt, May 1, 1862, Laurence Massillon Keitt Papers.
3. Laurence Keitt to Susan Keitt, January 24, 1864.
4. Laurence Keitt to Susan Keitt, February 11, 1864; Laurence Keitt to Susan Sparks, May 9, 1855.
5. Dr. Theodoric Pryor to Susan Keitt, June 17, 1864.
6. Kit C. Carter and Jerry C. Oldshue, “N.H.R. Dawson: Soldier, Statesman, and U.S. Commissioner of Education,” Alabama Review, 1981, 202–13.
7. Ibid. For a sketch of Elodie Dawson’s grave marker, see Obituaries: Mrs. Dawson’s Folder, N.H.R. Dawson Papers, University of Alabama Library, Tuscaloosa.
8. Harry Dixon to Richard Dixon, March 24, 1861, Harry St. John Dixon Papers; Will of Harry St. John Dixon, as composed in a letter to his parents, November 1862, Harry St. John Dixon Papers.
9. Will of Harry St. John Dixon, Harry St. John Dixon Papers; Dixon’s inscription is of course borrowed from Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”: “The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power / And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave / Awaits, alike, th’ inevitable hour: / The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
10. Rebecca Dixon Chambers letter, 1958, Harry St. John Dixon Papers.
11. Rebecca Dixon Chambers letter, 1958; Connie Dixon to Harry Dixon, September 16, 1874; Harry Dixon to Connie Dixon, July 12, 1874; Rebecca Dixon Chambers letter, 1958, all in Harry St. John Dixon Papers.
12. David to Emily Outlaw, May 23, 1850. Pulaski Cowper, “Colonel David Outlaw,” Wake Forest Student, 1896, 287–95; “Sketches of Members of the Convention of 1835, by a Member of That Body,” Economist, Elizabeth City, North Carolina, April 22, 1872.
13. Herbert M. Schiller, “Sumter Is Avenged,” 135–36; King, Rebel Lawyer, 11–12.
14. Henry Craft, “Memorial to the Honorable Connally F. Trigg,” 1880, Craft, Fort, and Thorne Family Papers.