The Rebel Wife
Page 29
Simon and Little John ride down the lane in the half-darkness toward the wooded trails that lead to the mill. The air is still but cool. The leaves droop off the trees, exhausted from the storm. He will come back.
There will be more like Buck and Judge, but I know what they look like now. I will be ready for them. I feel that there will always be something lurking in the darkness of the trees—whether it is the sickness or the Knights or blind hate. I know what it looks like. I will keep a gun with me, and I will be ready for it. I will make sure the powder is dry and Henry is close to me. I will take him to Eli’s grave. He should know who his father was—everything about him. And Simon will come back. I know he will.
Acknowledgments
THIS IDEA WAS BORN many years ago, and I have spent much time since then in research to try to recapture a sense of place and time. All those hours reading and poring over period documents can be a lonely process, but producing this work was not at all one of monastic isolation. I want to thank the good friends and family who were with me throughout this process. I owe a huge debt to my great and wonderful mentor in the master of fine arts program at Wilkes University who guided and goaded me to complete this manuscript, the very talented teacher and writer Kaylie Jones. Through Kaylie, I had the great good fortune to meet my agent, Trena Keating. Trena worked tirelessly and generously with me for many months, helping sculpt this novel into its final form. Without her, this book would have been very different. Through Trena, I had another stroke of good fortune in working with Trish Todd of Simon & Schuster. She connected with the book immediately and has remained a devoted believer. Other readers who gave critical feedback include Dr. Nancy McKinley, another faculty member of the Wilkes University creative writing program, whose knowledge of the period and insights into human behavior were indispensable, and the late Norris Church Mailer. I was privileged to receive a scholarship in her honor during my study at Wilkes. She immediately asked to see my book and generously read through a draft, including two different endings. She gave me honest and important criticism. Hers is a voice that is greatly missed.
David E. Lazaro, collections manager at Historic Deerfield, generously gave his time to the manuscript. Stephen Borkowski provided much guidance and his incomparable artistic acumen. I would also like to thank Beth Thomas for her detailed and thorough copyediting. And thanks to the city of Huntsville, Alabama, the model for Albion. The Heritage Room at the Huntsville Public Library is a researcher’s dream come true. The antebellum historic district is a place in which you can easily find yourself a time traveler. And I have had some truly transcendent experiences at the Weeden House Museum, thanks to its director, Barbara Scott.
Author’s Note
MASSIVE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC upheavals altered the physical and human landscape of the Deep South after the Civil War. For many whites, it was the end of the world; for many blacks, it was the beginning of a new one. From the time of emancipation in 1863 through the end of congressional Reconstruction in the mid-1870s, the recently freed people saw a dizzying amount of legislation pass Congress that guaranteed their rights and provided the means to protect those rights. In practice, however, enforcement was often difficult or impossible because of the open hostility of many white Southerners and the terrorist activities of secret paramilitary organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, the crowning (albeit posthumous) achievement of Massachusetts Senator and radical Republican Charles Sumner’s career, typifies the strange paradox of Reconstruction in the South. Congressman Robert Elliott from South Carolina, a freed man, delivered an important and acclaimed speech on the House floor in support of the act, which guaranteed equal access for African-Americans in hotels, public transportation, theaters, and other “public accommodations.” The same year, the Red Shirts of Mississippi, a white paramilitary group, successfully intimidated black voters, keeping them from the polls and enabling the Southern white Old Guard to take back political control of the state. With the presidential election of 1876, a compromise was struck whereby federal troops, the only authority that could guarantee access to the voting booth for African-Americans, would be withdrawn from all states formerly in “rebellion.” By 1883 the Supreme Court had deemed the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. Many of the same guarantees included in the 1875 act were again passed by Congress as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson. But by that time, disfranchisement and segregation had been the law of the land for almost a century.
For women, black and white, the latter half of the nineteenth century also left many promises unfulfilled. The woman’s movement and its one-time ally, the abolitionist movement, became estranged. Movement leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton were often hostile to the guarantee of civil rights for uneducated freedmen when educated women were denied the vote. White male legislators were not interested in guaranteeing voting rights for women; most insisted that women’s voices were heard through their male protectors in the “traditional” way. But regressive politics did nothing to stem the realities of economic and social oppression faced by women, particularly in the South, where they endured the hardships brought on by four years of destructive, bloody war. The plucky Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is a jazz age creation projected against an Old South screen. The real voices of women who lived in the period, however, became a literary phenomenon long before Scarlett was imagined. Journals, diaries, memoirs, and books of letters flooded the literary market of the late nineteenth century, bringing to a hungry reading audience the real-life heroines of the Civil War along with their disappointments, humiliations, fears, and bravery.
Alongside the true-life accounts of the Civil War, fiction writers from the South added their voices to the great chorus that declaimed what the war had been about and what had been lost. These voices, as much as legislation and jurisprudence, influenced public opinion. The literature of the South achieved a national profile through the regionalist movements of the late nineteenth century. Writers like the Virginian Thomas Nelson Page and the Georgian Joel Chandler Harris wrote prolifically on the “Old South” and the “War of Northern Aggression.” In spite of other perspectives, the charm of the “lost cause” captivated a national audience. Gone with the Wind, a great book in many ways, was the high point of a literature that emphasized white Southern culture and lampooned African-Americans.
Since the 1920s, at least, a growing chorus of contrary voices in literature has changed the landscape. Writers of the Harlem Renaissance and white writers like Julia Peterkin took a closer look at the myths constructed around African-American life in the South. Writers of the Southern Renaissance dealt with the legacy of slavery, deploying themes of race and injustice, innocence and depravity, the macabre and the grotesque, as they developed the Southern Gothic tradition. William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Harper Lee among many others could simply look in their backyards to find the strange dichotomies of Southern life on full display.
Today many novelists have continued to deconstruct those myths, like Alice Randall in The Wind Done Gone. But many of those traditions persist. My hope is that my novel serves as another perspective in the reconception of the aftermath of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. In the development of this story, I have used as broad a variety of resources as possible. My youth in Huntsville, Alabama, amid the beautifully preserved vestiges of the antebellum era, was a starting point. Since then, I have used works of fiction and nonfiction to tap into the spirit of the time as well as historical monographs detailing many different aspects of Southern life. Newspapers, journals, and lifestyle magazines played a critical part in my research. And most of all, the voices—through diaries, letters, and memoirs—of the women of the time were fundamental to the creation of Augusta. A sampling of these works can be found in the Bibliography on page 289.
Selected Bibliography
The research for this
book spanned many years, in some ways my entire life. I relied on primary sources, such as newspapers, fashion and news magazines, and books from the period. I also relied on a large variety of secondary sources, both fiction and nonfiction. Below is a list I have compiled for those who have a further interest in reading the period.
The People Who Were There
The most well-known and worthwhile diary of the period is probably Mary Chesnut’s, edited by C. Vann Woodward. Chesnut was not the only person to record her thoughts and feelings. Add to that the letters, memoirs, and oral histories that we have left from that time, and you could spend many years delving into the lives of the women and men who fought and lived through the tremendous upheavals of the nineteenth century.
Boney, F. N. A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1969.
Chappell, Frank Anderson. Dear Sister: Civil War Letters to a Sister in Alabama. Huntsville, Alabama: Branch Springs Publishing, 2002.
Clay-Clopton, Virginia. A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Cumming, Kate. The Journal of a Confederate Nurse. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: Tribeca Books, 2011.
East, Charles, ed. Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary of a Southern Woman. New York: Touchstone Books, 1992.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001.
Kemble, Frances. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984.
Myers, Robert Manson, ed. The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1972.
Rosengarten, Theodore. Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter with the Plantation Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin (1822–1890). New York: McGraw Hill, 1987.
Ryan, Patricia H., ed. Cease Not to Think of Me: The Steele Family Letters. Huntsville, Alabama: Huntsville Planning Department, 1979.
Smedes, Susan Dabney. Memorials of a Southern Planter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
Sutcliffe, Andrea, ed. Mighty Rough Times, I Tell You. Winston-Salem, North Carolina: John F. Blair, 2000.
Tourgée, Albion W. The Invisible Empire: A Concise Review of the Epoch. Ridgewood, New Jersey: Gregg Press, 1968.
Watkins, Sam R. Co. Aytch: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Woodward, C. Vann, ed. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981.
Woodward, C. Vann, and Muhlenfield, Elisabeth, eds. The Private Mary Chesnut: The Unpublished Civil War Diaries. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Fiction and Poetry
Modern Reading
These works of more recent vintage provide diverse and changing perspectives on the Civil War, slavery, and the legacy of the nineteenth century.
Bradley, David. The Chaneysville Incident. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage International, 1990.
__________. Go Down, Moses. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Frazier, Charles. Cold Mountain. New York: Grove Press, 1997.
Jones, Edward P. The Known World. New York: Amistad, 2003.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Macmillan, 1936.
Peterkin, Julia. Black April. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927.
__________. Green Thursday. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
__________. Scarlet Sister Mary. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
Randall, Alice. The Wind Done Gone. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Vintage International, 1993.
Period Fiction and Poetry
The short list below proves that even in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, there was disagreement on what the war was about and what its legacy should be.
Cable, George Washington. Old Creole Days. New York: New American Library, 1964.
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969.
Evans, Augusta Jane. Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.
Perkerson, Medora Field. White Columns in Georgia. New York: Rinehart & Co., Inc., 1952.
Preston, Margaret J. Beechenbrook: A Rhyme of the War. Baltimore: Kelly & Piet, 1866.
Weeden, Howard, and Harris, Joel Chandler. Bandanna Ballads Including Shadows on the Wall. New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899.
Historical Monographs by Subject
Battles of the Western Theater
Castel, Albert. Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.
Cozzens, Peter. The Battles for Chattanooga: The Shipwreck of Their Hopes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
__________. The Battle of Stones River: No Better Place to Die. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Daniel, Larry J. Shiloh: The Battle That Changed the Civil War. New York: Touchstone, 1997.
Foote, Shelby. The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign. New York: Modern Library, 1995.
Sword, Wiley. The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin & Nashville. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.
Political History
Bailey, Hugh C. John Williams Walker: A Study in the Political, Social and Cultural Life of the Old Southwest. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1964.
Budiansky, Stephen. The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. New York: Viking, 2008.
Craven, Avery O. The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953.
Current, Richard Nelson. Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Dorman, Lewy. Party Politics in Alabama from 1850 Through 1860. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Fisher, Noel C. War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Foote, Shelby. The Civil War: A Narrative. New York: Vintage Books, 1986.
Gallagher, Gary W. The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Gillette, William. Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
Going, Allen Johnston. Bourbon Democracy in Alabama, 1874–1890. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1951.
Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
__________. The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Groce, W. Todd. Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.
Hahn, Steven. The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Wiley, 1978.
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Sydnor, Charles S. The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819–1848. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948.
Wiggins, Sarah Woolfolk. The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991
Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968.
__________. Origins of the New South, 1877–1913. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971.
Slavery and Race
Bay, Mia. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dray, Philip. Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Frederickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.
__________. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 2003.
Haws, Robert, ed. The Age of Segregation: Race Relations in the South, 1890–1945. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1978.
Penningroth, Dylan C. The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.