Good Time Coming

by C. S. Harris

  But he was alive, and whole, and home. When I closed my eyes and listened to his soft, familiar laugh, I felt my heart begin to lighten.

  And I smiled.

  Author’s Note

  This story had its origins in a desire to explore the ways in which the women of a patriarchal society such as that of the antebellum South coped when virtually every able-bodied male in their community marched off to war, leaving them alone to face deprivation and a brutal occupation. How did white women who had supposedly been placed on a pedestal adjust to single-handedly running farms and businesses in an increasingly harsh and dangerous environment? How did enslaved women and gens de couleur libres react to their shifting circumstances? The answer, of course, is that they coped extraordinarily well. In many ways the tradition of the South’s ‘steel magnolias’ was forged in the holocaust of that war.

  But as I read the hundreds of journals, memoirs, and letters those women left behind, I began to notice an undercurrent of something that surprised me. It is one of the commonly accepted truisms of Civil War historiography that rape was extraordinarily rare in the Civil War. More honest historians acknowledge that Union soldiers looted and burned their way across the South, often torturing and murdering civilians as they went; but, we are assured, they stopped short of rape. Why? The answer is, they didn’t.

  Open, contemporary accounts such as Celine Garcia’s description of the brutal rapes at Clinton, Louisiana, or William Simms’s report of the scores of women gang raped in Columbia, South Carolina, are relatively rare, although actually more common than we are led to believe. But subtle references abound. Consider the frequent use of the phrase ‘plunder and pillage’. We all know what ‘plunder’ means: theft. But the word ‘pillage’ has traditionally been used to refer to wanton destruction accompanied by rape. There is no reason to assume it meant anything different to those who used it during the Civil War.

  Other frequently used euphemisms included the expression ‘the greatest indignity possible committed upon the women’ or ‘the worst insult imaginable’, or simply ‘horrors’. These and similar phrases can be found again and again in the diaries, memoirs, reports and, especially, the private letters of the period, yet their meaning seems to sail over the heads of modern historians. Likewise, when Southern women write of ‘lascivious’ solders ‘rampaging through town’, one must wonder exactly what historians think those men were doing to earn such an adjective.

  Because of the importance placed by patriarchal societies on female chastity and fidelity, women have long sought to hide their rape. This is especially true in times of war, when it is unlikely the perpetrators of such crimes will ever be brought to justice. The reasons for such concealment are numerous and multifaceted, and include women’s perceived need to safeguard their reputations and protect themselves from shame, scorn and societal rejection. But equally important is the recognition that rape is a tool of war, a deliberate attempt by invading armies to punish and humiliate their enemies. By concealing their rapes, the women of the South were refusing to be complicit in the ‘shaming’ of their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons; they were safeguarding not only their own honor but also the honor of their community and their men. The people of the time knew what was going on. But in the Victorian era, one spoke of such things obliquely, if at all.

  Interestingly, the rape of enslaved women and free people of color was more often acknowledged and has given rise to the fallacy that Union soldiers raped black women but not their white counterparts. However, this conclusion shows a pronounced lack of understanding of the times, when the reasons for the concealment of the rape of white women were not generally seen as applying to black women. Simms, for example, mentions only the rape and murder of black women in the sacking of Columbia; to admit that white women were also brutalized would have impugned the reputation of every white woman who survived Sherman’s infamous march to the sea.

  To put the events of the Civil War in perspective, consider that close to a third of all modern female United States veterans admit having been raped or sexually assaulted by their own fellow servicemen. There is no reason to assume that the nineteenth-century United States Army – the same army that perpetuated such atrocities as Sandy Creek and Bear River – behaved better in their rampage through the homeland of what had become a hated enemy. The historian Crystal Feimster has recently been attempting to reassess the prevalence of rape in the Civil War; E. Susan Barber and Charles Ritter have also addressed the issue.

  New efforts are likewise underway to reassess the accepted casualty figures for the Civil War. General consensus is that the long established figure of 625,000 dead is a drastic undercounting; the true number is probably closer to a million or more. Few have seriously attempted to assess civilian casualties; the figures sometimes given for the South as a whole are often lower than civilian casualties in the state of Missouri alone. Even the most casual reading of the period’s diaries and letters will show that the excess mortality amongst Southern civilians was staggering.

  While this is a work of fiction, I have sought to set it against an accurate framework of the events that actually occurred in the St Francisville area. The winters of 1862-63 and 1863-64 were indeed abnormally cold. I have at times combined several similar incidents in order to avoid repetition, but the battles for New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Vicksburg and Port Hudson were essentially as portrayed here, as were the various gunboat assaults on St Francisville and Bayou Sara, the theft of the wharfboat, the landing of General Banks’s army, the Yankee Doodle parade of the Brooklyn’s landing party, the battle at Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana, and the lynching of black troops that followed it. The Union major in command at Jackson was indeed James Moore Hanham, from Woodville, Mississippi; the Hanham Variation in chess is named after him. The Masonic burial of Commander Hart likewise actually occurred and is still commemorated in St Francisville by an annual reenactment known as the Day the War Stopped. The initial visit of the Katahdin, while modeled on other such incidents, is my own invention, as is the killing of Gabriel Dupont and Jules Boyle, and the events that flow from it.

  In the course of writing this book, I read innumerable memoirs, dairies, and letters. The most useful were those written by Louisiana women, such as Celine Fremaux Garcia, Kate Stone, Sarah Morgan Dawson, Eliza McHatton-Ripley, Clara Solomon, and Sarah Lois Wadley. The experiences of the women and children caught in the siege of Vicksburg are vividly detailed by Lida Lord Reed, Mary Webster Loughborough, Emma Balfour, and Dora Richards Miller. Lara Locoul Gore’s memoir of her family provided the inspiration for Castile’s brand. Martha Turnball’s Garden Diary, edited and annotated by Suzanne Turner, was an invaluable source for nineteenth-century gardening and the passage of the seasons in St Francisville.

  The remembrances recorded by men who served on both sides of the war in Louisiana were also useful, especially David Hughson’s Among the Cotton Thieves and Thomas Wallace Knox’s Campfire and Cottonfield; also the diaries of Lawrence Van Alstyne, George Hamill, Felix Pierre Poche, and Howell Carter.

  I drew additional inspiration for various incidents from accounts written by women who experienced the war in other parts of the South, including Lucy Breckinridge, Phoebe Yates Pember, Eliza Frances Andrews, Constance Cary Harrison, Susan Chancellor, Mary Ann Harris Gay, Dolly Lunt Burge, Emma LeConte, Julia Morgan, Cornelia Peake McDonald, and Catherine Hopley. Accounts left by women who served as nurses in the hospitals of both the North and the South include those of Louisa May Alcott, Adelaide Smith, Cornelia Hancock, and, especially, Kate Cummings. I also relied on Doctors in Gray by H.H. Cunningham, as well as The Medicinal Book of Augustus Ball; Thomas Ellis’s Leaves from the Diary of an Army Surgeon; and Marlin Gardner and Benjamin Aylworth’s The Domestic Physician and Family Assistant.

  The classic work on shortages and substitutes in the Civil War remains Mary Elizabeth Massey’s Ersatz in the Confederacy. Also valuable was The Confederate Housewife, edited by John Hammond Moore
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  The Reverend Garette Hale’s sermon using Christianity to justify slavery is based on the works by John Henry Hopkins, George Fitzhugh, and their many contemporaries. The comparisons of abolitionism to communism and socialism were indeed made at the time.

  The standard reference for the Civil War in Louisiana remains that of John D. Winters, along with the works of J.D. Bragg and, for the era of ‘Spoons’ Butler, Chester Hearn. I also relied on more local works such as those by Dennis Dufrene; Lawrence Estaville, Jr; Samual Hyde, Jr; Chistopher G. Peña; Donald Frazier; and Powell A. Casey. Terry Jones’s Lee’s Tigers was useful for keeping track of Amrie’s father. Samuel C. Hyde’s work on the Florida Parishes provided thought-provoking insight into the effects of the violence and anarchy of the Civil War on the subsequent culture of the area. I have also been influenced by Liddell Hart’s famous essay on the dangerous legacies of guerrilla warfare, and by Chris Hedges’s writings on war.

  David Goldfield’s America Aflame was invaluable for helping to put many of the events and attitudes of the Civil War into context. James Marten’s The Children of the Civil War provided the true tale of children frightened into being good by threats that God would withdraw His protection from their soldier father. Also useful were Kenneth Greenberg’s Honor and Slavery, and Stephen Ash, When the Yankees Came. Walter Brian Cisco’s War Crimes Against Southern Civilians is considerably more partisan but is valuable for his citations of documents contained in the government’s voluminous War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.

  For understanding slavery in the antebellum South, few sources match the WPA’s Slave Narratives. Also useful for insight into Louisiana’s slave laws and the world of the gens de couleur libres were Taylor’s ‘Slavery in Louisiana During the Civil War;’ The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color, by Mills; Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana; and Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave.

  A number of historical studies on women in the Civil War should also be mentioned, such as Waugh and Greenberg’s The Women’s War in the South; Ott’s Confederate Daughters; Faust’s Mothers of Invention; Sullivan’s The War the Women Lived; and Occupied Women, Whites and Long, eds..

  When discrepancies exist between official military reports and civilian eyewitness accounts, I have tended to go with the civilian accounts. For instance, reports from the Federal fleet claim the initial bombardment of Baton Rouge was provoked when ‘forty guerrillas’ opened fire on an officer rowing his laundry ashore; but civilian accounts say only four youngsters were involved. Since it is likely that forty men shooting at a rowboat would have inflicted considerably more damage than the few wounded that resulted, I have gone with the local accounts. Local reports of civilian casualties likewise tend to be more accurate. Porter’s claim that the occupants of St Francisville were given twenty-four hours to evacuate before the devastating January 1864 bombardment is contradicted by the accounts of those who lived through it. Doctoring of official accounts was common; extant correspondence between General Banks and several of his commanders in the field provides examples of commanders attempting to resist the general’s insistence that all references to rapes and other atrocities against civilians be removed from reports. I also received valuable information and assistance from Daniel at Centenary College in Jackson, Louisiana, as well as from the staff of various area battle sites, including Camp Moore, Port Hudson, and Vicksburg.

  Bayou Sara was rebuilt on a much smaller scale, but eventually succumbed to successive floods and fires and has disappeared. Although no longer as prosperous as they once were, the towns of St Francisville, Jackson, and Clinton still exist and preserve hundreds of antebellum homes and other structures that were repaired in the decades after the war.