Abstract
Melissa DeVelvis offers a straightforward thesis for Gendering Secession: elite women were “staunch supporters of South Carolina's secession,” even though “they reacted to their new circumstances with fears and misgivings that their male counterparts could not, or would not, express” (2). To arrive at that conclusion, DeVelvis successfully braids together many methodologies, old and new, into a fast-paced account that will have a long-lasting impact on the study of gender and politics in the Civil War era.
Gendering Secession fills a crucial gap between the antebellum and postbellum South by focusing on continuity, one that places elite white women in the middle of the Deep South's political consciousness between John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and the Confederacy's construction. In many of the earliest treatments of elite southern women, attention to political views and civic life took a back seat in a region shaped by slavery, rural settlement, and an emphasis on patriarchal authority. These accounts stressed that the experiences of northeastern white women, whether measured by work, family life, or benevolent activity, were truly a world away from the South. Thanks to many noteworthy histories, including Elizabeth R. Varon's We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), and Amy S. Greenberg's Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk (Vintage, 2019), scholars have increasingly envisioned a wider range of elite women's political activities from the household to the statehouse and even the White House between 1830 and 1860. In shifting our attention to South Carolina, a state characterized by its skewed wealth and demographics and a single-party political system, DeVelvis continues this trajectory by locating a wide range of women's civic and political engagement in unlikely ways and places.
First, she argues that elite women embraced the growing tension embedded in the nation's political debate over slavery. To seem too eager to enter such debates threatened women with being labeled as “unsexed and ‘manly’” (50). However, as DeVelvis points out, cautious language mixed with the opportunity to respond in kind to northern women created a sense of relief among South Carolinian women that they could add their voices to political discussions of slavery as an issue integral to the southern home. Steeped in “republican motherhood” and the American Revolution, DeVelvis argues that these women could leverage “a more passive form of patriotism” to unite domesticity, religion, and nation (147). Whether responding to Harriet Beecher Stowe's critique of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Lydia Maria Child's defense of John Brown, elite women in South Carolina gained confidence in deploying these critiques. By the time of Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency, even elite men voiced surprise at how freely women weighed in on current events.
Second, although occurring in fits and starts between 1859 and 1861, elite women raised their public profile in deploying that shared language and political identity. Whether strolling Charleston's Battery in peacetime, observing the state's political drama during the Democratic National Convention's meeting and the secession convention, or reacting to the shelling of Ft. Sumter from Charleston's rooftops, elite women claimed “spectator's rights” to small and large steps toward secession (89). DeVelvis stresses that these women viewed themselves as “public citizens” who represented the ways in which “the idea of the virtues of womanhood” could be applied to political discourse even though they could not vote (14–15). While their presence at political events offered deep symbolic importance to the secession cause, their early wartime correspondence confirmed that they were “analysts” and not merely “scribes” of events as they unfolded (182).
DeVelvis’ work excels at piecing together the mundane and the extraordinary in the months leading to secession on three levels. First, DeVelvis accomplishes that aim by pacing her study around the rhythms of the state's elite, from wintertime periods of intense, local socialization to the summertime travels to western Virginia and New York for a respite from the Low Country's “sickly season.” Such shifts materially impacted perspective and the pace of correspondence. Second, DeVelvis centers her study on close readings of personal letters and diaries, scouring both for clues large and small. For example, she notes how Keziah Hopkins Brevard's handwritten diary entries turned lengthier with much sloppier handwriting as she underlined her religiously informed fears that the nation would perish in the fall of 1860. Third, the work enriches its readability and interpretive depth through its application of the history of emotions to politics, carefully unpacking the vocabulary used by women to interpret their world. Importantly for her thesis, as elite white women such as Brevard mourned the Union's death, they set the stage for the Confederacy's birth.
With secession shifting from aspiration to reality at a dizzying speed in South Carolina, DeVelvis suggests that elite men and women often tracked in two different directions. Men, bound by honor to defend their family, state, and slavery, possessed little margin to question the defense of Charleston or South Carolina. Women, however, often drew upon religious imagery as they connected the present to the future, oscillating between enthusiasm for secession and deep misgivings about what might happen next. Ranging from fears of military losses in Virginia to slave insurrections in South Carolina, DeVelvis observes that some women tempered those concerns by maintaining outward appearances while others experienced signs of physical and mental fatigue. With the book's conclusion, which launches the reader from July 1861 into a post-war world of loss and devastation, those earlier forebodings appear prescient. Nonetheless, elite white women proved the staunchest defenders of the Lost Cause after the war, working through the United Daughters of the Confederacy to whitewash memories of the state's path to secession.
One of the evidentiary and interpretive threads in the book is DeVelvis’ profile of Ann Pamela Cunningham, leader of the Mt. Vernon Ladies Association (MVLA) and South Carolinian. The group's specific aim, to secure funds to purchase George Washington's estate, required a broad public footprint, including women at the county and state-level, to solicit funds and support from state and national legislators in the 1850s. By tethering her public work to the nation's founding and its slaveholding president, Cunningham acquired considerable latitude to maneuver. It also allowed Cunningham to insist that her work was apolitical even as she blurred the line between benevolence and politics. However, Cunningham's coolness toward secession led her mother to question her loyalty to South Carolina. “Two things could be true,” according to DeVelvis, with Cunningham supporting her state while also lamenting a looming civil war (157). Cunningham resumed her work with the MVLA after the war, making this perspective from South Carolina a valuable complement to Varon's study of the organization's course in Virginia.
The study's quick pivot from July 1861 to post-1865 highlights the study's interpretive successes and gaps. Whether looking at the rhetoric of honor or the rhetoric of evangelical sermons, historians have long noted the ways in which mastery was reinforced in South Carolina. Gendering Secession illustrates how elite women moved within that framework in the most conservative of slave states and on the most momentous political issue of the day. Importantly, the study maintains an eye for contingency, noting that some historically significant events, such as the Democratic National Convention meeting in Charleston, garnered only modest attention from most South Carolinians. The study also captures a wide swath of elite women from South Carolina, including adolescent women to middle-aged women with far-flung kin networks and elderly widows. It also nicely complements a wide range of historiography, whether traditional political histories, such as William W. Freehling's The Road to Disunion, Vol. II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861 (Oxford University Press, 2007), or more recent studies that link gender and race to politics, such as Lauren Haumesser's The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856–1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Because several of the diaries in the study have been published, this work offers a great classroom introduction to both the content and the methods in the history of family, gender, and politics in the Civil War era.
When the study leapfrogs over the bulk of the war years, it generates new questions about wartime trials and tribulations that these elite women confronted. It creates a useful bookend, but in the process the analysis feels rushed relative to the rest of the book. Although women's anxiety appears to be in step with the drumbeat of secession and military conflict, those concerns turn inward toward diaries rather than outward toward male kin. In part that stems from DeVelvis’ argument that many of these women “felt too swept away in events to write them down” (198). It also stems from two separate attitudes toward these events: framed by a culture of honor, elite men readily defended South Carolina; framed largely by religion, women increasingly internalized notions of “death, despair, and religious apocalypse” (197). It would be useful to imagine how these families navigated the apparent chasm between the public world of honor and the private world of religion that appear to be on a collision course as soon as Ft. Sumter fell.
That darker turn for women in 1861, so often cloaked in religious imagery, also raises the question of exactly how they developed and deployed that vocabulary over time. For evangelical women, revival season often contained its own emotive language, filled with powerful swings in spiritual worthiness, which fashioned both self and community. It could be that some volatility emerged in the type of primary sources used. Even the most steadfast evangelical women offered grim assessments of their spiritual progress in their diaries, particularly at the start of the year. Yet, women were equally capable of issuing scathing spiritual assessments of their kin, and especially their grown children, in their correspondence. It would also be useful to know if religion may have fostered other forms of public engagement on a broader scale, whether contributing to the maintenance of their local congregations or the consumption of literature from denominations that had split from northern counterparts over slaveholding. Such peacetime endeavors may have partially prepared women with the values and skills necessary to assist the Confederacy in those early days.
Finally, there is the issue of prognostication. With the first deaths at Bull Run, “Charlestonian society was rattled,” and, consequently, DeVelvis argues that women “turned to religion and writing—their tried-and-true outlets” (197). Yet discerning providential designs in their own lives proved problematic. As DeVelvis notes, two of her featured subjects, Brevard and Cunningham, anticipated their own death during the war's tumult, only to live at least another decade after the war's close. On an individual level, this suggests to DeVelvis a continuation of women's pre-war attempts to imagine an escape from the repeated loss of loved ones in their midst. On a social level, for historians of the Civil War's home front, this mindset has taken on its own civic and military significance in the South, with white women turning battlefield losses and domestic privations into indicators of God's seeming disfavor for state and nation. DeVelvis’ tentative conclusion underlines this latter possibility. Yet for many scholars of combatants, revivals seemingly supercharged the willpower of troops when faced with the growing possibility of personal and collective destruction. Similarly, studies of religious rhetoric among clergy and politicians before and during the war have stressed the range of interpretations of providential designs, with most suggesting that piety stiffened resolve in the conflict. It remains to be seen how this potentially gendered approach to wartime piety and morale played out.
Although untangling religious rhetoric and expectation marks an intriguing speculative point in the conclusion, Gendering Secession convincingly demonstrates that elite women in South Carolina played a significant role in the coming of the Civil War. DeVelvis’ attention to agency, contingency, and context creates a rich analysis of how South Carolina's elite women both sustained and navigated the secession crisis, producing a study that will enrich future explorations of family and gender in the Civil War era.