Table Of ContentA PAST STILL LIVING: THE GRIEVING PROCESS OF CONFEDERATE WIDOWS
Ashley Michelle Mays
A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of History.
Chapel Hill
2014
Approved by:
Joseph T. Glatthaar
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
William L. Barney
Donald G. Mathews
Molly Worthen
©2014
Ashley Michelle Mays
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ABSTRACT
Ashley Michelle Mays: A Past Still Living: The Grieving Process of Confederate Widows
(Under the direction of Joseph T. Glatthaar)
The American Civil War destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and tore asunder
the fabric of northern and southern society. In order to understand the long-term
consequences of this war, this dissertation examines the way in which death transformed the
lives of one group of survivors, Confederate widows. These widows faced staggering
emotional consequences because they not only lost a partner and a companion but also a
sense of stability in their lives. As widows shouldered the responsibility for their families'
survival, a rush of conflicting emotions threatened to overwhelm them. This emotional
turmoil encouraged widows to cling to their identities as wives while their social position as
widows determined the avenues available to them in the postwar period.
No matter how widows felt, Southern communities' cultural prescriptions for grieving
shaped the way in which widows expressed their grief. Through letters and ceremonies
friends, family, and even strangers comforted widows by demonstrating that their husband
had died a good death. In the process, communities encouraged widows to curtail their grief
in public. Widows outwardly conformed while relying on a reciprocal relationship with
friends and family for companionship and for financial support, a tenuous safety net.
Nevertheless, widows often found themselves unable to extinguish their often-conflicting
feelings about their loss. As a result, a tension arose between Confederate widows and their
communities over the appropriate way to express grief.
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Ultimately, this dissertation argues that widows and their communities engaged in a
dialectical conversation over the expression of emotion that would shape the postwar South.
Because widows could not express their grief publicly, they wrestled with their complex
feelings about loss privately in an introspective cycle that isolated widows from their friends,
family, and even their religious beliefs. Since widows' memories of the war proved to be
inseparable from their grief, widows recorded their memories privately by writing memoirs
and by preserving their husbands' possessions, rather than participating heavily in
Confederate memorialization. As a result, the collected memory of the Civil War in the
postwar South did not include widows' unique interpretations of wartime loss and thereby
sterilized the memory of the war.
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To my family
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project has benefitted from more helping hands and minds than I can name. I
would particularly like to thank my advisor, Dr. Joseph T. Glatthaar, for his untiring support
for my education and for this project. His advice and suggestions have helped me to become
a better writer than I thought I could be. I would also like to thank my other committee
members, Dr. W Fitzhugh Brundage, Dr. William Barney, Dr. Donald G. Mathews, and Dr.
Molly Worthen. It has been an honor to work with each of them. Many of the ideas for this
project arose out of conversations with my committee members and with my colleagues in
the History Department at UNC. I am also grateful to the amazing staff in the History
Department, who always seem to know the answer to any question.
Any argument is only as good as the evidence that supports it, so I owe a great debt to
the people and the institutions that have made my research possible. Fellowships available
through the UNC History Department, including the George B. Tindall Fellowship, the
Mowry Dissertation Fellowship, and the Raymond Faherty Research Grant for Military
History, together allowed me to expand the scope of my research beyond North Carolina to
consider Confederate widowhood across the South. I am also grateful to the staff at those
archives who have not only kept these valuable records safe but also helped guide me to
useful collections. I would like to especially thank the staff at the Southern Historical
Collection, who patiently dealt with my many questions as I first began to research and who
introduced me to the collection that really began this entire project. Also, I owe a great deal
of gratitude to the Virginia Historical Society. Thanks to the Frances Lewis Fellowship in
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Gender and Women's Studies, I was able to research in their rich collections and gain access
to numerous collections, without which this dissertation would be much poorer.
Words cannot express how much I have appreciated my family's support. My parents
inspired my love of learning at a young age and have made every effort to help me reach my
educational goals. Any success that I have began with their guidance and their example.
Since my wife and I moved to North Carolina, we have been grateful for my entire extended
family who have been incredibly supportive as well and helped us feel truly at home. My
wife actually deserves a good deal of the credit for the final product, though none of the
blame. Not only was she willing to marry a graduate student studying widowhood, she has
also read and improved every page of this dissertation. My ideas always became clearer
through our conversations. Finally, I would be remiss without thanking my daily writing
partner, my dog Onyx. I have found it much easier to write about grief with her sitting next to
me.
Ultimately, the stories that unfold in the following pages are not my stories—they
belong to the widows who originally lived them, felt them, and recorded them.
I have tried to narrate their words faithfully in order to understand the historical significance
of their experiences. I hope that the reader will learn as much from them as I have.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS..............................................................................................x
INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1
Historiography .........................................................................................................3
Organization and Method ......................................................................................19
CHAPTER 1: LOSS ..........................................................................................................24
Separation ..............................................................................................................27
Bridging the Distance ............................................................................................36
Bonds of Marriage .................................................................................................50
Conclusion .............................................................................................................64
CHAPTER 2: DEATH RITUALS.....................................................................................66
Notification ............................................................................................................70
Mourning ...............................................................................................................77
The Funeral ............................................................................................................81
Conclusion .............................................................................................................94
CHAPTER 3: CONDOLENCE LETTERS.......................................................................96
Traditional Condolence Letters .............................................................................99
The Rise of Death Letters ....................................................................................114
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................128
CHAPTER 4: GRIEF.......................................................................................................130
Redemptive Grief.................................................................................................133
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Compounding Grief .............................................................................................137
Bridging Over Grief.............................................................................................146
Mental Health ......................................................................................................154
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................164
CHAPTER 5: LIVING ....................................................................................................166
Availability ..........................................................................................................169
Networking ..........................................................................................................175
Housing................................................................................................................179
Financial Support .................................................................................................185
Confederate Assistance........................................................................................197
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................203
CHAPTER 6: MEMORY ................................................................................................205
The Function of Memory.....................................................................................207
Widows' Memorial Activities ..............................................................................212
Confederate Memory Organizations....................................................................234
Conclusion ...........................................................................................................245
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................247
Identity .................................................................................................................248
Emotion................................................................................................................250
Social Connections ..............................................................................................253
Application...........................................................................................................256
APPENDIX A..................................................................................................................260
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................26
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
ADAH Alabama Department of Archives and History
AU Department of Special Collections and Archives, Auburn University
DAS Documenting the American South
GDAH Georgia Department of Archives and History
HNOC Williams Research Center, The Historic New Orleans Collection
KHS Kentucky Historical Society
LaRC Louisiana Research Collection, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane
University
LMA Ladies Memorial Association
LOV Library of Virginia
LSU Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections
MDAH Mississippi Department of Archives and History
MOC Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library, The Museum of the Confederacy
PJD Papers of Jefferson Davis
RU Woodson Research Center Special Collections and Archives, Fondren
Library, Rice University
SAF State Archives of Florida
SHC Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
UDC United Daughters of the Confederacy
UF Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries,
University of Florida
UOS Archives and Special Collections, The University of the South
UTA Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at
Austin
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