A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War

A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War PDF Author: Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
"An excellent prelude to the well-known wartime diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Emma Holmes, the diary of Keziah Brevard documents one plantation mistress's personal reflections on the events that were to shape both her world and her Southern homeland for years to come: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention, and the attack on Fort Sumter." "In 1860 Keziah Brevard was a fifty-seven-year-old widow living nine miles from Columbia, South Carolina, with her slaves as her only companions. She kept a diary to record thoughts and a great variety of matters - from dramatic events of national importance to her management of three plantations and a grist mill. Brevard reacted strongly to the political ferment of the period. Entries during the month of October 1860 were outright assaults on "the rabble of the North." And her words of November 9 showed extreme emotion: "Oh My God!!! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected." The act of secession, however, failed to stir similar passions; nor did the firing on Fort Sumter elicit extensive comment. But her relatively long entries of January and February are quite another matter; during those weeks in early 1861 Brevard wrestled privately with the morality of secession and slavery." "In the difficult times of the Old South's twilight, Keziah Brevard had several distinct advantages including a keen mind, shrewd business sense, relatively good health, and substantial financial resources. Her diary reveals a competent, no-nonsense woman capable of successfully leading a large household as well as several business enterprises."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War

A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War PDF Author: Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book Here

Book Description
"An excellent prelude to the well-known wartime diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Emma Holmes, the diary of Keziah Brevard documents one plantation mistress's personal reflections on the events that were to shape both her world and her Southern homeland for years to come: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention, and the attack on Fort Sumter." "In 1860 Keziah Brevard was a fifty-seven-year-old widow living nine miles from Columbia, South Carolina, with her slaves as her only companions. She kept a diary to record thoughts and a great variety of matters - from dramatic events of national importance to her management of three plantations and a grist mill. Brevard reacted strongly to the political ferment of the period. Entries during the month of October 1860 were outright assaults on "the rabble of the North." And her words of November 9 showed extreme emotion: "Oh My God!!! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected." The act of secession, however, failed to stir similar passions; nor did the firing on Fort Sumter elicit extensive comment. But her relatively long entries of January and February are quite another matter; during those weeks in early 1861 Brevard wrestled privately with the morality of secession and slavery." "In the difficult times of the Old South's twilight, Keziah Brevard had several distinct advantages including a keen mind, shrewd business sense, relatively good health, and substantial financial resources. Her diary reveals a competent, no-nonsense woman capable of successfully leading a large household as well as several business enterprises."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Plantation Mistress

The Plantation Mistress PDF Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0394722531
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.

They Were Her Property

They Were Her Property PDF Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

The Uncompromising Diary of Sallie McNeill, 1858-1867

The Uncompromising Diary of Sallie McNeill, 1858-1867 PDF Author: Sallie McNeill
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781603440875
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Gives insight into an elite planter-class Texas woman's loneliness and hunger to experience the non-traditional world of a Southern Belle. Her contextual observations on slavery, family relations, and the Civil War contribute to Southern history.

The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848-1879

The Diary of Dolly Lunt Burge, 1848-1879 PDF Author: Dolly Lunt Burge
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820328596
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Having moved from Maine with her physician husband in the 1840s, Dolly lost her husband and her only living child to illness by the time she began the diary at age thirty. A devout and self-sufficient schoolteacher, she soon married her second husband, Thomas Burge, a planter and widowed father of four. Upon his death in 1858, Dolly ran the plantation independently through the Civil War, remaining on the land during Sherman's infamous march through the area. After making the transition from slave labor to tenant farming, Dolly was married a third and final time to the Rev. William Parks, a prominent Methodist minister.

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895

The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895 PDF Author: Jane Turner Censer
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807129216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This impressively researched book tells the important but little-known story of elite southern white women's successful quest for a measure of self-reliance and independence between antebellum strictures and the restored patriarchy of Jim Crow. Profusely illustrated with the experiences of fascinating women in Virginia and North Carolina, it presents a compelling new chapter in the history of American women and of the South. As were many ideas, notions of the ideal woman were in flux after the Civil War. While poverty added a harder edge to the search for a good marriage among some "southern belles," other privileged white women forged identities that challenged the belle model altogether. Their private and public writings from the 1870s and 1880s suggest a widespread ethic of autonomy. Sometimes that meant increased domestic skills born of the new reality of fewer servants. But women also owned and transmitted property, worked for pay, and even pursued long-term careers. Many found a voice in a plethora of new voluntary organizations, and some southern women attained national celebrity in the literary world, creating strong and capable heroines and mirroring an evolving view toward northern society. Yet even as elite southern women experimented with their roles, external forces and contradictions within their position were making their unprecedented attitudes and achievements socially untenable. During the 1890s, however, virulent racism and pressures to re-create a mythic South left these women caught between the revived image of the southern belle and the emerging emancipated woman. Just as the memoirs of southern white women have been key to understanding life during the Civil War, the writings of such women unlock the years of dramatic change that followed. Informed by myriad primary documents, Jane Turner Censer immerses us in the world of postwar southern women as they rethought and rebuilt themselves, their families, and their region during a brief but important period of relative freedom.

The History of Southern Women's Literature

The History of Southern Women's Literature PDF Author: Carolyn Perry
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807127537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 724

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Book Description
Many of America’s foremost, and most beloved, authors are also southern and female: Mary Chesnut, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Harper Lee, Maya Angelou, Anne Tyler, Alice Walker, and Lee Smith, to name several. Designating a writer as “southern” if her work reflects the region’s grip on her life, Carolyn Perry and Mary Louise Weaks have produced an invaluable guide to the richly diverse and enduring tradition of southern women’s literature. Their comprehensive history—the first of its kind in a relatively young field—extends from the pioneer woman to the career woman, embracing black and white, poor and privileged, urban and Appalachian perspectives and experiences. The History of Southern Women’s Literature allows readers both to explore individual authors and to follow the developing arc of various genres across time. Conduct books and slave narratives; Civil War diaries and letters; the antebellum, postbellum, and modern novel; autobiography and memoirs; poetry; magazine and newspaper writing—these and more receive close attention. Over seventy contributors are represented here, and their essays discuss a wealth of women’s issues from four centuries: race, urbanization, and feminism; the myth of southern womanhood; preset images and assigned social roles—from the belle to the mammy—and real life behind the facade of meeting others’ expectations; poverty and the labor movement; responses to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the influence of Gone with the Wind. The history of southern women’s literature tells, ultimately, the story of the search for freedom within an “insidious tradition,” to quote Ellen Glasgow. This teeming volume validates the deep contributions and pleasures of an impressive body of writing and marks a major achievement in women’s and literary studies.

Women in the American Civil War [2 volumes]

Women in the American Civil War [2 volumes] PDF Author: Lisa . Tendrich Frank
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851096051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 775

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Book Description
This fascinating work tells the untold story of the role of women in the Civil War, from battlefield to home front. Most Americans can name famous generals and notable battles from the Civil War. With rare exception, they know neither the women of that war nor their part in it. Yet, as this encyclopedia demonstrates, women played a critical role. The book's 400 A–Z entries focus on specific people, organizations, issues, and battles, and a dozen contextual essays provide detailed information about the social, political, and family issues that shaped women's lives during the Civil War era. Women in the American Civil War satisfies a growing interest in this topic. Readers will learn how the Civil War became a vehicle for expanding the role of women in society. Representing the work of more than 100 scholars, this book treats in depth all aspects of the previously untold story of women in the Civil War.

Secession Winter

Secession Winter PDF Author: Robert J. Cook
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421408953
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
What prompted southern secession in the winter of 1860–61 and why did secession culminate in the American Civil War? Politicians and opinion leaders on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line struggled to formulate coherent responses to the secession of the deep South states. The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861 triggered civil war and the loss of four upper South states from the Union. The essays by three senior historians in Secession Winter explore the robust debates that preceded these events. For five months in the winter of 1860–1861, Americans did not know for certain that civil war was upon them. Some hoped for a compromise; others wanted a fight. Many struggled to understand what was happening to their country. Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon take approaches to this period that combine political, economic, and social-cultural lines of analysis. Rather than focus on whether civil war was inevitable, they look at the political process of secession and find multiple internal divisions—political parties, whites and nonwhites, elites and masses, men and women. Even individual northerners and southerners suffered inner conflicts. The authors include the voices of Unionists and Whig party moderates who had much to lose and upcountry folk who owned no slaves and did not particularly like those who did. Barney contends that white southerners were driven to secede by anxiety and guilt over slavery. Varon takes a new look at Robert E. Lee's decision to join the Confederacy. Cook argues that both northern and southern politicians claimed the rightness of their cause by constructing selective narratives of historical grievances. Secession Winter explores the fact of contingency and reminds readers and students that nothing was foreordained.

Looking for the New Deal

Looking for the New Deal PDF Author: Elna C. Green
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036583
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"Rife with palpable misery and often pleading with desperate urgency, the hundreds of letters assembled in Looking for the New Deal paint a bleak and accurate portrait of the female experience among Floridians during the Great Depression. Searching for help at a time when desperation overwhelmed America, women in Florida shared the same goal as their counterparts elsewhere in the country - they wanted work. In pursuit of a means to provide for their families, these women doggedly, often naively, wrote letters asking for relief assistance from agencies, charities, and state and federal government officials. In this volume Elna C. Green gathers more than three hundred letters written by Floridians that reveal the immediacy and intensity of their plight. The voices of women from all walks of life - black and white, rural and urban, old and young, historically poor and newly impoverished - testify to the determination and ingenuity invoked in facing trying times."--BOOK JACKET.