"It will take a man person with you to ... keep the place up": Family, gender, and power in confederate common white households

Abstract

This article provides fresh insight on the ways in which the American Civil War challenged and destabilized understandings of familial and gendered power within the Confederate States. It is well established that the impressive extent of the Confederacy's military mobilization significantly altered the gendered demographics and dynamics of the home front. While not rejecting this orthodox view, this article does challenge its tendency to overemphasize the extent to which the rural South was sapped of men. In doing so, it not only underscores the important roles some men, most notably those too old for military service, continued to play in ordinary households but also how this pattern unsettled familial power in terms of generation and age as well as gender. Finally, this article endeavors to excavate the more quotidian experience of Confederate common white families and, in order to do so, utilizes three microbiographies of specific households from the state of South Carolina.