Grieving for a Nation: The Emotional Politics of Confederate Widowhood

This paper explores the complicated emotional relationship between Confederate widows and Confederate defeat. Throughout the conflict, newspapers and government officials championed a particular version of widowhood—the young wife who selflessly transferred her monogamous love from dead husband to the deathless cause for which he fought.  Widows were to “preserve green by grateful tears the dearest and most brilliant memories” of their hearts.  Only then would their husbands live forever—as would their Cause.  If a young widow could lose a husband and continue to support the war, what shouldn’t other southerners sacrifice?

 But a closer look at the letters and diaries of widows, as well as their petitions to local and state governments, reveals that these women spent their new cultural capital with practicality and shrewdness.  Indeed, even as their culture created an entire industry in their name, widows played the role on their own terms to forward their own ends. They became emblems of the Confederacy and walking embodiments of sacrifice, bound not merely to patriarchy but to nationalism, to Confederate survival.  Stripped of their individuality and commemorated, widows played a public role, behind which was a private grieving process.  For some, Confederate defeat brought relief and joy at the return of male kin.  Anger and despair consumed other widows who realized that their sacrifice had been for nothing.  Many widows did not care about the war or its end because they remained distraught by a personal loss, not a political one.  A famous few became professional widows, shaping the memory of their dead officer husbands.  Exploring the varied emotional responses of Confederate widows in the final years of the war reveals the complicated politics of mourning that lay beneath the official paeans to the “Women of the Confederacy…whose annual tribute express[es] their enduring grief, love and reverence for our sacred dead.”