At the Edge of War and Peace: The Emotional Language of Defeat

After the American Civil War, white southerners wrestled with the psychological and cultural impact of defeat. Men who had once defined their lives around a code of honor and mobilized into armies believing in the righteous of their cause were now exposed to self-doubt and shame. These emotions were transformative as both men and women exposed themselves and their most inner feelings in the written word. Drawing upon diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, this paper seeks to recapture how defeat felt for white men and women between 1865 and 1867 considering especially the war’s personal and enduring impact. Writers’ use of words such as “humiliation” and “despair,” and the palpable sense of uncertainty about the future, demonstrated an overt ontological shift. Individuals employed a common language illustrative of broader cultural transformations and suggestive of an emotional community, to employ Barbara H. Rosenwein’s conceptual instrument. This paper argues that the emergent emotional language, though borne from the crisis of defeat, served as an important means of social communication that facilitated the process of reconstruction.

Since C. Vann Woodward famously deemed southerners’ ennui “the burden of southern history,” scholars have commented on whites’ reactions to defeat. Often, though, depression and despair have been deployed as illustrative descriptions rather than modes of evidence. This paper instead focuses on how southerners felt and thought, contextualizing these inner experiences within broader discourses about gender, race, and citizenship. This approach draws upon a diverse range of scholarship—especially works by Jan Lewis, Steven M. Stowe, and Stephen Berry—that has demonstrated how the communication of emotions and gendered identities are informed by social constructions. Ultimately, this paper explores whites’ strides toward reconstruction; the means by which they communicated and experienced the Confederacy’s defeat; and how inner worlds shaped the cultural fabric of the post-war South.