Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had: The Civil War Letters of Major William Morel Moxley, Eighteenth Alabama Infantry, and Emily Beck Moxley

By Emily Beck Moxley and William Morel Moxley

This rare correspondence between a soldier and his wife relates in poignant detail the struggle for survival on the battlefield as well as on the home front and gives voice to the underrepresented class of small farmers

Most surviving correspondence of the Civil War period was written by members of a literate, elite class; few collections exist in which the woman's letters to her soldier husband have been preserved. Here, in the exchange between William and Emily Moxley, a working-class farm couple from Coffee County, Alabama, we see vividly an often-neglected aspect of the Civil War experience: the hardships of civilian life on the home front.

Emily's moving letters to her husband, startling in their immediacy and detail, chronicle such difficulties as a desperate lack of food and clothing for her family, the frustration of depending on others in the community, and her growing terror at facing childbirth without her husband, at the mercy of a doctor with questionable skills. Major Moxley's letters to his wife reveal a decidedly unromantic side of the war, describing his frequent encounters with starvation, disease, and bloody slaughter.

To supplement this revealing correspondence, the editor has provided ample documentation and research; a genealogical chart of the Moxley family; detailed maps of Alabama and Florida that allow the reader to trace the progress of Major Moxley's division; and thorough footnotes to document and elucidate events and people mentioned in the letters. Readers interested in the Civil War and Alabama history will find these letters immensely appealing while scholars of 19th-century domestic life will find much of value in Emily Moxley's rare descriptions of her homefront experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780817387297

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Introduction

Times are as hard here as mill Rocks, wrote Joseph H. Justice to his friend William M. Moxley on 12 January 1862. Indeed, the first year of the Civil War had laid a heavy hand on southeast Alabama, taking into the army men many of whom were not to return, introducing to home communities disease and privation that they had never before experienced, and causing local economies to stagnate. The collected letters of the extended Moxley family and many of their friends and neighbors make it distressingly clear exactly how hard times were in the Wiregrass during the year following Alabama's secession.

The Moxleys were typical of the yeoman-class farmers who constituted the bone and sinew of the Confederate heartland. William Morel Moxley, a physician and small farmer in Bullock, Coffee County, Alabama, was born in Burke County, Georgia in about 1824, the eldest son of Nathaniel and Jane (Matthews) Moxley.¹ Like many other early nineteenth-century Southern families, the Moxleys followed the frontier, moving from Burke to Stewart to Jefferson to Henry County by 1850. All of these locations were, at the time, still very much a part of the Old Southwest frontier. Jefferson, for example, was described in the 1850 census as a county with zero libraries and fourteen churches—eight Methodist, one Presbyterian, four Baptist, and one Hard Shell.² From Henry County in central Georgia, the Moxleys moved for a brief period to Barbour County in southeast Alabama before purchasing, on 4 November 1854, a forty-acre tract in northwest Coffee County, near the village of Bullock.

Where and how William Moxley received his medical training cannot now be determined, and he was perhaps only what was commonly called an empiric, one who practiced medicine without benefit of formal education. In every Southern state except Louisiana, medical licensing virtually disappeared during the 1830s. With the wave of anti-elitism that swept the country during the Jacksonian era, medical historian Sally G. McMillen states, any white man could declare himself a doctor.³ From 1857 thorough 1858, however, William Moxley's younger brother was a student at the Reform Medical College in Macon, Georgia, and he might well have attended the same institution at the same time. By 1860 Moxley owned $1,000 in real property in Coffee County and $700 in personal property, making him fairly affluent by the standards of the place but by no means a member of the planter elite.

William Moxley had three brothers and one sister. Daniel Newton Moxley was born in Burke County, Georgia, on 12 May 1827. In 1850 he was living in Louisville, Georgia, with his sister, Sarah, her daughter, Mary I. Brooks, and her son, James W. Brooks. In 1855 he was reading medicine in Florida, and from 1857 thorough 1858 he was a student at the Reform Medical College in Macon, Georgia. By 1859 he was practicing medicine in New Providence, Alabama, with assets totaling $2,520 in real estate and $375 in personal property. He briefly commanded Company B, Twenty-fifth Alabama Infantry, but resigned after the battle of Shiloh because of ill health. On 20 October 1864 he married Sarah Narcissa King (12 November 1839–26 January 1926), a schoolteacher at New Providence. Daniel Newton Moxley died on 29 January 1901 and is buried beside his wife and children in the Providence Cemetery, one mile north of the Crenshaw County village of Glenwood.

Benjamin Thomas Moxley was born in or about 1832. On 29 December 1850 he married Jane Watson in Jefferson County, Georgia, where, in 1860, he was employed as a bricklayer. He served briefly as a private in Company C, Twentieth Georgia Infantry, before transferring to William Morel Moxley's company. He died in or about 1890.

Little is known of the fourth of the brothers, Nathaniel Jasper Moxley. He is reported to have served in a regiment of Georgia cavalry during the war, and as late as 1890 he was living in Augusta, Georgia.

Their sister, Sarah E. Moxley Brooks, was also a native of Burke County. In July 1860 she was residing in the home of her cousin, Martha A. Cheatham, in Louisville, Jefferson County, Georgia. She was thirty-four years of age at the time, the widow of William Brooks, and employed as a seamstress.

William's wife, Emily Ann M. Beck, was born on 16 March 1836 in Talbot County, Georgia, the daughter of Jourdan and Elizabeth Daniel Beck. Jourdan Beck was born on 9 September 1806 in Barnwell, South Carolina, the son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Mathis) Beck. Elizabeth Daniel Beck, known to her husband as Betsey, was born in Burke County, Georgia, on 28 April 1810. In 1850, Jourdan and Elizabeth Beck were farming in Muscogee County, Georgia, on a farm valued at $1,500. On 6 February 1857, they purchased one quarter section of land in the southwest corner of Pike County, Alabama, a mile east of the hamlet of Fleetwood and some two miles south of Henderson, or Henderson's Store, as it was then sometimes called.

Emily was the oldest of the six surviving children. Her younger siblings were Charles A. Thompson (Tom) Beck, who was born in December 1837; Madison Lewis (Mat) Beck, born in about 1840; Allen D. Beck, born in or about 1842; Mary Verlinda E. (Sis) Beck, born 21 April 1843; and Joseph J. Beck, born on 12 December 1849. The two youngest of these siblings were born in Muscogee County, Georgia.

Madison Lewis Beck became a farmer in Pike County and was the owner of one female slave, aged eighteen. On 13 January 1859 he married Mary M. Stringer, daughter of Wilson B. Stringer and Margaret Ann (Williamson) Stringer.

On 18 January 1859, Mary Verlinda E. Beck was married to John Lafayette (Fate) Stinson who—like her brothers Mat and Tom—was to serve as a private in Company B, Twenty-fifth Alabama Infantry.

William and Emily were married on 15 September 1853 in Jefferson County, Georgia. Their first child, George Edwin Moxley, was born in Georgia on 31 December 1852, when Emily was about seventeen years old. Their next child, Mary J. Elizabeth Moxley, named after her grandmother but called Betty by her family, was born shortly before the Moxleys left Georgia in about 1855. Laura Moxley was born about a year later in Alabama in 1856. William Jasper Moxley, also called Willie, was born in about 1858 and was followed by Davis Moxley (later renamed Thompson, after his late uncle, Charles A. Thompson Beck) in 1860. Emily was pregnant with their last child as William entered the Confederate army in 1861.

Also prominent in the Moxley correspondence are the Stinson, Stringer, and Justice families. Robert M. Stinson, son of John and Martha C. Stinson, was twenty-three years old in 1860 and serving as overseer on his father's farm. He was the husband of Emily Moxley's cousin Emiline E. Stinson, and with his brothers John Lafayette and Micajah Jason, he enlisted in Company B, Twenty-fifth Alabama Infantry, as did their cousin Elias Green Stinson, the son of the Beck's nearest neighbors, Micajah B. and Sarah J. Stinson. John B. Stringer, Mat Beck's brother-in-law and the son of Wilson Baker Stringer and Margaret Ann (Williamson) Stringer, served as a private in the same company.

Appleton H. Justice, a Coffee County merchant, was forty years old in 1860. Locally prominent, Justice was elected a county commissioner on 6 May 1861 and served as postmaster at Bullock from 5 March 1860 through 18 July 1866 except during a period of military service at Pensacola, Florida. Justice was in the army only briefly, however, before resigning due to ill health. He was married to Susan M. Justice.

Their son, Dawson W. Justice, a twenty-year-old clerk in 1860, was at that time living with the family of Thomas Wasden in Bullock. He enlisted in the Bullock Guards in June 1861 and by November 1861 had been elected sergeant major of the Eighteenth Alabama. He was reported wounded in action in the campaign for Atlanta at some time between 7 May and 4 June 1864.⁴

These parents and siblings and an extended family of in-laws and neighbors corresponded extensively with William and Emily Moxley, adding a depth and breadth of context and content to our understanding of the lives of these farm families struggling with the exigencies of war.

William Moxley's letters to his wife and to other members of his family offer insight into the daily life of a newly elected company-grade officer attempting to learn the art of war and to teach it to a group of enthusiastic but highly undisciplined volunteers. Issues of crime and punishment in camp; complaints about pay, mail service, food shortages, and inflated wartime prices; and rumors of battles lost and won and of an imminent peace dominate the news he sent home.

Alabama historian Leah Rawls Atkins has observed that the state's volunteers were fighting for Southern independence in the spirit of the American Revolution, not to preserve property in slavery, which most of them did not own anyway.⁵ This statement certainly seems true of William Moxley and his neighbors.

Coffee County was located in the so-called Wiregrass district of southeast Alabama, a region characterized by dense pine forests and barren sand or clay soils. The county and those surrounding it, therefore, were among the last frontier regions east of the Mississippi River. They were never part of the Cotton Kingdom and were never participants on a large scale in the plantation economy and its peculiar institution. The region's agriculture was largely built on a subsistence base: peas, corn, and—following the Civil War—peanuts. In 1850, in fact, Coffee had 6,380 white inhabitants and only 557 slaves. By 1860 this frontier county had matured to the point where its 5,380 white inhabitants owned 1,417 bondsmen, but its red clay and piney woods character guaranteed that it would never rank with the great plantation districts of the Southern tidewater and river valleys.⁶

Serving the Southern cause and suffering deprivation for neither slavery nor jingoistic patriotism, William and Emily Moxley nevertheless saw the North as the aggressor in the conflict, and both wrote of wanting nothing but the recognition of the Confederate States of America as an independent nation. William Moxley, unhappy in the army and longing for home, wrote to his wife that he could return only when our Country is at peace and occupies a place among the nations of the Earth. God grant that we may gain the victory and all can go home to their familiys and live in peace and comfort, was Emily Moxley's simple prayer.

William and Emily Moxley did not own slaves. Emily's father, Jourdan Beck, owned four: a man named Robin, who is mentioned in these letters with remarkable affection, and his wife and two children. The senior Beck writes of making less than two bales of cotton in 1861, apparently an average yield for his farm. Of the Moxleys' acquaintances, only Wilson Baker Stringer—the father-in-law of Emily's brother Mat—seems remotely to have approached the station of plantation aristocracy; he owned twelve slaves in 1850 and twenty-nine in 1860. In keeping with his planter status, Stringer was elected as one of Pike County's representatives to the Alabama state legislature in 1865 and 1866 before migrating to Texas. He was also a Primitive Baptist preacher.⁷

Perhaps because of their fragile link with the plantation South, the Moxleys' faith in ultimate Confederate triumph was not particularly strong, and their letters display remarkably little of the fervent patriotic rhetoric that characterizes much Civil War correspondence. Even this limited enthusiasm for cause and country declined as war went on. Although never critical of the Confederacy's goal of independence, Emily Moxley became increasingly disdainful of the management of the Southern war effort. Echoing her husband's observations and complaints of lack of patriotism—even in the Confederate officer corps—she offers her opinion that if the officers of the present day were such men as the old revolutioners were, we would be more successfull in our battles. But the senior officers of her husband's regiment, she believed, were in for money and do not think of the responsibility that rests upon there heads. If the leaders of the new Confederate nation were to do as they should and support their cause with a pure motive and with a heart that can feel for there men that are under them, she wrote, God would be with them unto the end.

She and her husband saw only corruption, greed, and personal ambition in high places, however, and so despaired of the ultimate victory. When I see how much difference in the officers of the present day & the old Revolution, wrote William Moxley, it does in some degree shake my faith in our success. There cannot be any simularity if Hystory gives us a correct an account. When the unfounded rumor of the fall of Savannah reached Coffee County on 24 February 1862, Emily Moxley was moved to write to her husband, It seams that God has forsaken us, and when Nashville was actually captured on the following day, she wrote, I see no chance for us now, or but very little, at least.

Although Emily Moxley was not typical of the patriotic women of the Confederacy to whom the Congress tendered its resolution of thanks on 9 April 1862 for the energy, zeal, and untiring devotion which they have manifested in furnishing voluntary contributions to our soldiers in the field, and in the various military hospitals throughout the country, she, and her fellow women of the Wiregrass, were nevertheless subject to the horrors of America's first total war and made sacrifices to the Confederate cause as great as any offered by the nation's female elite.⁸

As interesting and valuable as William Moxley's commentary on the life of two company-grade officers are, and as revealing as are his and his wife's critique of the faltering Confederate cause, for the social historian the true worth of the Moxley letters lies in their domestic content. In her 1903 memoir, Nell Grey, the wife of Daniel Grey, adjutant of the Thirteenth Virginia Cavalry, observed, Before the war, it was scarcely considered wise or delicate for women to live without the protection of a male relative in the house, and as far as possible they were shielded from the burden of business responsibilities.⁹ Similarly, twenty-year-old Georgia plantation mistress Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas jotted in her journal in 1855, "True to my sex, I delight in looking up and love to feel my woman's weakness protected by man's superior strength."¹⁰

This tradition of patriarchy died hard in the Wiregrass, as it did in the rest of the Confederacy as well, but the enforced absence of men thrust responsibility upon Southern women of all classes and delivered to them a degree of autonomy that they had never before experienced. In the spring of 1862 one Rebel cavalryman noted that for the first time he had seen white women working in the field. They were compelled to work, he wrote, by reason of their male relatives being in the army, and so must themselves plow, sow, and harvest or do without bread.¹¹

Southern soldiers sought to rectify this imbalance by their sacrifices on the battlefield. Even now we are endeavoring to repay them, wrote Robert Franklin Bunting, the chaplain of the Eighth Texas Cavalry, in protecting their homes, defending their rights, and soon we hope to drive the foul invader and insulting foe from their State. Since the women of the South were willing to make every sacrifice, he wrote, why shall not we do our duty in their defence and for their deliverance?¹²

Not surprisingly, however, despite these women's rapidly developing ability to carry out the responsibilities vacated by their men, absent husbands were reluctant to relinquish control of their property and families and attempted to supervise their wives by correspondence or by the proxy of a male relative.¹³ William Moxley, a loving but traditional husband and father, offered direction to his wife on virtually every aspect of child raising, farming, and medical treatment but generally insisted that she rely upon the judgment and support of his manifestly incompetent or unconcerned brother at home. More important, her letters to him—among the pitifully few remaining collections of letters from wives to their soldier husbands—offer an almost unique chronicle of the loneliness, fear, and growing resourcefulness of a rural, yeoman-class wife, left to rely upon her own sagacity and strength to keep farm and family alive under conditions of unprecedented stress and deprivation. Emily Moxley's letters are not only rich in the reporting of such day-to-day concerns as the recovery of lost or stolen livestock, the payment and collection of debts, and the problems of buying shoes and blue jeans for a family of growing children as the Union blockade took effect but are especially compelling in their emotional