The Divided Family in Civil War America

By Amy Murrell Taylor

The Civil War has long been described as a war pitting "brother against brother." The divided family is an enduring metaphor for the divided nation, but it also accurately reflects the reality of America's bloodiest war. Connecting the metaphor to the real experiences of families whose households were split by conflicting opinions about the war, Amy Murrell Taylor provides a social and cultural history of the divided family in Civil War America.

In hundreds of border state households, brothers--and sisters--really did fight one another, while fathers and sons argued over secession and husbands and wives struggled with opposing national loyalties. Even enslaved men and women found themselves divided over how to respond to the war. Taylor studies letters, diaries, newspapers, and government documents to understand how families coped with the unprecedented intrusion of war into their private lives. Family divisions inflamed the national crisis while simultaneously embodying it on a small scale--something noticed by writers of popular fiction and political rhetoric, who drew explicit connections between the ordeal of divided families and that of the nation. Weaving together an analysis of this popular imagery with the experiences of real families, Taylor demonstrates how the effects of the Civil War went far beyond the battlefield to penetrate many facets of everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 4, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807899076

Amy Murrell Taylor

Amy Murrell Taylor is T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky and author of The Divided Family in Civil War America.

Book preview

001

Table of Contents

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Union Father, Rebel Son

Rebellion

Political Conscience

Widening the Breach

Chapter 2 - Marriage and Courtship

Marriage

Courtship

Chapter 3 - Brothers and Sisters

Brothers in Conflict

Brothers in Combat

Women and Sisters in Conflict

Chapter 4 - Border Crossing and the Treason of Family Ties

Travel

The Lincoln Case

Intersectional Mail

Advertisements

Chapter 5 - Border Dramas and the Divided Family in the Popular Imagination

Seduction Tales

Romantic Triangle Stories

The Divided Interracial Family

Chapter 6 - Reconciliations Lived and Imagined

Wartime Reunion

Postwar Reconciliation

Reconciliation in the Popular Imagination

Chapter 7 - Reconciliation and Emancipation

African American Families Divided and Reunited

African Americans in the Reunited National Family

Epilogue

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

CIVIL WAR AMERICA

Gary W. Gallagher, editor

001

© 2005 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Bulmer by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Amy Murrell.

The divided family in Civil War America / Amy Murrell Taylor.

p. cm. — (Civil War America)

Includes 00bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2969-2 (cloth: alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-080-78990-7

1. United States — History — Civil War, 1861 - 1865 — Social

aspects. 2. Family — United States — History — 19th

century. 3. United States — Social conditions — To 1865.

I. Title. II. Series.

E468.9.T38 2005 973.7’1 — dc22 2005010248

A portion of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different

form, as "Union Father, Rebel Son: Families and the Question of

Civil War Loyalty," in The War Was You and Me: Civilians in

the American Civil War, ed. Joan Cashin (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2002), and is

reproduced here with permission.

09 08 07 06 05 5 4 3 2 1

For my family

Acknowledgments

I HAVE MANY PEOPLE to acknowledge for their support and guidance over the years. As an undergraduate at Duke University, I had the good fortune to work with Anne Firor Scott and Nancy Hewitt, who opened my eyes to the history of women and families. I have them to thank for inspiring me by their example — and for teaching me how to be a historian.

My friends and mentors at the University of Virginia provided a wonderful community in which to develop intellectually. Ten years ago I was lucky to begin graduate school there and to study with Edward Ayers, a truly inspiring teacher and scholar. His always patient and enthusiastic advice made it possible for me to become the author of this book, and I am greatly indebted to him for all the time he spent reading and rereading the drafts of this work. I only hope I can be as dedicated an adviser as he has been. One of the best aspects of studying at the university was that so many others showed a similar dedication. Paul Gaston shared his passion for the South while guiding me through the history of civil rights. Peter Onuf took an interest in my Civil War research early on and, in one especially pivotal conversation, urged me to launch this full-blown study of divided families. Once I got this project under way, Cindy Aron, Gary Gallagher, and Stephen Railton read drafts and shared their expertise — each has influenced the final outcome in ways for which I am grateful.

My fellow graduate students in the History Department taught me a great deal, as well as provided much-needed social outlets. I am thankful to my friends from History 701 and 702, the Southern History Seminar, and the members of my dissertation support group — Andy Morris, Steve Norris, Josh Rothman, and Andy Trees. I also appreciate my conversations with Taylor Fain, Valerie Garver, Robert Ingram, Kathy Jones, Peter Kastor, Matt Lassiter, Andy Lewis, Maire Murphy, Anne Rubin, Lori Schuyler, and Lara Diefenderfer Wulff. The Virginia Center for Digital History and, in particular, its director, Will Thomas, were very good to me. I started working there in the hope of paying my bills and left with a new appreciation for servers, scripts, and source codes. I am thankful for the friendships formed while transcribing and tagging documents, especially with Susanna Lee and Watson Jennison. My many lunches with Holly Shulman, during which we brainstormed about our projects, are especially memorable.

My new friends at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY-Albany) deserve thanks, too. Iris Berger, chair of the Department of History, rolled out the welcome mat when I arrived and has since provided much support — from tracking down money to listening to the stress of a junior faculty member. My transition from graduate student to professor was also made easier by the friendship of Richard Hamm, Jennifer Rudolph, Harriet Temps, Ivan Steen, and Julian Zelizer. Allen Ballard deserves special thanks for his frequent inquiries about my progress on this book and for teaching me how to carve out more time for writing.

I have been very fortunate to receive the advice of many other distinguished historians over the last decade. Particularly helpful were the comments I received on portions of this work from Peter Bardaglio, Catherine Clinton, Lynda Crist, Drew Gilpin Faust, Robert Kenzer, Peter Kolchin, Virginia Laas, Jan Lewis, James Marten, Stephanie McCurry, Sandy Treadway, and Mark Wetherington. I am also grateful to Joan Cashin for several detailed readings of the first chapter. Reid Mitchell, James Marten, and the anonymous readers for the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press all graciously took time out of their busy lives to read the entire manuscript and provided suggestions that greatly improved the outcome. Catherine Clinton read several different sections but deserves special thanks for her constant encouragement over the last few years. I also thank David Perry, Ron Maner, Stevie Champion, and other members of the staff at the UNC Press for taking an interest in this project and patiently guiding me through the process of turning it into a book.

I would not have gotten very far with all of this advice, however, without financial support. I thank the following institutions for their generosity: the American Historical Association for an Albert J. Beveridge grant, the Virginia Historical Society for a Mellon Research Fellowship, the North Caroliniana Society for an Archie K. Davis Fellowship, and Duke University for a Women’s Studies Research Grant. The University of Virginia was a constant source of support while I was a student; I thank the Center for Children, Families, and the Law for a summer fellowship, as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for DuPont, Southern History, and travel fellowships. SUNY-Albany helped at the final stages with a Faculty Research Award Program grant, and the United University Professions provided assistance with an Individual Development Award. Special thanks go to SUNY-Albany’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Vice President for Research for last-minute support that made possible the reproduction of the images in this book.

Tracking down the scattered private papers of divided families required the help and expertise of many people. I am indebted to the following archivists and librarians for taking the time to identify these families: Karen Kinzey of Arlington House; Elizabeth Dunn at Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library; James Holmberg, Rebecca Rice, and Mark Wetherington at The Filson Historical Society; Claire McGann at the University of Kentucky’s Margaret I. King Library; Martha Bennett at the Fort Delaware Society; Mary Herbert of the Maryland Historical Society; Dennis Northcott at the Missouri Historical Society; John Coski at the Museum of the Confederacy; Marilyn Hughes and Wayne Moore at the Tennessee State Library and Archives; Michael Plunkett at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library; Graham Dozier and Frances Pollard at the Virginia Historical Society; Diane Ayotte, Jennifer Lukomski, and Cindy Stewart at the Western Historical Manuscript Collection of the University of Missouri; Nancy Baird and Pat Hodges at the Kentucky Library of Western Kentucky University; and the staffs of Woodruff Library of Emory University, the Southern Historical Collection at UNC - Chapel Hill, the Hagley Library in Wilmington, the Delaware Public Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Maryland. I am also grateful to the wonderful interlibrary loan staffs at the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library and at SUNY-Albany’s University Library for tracking down newspapers and novels.

A number of Civil War historians offered additional suggestions for finding divided families. Thanks especially to Jonathan Berkey, Peter Carmichael, Catherine Clinton, Robert Krick, Susanna Lee, Cora MacVilla, James Marten, Chandra Miller Manning, Anne Rubin, and David Smith. My search for these families was also facilitated by wonderful friends who opened their homes and gave me places to stay while I visited the archives. Thanks to Margaret and David Brackett, Allison Cowett and Dave Adams, Jessica and Jason Dasher, Preston and Elizabeth Kim, and Duncan and Sherri Murrell.

It almost seems appropriate, given the topic of this book, that my own family pitched in to help. My parents, Darwin and Joyce Murrell, took an interest in this project from the beginning. I will always remember the time they spent with me in the archives, learning about the Civil War and weeding through voluminous documents and microfilm. Together they were my best research assistants. How my brother Duncan and I, two siblings who showed no interest in the Antietam battlefield when we drove through it frequently as children, both ended up writing about the Civil War at the same time is still a mystery to me. But I have enjoyed our numerous and enlightening conversations about our newfound mutual interest. I am unsure how to begin thanking my husband, Scott Taylor. His humor, patience, and shared love of history have been the greatest support while I worked on this project. He may be happier than I am that this book has come to an end. I look forward to collaborating on our new project together — our daughter Katie, who came into our lives just in time to provide the final push for me to finish this work. To my entire family I dedicate this book.

Albany, New York

March 2005

Introduction

ABRAHAM LINCOLN WARNED in 1858 that a house divided against itself cannot stand. His words, prophetic of the war that was to come three years later, continue to resonate today. That phrase — just one part of a much larger address — has become one of Lincoln’s most recognizable contributions to our American political vocabulary. But those words were not unique to the nineteenth-century president. The image of a house divided, or a family in conflict, was a timeless one that drew on a long tradition in literature and political thought. From the Bible to Greek tragedies to Shakespeare’s works to the political theories of John Locke, the family has offered a common language for understanding the complexities of human relationships. For Lincoln, the family provided a rhetorical shorthand, allowing him in just six words to convey what slavery might do to the relationship between Northern and Southern citizens.

Lincoln was not alone in describing a nation in family terms. Historians across the globe have uncovered numerous moments in which family language and metaphor figured centrally in the imagining of nations — particularly nations in conflict. We can see this in the French Revolution, Russian propaganda during World War I, and the Cold War, to name a few examples. The widespread use of the family image raises important questions about national identity — where it comes from, how it is defined, and how attachments to family and nation coexist and reinforce one another. In the United States we can trace the roots of the family metaphor at least to the Revolution, as colonists imagined themselves as children of a tyrannical British father.¹ The Civil War only amplified this association of nation and family with an outpouring of speeches and stories that joined Lincoln in comparing the nation to a divided house. Even today, in movies, Web sites, children’s literature, and John Jakes novels, we continue to see the warring nation as if it were a quarreling family — or a war of brother against brother. It has become a cliché, easily recognizable and frequently invoked. Less understood is why this image has taken root in American culture.

This book offers the first sustained historical study of the divided family in the American Civil War. It takes what we often consider to be just rhetoric or common sense and finds within this image something more meaningful for those who lived through the war. It was meaningful, on a profound level, because it was real. Thousands of families did divide in what was widely considered to be a shocking dimension of the Civil War. Brothers did fight brothers; even Abraham Lincoln had relatives in the Confederate army. The image of the divided family therefore captured something tangible and authentic about the experience of war. But, on another level, it offered to Civil War Americans a framework for making sense of new and unprecedented problems. How could a country that was once one nation be carved into two? How could fellow citizens kill one another? Americans looked to the vocabulary of family — deference and authority, affection and conflict — for guidance in framing those difficult questions. This book follows the interplay of these two levels — experience and language — to provide a social and cultural history of the divided family in Civil War America.²

WE NEED NOT REACH FAR into the vast library of Civil War history to find evidence of divided families. The idea that two brothers, or a father and son, or a husband and wife could assume opposing stances in the war has both captivated and perplexed scholars, writers of fiction, and filmmakers since the first shots were fired over Fort Sumter.³ Family division has become one of the curiosities of the war, filling out war narratives with colorful images and dramatic flourishes. Stories of divided families almost always appear in some form in anecdote books, a staple of Civil War popular culture, under titles such as Love and Treason and ‘Brother against Brother’ Was Real.⁴ Biographies of some of the most prominent Civil War political and military leaders rarely fail to mention a personal connection to the enemy side. Many central figures of that era were split from a family member, including Confederates Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson, and their Union-sympathizing sisters, and U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden and his Confederate son. Indeed, the more one looks for evidence of divided families in the war, the more numerous they appear.⁵

This book thus began with the impossible search for all — or almost all — instances of family division in the American Civil War. Finding these families involved searching for references in the many books that have preceded this one, reading anecdote books and following short leads, drawing on the memories of archivists, and taking seriously what have become, in many minds, folkloric tales and legends. The writings of contemporary observers energized this search. There is scarcely a family that is not divided, one woman wrote from St. Louis in 1861, and a Virginian noted of his own divided family, There are thousands of families in the same situation.⁶ Statements such as these, however, quickly made it apparent that this subject needed to be narrowed along several lines. I turned first to those families in which division meant open allegiance to the opposing sides during the four years of war. Many more families argued about the merits of secession and slavery prior to April 1861 or disagreed on the course of the war. But the families considered here are those in which disagreements translated into opposing national loyalties, evident through service in the army or an overt display of allegiance at home.

These families tended to live in one region of the country: the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia (and later West Virginia), Maryland, and Delaware, as well as Washington, D.C. These states — all slaveholding states of the Upper South — were widely acknowledged during the war for having the greatest concentration of divided families. As one Missouri newspaper observed in 1861, Secession has broken up the dearest social relations in every community of the border slave States, turning son against father, brother against brother, daughter against mother, friend against friend. These words echoed what would become a popular belief during the conflict: that divided families were a border state problem that set this region apart from states farther north or south.⁷ The border slave States, indeed, had become an increasingly self-conscious region by the eve of the war, known alternately as the border states, the middle states, and, in the words of a Virginia legislator, the tier of friendly states between the Union and the Confederacy. They comprised the area immediately north and south of the Union-Confederate border, where, as a Virginia newspaper explained, national loyalties in the 1860s could give rise to . . . reasonable doubt. It was here that slavery and abolitionism, Democrats and Republicans, industry and agriculture, urban and rural communities all existed side by side. This was the crossroads of American travel, too, as Northerners moved south to obtain land or to vacation, Southerners went north for education or employment, and Easterners moved west to seek new land.⁸

The different cultures, economies, and politics of the nation coincided in this region, making it difficult, when the war came, to draw a political border between the Union and the Confederacy that would mirror the geographic border between North and South. Latent divisions within the border states instead gave rise to the protracted secession crisis. This was a region where some of the most significant compromises to stave off sectional conflict originated in the 1850s and where voters supported moderate candidates over the more radical Republicans or Southern Democrats in 1860. Yet it was also where consensus was elusive once secession came, as states either seceded reluctantly after months of debate, like Tennessee and Virginia (which eventually splintered in two), or remained in the Union despite vocal secessionist minorities. The governor of Kentucky, for instance, supported efforts to establish an alternative Confederate government in his Union state, while in Missouri guerrilla warfare continually drew citizens into violent confrontations. In this region where, as one Kentuckian put it, treason & loyalty overlap, and where reluctant Confederates and latent Unionists lived side by side during the Civil War, the line between Union and Confederacy fell in unexpected places, dividing towns, cities, and rural communities. It almost made sense, then, that families living in this diverse and conflicted region would divide, too.⁹

The people who experienced a schism in their families were not satisfied with that conclusion, however. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans idealized the family as the foundation of social and national stability — it was not supposed to give in so easily to the weight of adversity. Family members, of course, were known to have their differences and to argue about politics in the years leading up to the war. But many expected that in a time of war, when it became necessary to assume a public stance on one side or the other, their families would close ranks and present a united front. Americans believed then — as some historians do now — that men and women would act as a cohesive family unit, that their loyalty to family would coincide with their loyalty to country. Yet quite the opposite occurred when border-state residents chose to put a nation before their family and to become their kinsmen’s public enemy. The division of Civil War families thus struck a powerful blow to popular expectations, forcing people to step back, question old assumptions, and reconsider the meaning of family and its role in shaping national loyalty.¹⁰

To explain what they called this tragedy and horror of war, border-state men and women looked deep within themselves to understand why their family members assumed opposing national allegiances. They turned to personal letters and diaries, at times writing long, introspective analyses of their conflict. A close reading of their words, particularly those of the white middle and upper classes who left behind the most extensive written record, anchors this study. The first three chapters explore how members of these families tried to understand one another’s motivations and actions during the latter part of the sectional crisis and the first few years of the war. Chapter 1 examines conversations between fathers and sons, Chapter 2 follows the interactions between men and women during courtship and marriage, and Chapter 3 explores the relationships between brothers and sisters. Each of these chapters reveals that family division went beyond the oft-cited brother against brother and centers instead on particular relationships that triggered the greatest dispute about two critical — and still debated — questions of the Civil War: What motivated individual family members to align themselves with one side or the other? And why did they fight? Few agreed on the answers to these questions, and many argued vigorously about the meaning of their division.¹¹

The story that emerges from these families is one of borders tested and boundaries challenged. Attempts to understand why a Union-Confederate border had broken through their household inevitably led these individuals to search for answers in the deeper social borders between gender and generations. To varying degrees, family members came to view their divided national loyalties through the more familiar lens of family conflict, as crises of duty and authority rather than of slavery and secession. Coming-of-age struggles between sons and their fathers, for example, were a part of everyday life in midcentury families; it followed then, in some minds, that this generational conflict, rather than something strictly political, could explain why sons assumed public stances in opposition to their fathers. Border-state families thus turned to the language of gender and generations to describe their internal breakdown: they took what was unfamiliar — wartime division — and made it familiar by cloaking their arguments in the existing vocabulary of domestic conflict. Their words, expressed in moments of frustration and candor, articulated beliefs about family life that often went unspoken in nineteenth-century sources. They talked about what it meant to be a son or a father, a wife or a daughter, and the meaning of those positions in the context of a military and political war.¹²

This book focuses on individuals who often lived in the same household and were bound together by close emotional, financial, and blood ties of kinship. Certainly family meant many other things, too, and could encompass a wide range of relationships. But relations between extended family or intimate friends are relevant to this study only when those relationships appear to have been a significant part of a man or woman’s wartime life. The reason for this focus is simple: wartime divisions within the nuclear family were the most intense and surfaced in family correspondence far more clearly — and with far more frustration — than divisions involving extended kin. This may reflect the high expectations that had come to surround nuclear family relations in midcentury America. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, the combined forces of political independence, religious awakenings, and commercial and industrial expansion all helped foster an idealization of the father-mother-child family structure. Such a family was meant to be an emotional sanctuary, a small and child-centered refuge from public life that replaced traditional patriarchal authority with affection and love. Few families ever measured up to that ideal; those that came the closest were typically members of the white middle or upper classes, especially those in the urban North. Yet far more people across the nation, and in the border region, embraced this ideal anyway and grew frustrated when their wartime divisions exposed their inability to achieve it. Their attachment to this domestic model both exacerbated their conflicts and, as we will see, offered a guide to reconciling their divisions. The nuclear or modern family, and particularly the gap between that ideal and the reality, is therefore critical to understanding the domestic dramas that unfolded in border-state society.¹³

One aspect of their ideal that troubled divided families the most was the relationship — or the border — between public and private life. The family was defined in part by its physical and emotional distance from political, military, and economic affairs: these two spheres — the private and the public — were not to overlap but were to be separate and distinct. Yet, as numerous historians have documented in recent years, the line between public and private was far more permeable in reality and never as neat as promised.¹⁴ This insight has led to a reconsideration of some of the most significant events and trends of the nineteenth century, and the Civil War is no exception. Wars, by their very nature, transcend public-private boundaries. An acknowledgment of this has led historians to argue that the war looks different when the connections between homefront and battlefield are considered. For some, pressures emanating from the homefront proved to be a drag on military progress; for others, families helped explain how and why men took up arms and fought the way they did. The war was not fought solely on the battlefield but also penetrated — and depended on — the most intimate facets of life.¹⁵

Divided families are intriguing in part because they openly acknowledged the permeability of the border between homefront and battlefront long before historians began to see it in hindsight. Divided relatives viewed the presence of war in their families as an intrusion, a sign of dysfunction, and they responded with a vigorous defense. Their translation of the conflict into domestic terms was, in part, an effort to reinscribe a division between their private lives and the public world of war. They tried to minimize their discussion of politics and redraw boundaries that would, they hoped, restore normalcy. They continually defined and redefined, in explicit language, what was private and what was public, what was domestic and what was military or political. And their words are revealing. Not only did these men and women acknowledge the connections between these two spheres, but also, driven by the war to document their daily experiences in diaries and letters, they went a step further and resisted these linkages. Their eagerness to defend a border between public and private — their use of it to deflect wartime stress — may be one reason why this domestic ideology continued to resonate throughout the nineteenth century despite a much more complicated reality for most families.¹⁶

Most divided families found it difficult to keep their affairs private as the war progressed. They did not live or act in isolation but instead were surrounded by other wartime pressures that forced their problems into the open. In the view of some contemporary observers, such as neighbors, newspaper writers, and politicians, the idea that a family had members with opposing political loyalties raised questions about that family’s character, reputation, and, most significantly in this time of war, potential for disloyalty and even treason. Who knew whether someone in a divided family might utilize their kinship connections to spy or otherwise subvert a national cause? Many regarded divided families with a combination of lament and suspicion, wondering whether to sympathize with or condemn their alignment on opposing sides. Chapter 4 of this study examines how divided families became an acknowledged public problem. It pays particular attention to border crossing, to how military and political leaders in both the Union and the Confederacy passed laws limiting contact across the military border — via travel and mail — between family members. Such policies reflected a belief that the idealized boundaries between public and private life could be, and would be, subverted easily by these families, a subversion (or treason) that would threaten the wartime border between the opposing sides.

An additional tension in their own domestic ideals made it even more difficult for divided families to protect their privacy. The family, despite its role as a private refuge, had simultaneously served a very public function for the nation since the Revolution. American national identity was not self-evident in the decades after independence; it was defin ed less by the traditional components of nationalism, such as ethnicity, religion, or even a strong nation-state, and more by the diffuse ideas and values of its citizenry. The new republic is better described as an imagined community, to borrow the words of Benedict Anderson; it was a nation of citizens who may have never known or met one another but who nonetheless thought they shared a deep, horizontal comradeship. Certainly the republican values of liberty and equality drew early Americans together into such a comradeship, but in an effort to nurture those values, and to represent them in a tangible and easily identifiable way, Americans turned to the idea of family.¹⁷

The family became a model and a metaphor for the youthful nation. Republican leaders held up the family as an incubator of civic and political values — of virtue and affection — deemed essential to the welfare of the republic. As republican mothers and republican wives, women were to epitomize such values and inculcate them in their kin, thus serving the public interest while safely ensconced in the private sphere. John Adams, reflecting such expectations, once explained that the foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families.¹⁸ Early national leaders such as Adams were not alone in linking a nation’s welfare to the family, but this connection was particularly resonant in postrevolutionary America. Early Americans grasped for symbols and metaphors that would help them imagine their republican nation as a cohesive whole. They tried to build a society and a government of free and equal individuals, but, without an absolute monarch to bind them through deference and authority, Americans needed to envision some other ligament of national loyalty. They found this in the metaphor of the family, a concept familiar to every citizen, which offered a more voluntary and affective model for bringing together citizens of different backgrounds and interests. Americans were to be, according to many republican spokesmen, loyal members of one great family.¹⁹

Abraham Lincoln’s references to the house divided helped sustain this popular association of nation and family well into the Civil War. It might be tempting to attribute this continuity to rhetorical habit, to a tradition so en-grained in American culture by midcentury that it naturally appeared again, and to some extent this was the case. But the particular circumstances of the Civil War also gave added meaning to the long-standing imaginative connection between nation and family. A civil war is, after all, a crisis of loyalty, and the U.S. Civil War revealed the failure of the American people to generate a common bond of national unity. It also, as the experiences of divided families reveal most dramatically, marked the failure of family. The affection, duty, and other attachments that were to be nurtured in the family proved vulnerable to the stresses of war. The family turned out not to be the stable, fixed model for the nation that early leaders may have hoped but instead an institution rife with conflict and disloyalty. Family and nation thus experienced parallel and interconnected crises of loyalty in this war that gave new intensity to the metaphoric connection between them.²⁰

No one did more to promote the imaginative link between family and nation during the Civil War than the authors of wartime fiction. In both the North and the South, publishing houses churned out short stories and novels that offered ways of understanding the divided nation. Family comprised a dominant theme of these tales, as writers depicted the Union and the Confederacy as warring brothers, or father and son, or husband and wife. Divided families helped writers tell the story of the warring nation and examine the existence — or absence — of loyalty among its people. Chapter 5 of this book begins with one theme that was especially popular within this body of wartime literature — the failed romance of men and women on opposing sides of the Union-Confederate divide. These stories called on gender to depict the failed affections between Civil War Americans North and South. Other stories used the motif of family dysfunction with race more clearly in view, exploring the loyalty or disloyalty of African American slaves in interracial families. Chapter 6 examines how the metaphor of family and marital strife fed into a closely related theme by the late 1860s: intersectional marriage across the lines of battle. The message of this simplified postwar imagery was that kinship would heal all wounds, that ingrained and long-standing loyalties would resurface to trump any lingering division. No matter what remained of a Union-Confederate border, no matter what it was about slavery and sectional politics that once pulled the nation apart, all could be easily set aside and the national family restored.

But here the image diverged from the reality. The national family reunited in fiction offered an idealized version of what actual divided families aspired to over the course of the war. In both, Americans sought to domesticate the war, to translate the divisive issues of slavery and sectional politics into more manageable familial dramas. But real families did not find this so easy to accomplish. Chapter 6 continues the theme of reconciliation by examining these families’ attempts to remain united from the first moments of their division. Despite their best efforts to defuse their political differences, most divided families found that the war would continue to intrude and tear them apart emotionally for years to come. Their personal loyalties were damaged by the war, though popular images still celebrated them more strongly than ever as models of unity. Family loyalty, and the reconciliation it promised, was something more easily imagined than achieved in reality.

It was easily imagined because writers of fiction could sidestep the war’s divisiveness with little difficulty. Chapter 7 of this volume examines how these writers, in transforming the war into a family affair, avoided a serious reckoning with the most fractious aspect of the war — the destruction of slavery. In tales of intersectional marriage, African Americans become peripheral members of the national family: they are loyal but dependent, loving but subordinate to whites. The family metaphor helped Americans who were anxious to preserve the nation’s racial borders as four million black men and women became free. This chapter also considers the subject that white authors managed to bypass in these postwar tales: the process of emancipation and the reunification of ex-slave families. The testimony of freed blacks exposes as fantasy the view that African Americans were loyal dependents of white families. Rather, these men and women now focused on repairing their own family divisions and demonstrated loyalty to their kin that paralleled that seen in other divided families. When image and reality are scrutinized together, then, what emerges is the origins of white Americans’ selective memory of the war, and of a culture that celebrated the reunion of a divided white population at the expense of a serious engagement with the status of African Americans.²¹

The history of divided families is therefore not just a story of family or of the nation at war, but a story of the powerful intersection between the two. A writer for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine observed in 1863 that "we are taking the nation home with us as never before, and making our public interests a part of our private welfare."²² Americans took the nation home both in their real families and in the popular imagination. On each level the family figured prominently in their thinking about Civil War loyalty by absorbing, translating, and making understandable the divisions of the nation. Sometimes the family inflamed those divisions and at other times it smoothed over them. Sometimes it reinforced the nation’s political, social, and geographic borders, and other times it reached across them. Subsequent generations continued to make the family — especially the divided family — central to their perceptions of the Civil War. This book begins to explore where that association came from.

IN THE YEARS LEADING UP to the war, and as secession became imminent, many observers joined Abraham Lincoln in regarding the United States as a house divided. Family language pervaded newspaper stories and speeches aired during secession conventions; the view that the nation was embroiled in generational conflict between children and their parents was especially popular. Both unionists and secessionists found in the language of generations a way of arguing for the righteousness of their political stance. Both sides proclaimed their obedience to the Founding Fathers — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison — while calling their opponents rebellious children who were working against that paternal legacy. These images cast Civil War Americans as the children, leaving their parents in the past, whereas other metaphors centered on the older generation. The state of Virginia, for example, was widely described as the mother State or the old mother Virginia, which had given birth, in the migration of its citizens, to states farther south and west. Virginia, that old mother of heroes and statesmen! proclaimed the Southern Field and Fireside, How grandly she breasts the storm! . . . she bears her bosom to receive upon it strokes which are aimed at her children. This statement offered the Confederate view: that Virginia’s secession upheld its proper position as a protective mother, geographically buffering states farther south from the invading North. But New York’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine saw things quite differently: this "Mother of Presidents, who had given birth to the disloyal subject, Nullification , and cherished [it] in her bosom, should now be called the Nurse of Disunion." The seceding state of Virginia was, depending on one’s sectional perspective, a good or a bad mother.²³

These generational metaphors drew together, in one succinct image, several diverse and conflicting questions that were paramount in the secession crisis: who had a legitimate claim to the political legacy of the founders? who interpreted the Constitution correctly? and who had the authority to determine whether disunion was allowable or not? These images explored the more amorphous subject of duty and loyalty, too, considering what claim each section could make on the other. They also suggested, most simply, who was right and who was wrong in the ongoing debates. Generational imagery, through the personae of parent and child, created a dichotomy between right and wrong, maturity and youthfulness, wisdom and carelessness. This distinction at once reflected the reality of the secession crisis and suggested a widespread desire to exaggerate those differences at the beginning of hostilities. At the same time, though, these images mirrored a real generational crisis taking place within border-state families as the nation fell into civil war.

1

Union Father, Rebel Son

WHEN NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Henry Lane Stone joined the Confederate army, he did not just turn against the Union, or what he called the cursed dominion of Yankeedom. He also defied