Hearts at Home: Petticoats on Pedestals

	An untitled seventeen-stanza poem by an unidentified poet, September 28, 1862: "I saw a vision of a woman, where/Night and new morning strive for domination/Incomparably pale, and passing fair/And sad beyond expression." It is typical of the war's melodramatic verse. William D. Cabell Papers, #276



Confederate soldiers occasionally expressed devotion to their sweethearts by bloodthirsty means. John M. McDowell, stationed in Mississippi, May 20, 1864, boasts to a female cousin that during a recent battle he tried to kill a Yankee for each local girl and two for a "Miss Puss." Sarah Amanda McDowell Letters, #4618-B



	Courtship was never far from the minds of Confederate warriors. An unidentified Army of Northern Virginia soldier sent these two hand-drawn and colored valentines to sisters Barbara and Rebecca Ritenour on February 14, 1865. It is unknown which sister eventually won the soldier's heart. Ritenour Papers, #38-665



An undated wartime letter from Mollie Lowerman, Walker's Creek, Virginia, to Amanda Bosserman: "You will enjoy yourself fine if you do have to take pokeroot. . . . I had the very pokeroot last Sunday at Church but I do not care one cent for it is pokeroot or no root at all." Mollie urges Amanda to visit as a regiment of cavalry is stationed in the neighborhood but she (Mollie) has only met one of its members, a Mr. Nelson of Monroe County whom she says is a "very nice fellow" but is also a "pokeroot." Pokeroot was a plant with stimulative and purgative abilities and apparently was also used for dyeing. It is unclear what Mollie meant by her use of the term in this letter. Bosserman Family Civil War Letters, #10859	Page 2



	This undated valentine pokes fun at the courtship duplicity of men as suitors. Letters From Civil War Virginia, #10911



A multitude of officials, women, and idealized Southern scenes appeared on Confederate and state currency. White women appeared as the personification and patrons of beauty, family, home, gentility and as goddesses of war and agriculture. Seven examples are displayed: July 21, 1861--One dollar Virginia treasury note: A woman as representative of agriculture and prosperity July 25, 1861--Ten dollar (facsimile) Confederate treasury note: Women as Confederate warriors and patriots October 16, 1861--One dollar North Carolina treasury note: Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture October 1861--One dollar, Bank of Tennessee (Nashville) note: Women as patrons of home and agriculture March 13, 1862--Five dollar Virginia treasury note: A woman as destroyer of tyranny March 15, 1862--One dollar and fifty cents, Bank of Rockbridge, Lexington, Virginia: A woman as destroyer of tyranny Ca. 1862--Twenty dollar Missouri defence bond: Woman as goddess of prosperity. African-American women were conspicuously absent from Confederate currency though they comprised nearly half the South's black population.



	Daguerreotype of Marianna Saunders Prentis (1812-1864), one of thousands of such images taken of Southern women during the war. Marianna Saunders Prentis, #4136-G



According to family tradition, this 1840 oil painting, measuring 29.5 x 24.5 inches, of Martha Susan Prince (Mrs. Robert C. B. Nelson) was deliberately "stomped by a Union soldier." Her chin does bear evidence of repairs. Martha Susan Price Painting, #10605-A



	Evans, Augusta J. (Augusta Jane), Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, second edition, Richmond: West & Johnson, 1864, and, Macaria, New York: John Bradburn, 1864. During the 1864 Atlanta campaign a Confederate soldier asserted a paper bound copy of Macaria saved his life when it stopped a Yankee bullet which might have otherwise killed him. This novel, first published in Richmond in 1864 and the South's most popular wartime novel, sold more than 20,000 copies. It appeared in several and different editions between 1864 and 1903. Augusta Jane Evans (1835-1909), a prominent antebellum Southern writer, wrote her third novel, under trying circumstances while a nurse in Mobile, Alabama. Although the war cut her off from her regular publishers, she had a copy smuggled by blockade runner to New York City by way of Havana, Cuba. Its dedication "To The Army of The Southern Confederacy" did not appear in Northern and postwar editions. The allegoric adventures of its heroine, Irene Huntingdon, paralleled the wartime lives, loves, and struggles of Confederate women. Macaria (Greek for "blessed") portrayed the Civil War as an opportunity for Southern women's self-expression and self-realization. It also characterized the North as a land of "shameless, hideous Abolitionism," the South as "the bodyguard for the liberty of the Republic" and discussed the dangers besetting it (especially the possibility of secession by select Confederate states). After the war Evans married Lorenzo Madison Wilson, a wealthy neighbor twenty-seven years her senior. Although a zealous wartime advocate for women's rights, Mrs. Wilson's last novel, A Speckled Bird (1902) denounced female suffrage. The second Richmond edition's dedication page and the first Northern edition's title page are displayed.



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