Married to the Confederacy: the emotional politics of Confederate widowhood

Between 1861 and 1865, approximately three million men left for war; the war killed 750,000 of them. In the process, more than 200,000 white women became widows. This dissertation examines the complicated emotional and political relationships between Confederate widows and the Confederate state. Throughout the American Civil War, Confederate newspapers and government officials championed a particular version of white widowhoodthe young wife who selflessly transferred her monogamous love from dead husband to the deathless cause for which he fought. Only then would their husbands live foreveras would their Cause. But a closer look at the letters and diaries of widows reveals that these women spent their new cultural capital with great 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. Precisely because society invested widowhood with so much significance, it inadvertently created the stage upon which an unforeseen and unprecedented number of young Confederate women could be seen and heard.