Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant
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Here are the life stories of three women who connect us to our national past and provide windows onto a social and political landscape that is strangely familiar yet shockingly foreign.Berkin focuses on three “accidental heroes” who left behind sufficient records to allow their voices to be heard clearly and to allow us to see the world as they did. Though they held no political power themselves, all three had access to power and unique perspectives on events of their time.Angelina Grimké Weld, after a painful internal dialogue, renounced the values of her Southern family’s way of life and embraced the antislavery movement, but found her voice silenced by marriage to fellow reformer Theodore Weld. Varina Howell Davis had an independent mind and spirit but incurred the disapproval of her husband, Jefferson Davis, when she would not behave as an obedient wife. Though ill-prepared and ill-suited for her role as First Lady of the Confederacy, she became an expert political lobbyist for her husband’s release from prison. Julia Dent Grant, the wife of Ulysses S. Grant, was a model of genteel domesticity who seemed content with the restrictions of marriage and motherhood, even though they led to alternating periods of fame and disgrace, wealth and poverty. Only late in life did she glimpse the price of dependency.Throughout, Berkin captures the tensions and animosities of the antebellum era and the disruptions, anxieties, and dislocations generated by the war and its aftermath. The Barnes & Noble Review Whether thanks to Scarlett and her hoop skirts or to our own unhealed national scars, there's something endlessly fascinating about lives rent apart by the Civil War. Nineteenth-century American womanhood, with its mixture of ambition and limitation in essentially bonded lives, also continues to feel both resonant and haunting. In Carol Berkin's hand, this triptych of three women -- one abolitionist and the two "first wives" of the Confederacy and the Union, respectively -- provides a fascinating lens through which to view struggle and belonging during the tumultuous generation surrounding the Civil War. Oddly, all three women are southerners. Each comes from a slaveholding background. Each tries to fathom her role as the wife of a powerful man, as well as the limits of her own power in the face of chaos, destruction, and changing social norms. Angelina Grimke, too sharp-tongued to be a southern belle, renounces her plantation upbringing, eventually finding her voice as one of the first women abolitionists. Her life as a public speaker challenges not only racial bias but also the gender conventions of the day. Varina Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson by Davis, attempts good public relations and is also challenged as the watchful power behind the throne. By contrast, Julia Grant, wife of the general and president, seems as if she'd have been a content not to have the sphere of her femininity challenged by the whole mess, either of politics or war. Though deeply grounded in fact, these microhistories of individual women's lives read as linked novellas, capturing three women apprehending differently the unraveling of their Union, and its difficult implications for their lives. --Tess Taylor
