Women at War: The Civil War Diaries of Floride Clemson and Cornelia Peake McDonald

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Juncker, Clara

MAURICE ZOLOTOW CLAIMS in his introduction to Marilyn Monroe (1960), the first of the more than one hundred biographies of Hollywood's blonde Venus to follow, that he was breaking new ground. The Civil War, he argues, had so far dominated the market for serious autobiographies and biographies, because, in Lytton Strachey's words, "it is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one." In Zolotow's view, biographers of actors ignore the documents and human sources that even the dullest writer of a PhD dissertation cannot dismiss: "In one publishing season there are probably issued more decent biographies of minor Civil War generals-books with some scholarship, wit, wisdom-than our theatrical biographers produce in a decade" (8). Forty years after this statement, scholarship on both movie stars and Civil War generals flourish, but other Civil War lives and deaths have entered the field. C. Vann Woodward and Elizabeth Muhlenfeld both made sure that Mary Chesnut saw the academic limelight, and other editors have discovered the private Civil Wars of diarists and letter writers, Floride Clemson and Cornelia McDonald among them.1 Their published journals-A Rebel Came Home: The Diaries and Letters of Floride Clemson 1863-66 (rev. ed. 1989) and A Woman's Civil War: A Diary, with Reminiscences of the War (1992)-introduce us to courageous and spirited women, who fought their own Civil War battles without brothers, fathers, or husbands present. Unlike the generals who crowd Maurice Zolotow, these two women-one a pampered belle, the other an overworked mother of nine-map the war through their personal anxieties and concerns. Floride Clemson interweaves the deterioration of her body and the fall of the Confederacy, whereas Cornelia McDonald records the war as a struggle to remain in her Winchester home. Both women ultimately fail to preserve a body and a house, respectively, and merge private and regional defeat, but in the process they situate the writing of the war within feminine spaces and win a voice of their own. They began, in short, the work that writers such as Stephen Crane and Ambrose Bierce would take up later in the nineteenth century and John Dos Passes and Ernest Hemingway (and many others) would continue. Among the first to break the silence in the wake of war atrocities, these women diarists wrote their stories of suffering and survival that inspire and sustain readers in the twenty-first century as well.

Floride Clemson kept her diary from 1 January 1863, through 24 October 1866, and additionally wrote copious letters to her mother, Anna Calhoun, especially during a trip to Niagara Falls in the summer of 1863. The editors of Λ Rebel Came Home have included this correspondence in an appendix to Floride's diary, which, besides her trip to the North, gives an account of the journey from Beltsville, Maryland, to Pendleton, South Carolina, that Floride and Anna Clemson undertook at the end of 1864, and of the final illness of Mrs. John C. Calhoun, Floride's grandmother, in July of 1866. Floride's grandfather, John C. Calhoun, died in 1850; he had during an illustrious career served in public office in the South Carolina General Assembly, in the lower house of the United States Congress, as secretary of War, and as Vice-President of the United States. In 1832 he had given up the vice-presidency for a seat in the Senate in order to defend South Carolina in the nullification crisis. At the time of his granddaughter's arrival in the family on 29 December 1842, he was about to leave the Senate to declare his candidacy for the 1844 presidential election. A politician, lawyer, and planter, Calhoun spent time away from Washington at his 1,400-acre estate Fort Hill, a property including 50 to 70 slaves. Here, he first met his favorite daughter's new baby in March 1843.

Floride's father, Thomas Green Clemson, a Pennsylvanian educated in Paris, had been a mining engineer when he married Anna in 1838, but he also managed his father-in-law's gold mine at Dahlonega, Georgia; a plantation owned by Anna's uncle in Abbeville District; Fort Hill; and the 1,050-acre plantation he himself purchased in 1843, the "Cane Brake" plantation on the Little Saluda River in Edgefield District, where he experienced considerable financial difficulties. When John C. Calhoun replaced secretary of State Abel Upshur in 1844, he immediately convinced President Tyler to appoint Floride's father chargé d'affaires to Belgium, where Floride spent her early childhood. After the death of John C. Calhoun in 1850 and some years in the North, where Thomas Clemson edited his speeches for publication, the Clemsons settled permanently in Maryland at "The Home" in 1853. At this roughly 100-acre property about a mile from Bladensburg, Prince Georges County, Thomas Clemson imported Belgian furniture and guns and took up gentleman farming. He looked as well for government employment and proper education for Floride and her brother, Calhoun. Ten years later, she wrote on the front cover of a ruled journal: Floride Clemson. Diary begun 1863 "The Home. "