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

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Juncker, Clara

The MacDonalds' Winchester home represents to Cornelia security, continuity, stability, and identity. She writes about securing all the doors at night, her children sound asleep (23), and about domestic duties that fill her life inside the house. "I went about my daily tasks, "she tells us in her first entry for March 1862, "and when anything annoying or distressing would happen, would try to find comfort in the thought that my children were all with me, and we had a home" (27). Her domestic space includes a beautiful garden, which she describes as a landscape of plenty. Like the inside of the house, it nourishes her family. In June 1862, she writes of "an abundance of raspberries," early vegetables, as well as "a good crop of potatoes, and also some late ones, enough I hope to serve the family for some time" (57). When she considers those less fortunate, she also imagines them in domestic terms, perhaps in a mountain hut with an overworked mother toiling for her pale and pinched-faced children in an attempt to fill both a father's and a mother's place (100). With war, absence, and death as equalizers, a shared domesticity unites Confederate women across traditional boundaries of class and region.

As Minrose C. Gwin notes in her introduction, A Woman's Civil War conflates "place and psychic space" (18). Cornelia spends sleepless nights worrying about homelessness, and especially her garden becomes a canvas on which she paints her emotions. With a snowstorm and a Yankee attack approaching on 28 November 1862, she enjoys the "lovely" sight of her cedar trees covered with snow, but at night she finds the view so "sad" that she closes her window and will not look. Suddenly, the snow looks "like a winding sheet of the two who were here a year ago" (94). She writes in one breath about "vacant hearths and broken hearts" (124). Since her mental state would parallel Confederate victories and defeats, Cornelia's home, and her mind, become political spaces, as her responses to Union flags on civilian territory makes clear. She considers the US flag "streaming over Mr. Mason's house" a personal insult (27), and she declares to Col. Candée of the Fifth Connecticut regiment of infantry that if he puts a flag by her front door, she will enter her house only through the back (28). Her domestic space is gendered, to be sure, with its feminine activities and concerns. The arrival of soldiers in her home threatens the order she associates with separate spheres. "At all hours of the day and night men's feet are trampling in and out," she complains, "and oaths and drinking songs float out of the windows and penetrate the walls and floors till they reach my reluctant ears" (146).

Enemy soldiers violate not just Cornelia's feminine sensibilities. Throughout her diary and reminiscences, she must defend her family and her home from intrusions of every kind. In March 1862, US army soldiers line the streets, the doorsteps, and the front yards all over Winchester; they look, Cornelia records, "as much at home, and as unconcerned as if the town and all in it belonged to them, and they were quietly enjoying their own" (25). Soon the Northerners will annoy her in her own home, again because they invade the space she considers hers. She looks out the window and sees soldiers' faces in her apple trees; soldiers cut down one of her lovely ornamental trees for fuel (33) ; officers want her house for headquarters or army hospital; horses and wagons trample her green lawn and carry the mud indoors, where it covers her furniture, her carpets and her floors; wet coats drip pools of water under every chair; the kitchen is so full of men she cannot herself get in (44); soldiers carry off her Christmas dinner including the pan of light brown rusks baking in the oven (103) ; Blenker's brigade pulls up all potatoes in her vegetable garden and leaves the second crop, no larger than peas, to wither in the sun (58) ; her stone fence is carried away for fortifications (60) ; the whole house shakes and glass windows break when the enemy fires at the government stores and army supplies in Winchester (73). Cornelia produces a number of "before and after" entries, much like the lengthy one for 3 February 1863, in which she contrasts the former beauty of her grounds with the present state of affairs: