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

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Juncker, Clara

Bodies, dead and alive, represent Floride's beloved South at a tumultuous historical moment. Even between battles and dramas, Floride depicts the South through the bodies around her. She is delighted with Baltimore, where she spends New Year's Day in 1863, because of the city's "Southernness" and "the beauty of its ladies," and immediately tries to imitate the local hair style, artificial braid and all (27). When a gentleman lets her know that she has been written up in a New York newspaper "as an active rebel, & secessionist, who ought to be watched," her body feels stronger: "I am fast getting well, & strong again; & they say looking better than I ever did before, & handsomen " (42). She again merges political and bodily discourses, as when concluding an entry for 29 October 1863: "We are all well but have much trouble in getting hands to work. Hurrah for Charleston yet! I have had two more teeth filled" (44).

The fall of the Confederacy coincides in Floride's diary with the final illness and death of her grandmother, Mrs. John C. Calhoun. At her estate, "Mi Casa," in Pendleton, South Carolina, where Floride and Anna Clemson spend the spring of 1865, the deteriorating body of the family matriarch becomes emblematic of the Confederate struggle and defeat. On 19 February, Floride comments on both in her diary entry for the day. Columbia has just surrendered, Charleston is evacuated, and Floride records the widespread fear of Sherman's raids, or cavalry attacks from over the mountains: "1 can not but feel that there is little hope for our cause, everything shows that our resources are nearly if not quite exhausted, especially in men, & there is little hope from abroad, I might say, none. "Within "Mi Casa," illness reigns: "Grandma is most of the time in bed. She has a kidney affection which causes an exterior irritation which is very painful. Aunt Kate also keeps her room with falling of the womb" (76). In mid-June, Floride writes that property valued at $20, 000 or more is to be confiscated and that her brother, Calhoun, has taken the Oath of Allegiance and is on his way home, where their grandmother now articulates with her body and voice the general affliction of her region:

The doctor has at last told us that the ulcer grandma has been so afflicted with has become cancerous, & will in all probability never be cured. She spends most of her time in her room, & her nervous system has so completely given away that she screams & cries for hours every day, but I do not think from pain by any means. (88)

Floride and her mother remain at "Mi Casa" in 1866, while Thomas and Calhoun Clemson look for financial sustenance elsewhere. The two women witness in July the sufferings of Grandmother Calhoun, who dies 25JuIy. Floride describes her final days in graphic detail: "the odor from the cancerous discharge, is so terribly offensive that even when she is quiet we can hardly stay in the room this hot weather. They tell us she can not out last the summer, & may die very soon if the cancer eats into an artery." A few days after Mrs. Calhoun's death, Floride records on 28 July that her grandmother "was fearfully emaciated, & changed. Mother says that the cancer had eaten away the lower part of her stomach, & split open her groin, nearly to the bone." Floride herself has "spasms occasionally still" (107), but goes on to summarize old Mrs. Calhoun's sickness and death, her funeral, and her will. She wraps up this narrative in a religious, fairly cliche-ridden discourse: "I trust in God that she has gone to the rest that remaineth for his people, which I believe she most earnestly tried to deserve" (109). This sort of language becomes characteristic as well for Floride's attempts to accept Confederate demise.