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

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Juncker, Clara

He was dressed in a beautiful new uniform, grey and buff; a splendid red silk scarf was around his waist, and his sword was lying by his side. He was very tall and slender with regular features and dark hair-very fine soft hair-his face was noble looking and must have been very handsome. It was still warm and it was difficult to believe he was not asleep. No wound could be seen, and not a drop of blood stained his clothing. (53)

The body she describes lacks the usual signifiers of death-blood, wounds, cold skin. Indeed, she encounters the uncanny, a combination of the monstrous and the beautiful that prompts both an emotional breakdown and impatience with a language that cannot rescue the dead (Faust 18). She buries him with four or five "rough looking soldiers" from his regiment and inscribes on a small board at his head only "ARTHUR MacARTHUR AGED 27. " She speaks her sorrow with flowers and in the private space of her diary.

Cornelia mentions repeatedly the absent bodies and empty chairs of fathers, brothers, and sons who had lost their lives so as to save the Confederacy. When she herself loses first her baby daughter and then in December 1864 her husband, incarcerated in Atheneum prison in Wheeling, her prose erases their physicality so as to save them from death. The three-year-old Bess who dies in her mother's arms in 1862 seems like "lovely clay" (71) that turns into a "glorified form floating away in the brightness to her Father's throne" (72). The corpse of Angus MacDonald becomes an "object," stretched on a white bed and framed with a green wreath Cornelia had seen in her dreams. "Ah! How familiar it looked, that wreath" (216), Cornelia writes, her husband's body occupying the empty center of her prose. Bodies press themselves into Cornelia's diary, whether absent or present, dead or alive.

Cornelia's own body, and those of her slaves, hover between presence and absence. Early in the diary, before her "servants" take off, Cornelia observes the silences surrounding the Victorian female body, which exists only indirectly as a reproductive vessel-she has, after all, given birth to nine children. The African American bodies performing the many tasks of her household go unmentioned, except in the moment of their departure (84). On 21 October 1862, Cornelia writes of increased anxieties and responsibilities, as well as "unaccustomed tasks to be performed" (84). On 22 November, she jots down: "Cares and heavy tasks all day, and when night comes such weariness that I can only go to bed without touching pen or paper" (91 ). She continues to complain about "hard work," "unusual tasks," and "anxiety about food" (97) and thus takes on a physical existence within her diary pages. In 1863, she matter-of-factly mentions her body: "My hand has a hole in it from the soap and the rubbing; on every knuckle. I tried to wash the dirt out of the wristbands" ( 154). With this new physicality comes a measure of power. Cornelia literally blocks with her body the path of General Milroy, and, she writes, "seized him 'by the button' as it were," so as to get him to remove Yankee soldiers from her home (132).