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

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2004 by Juncker, Clara

As the war intensifies, Cornelia comments on African Americans around her, but she erases their bodies as they enter her vision. She visits Manuel, who left her place when Jackson evacuated Winchester in March 1862 and had been acting as teamster for the federal troops. Three months later, she finds him in a cottage on Piccadilly, now a "poor creature, emaciated almost to a skeleton, and greatly frightened by our entering the house" (64). Ill and starving, he has become a nobody, reduced to bones, tears, and marginality. In contrast, the African American women riding with Yankee officers and wearing white women's finery have swollen into bodies that Cornelia tries to delete. From her porch she observes in June 1864 "a very fat and very black negro woman . . . arrayed in a low-necked shortsleeved brown silk dress, with a large pink rose pinned on her breast, and several others pinned in her woolly hair." On her way to the Yankee camp, this woman has become too large and too active, busily fanning herself and smelling another rose "vigorously. " Her body, in short, invades Cornelia's world and diary, where only contempt awaits her (189).

As in this vignette, which has Cornelia sitting on her porch while commenting on the large African American woman outside, bodies and houses intertwine in her record of A Woman's Civil War. Cornelia occupies a precarious space on the porch-neither inside nor outside, but holding on to her domesticitywhile the body of an other occupies the public space that threatens her own. This conflation of house and body dominates Cornelia's diary. As early as in March of 1862, she faces her first group of US Army officers outside her home in Winchester, sent by General Williams to determine if it might be suitable to occupy as headquarters. Cornelia has to open her house to the soldiers and at the same time, with equal reluctance, opens her body, in that she breaks into angry tears (26). One year later, her hold on the house more precarious than ever, she comments on ladies all around being dragged from their homes and male protection, "and hurried off to a strange land without even clothes to wear" (137). Metaphorically and socially, if not literally naked, these women lose their homes and expose their bodies in one narrative movement.

Roughly three weeks before she herself had to leave her residence, Cornelia makes explicit the connection between body and home that permeates her thinking:

I have had so many startling visits, and been so often summoned to surrender the house, and so often intruded upon by rude men, that if I hear a step on the porch my heart palpitates and flutters in a way to frighten me. It is often long before I can quiet its beatings. I am growing thin and emaciated from anxiety and deprivation of proper food and am weak; and now have become faint-hearted. (150)

Cornelia's investment in her home has invaded her body to the extent that the threat to her house in Winchester threatens her health. Facing another command to leave on 4 June 1863, when a Major Butterworth informs her that her house will be needed for a hospital, she experiences this dissolution of her home as a dissolution of body. Unable to listen to or see the Major, she has a breakdown of sorts and cannot control her own reactions (150). In the reminiscences about the war years that follow her printed diary, Cornelia describes the town house in Lexington her husband recommends her to take in August 1863. It is "a staring white house without a shutter, without anything pleasant near, not a tree or a bush, but a woodpile in front, and a dreary garden (with cabbage in it) that climbed the hill behind it" (178). Many years later, she will respond with her body to this negative version of her previous home: "a sense of pain I had always when I saw it" (179).