The estimates of troops involved in various battles are way off, typically underestimating the Confederate numbers and overestimating those of the Union. A few errors appear. Wilson and the Yalobusha River. Events are sometimes confused, too, such as several incidents during the Vicksburg Campaign. Separated by chronology and illustrated with pertinent maps, the papers cover a wide range of important subjects and campaigns. In short, the papers allow readers to discover the real Lee unclouded by the embellishment of admiring biographers and presented clearly for anyone interested in independently interpreting his actions and recorded thoughts.
It is unfortunate that this work is poorly annotated, which to a degree limits its usefulness as a significant research device. Despite that, all students of the war should relish this invaluable companion. His explanation of Gettysburg includes charges made by various officers and refutations of those charges, countercharges by other generals and refutations of the countercharges.
The Effect of the Civil War on Southern Marriage Patterns
It tells the story of the war in first person from one of the great generals of American history, allows him to make his case and at least on some accounts quiets the armchair strategists who over the years have faulted Long street too severely. In the main, Longstreet is correct with most of his assertions, and the well-documented inflation of the Lee side of the Gettysburg controversy can be traced through the pages of the Southern Historical Society Papers and elsewhere. Longstreet here provides ample documentation of his close relationship with Lee, although his language is sometimes blunt and egotistical.
Moderately successful in his West Point Class of , the North Carolinian was commissioned colonel of the 3rd North Carolina at the outbreak of war and rose to major general before his death. Fearless and outstanding at Seven Pines, Cedar Mountain, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, Pender was struck by a shell fragment on the second day at Gettysburg. He ignored his leg wound long enough for infection to set in, and he did not survive the subsequent amputation. They contain gossip and musings but also much of military interest.
His observations of Lee, Jackson, A. Hill are valuable and add significantly to the body of work on the Army of Northern Virginia. The editor of this volume might have annotated the letters in a significant and helpful way; that notwithstanding, it is still an excellent book. The son of Zachary Taylor, brother-in-law of Jefferson Davis and a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army, Taylor was in a unique position from which to observe events both military and political during the war.
Along the way Taylor interjects valuable commentary on various military operations and how they unfolded. Despite his connections with Davis, Taylor delivers an objective treatment of many individuals who were not so well connected, including Joseph E. In a reflective chapter following a description of surrender, Taylor subtly blames Longstreet for the loss at Gettysburg, laments over the lost opportunity of Shiloh and writes that if any single individual could have saved the cause of the South, it was the commander killed at that battle: General Albert Sidney Johnston.
So there you have it. The greatest memoirs and letters by Confederate generals offer a mixture of mostly outstanding material but also much rationalization and spreading of blame. We have the intensely interesting, behind-the-scenes looks at other officers by Porter Alexander. Early offers great anti-Yankee fanaticism blended with his recollections of the war. Gordon gives us a fascinating view of several important battles and an exaggerated account of his own story. From Hood we get attacks on others, along with an attempt to substantially boost his shattered reputation.
From Lee we get critically important correspondence from the field that forms a central core of knowledge about the Army of Northern Virginia. Longstreet leaves readers with an assault on his critics that washes over numerous pages. From Pender we get enthralling observations of his superiors that make for outstanding reading. Taylor, finally, provides excellent analysis, with a particular focus on the Western theater. These books are all good. But to enjoy and understand them, you need to know the angles the authors were playing. Read on—with a careful, skeptical eye.
After the war, white southerners responded to interracial marriage with violence. John Blassingame, for example, has argued that the death of white men in the war led to a postwar increase in sexual contacts between white women and black men in New Orleans. Although instances of interracial marriage and cohabitation occurred during Reconstruction in numbers large enough to suggest some initial level of toleration from white neighbors, the vast majority of white women—confronted with the possibility of violence, rigid enforcement of miscegenation laws, and the vast social distance between themselves and black men—married white men.
Not only the deaths of white men but also their wounds affected the prospects for marriage in the aftermath of the war. One of the most important roles of nurses, official matrons, and volunteer hospital visitors was to help wounded men cope with the psychological impact of their injuries. The young man had suffered a facial wound and lost a leg. Female hospital workers and visitors treated disfigured patients as heroes instead of shrinking from them in horror or pity. Judith McGuire, a volunteer nurse, eased the anxiety of a man eager to travel home to marry his sweetheart.
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Letter writers and diary keepers commented frequently on wartime marriage, but after the war many of them stopped writing; the resulting silence created a gap in evidence about postwar marriage patterns. During the war, many Americans sensed that they were living through exciting, unique times. In order to record their experiences and reactions, they started keeping personal diaries, only to stop writing when the conflict ended. Many southerners stopped confiding to diaries because the humiliation and pain of defeat left them unable or unwilling to express themselves in writing.
Furthermore, letter writing decreased from wartime levels as soldiers and refugees returned home. Women, especially, avoided recording events and sentiments that could be perceived as dishonoring Confederate veterans and their military service, and imbalanced sex ratios and the marriage squeeze may have served to remind southerners of their loss. Finally, people, particularly southern women, may have stopped writing about marriage after the war simply because the fears of spinsterhood expressed during the war were not realized.
Risk assessment experts and cultural demographers have noted that perceptions of demographic patterns often do not match reality and are biased in predictable ways. Extraordinary, catastrophic, and uncontrollable risks, such as those posed by epidemics, natural disasters, and wars, are perceived to have a much greater impact than more ordinary and controllable risks. Given the dearth of qualitative evidence on postwar marriage patterns and the possible biases of observers, quantitative data are required to document postwar marriage patterns.
However, it is impossible to determine year-to-year variations in marriage during the war itself — or in its immediate aftermath — ; there may well have been some short-term effects on marriage that were resolved in the five years between the end of the war and the enumeration. Therefore, it is possible to examine only the long-term impact of the war on first marriages. The short-term effect of the war on the timing and incidence of marriages and its short- and long-term effects on remarriage are difficult or impossible to discern from census records.
Table 1 shows various measures of the timing and incidence of first marriage for white men and women in the census years , , , and arranged by age and census region. However, the sectional averages provide modest support for the hypothesis that the war created a marriage squeeze among southern white women.
The mean age at first marriage for southern white women rose 0. At the same time, the mean age at first marriage for southern white men fell 0. The greater death rate of young men in the Confederate forces and the resulting imbalance in the number of men and women seeking to marry is the most likely reason for the distinct southern pattern. The imbalance is reflected in the sex ratio the number of white men from 20 through 29 years old per white women in the same age range.
In the North, the sex ratio declined a modest 1. In the South, the decline was a much steeper In essence, for every white women from 20 to 29 years old, there were 4. The sex ratio, however, is a crude measure of potential marriage partners.
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It includes many men and women currently married and thus unavailable as potential spouses. An estimate of the marital sex ratio—the ratio of the expected number of first marriages among white men to the expected number among white women—is therefore also included in Table 1. In the North, the marital sex ratio declined a modest 4. In southern census regions, however, the ratio declined a sharp This means that for every southern white women expected to be entering marriage in there would be just 70 southern white men.
The lower age at first marriage for southern white men after the war, as compared with before the war, may have been related to the decrease in competition for property and in the purchase price of farms and businesses and to the greater probability of their inheriting property.
After the war, there were fewer people in a position to make large purchases. Furthermore, land prices collapsed, which made it cheaper to purchase a new farm. In Orange County, North Carolina, for instance, the average number of sons mentioned in wills declined Lower farm prices, less competition, and greater shares of inheritances, however, were probably offset by reduced wealth, reduced savings, reduced incomes, increased taxes, and the bleak economic conditions of the postwar South. Most white families—especially slave-holding families—lost substantial real and personal wealth because of the war, which probably lowered the value of intergenerational transfers to young couples considering marriage.
Although young white men could expect less competition from other southern white men for farms, they faced increased competition from a small but growing number of blacks and northern whites. Without more research it is impossible to say whether and to what degree the decline in the average age of marriage among southern white men after the war resulted from economic change. Because of the very small number of individuals who marry for the first time after age 45, the percentage single in this age group is typically interpreted by demographers as the percentage of the population remaining permanently unmarried.
The results suggest that the vast majority of white men and women in the late nineteenth century eventually married. Overall, only about 7 percent of white men and women 45 through 54 years old in the four IPUMS samples analyzed here never married. There was little apparent trend at the national level in the percentage of those who never married.
It should be remembered, however, that, in the and censuses, the majority of men and women 45 through 54 years old had married before the war. In the North, New England women had the highest average age at first marriage and the highest percentage never married. The average age at first marriage and percentage never married decline steadily as the census moves west. Sex ratios were lowest in the East and highest in the West. Other factors include regional differences in land availability and in the availability of paid work for women.
Southern men and women married slightly earlier than northern women. The earlier marriage age did not translate into a lower percentage of southern women who never married, however. With the exception of the census year, northern women were a little more likely to marry eventually than southern women. The small changes in nuptiality depicted in Table 1 do not indicate a dramatic impact from the Civil War.
The vast majority of men and women in both sections continued to marry. It is unclear, however, whether the modest, short-term marriage squeeze evident in the period data translated into reduced lifetime chances of marriage. Table 2 shifts the perspective from the estimates centered on census years to actual birth cohorts.
IPUMS samples for census years , , , and were added to the analysis to follow the various birth cohorts into old age. Because of the focus on birth cohorts, Table 2 is limited to the native-born population, and the sectional analysis is based on section of birth. Italicized cells are estimated values. Cohorts experience strong period effects, such as wars, at different ages. Individuals born between and , for example, were between the ages of 31 and 40 at the outbreak of the war in and between 35 and 44 years old at its conclusion.
The small proportion of women still single in their thirties at the outbreak of the war may have seen their chances of eventually marrying diminish, especially if unmarried men in their age cohort married younger women, thereby taking advantage of the reduced number of young men in the postwar South. Likewise, women widowed in their thirties may also have faced more competition for husbands of the appropriate age.
In contrast, the — and especially the — birth cohorts were at peak marriage ages during the war, and a higher proportion of men in those cohorts fought and died. The expectation is that women in these birth cohorts, especially in the South, would have experienced a dramatic marriage squeeze after the war and that men in these cohorts would have had much less competition in their search for wives.
At the national level, the female mean age at first marriage rose slowly and steadily with each cohort, from Likewise, the percentage of women remaining single at older ages rose steadily with each birth cohort from 7. In this context, the percentages of women who never married in the — 7. There is evidence for a modest, short-lived marriage squeeze when results are confined to men and women born in southern census regions, however. There, the mean age at first marriage rose about 0.
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There is no indication that women in these cohorts faced a diminished lifetime prospect for marriage. Approximately 92 percent of the southern-born white women in the — cohorts eventually married, roughly equal to the percentage for adjacent cohorts. Men born in the South are unique among the groups shown in Table 2 in having no long-term upward trend toward higher mean age at first marriage.
In contrast to women born in the South between and , men in the — and — southern birth cohorts had about a 0. Overall, however, the war had a modest effect on the timing and incidence of first marriage. Only the deaths of single men would have affected the timing of first marriages. As far as the effect of the deaths of married men is concerned, no informed estimate exists of the number of widows produced by the war. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive enrollment statistics for the Confederate army that include the necessary detail.
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However, information on the marriage status of a sample of Union soldiers was collected by the U. Although the number of war widows cannot be measured with the census, the — IPUMS samples—which recorded current marital status—permit a rough estimate of the regional distribution of widowhood in the period after Table 2 includes estimates of the proportion of native-born white men and women ages 40—49 and 50—59 currently widowed by birth cohort.
Women widowed by the war, of course, could have remarried in the fifteeen or more years following the end of the war, and many women enumerated as widowed in and later censuses lost their husbands before or after the war, but it is nonetheless clear that the Civil War had a major impact on the incidence of widowhood and possibly the rate of remarriage. Figure 3 , a county-level map of widowhood in , highlights quite clearly the sectional impact of the war on subsequent widowhood. The prevalence of widows in the South appears to be concentrated around urban areas and along the Mississippi River, suggesting a degree of geographic mobility among widows to areas offering greater access to wage labor and social support networks and higher overall mortality rates in counties adjacent to the river.
The modest impact of the war on long-term marriage patterns may also be explained in part by adjustments in the age differential between spouses and an increased tendency of men and women to marry individuals outside their customary group. If women relaxed their standards of acceptable partners, the impact of the war on first marriage may have been lessened.
Southern women aged 20—24 in were more likely to be married to a younger man the percentage who did so increased from 6. A similar tendency of women to select marriage partners from a somewhat wider pool of eligible spouses is also discernible in the North, but to a much lesser extent than in the South. One notable exception is the greater tendency of native-born, northern women to many foreign-born men. Between and the percentage of northern, native-born, white women marrying foreign men increased from 5. Finally, the intrinsic dynamics of the postwar American population mitigated the long-term effects of wartime mortality on marriage.
High fertility before the war resulted in large differences in cohort size and rapid elimination of short-term gender imbalances. Table 1 indicates that despite the short-term shock evident in the census, the sex ratio among white men and women aged 20—29 and the marital sex ratio had returned to near their prewar levels by Theoretically, therefore, there were still potential marriage partners for the vast majority of postwar women, though unequal geographic distribution of men and women still exerted strong influence locally. The new census … shows that in the United States the men outnumber women to the extent of nearly a million.
This reverses the popular belief regarding the number of superfluous women, and the ladies are to be congratulated on the new condition of things. This is one of those paradoxical cases in which the minority is more powerful than the majority, and the fewer there are of women the better off they will be. They need no longer be haunted by the fear that there will not be men enough to go around. They will command the matrimonial situation, and may dictate their own terms.
There will be a corner in women.
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Nothing can prevent it. And it will last. This misproportion exists not only between adults of the two sexes, but extends down into the cradle, so that the coming woman, as well as the woman who is already here, is likely to have things pretty much her own way. The old maid has no longer any reason for being. If she remain single, it may, without any special effort of gallantry, be taken for granted that she does so of her own accord.
It cannot be because there are not men enough, and to spare.
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She will probably marry, and have an establishment of her own …. Thus, despite its enormous death toll, the war had a modest, short-lived effect on the timing and incidence of first marriage. On one hand, for a brief period after the war, southern men who had survived the conflict enjoyed demographic advantages in the search for a wife. Relative to southern men born a generation earlier or later, white men in the postwar South had more potential spouses to choose from and married at a slightly younger age.
On the other hand, unmarried southern white women in their twenties at the outbreak of the war faced an acute shortage of available men after the war. Unsurprisingly, a small number of women in this cohort delayed marriage or compromised on marriage partners. The vast majority eventually married, however, and the war did not create a large cohort of lifelong spinsters or so-called maiden aunts.
Although available census data limit the analysis of the timing and incidence of first marriage, an analysis of widowhood in the and later censuses suggests that many women widowed during or after the war were unable to remarry. High levels of widowhood in the postwar South among relatively young women probably reflects both high death rates of southern men during the war and low remarriage rates of southern widows afterward. Like the Confederate South, France lost between 15 and 20 percent of its young men in a few years of war.
But, despite the severe marriage squeeze experienced by French women after the war, the vast majority of them eventually married. Indeed, among French women who came of age during the war, there was only a modest increase in the percentage remaining unmarried at age In examining this paradox, Henry concluded that relatively small changes in age preferences compensated for the large imbalance in potential marriage partners. In addition, as many historians have argued, the war challenged traditional gender roles and individual marriages in diverse and interesting ways.
The demographic evidence highlights several promising areas for future research. The degree of community diversity in demographic behavior is an interesting and largely unanswered question, especially given known patterns of local enlistments and the clustering of war mortality in specific companies and regiments. Although low sample densities in existing IPUMS census samples currently prevent a detailed investigation of variations by community, higher sample densities in future samples and detailed community studies by individual researchers may show that marriage patterns in specific communities varied widely from the sectional patterns observed in this article.
The results on sectional marriage patterns discussed here will provide a standard by which other scholars can compare other communities or individual marriages. A more promising area for research is the social demography of widowhood. There is a stark, surprising contrast between the extremely high levels of widowhood in the postwar South and the paucity of historical research.
Nearly one in three southern white women over the age of 40 were currently widowed in , representing about , women and many more dependent children. Although most of these women were not war widows, the war clearly contributed to marked sectional differences in the rate of widowhood.
Despite these staggering numbers and the growing interest in the social history of the war and its aftermath, there are almost no studies of postwar southern widowhood. How these women and their families coped with the dire economic environment of the postbellum South deserves the attention of social historians. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Author manuscript; available in PMC Dec Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer.
Jones is an assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford University. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. Open in a separate window. Italicized values are based on — cases. The authors would like to thank Catherine Fitch. Steven Ruggles, Douglas Bradburn. Diane Sommerville, Orville Vemon Burton. Stephanie McCurry, and participants in the University of Minnesota Early American Workshop for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations. Journal of American History. A History of Marriage and the Nation. Vinovskis considered men of military age to be those listed as 13 through 43 years old in the census.
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The estimate of the ratio of southern men killed in the war is based in part on the number of deaths among Union troops. Wilson Charles Reagan, Ferris William. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, — From Pedestal to Politics, — More recent studies, while agreeing that the war challenged traditional gender roles, suggest that southern women did not eagerly embrace change.
See Faust Mothers of Invention. Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: LeeAnn Whites has made the most forceful case for interpreting the war as a crisis in gender.
Gender and the Civil War. Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War. Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand. Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community: Orange County, North Carolina, — The Clays of Alabama: Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, — Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments. Only white marriage patterns can be ascertained in the prewar period; the and censuses enumerated slaves in a separate, more limited population schedule, and because the slave schedule did not group or identify family members, it is impossible to infer marital status and estimate age at marriage.
Ruggles Steven, et al.