Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War

by Drew Gilpin Faust

"We all live within the stories we tell," writes Drew Faust, "for these tales fashion a coherent direction and identity out of the discontinuities of our past, present, and future." Forging an identity was an extraordinary task for white southerners of the late antebellum and Civil War era. Seeking to explain and justify their individual lives and their slave society, they told stories about themselves and their world - in diaries and letters, sermons and songs, novels and paintings - which reveal the foundations of power, meaning, and personal identity in the Old South.
In a series of eloquent essays, Faust investigates the experiences of wealthy planters, common soldiers, intellectuals, and Confederate women. She breaks especially fresh ground in her attention to southern thought and belief, to southern society and culture during the Civil War, and to the role of gender relations within the Confederate South.
Sometimes southern stories were collective, as in the case of the antebellum proslavery argument or Confederate discourses about women. Sometimes they were personal, as in the private writings of figures such as Lizzie Neblett, Mary Chesnut, Thornton Stringfellow, or James Henry Hammond. These men and women regularly employed their pens to create coherence and order amid the tangled circumstances of their particular lives and within a context of social prescriptions and expectations.
Southern Slaveholders in Peace and War represents some of the most interesting work in southern history of the past two decades. Faust's approach reveals a society so involved in defining itself and its legitimacy that it became embroiled in a war of words and ideas long before the onset of armed conflict. By exploring the cultural, moral, and personal dilemmas that confronted white southerners, Faust has made an important contribution to our understanding of southern culture, both before and after the Civil War.

Genres: History, American History

252 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1992

About the author

Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian who served as the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or graduate degree from Harvard and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust is also the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has been ranked among the world's most powerful women by Forbes, including as the 33rd most powerful in 2014.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as captivating as Faust's more cohesive books like Mothers of Invention and This Republic of Suffering, but still a very interesting and readable set of essays examining the way the Southern political and economic elite and middle class viewed themselves, their society and the rapid deterioration of their situation as the war progressed. Faust has a gift for explaining how slavery era white Southerners justified themselves without either moralizing or falling prey to her subjects' illusions.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of essays about different aspects of slave-owning southerners before and during the Civil War. The essays in the second half focus on women and looked to cover the same materials as another book Faust wrote later that I have read, so I skipped that. I learned from the essays in the first half, but given that they were unrevised versions of essays written at various times, they weren't written to work together. Still, useful background reading.