Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate
Veteran Families in Virginia |
| |
| Jeffrey W. McClurken |
| 256 pages, 6 x 9 |
| 1 map, 14 tables |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2813-5 • $39.50 |
| A Nation
Divided: Studies in Civil War Era
|
| August 2009 |
 |
Take Care of the Living assesses the short- and long-term
impact of the war on Confederate veteran families of all classes
in Pittsylvania County and Danville, Virginia. Using letters,
diaries, church minutes, and military and state records, as well
as close analysis of the entire 1860 and 1870 Pittsylvania County
manuscript population census, McClurken explores the consequences
of the war for over three thousand Confederate soldiers and their
families. The author reveals an array of strategies employed by
those families to come to terms with their postwar reality, including
reorganizing and reconstructing the household, turning to local
churches for emotional and economic support, pleading with local
elites for financial assistance or positions, sending psychologically
damaged family members to a state-run asylum, and looking to the
state for direct assistance in the form of replacement limbs for
amputees, pensions, and even state-supported homes for old soldiers
and widows.
Although these strategies or institutions for reconstructing
the family had their roots in existing practices, the extreme
need brought on by the scope and impact of the Civil War required
an expansion beyond anything previously seen. McClurken argues
that this change serves as a starting point for the study of the
evolution of southern welfare.
A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era
Jeffrey W. McClurken is Associate Professor in the Department of History and American Studies at the University of Mary Washington.
