Book Review: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy: Life Under Occupation in the Upper South

The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy: Life under Occupation in the Upper South. Edited by Minoa D. Uffelman, Phyllis Smith, and Ellen Kanervo. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2023. Softcover, 167 pp. $29.95.

Reviewed by Sarah Kay Bierle

“Mary calls me a go ahead woman. I am confident that if I do not go ahead that all of us and all we have will go to ruin,” wrote Sarah Kennedy in February 1865, recording her daughter’s comment (85). Through the 52 letters preserved from the period of August 1862 to February 1865, Kennedy created a private record of her life as mother in an occupied home front town of Clarksville in northern, middle Tennessee. Editors Minoa D. Uffelman, Phyllis Smith, and Ellen Kanervo have published these letters through the University of Tennessee Press as The Civil War Letters of Sarah Kennedy: Life Under Occupation in the Upper South, and give a new volume with the voice of a southern woman in an occupied community.

Uniquely, Sarah Kennedy’s letters survive and the correspondence from her husband does not, despite his prominence in the region. Her husband, David Newton Kennedy, was initially a Union man, but following the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, he supported the Confederacy and seems to have been associated with the 49th Tennessee and also the Confederate Treasury Department. When he left Clarksville, Sarah Kennedy stayed at home with their six children and the community was soon occupied by Union forces. The Kennedys had been married for 18 years by the beginning of the Civil War, and, though their first three children had died, six more children had been born and were in Sarah’s care and guardianship during the war years. Through Sarah Kennedy’s letters, readers gain a treasure of insights into home front life, motherhood, and changing society in occupied Tennessee.

Kennedy’s letters focus narrowly on family life and the immediacy of war’s effects on the Clarksville community. She rarely commented on the wider war effort, patriotism, or battlefield military action. Her “battles” were against cold, supply shortages, illnesses that continually threatened her children’s lives, decisions about education and child-rearing, and a changing society as enslaved workers left to find freedom and upended the lifestyle Kennedy had been accustomed to. The details Kennedy wrote about, motherhood, education, living in an occupied community, and slavery and freedom-seekers are interesting within the published collection and may be of greater use when compared to other archived or published collections.

In almost every letter, Kennedy wrote to her husband about their children, usually mentioning each by name and sending details about their health, education, interests, and desire for him to come home. She also wrote openly about the difficulties of motherhood and her weariness with caring for so many little ones, ranging from toddler to pre-teen. One of the children probably had special needs, and his outbursts and “spasms” worried Kennedy, especially as he got older and stronger. Feeling alone and overwhelmed by responsibilities, she sometimes wrote about feeling depressed or alone with the responsibilities of motherhood, then often noted trying to garden or do something to help herself feel better and more confident. In February 1863, after particularly hard weeks with sick children, she wrote: “The children have been so much affected and I have felt so great a weight of responsibility and so much care that this morning when Jimmy was taken with a chill, I took a hearty cry and have been nearly crying all day. I know it looks badly in me to give up so, but I cannot be always cheerful and I know I bear up under my trials with a great deal more fortitude than many do.” (24-25)

Well-educated herself, Kennedy carefully considered her choices for the children’s education. At various times, she sent some of the children to schools, music lessons, and private teachers, making decisions based on the child’s health, aptitude, and quality of teachers. She kept her husband informed of each child’s learning, seeming especially delighted when one of the little girls learned to read and showed signs of becoming scholarly.

Union occupation of Clarksville impacted Kennedy’s daily life and created communication challenges as she tried to correspond with her husband who was deeper in the Confederacy. Compared to other locations and occupied towns, Kennedy wrote about minimal interaction with Federal soldiers, noting in May 1863: “We live as quietly as if the war had never been heard of, that is, we are not at all troubled by the soldiers. I have been as little annoyed as any one whilst my neighbors have in some cases suffered insult.” Nearly one year later in March 1864, Kennedy had her first self-described “insult” when “We had a scare yesterday. The kitchen chimney burned out with a blaze that frightened the town, and I was waited upon by an officer who asked if I had fired the house intentionally. This is the first insult that has been offered to me.” (70)

Social changes affected Kennedy more, though. While she seems to have maintained her home and rented other homes and properties for income, she kept careful watch on her household’s food supply and wood and coal for the winter months. Others in town were not as fortunate, and in December 1862, she noted that “A society has been formed here for supplying the poor with necessaries.”(8) A few weeks later, Kennedy reported, “Our town looks like desolation itself. All its glory has departed.” (20) By late 1863, some neighbors had started colluding with the occupying troops, prompting Kennedy to write: “All the southerners here wear countenances of gloom with the exception of those who are making fortunes. They wear high looks and are looked up as no better than Lincolnites.” (52) However, the real change of sentiments in the community came with the demise of slavery, and Kennedy remarked perhaps bitterly: “The union men are turning sesech because all their darkies are leaving them.” (75)

Over the months of her letters, Kennedy first triumphed that the enslaved men and women in her house did not seem to want to leave. Then, she grew frustrated as they sought employment beyond her control or performed their forced labor poorly. Whether she truly meant it or was simply making light of the situation, she expressed relief when an enslaved couple left because they had been lazy, in Kennedy’s view. She relied heavily on an enslaved woman named “Aunt Lucy” to help with household chores and looking after the children, but when Lucy’s health failed, Kennedy hired freedwoman and white women to help with the laundry, chores, and sometimes childcare. The frustration of this change of life comes through Kennedy’s writings, but perhaps not as bitterly as in other southern women’s writings. Her writings may provide helpful clues for the African American experience from slavery to freedom in Federally-occupied communities.

Throughout the published letter collection, the editors have provided extensive notes to help with genealogical identifications, archaic words, and events. Each chapter begins with a couple of paragraphs, explaining the military happenings of that period of the Civil War. A lengthy introduction and helpful epilogue bookend the letters with context, observations, and family and local history. Readers interested in women’s history, slavery and emancipation, accounts of occupation, and daily family life in the 1860s will find this book an insightful addition.

Sarah Kennedy’s letters are not the stories of battle, but rather the daily struggles of motherhood in a changing world and occupied town. In June 1864, she wrote a simple conclusion to her experiences: “I have borne all my trials with all the heroism that I could possibly command taking every thing quietly, not allowing a certain portion of the world to see that I have any feeling at all. I am dignified and prudent in word and action and strive to elude notice…” (77) But her letters have brought her life into notice, and the shelves of books on civilian experience are improved by this publication.