Book Review: Gendering Secession: White Women and Politics in South Carolina, 1859-1861
Gendering Secession: White Women and Politics in South Carolina, 1859-1861. By Melissa DeVelvis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025, Hardcover, 241 pp., $59.99.
Reviewed by Tim Talbott
South Carolina Fire-Eaters like Robert Barnhill Rhett, Maxcy Gregg, Lawrence Keitt, Francis W. Pickens, and William Porcher Miles used their political positions and power during the secession crisis to advance their goal of creating an independent slave-holding nation. Their speeches, as well as their writings—both public and private—offer a wealth of evidence to this fact. Being that they were men of high social and political status, they were acting within their proper and expected societal roles. But what of elite South Carolina women? How did they react to this momentous event? To help answer this question, and joining the impressive body of scholarship in the Cambridge Studies on the American South series, is Gendering Secession: White Women and Politics in South Carolina, 1859-1861 by Melissa DeVelvis.
As outlined by historian Barbara Welter in her 1966 essay, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” women of status in the mid-19th century were expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. Elite men and women in the slave states especially revered this understanding of a female’s role. In particular, they viewed public politics as corrupting, dirty work, and one reserved for the male sphere alone. However, in such heady times, women felt the need to express their political thoughts and emotions and sought proper outlets such as letters to female friends and family, and personal diaries and journals. As DeVelvis explains, “Women managed the overwhelming nature of their emotions by using writing as an outlet to prevent their feelings from erupting around others and quiet the turmoil in their minds.” (4)
DeVelvis contends that Gendering Secession “offers new interpretations of elite white women, politics, and secession, but it is also an exploratory study of how women experienced a pivotal year. It is interested in how we mark the passage of time, what parts of our lives are worth writing down, and how we recapture the physical act of writing almost 200 years after the fact.” (5) What comes across is that elite South Carolina women were hopefully patriotic in their support of a cause they believed was righteous, while at the same time they expressed apprehension of a looming war potentially filled with pain, death, and destruction.
Organized into six chronological chapters that cover from John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid in the fall of 1859 to the summer of 1861, DeVelvis provides readers with vivid evidence of the rollercoaster of political emotions expressed in elite South Carolina white women’s writings.
Chapter One reveals the outrage and fear of potential insurrections by their enslaved property mixed with a loathing for “Black Republicans” and meddling northern abolitionists following the Harpers Ferry affair. Chapter Two covers a bit of a cooling off period that followed through the spring of 1860 and also witnessed Charleston hosting the Democratic National Convention. While the state’s elite white women attended the convention, they apparently did not spill much ink on its troubling results for the future. Chapter Three discusses the “sickly season” in the summer of 1860, a traditional time when many elites fled the low country to mountain water-cure spas and took trips to distant locales to shop and vacation. At these social hubs they hobnobbed with fellow elites discussing their hopes and fears for forthcoming events. Chapter Four examines the mixed emotions during the lead up to and results of the 1860 presidential election and the state’s decision to secede. As one might imagine, this period bought out high levels of political emotion in women’s writings. Chapter Five looks at the period from December 1860 to March 1861, as more southern states joined the Confederacy yet direct military action remained in abeyance. The final chapter “examines women’s reactions to the siege and subsequent fall of Fort Sumter, and their short-lived and heartbreaking hope that it would be the sole conflict that resulted from secession.” (33)
DeVelvis takes great pains to interpret these women’s writings from all angles. Many of their diaries were edited after the war, so when possible, she checks the originals. She is also able to gauge periods of high emotion with words the authors chose to use, the types and length of sentences they wrote, and changes in their handwriting styles. Also included are some South Carolina unionist women’s perspectives on the secession crisis.
Paged footnotes help readers quickly see sources cited, and a thorough bibliography of primary (both published and unpublished) and secondary sources, along with a well-organized index complete the study. Missing are any images of the women discussed within the book. Including some would have added a nice touch.
Gendering Secession offers students of the Civil War era a significant and largely neglected perspective. Although South Carolina’s elite white women were not able to vote or run for office they held powerful influence within their households and communities by the examples and guidance the provided their families and the forward public face they presented. The tug-of-war of emotions that came with the exciting yet also apprehensive times they were experiencing comes through vividly in this important piece of scholarship.
