Civil War Wives

by Berkin, Carol

• ISBN13: 9781400044467
• ISBN10: 1400044464
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-09-08
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

In the life stories of three "accidental heroes"--women whose marriages provided them with position and perspective they would not otherwise have had--one of the nation's premier historians offers a unique understanding of the tumultuous social and political landscape of their time.

Author Biography

Carol Berkin received her B.A. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is currently Baruch College Presidential Professor of History and also teaches at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Revolutionary Mothers, A Brilliant Solution, Jonathan Sewall: Odyssey of an American Loyalist, and First Generations: Women in Colonial America. She lives in New York City and Guilford, Connecticut.

Excerpts

One

"WE ARE A NATION OF CHANGES"

America at the Crossroads in the 1830s

"it was the best of times. It was the worst of times." When Charles Dickens penned these now familiar words of contradiction, he was not speaking of the United States in 1830. Yet the contradiction surely applied, for during this turbulent decade Americans agreed that their country was changing rapidly. But whether the changes they witnessed were for the good or bad, they sharply disagreed.

No one could deny that the nation was growing, both physically and in population. Eight new states had come into the Union since the century began and two more would join before the decade ended. The nation's population had soared, growing from under four million in 1790 to almost thirteen million by 1830. Although the great wave of German and Irish immigration lay ahead in the 1840s, roughly a hundred thousand new Americans would arrive in the United States before the decade was over. Yet if the nation was growing larger, there was a sense that it was also becoming more intimate, for a revolution in transportation and communication

was in full swing. Toll roads crisscrossed the country, creating a transportation network unimagined in the eighteenth century. The heavily traveled National Road had snaked its way through the Appalachian Mountains since the 1820s, and by 1830 it reached as far as the Ohio River. Construction on a state-of-the-art highway soon followed, and by 1838 it carried people and produce as far as Illinois. A system of canals, including the famous Erie Canal, now linked the western countryside to the cities of the Northeast. Americans were already growing accustomed to the marvels of new technology, for since the late eighteenth century, steamboats with fanciful names such asCar of Neptune, Firefly,andVesuviuscould be seen on the Hudson, Delaware, and Savannah rivers. But an even faster, if noisier, form of transportation was beginning to appear on the landscape: the railroad. Americans who had seen Peter Cooper's "Tom Thumb" steam locomotive make its first run in 1830 knew they had been given a glimpse of the future.

Cheaper printing technology and improved mail service were creating a more intimate America as well. Letters posted in Buffalo, New York, sped south in the holds of canal boats, reaching New York City in a remarkable six days. The same letter could reach New Orleans in only two weeks. Affordable books, pamphlets, and newspapers now reached homes that had once boasted of nothing but a family Bible. The statistics were dazzling: in 1790, 92 newspapers were published in the United States, with a circulation of four million; by 1835, there were 1,258 newspapers reaching ninety million readers. By 1836, instant communication seemed possible, as Samuel F. B. Morse perfected his electric telegraph.

Changes in the American economy were no less dramatic. In the North, production had begun to move out of the household and into shops and factories, while in the South, King Cotton claimed its throne. The signs of prosperity were everywhere: not only in urban mansions and Southern plantation homes but also in the luxuries that graced the tables of the nation's middle class. Signs of expanding democracy were just as obvious, at least for the white male population. The older notion that only men of property should enjoy full citizenship had given way to the demand for wider participation in choosing those who made the laws and set the policies for the nation. The "era of the common man" was in full swing by the 1830s, and as the number of voters swelled, a new breed of professional politicians emerged to woo their support and to offer policies that served their interests.

Along with these changes came a new national ethos. The brash nationalism that had followed the War of 1812 produced a cultural revolution. Young American artists turned their backs on Old World subjects, preferrin

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Excerpted from Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis, and Julia Dent Grant by Carol Berkin
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