Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis and Julia Dent Grant
People are often encouraged to step out of their comfort zones for reasons of personal growth. Once done, the results can be very surprising. Carol Berkin, who has written principally about 18th century America, demonstrates in action, as a writer, narrative content and prose why it is important to heed such advice. Her sterling new book, Civil War Wives: The Lives and Times of Angelina Grimke Weld, Varina Howell Davis and Julia Dent Grant, chronicles the lives of three American women of the antebellum and Civil War eras. While sometimes forced to play the rules of their times, they managed on a personal and more intimate level, and in their relationships, to challenge preconceived notions that to the modern reader seem very foreign, yet not too far in the distant past. Berkin’s crisp narrative merges the lives of these women within the context of the age and our present, producing a social history of the antebellum period. Berkin is at her best when she skillfully leads readers to understand that Weld, Davis and Grant lived in an era in which most males and females followed values and constraints of the age that constituted both perception and reality of gender roles. Readers are drawn sympathetically to the three women and their husbands as well. Clearly each woman is worthy of an individual biography, but in Berkin’s hands a broader brush of the collective of the age is told. In Grimke Weld we find a Southern woman, a member of the slave- holding elite, who understood the moral problems of slavery. She became a highly vocal critic of the “peculiar institution.” Then, shunned by her own church and silenced by her husband, she finds a modicum of personal satisfaction seeing the institution dismantled at the end of the Civil War. Interestingly the Quaker church to which she converted does not, here, seem to be the simple “liberal” culture portrayed in textbooks and through the visual media. Howell Davis, a much younger spouse to Jefferson Davis, proves to be articulate and politically savvy, even when the world reminds her to “keep her place.” Not fully appreciated by her husband for her true worth, Howell Davis shoulders on against a resistless tide of critics and gossips during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and well into the Gilded Age. For Dent Grant it was a life lived and caught between two worlds: that of the slaveholding past to which she was born and marriage to a man she worshipped, who helped destroy slavery and maintained a paternalistic attitude towards his wife. The real triumph of these women is what they represent to other women, even today. In their own ways they proved to be resolute, resourceful and determined; in other words, great role models. At the end of their lives each could look back and see how far they had personally come in a nation that still had a long way to go in fulfilling the self-evident truths on which our national character is based. Hats off to Carol Berkin for illuminating the lives of these individuals, a terrific, “band of sisters.” Reviewer: James A. Percoco teaches U.S. and Applied History at West Springfield High School in Springfield, Va. He is author of A Passion for the Past: Creative Teaching of U.S. History and Divided We Stand: Teaching About Conflict in U.S. History. Percoco is a USA TODAY All-USA teacher and is an adjunct professor in the School of Education at American University where he serves as History Educator-in-Residence.
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Illustrated, 361 pp., 2009. Alfred A. Knopf Publishers, 1745 Broadway, 7th Floor, New York, NY, 10019. $28.95 plus shipping.