Stalag Iv-B Book

The Confederacy produced many interesting and talented women who left valuable accounts of their experiences and observations, but Eliza Andrews was in a class by herself. Later a noteworthy teacher, novelist, and botanist, her youthful journal of War and Reconstruction is characterized by a sharp eye, intelligence, and smooth prose. It's a great pity that she destroyed most of it in a moment of self-doubt; the surviving portions cover Christmas Eve, 1864 through August, 1865.

Her viewpoint is that of a sophisticated member of the Southern elite: there is adoration of knightly Confederate officers; loathing for the barbarous, hypocritical Yankees; racism mingled with compassion for the slaves, developing into sorrow, suspicion, and fear once they are emancipated (although a modicum of mutual loyalty persisted, and her family offered support to some of them for the rest of their lives); the white lower orders are seen as colourful, sometimes admirable, but definitely other.

There's not much sign of Southern patriarchy here: not only was Eliza highly educated and accustomed to mingling with the leaders of society, but she often expresses regret about browbeating her father for his pro-Union beliefs (during Reconstruction he appears to have been something of a scalawag, but she loyally refuses to elaborate). However, she was expected to keep her strong opinions within the bounds of feminine propriety, and occasionally wishes she could cuss like the men.

The anticapitalist strain in Southern thought (so readily dismissed by Northern writers) reached remarkable fruition in Eliza's case: her contempt, derived from personal experience, for the North's mask of rectitude inoculated her against comfortable myths about the War, and when she prepared her diary for publication in 1918, she had become convinced that both sides were merely unconscious agents in the evolution of society:

[The South] was the last representative of an economic system that had served the purposes of the race since the days when man first emerged from his prehuman state until the rise of the modern industrial system made wage slavery a more efficient agent of production than chattel slavery. . . . [The War] was a pure case of economic determinism, which means that our great moral conflict reduces itself, in the final analysis, to a question of dollars and cents, though the real issue was so obscured by other considerations that we of the South honestly believe to this day that we were fighting for States Rights, while the North is equally honest in the conviction that it was engaged in a magnanimous struggle to free the slave. . . . The truth of the matter is that the transition to wage slavery was the next step forward in the evolution of the race, just as the transition from wage slavery to free and independent labor will be the next.

She concludes:

In the clearer understanding that we now have of the laws of historical evolution, we know that both [sides] were right, for both were struggling blindly and unconsciously in the grasp of economic tendencies they did not understand, toward a consummation they could not foresee. . . whatever praise or blame may attach to either side for their methods of carrying on the struggle, the result belongs to neither; it was simply the working out of that natural law of economic determinism which lies at the root of all great struggles of history.

Most of Eliza's fellow diarists never got anywhere near this level of dispassionate analysis. When memoirs of this sort began flooding the publishers around the turn of the century, they were usually characterized by safe and unthreatening "We loved the South but we now really, really love the Union" smarminess. Eliza's smart astringency sets her apart, and earns the reader's respect.

The only real problem with her book is that she, herself, never got away from the life of privilege: her life, even during the collapse of the Confederacy, was essentially a round of parties (the difficulty of setting a presentable table when the only food to be had was ham and peas was much on her mind). There are stories of practical jokes with friends, and sing-alongs, and outings; apart from having to do her own cleaning once the slaves began to leave, she rarely got her hands dirty. So, valuable and insightful as her account may be, it lacks the visceral impact of Kate Cumming's hospital journal and some of the books by former soldiers. The horror of war does not come through, but she convincingly sketches the breakdown of society in the wake of war, and the anxieties and fears of defeat and occupation.