Home and War

This chapter focuses on the flight of the South’s low-country slaveholding women and their subsequent lives as refugees. The making of a proslavery nation required keeping the white “home” intact, but Southern, white women were asked to shoulder responsibilities and losses for which they were ill prepared. Southern homes crumbled under the weight of battlefield losses, food shortages, growing dissatisfaction, and slave resistance. These burdens created a white, female refugee problem that, while numerically small, was not new to American warfare. The resulting disintegration of the material and ideological foundations of the plantation household profoundly changed the dynamics of Black and white lives in the South, gender dynamics across race and class, and the meaning of the home.