Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875. By Nancy Bercaw. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xviii, 279 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2591-5.)

Abstract

Scholarly, and increasingly popular, understandings of the Civil War era have changed considerably over the past several decades. Battlefields now defy the boundaries of national park sites, and Southern belles, the riotous poor, and self-emancipating slaves stand shoulder-to-shoulder with soldiers in a cataclysmic contest over Union, citizenship, and freedom. Remaking the nation, most now agree, involved rethinking relationships between men and women, rich and poor, capital and labor, and black and white as well as reattaching North and South. Nancy Bercaw locates herself securely within this new interpretive framework. But, for her, Civil War and Reconstruction are best observed from the vantage point of the household, a term that in her hands serves as both language and locus of “southern dissent” (p. 2). Focusing on the Mississippi Delta, Bercaw traces the wartime dissolution of the plantation household and the rise of new and competing households constructed by returning black soldiers and by the women they had left behind. While former slaveholders yearned to reestablish the domestic order that had provided them status as well as shelter, freed-women, faced with their own unique exigencies of war, made a bid for independence by assembling family and friends into a new form of household. Meanwhile, freedmen, especially those who had been siphoned away by Yankee recruiters, gradually embraced a Northern model, one synonymous with a male-headed, nuclear family.