The Roots of Tara: Making War Civil

Abstract

IN ANDREW JOHNSON AND RECONSTRUCTION (1960), ERIC McKITRICK SETS up a provocative metaphor of how things stood at the end of the Civil War. he writes, besieged the South with arms and she had submitted; the South, now in her defenseless, 'feminine' entity, had no further right to repel the North, should the North now assume the role, as it were, of suitor.' Right or no, the South did resist, then as earlier. As McKitrick adds, pressing the metaphor: Finally in receiving her triumphant conqueror, the South was unable to tender even the civilly measured hospitality that accompanies a forced submission .. . Southern diarist Mary B. Chesnut assumed the same associations in chronicling the war. The South, she observed early in her account, would be an unwilling bride.2 For both McKitrick and Chesnut, the Civil War was fundamentally disruptive, the more so because it was fought on familiar and familial ground. As their descriptions demonstrate, that disruption could best be registered in a language that attacked a sentimental ideal, one that grew out of and furthered an orientation of culture along sexually coded lines. The operative technique was to realign a sexually coded language with the military opposition the war brought about. The resulting figures of a feminine South, a masculine North, and the threat of violence in their relations shaped histories as early as 1866, when popular magazines like Harper's Monthly noted that the house serving as Lee's headquarters in 1862 was bored, ripped, and threaded by Grant's balls of 1864 (XXXII, 417). Likewise, contemporary naval battles in Northern magazine accounts capitalized on a war of pronouns, the same