This Republic of Suffering - Faust, Drew Gilpin [71]
In the South, where 18 percent of white males of military age perished in the war, death was omnipresent, and fabrics and fashions were scarce. As the Daily South Carolinian asked in 1864, “Who has not lost a friend during the war? We are literally a land of mourning.” Confederate women, especially in cities and towns, seem to have done all they could to overcome obstacles to securing appropriate mourning dress, which promised the consolation of visibly shared misery. The southern death toll produced a uniformed sorority of grief. As Lucy Breckinridge of Virginia remarked, “There were so many ladies here, all dressed in deep mourning, that we felt as if we were at a convent and formed a sisterhood.” When the Yankees entered Richmond in April 1865, a New York newspaperman observed, “the women are nearly all dressed in mourning.”21
Teenaged Nannie Haskins of Tennessee was outraged when a visitor told her how well she looked in black after her brother’s death. “Becomes me fiddlestick,” she wrote. “What do I care whether it becomes me or not? I don’t wear black because it becomes me…I wear mourning because it corresponds with my feelings.” Mourning garb was, to paraphrase language that Saint Augustine used to describe the Christian sacraments, an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible state.22
“Women in Mourning, Cemetery in New Orleans.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 25, 1863.
Susan Caldwell of Warrenton, Virginia, was eager to wear mourning after the death of her child in the fall of 1864. But her husband, Lycurgus, wrote from the army to forbid it. “You have too many things already to remind you of your bereavement and oppress your spirits—and our pecuniary circumstances will not permit it.” Susan was not worried about being reminded of her grief; she was not likely to forget it, and she longed for a way to express her sorrow. She sadly but dutifully replied, “My dress at present corresponds but little with my mournful aching heart but I am willing to do as you wish me.”23
Acquiring mourning apparel in the Civil War South required effort, even ingenuity, and often considerable expenditure. After receiving news of the death of her son Romulus in 1862, Margaret Gwyn of Georgia bought some “mourning goods” at the local store and began to sew a black dress. A woman of modest circumstances, she dyed other of her clothes to make them a suitable expression of her grief. As she worked, “my eyes was often filled with tears which is a relief to the troubled mind.” A woman near Fredericksburg could not decide whether to don mourning in 1863, for she was “not willing to leave off col[ors], unless she can procure a handsome outfit in black, and that cannot be had though she is perfectly regardless of expense.” Merchants in southern cities and towns announced successful acquisition of fabric and fashions in newspaper advertisements with a triumphant tone that reflected the scarcity of such goods. The Daily South Carolinian regularly carried notices when shipments arrived, often smuggled through the blockade. In “News for Ladies” the paper whetted appetites by describing in detail the elaborate mourning attire in fashion across the Atlantic.24
“View of the ‘Burnt District,’ Richmond, Va.” Library of Congress.
In the North, where the rate of death of men of military age was one-third that in the Confederacy, mourning was less universal, and the goods that made it possible proved more readily available.25 Advertisements in northern papers announced far greater variety and availability of wares both in specialty stores and in more general establishments like New York’s Lord & Taylor, which opened its own