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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
An East Texas Family's Civil War: The Letters of Nancy and William Whatley, May-December 1862

An East Texas Family's Civil War: The Letters of Nancy and William Whatley, May-December 1862

Whatley, John T.
Jones, Jacqueline

Hardcover

Series: Library of Southern Civilization

Civil War Period (1850-1877)General Gender StudiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 0807170690
ISBN13: 9780807170694
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: Apr 17 2019
Pages: 200
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.90 Width: 8.80 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

During six months in 1862, William Jefferson Whatley and his wife, Nancy Falkaday Watkins Whatley, exchanged a series of letters that vividly demonstrate the quickly changing roles of women whose husbands left home to fight in the Civil War. When William Whatley enlisted with the Confederate Army in 1862, he left his young wife Nancy in charge of their cotton farm in East Texas, near the village of Caledonia in Rusk County. In letters to her husband, Nancy describes in elaborate detail how she dealt with and felt about her new role, which thrust her into an array of unfamiliar duties, including dealing with increasingly unruly slaves, overseeing the harvest of the cotton crop, and negotiating business transactions with unscrupulous neighbors. At the same time, she carried on her traditional family duties and tended to their four young children during frequent epidemics of measles and diphtheria. Stationed hundreds of miles away, her husband could only offer her advice, sympathy, and shared frustration.

In An East Texas Family's Civil War, the Whatleys' great-grandson, John T. Whatley, transcribes and annotates these letters for the first time. Notable for their descriptions of the unraveling of the local slave labor system and accounts of rural southern life, Nancy's letters offer a rare window on the hardships faced by women on the home front taking on unprecedented responsibilities and filling unfamiliar roles.

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Civil War Period (1850-1877)

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