On 6 November 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the sixteenth President of the United States of America, and many South Carolinians prepared to secede. Upon hearing the news, Columbia native Keziah Hopkins Brevard could not stop her pen, writing quickly and anxiously, “Oh My God!! … I had prayed that God would thwart his election … I must trust in God that he will not forget us as untrustworthy as we are … I learnt the sad news that Lincoln was elected – This day corresponds with the note, it is so gloomy looking.” One entry was insufficient in the face of such a momentous occasion; Brevard resumed writing in the afternoon, wondering if there would be a “crisis” and, despite her nervous tone, declared, “We now have to act, God be with us.”Footnote ¹ Rather than anger at Lincoln or excitement for secession, the foremost emotions in Brevard's entries are melancholy and anxiety. While strongly in favor of the South Carolinian cause, she filtered her understanding of the nation's political future through comparisons to gloomy weather and pleas to God for mercy and guidance. Brevard's anxious, beseeching writings enabled her to express political opinions while remaining within the social and gendered boundaries of an elite southern white woman.

Brevard was not alone in expressing anxiety during South Carolina's sweeping political change in late 1860. Elite white women's writings reveal that though they and their families were staunch supporters of South Carolina's secession, women reacted to their new circumstances with fears and misgivings that their male counterparts could not, or would not, express. Planter-class women were part and parcel – alongside their husbands and fathers – of their state's ruling class. They were highly invested in the institution of slavery, from which they directly profited, but avoided discussing the politics surrounding slavery due to ideas of southern womanhood.Footnote ² A pure and proper woman, in theory, would not engage in political discussions, understood as masculine and corrupting; she was instead to be domestic and pious, nurturing the spiritual lives of her family.Footnote ³ In 1860, South Carolina's “ladies” harnessed familiar and proper religious concepts to express political hopes and fears, creating a socially acceptable outlet through which to discuss current events.

In the months before Lincoln's election, South Carolina's elite women increasingly turned to religious metaphor to make sense of their looming political reality. Their writing also deployed language found in popular sentimental fiction, further demonstrating that women clung to what was societally appropriate even amid a political maelstrom. To discuss the imagined outbreak of war, they wrote of religious apocalypse and God's reckoning. To describe their uncertain future, they equated their moods with the weather, modeling their words after popular sentimental novels and short stories. Women managed the overwhelming nature of their emotions by using writing as a “safety valve” to prevent their feelings from erupting around others and to quiet the turmoil in their heads.Footnote ⁴ They also reached out to friends for assistance, taking advantage of the epistolary tradition between women privileged with literacy.Footnote ⁵ These comfortable modes of expression allowed South Carolina's white women space to grapple with events that would soon destabilize their zealously defended domestic sphere.

Historians have long examined secession, its causes, and the conditions that made 1860 ripe for action.Footnote ⁶ Some describe the role that emotions like fear, paranoia, anger, and jealousy played in the crisis.Footnote ⁷ Elite southern women's emotions and political consciousnesses, however, are largely absent from descriptions of the secession crisis.Footnote ⁸ Lawrence McDonnell's well-researched study of “street-level” white Charlestonians during secession deliberately excludes women; McDonnell argues that southern men chiefly focussed upon other men and attempted to “disentangle” women from political discussion. This does not mean that men successfully did so, however; nor should we take patronizing contemporary sources at their word.Footnote ⁹ Diaries and letters reveal that women were directly involved in political discussion but masked their involvement through gendered modes of expression. Highlighting their voices not only expands our understanding of elite women's emergent political consciousness during the secession crisis; it also underscores the complex interrelationship between emotions, women, and political legitimacy.

Tightly held notions of white southern gender roles shaped political opinion. Southern notions of manhood forbade men from expressing their anxieties concerning secession and its consequences for fear of appearing cowardly. Obsessed with defending their honor and sense of mastery, men refused to show cowardice in the face of future conflict. Young men in particular jumped at the chance for adventure and fame, believing that dying for their newly constituted cause and country would bring them the greatest honor and immortal legacy. These ambitious men, one contemporary southern woman wrote, enjoyed “beyond all measure the excitement of a life which wakes them out of their ‘bovine’ torpor – & which is such an utter change from the quiet of a planters existence.”Footnote ¹⁰ Elite white men and women of South Carolina were similarly constrained by gendered ideas of manhood and womanhood within their social class, and their interpretations of the events of 1860 reflect this divide.Footnote ¹¹

Examining elite South Carolina women from late 1860 to the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and their emotional reactions to political change provides a much-needed bridge in southern women's history. Typically, secession is understood either as a conclusion to the antebellum period or as an introduction to a study of Confederate womanhood. This temporal designation paints secession as inevitable, rather than as a series of tumultuous months in which the prospect of a Confederacy and its size was never guaranteed.Footnote ¹² An examination of elite white women's shifting political consciousness, evidenced by fearful anticipation of secession and war, helps connect these two periods and reminds historians that these antebellum and bellum women were the same historical actors. Connecting these two periods adds to our temporal understanding of the nineteenth century and deepens our understanding of women's politics during this period, which too often focusses entirely on northern activists or the suffrage struggle.

Like antebellum and Civil War studies, this examination relies upon women's letters and diaries to access real-time reactions to political developments and understand how emotions evolved over time. Few sources bring the historian closer to an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of affect and emotions than a sustained personal diary.Footnote ¹³ While men also wrote in journals, an elite white woman's diary acted as a confidant. Male writers, with a few deviants from the norm, did not refer to their diaries as “my dear friend,” nor did they adopt the intimate tone of a female diarist. Female diary writing was a genre within itself, a “particular kind of intellectual-intimate charge,” and thus women became storytellers. They wrote like novelists, often returning to and editing past entries that seemed confusing or overly emotional with an anticipation that someone, someday, might read it.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, letters addressed to a single family member were often passed around and even copied and mailed to others.Footnote ¹⁵ This circulation created an emotional community with shared language, interest, values, and goals.Footnote ¹⁶

South Carolinian women's letters and diaries made clear that they used their emotions, specifically anxiety and melancholy, to express a growing political consciousness inseparable from individual feeling. By welding emotions and political history, scholars can expand their definition of politics to include marginalized subjects.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, Nicole Eustace explains that strong feelings of nationalism develop “among individuals who not only share no common origins but also cannot claim comparable civic status.”Footnote ¹⁸ Individuals’ culturally informed emotions toward secession were reinforced by similar expressions among fellow elite white women, forming a simultaneously emotional, political, and sentimental consciousness and community. Women's emotional reactions to events were genuine and individual. Yet as they took to their writings to think through their feelings, they used culturally accepted and gendered methods of expression and often found that other women of their class did the same. As Michael Woods explains in his study of emotions and sectionalism in the antebellum United States, “emotions are inextricably linked to personal and collective identities, to judgments of weal and woe, to mass mobilization, and to rational decision making, making them an inherent element of political activity.”Footnote ¹⁹ Woods's study, however, does not thoroughly examine the gendered nature of these emotions. In his convincing chapter on the utilization of mourning culture to transform reluctant secessionists into loyal Confederates, he neglects to mention that Victorian mourning culture was predominantly shaped and consumed by women. By studying women exclusively, this study reveals a gendered anxiety and melancholy separate, yet complementary, to Woods's examination of sectional emotions leading to secession.Footnote ²⁰

Upon examining over 350 letters and diary entries by South Carolinian elite white women, several key voices emerged as astute analysts of current events. Among the loudest voices were older women, such as Keziah Hopkins Brevard and Susan Burn. Brevard, a fifty-seven-year-old Presbyterian widow residing on the outskirts of Columbia, owned over two hundred slaves and lived in constant fear of rebellion.Footnote ²¹ Her diary is a fascinating juxtaposition of brief daily logs with lengthy entries detailing slavery and disunion. Susan Burn, the forty-nine-year-old wife of a Baptist pastor in Hartsville, closely monitored the religious activities of her adult children. Ada Bacot, a young widow at age twenty-seven, lived with her overbearing father in Society Hill. Her unpleasant living conditions and the deaths of her husband and two small children led to understandably morose and foreboding diary entries, which in turn tempered her thoughts on secession.

Many women's diaries and letters contain detailed records of visits from other prominent South Carolina families. Sally Baxter Hampton, a twenty-seven-year-old socialite living near Columbia, startled many by offering her opinions on political events. Not only northern-born but also the muse of British novelist William Thackeray, Hampton offered a unique perspective on the secession of her adopted state. The Palmer family of Santee regularly vacationed with the politically and economically elite Hampton family, and letters from the women in this family reveal a concern over and engagement with current political events which these women would have considered unladylike just a short time before. Eighteen-year-old Hattie Palmer and her friends from school offer insight into the lives of young unmarried women, who mixed their secessionist fervor with reservations about the future. These women of similar economic and social status but varying provenances and ages form the backbone of this article.

In late 1860 and early 1861, elite South Carolina women's emotional language concerning politics shifted. Through similar expressions, these women indicated their political engagement by filtering their growing sense of unease through familiar forms of writing. Women who believed wholeheartedly in the righteousness of South Carolina's cause nonetheless quickly anticipated the death and destruction that would accompany secession, revealing the complexity of their political beliefs at a time when it was considered improper for women to voice them aloud. Instead, women used socially acceptable avenues of religious anxiety and sentimental melancholy to express their hopes and fears as their state approached and then achieved disunion.

Many South Carolina women viewed the events of late 1860 as almost millenarian, adding a sense of urgency to their emotions and writings. To avoid critiques of excessive sentimentality, women limited their outward displays of emotion by turning to their diaries and letters, using religious allusions to God's wrath to justify their claims of hard times ahead. Susan Burn's sister Martha earnestly discussed the fate of the Union in September 1860, a subject most women surveyed did not broach until late October, when politics appeared inescapable.Footnote ²² Her cross-hatched letter blends biblical doomsday with worried prophecy concerning America's future:Footnote ²³

In a single, urgent letter, Hartscene predicted a religious purification, earthquakes, and slave revolts. Though many proslavery ideologues accused abolitionists of inciting rebellion, few tied these events to a religious end of days. The letter seems rushed, almost as though Hartscene's pen could not move quickly enough to purge her thoughts, and the correspondence reads as a disjointed stream of consciousness. It is likely that Hartscene, like her sister, was Baptist, as her mistaken reference to the Book of Daniel aligns with the Baptist belief in the Rapture and Tribulation before the Second Coming of Christ.Footnote ²⁵ She perceived an urgent and very real religious threat on the horizon, which would manifest in the form of a civil war. Hartscene's tone indicates that putting pen to paper was a necessary form of catharsis that enabled her to live in a time of looming political chaos.

Though it avoids explicit mention of political events or figures, Hartscene's letter is political in that she directly discussed her country's present and future. This use of religion as a justification for and vehicle to express political opinions continued throughout the Civil War. Civil War scholars argue that women evoked their Christian purity to gain a new legitimacy in the public sphere; by converging religion with politics, women found an avenue into the male world of politics without challenging the boundaries of acceptable womanly behavior. Religious faith and hope increased in importance for Confederate women as the tides turned against their new nation.Footnote ²⁶ The writings of South Carolinians indicate that women used religion in similar ways during secession winter, to confidently state either that God supported the South or that the upcoming election signaled God's retribution upon mankind.

In October 1860, Keziah Hopkins Brevard expressed similar worries to Hartscene by lamenting the death of her country in religious terms. Her diary's daily nature allows the reader to trace which events took up the most mental, and therefore written, space.Footnote ²⁷ Brevard's diary mostly consists of brief, mundane entries that are disrupted by the occasional long tirade concerning the ignorance and misbehavior of her slaves and disgust and terror at the thought of coexisting with free blacks. When discussing the state of her country as secession approached, Brevard's entries similarly doubled in size. The fretful slave-owner used exclamations and dashes rather than periods and complete sentences, underlining words to physically manifest the urgency of her thoughts and feelings. Brevard supported the secessionist cause, writing in early October that “it is time for us to shew the rabble of the North we are not to be murdered in cold blood because we own slaves.” Yet even these angry outbursts paled in frequency to her repeated pleas of “Oh My God save this Country!!!,” “My God spare me from witnessing blood and murder,” and that God save them from Lincoln and the “selfish notions” of the “Black Republicans.”Footnote ²⁸ The “wicked hearts” of the “Northern cut throats,” she wrote, “know no God or else they never could have the feelings they have toward us.”Footnote ²⁹ To Brevard, godless northerners and the sins of mankind were to blame for the impending dissolution of the United States, and only desperate prayer and God's forgiveness would save the country she loved. Lincoln's election, she reasoned, would be proof that God punished “his people for sinning against his commands.”Footnote ³⁰

Brevard's ideal escape from the anxieties of 1860 and the death and destruction she and Martha Hartscene predicted was that of the afterlife. Rather than live to see emancipation and live amongst free African Americans, Brevard prayed, “Oh that God had made me one of his flock & taken me long before this – My God take me quickly – Oh I fear to stay here.”Footnote ³¹ Brevard frequently contemplated her own sinfulness and hoped that she was “fit” for Heaven and not left to “see & know the troubles that are comeing upon us.”Footnote ³² Though a South Carolina patriot, she longed for rest and eternal peace in the Heaven promised by the Christian God. “I wish my anxiety could be ended,” she wrote days before Lincoln's election. To Brevard, death was a welcome means to end her worries.Footnote ³³ Brevard did not get her wish – she died in 1886 at the age of eighty-three.

This troubling desire for death in the face of political turmoil and the threat of violence only increased as secession and war loomed louder and closer. Eleanor Boggs similarly longed for the blessings of death, as Heaven freed her from the troubles of her country's present state.Footnote ³⁴ Mere weeks before secession, Ada Bacot wrote that “for the first time” she felt relief that her husband and children were safe in Heaven. They were in a place of peace and comfort, freeing Bacot from the “fear & anxiety” of caring for loved ones with violence and even war on the horizon.Footnote ³⁵ Before the tragic events of the Civil War, most southerners believed in a benevolent God and did not fear death, clinging to the idea of reuniting with loved ones in the afterlife.Footnote ³⁶ Antebellum women in particular clung to the thought of death as peaceful and even desirable, as high infant mortality rates made death a constant presence in their households.Footnote ³⁷ Southerners grappled with death as their constant companion by imagining that their loved ones awaited them in Heaven.

Resignation to the will of God, however, meant nothing if access to Heaven was not guaranteed.Footnote ³⁸ As secession approached, mothers and sisters increasingly filled their writings with pleas to their family members, generally male, to live a pious life that led to Heaven. Antebellum women served as religious custodians of their households, and their anticipation of violence on the horizon added a new urgency to this position. In November, no doubt fretting over talk of South Carolina's upcoming Secession Convention, Susan Burn begged her son to become religious:

Echoing her mother, Flora Burn urged her brother, “Think of death, he is fast approaching us all with silent and measured steps … we should not forget that his arms must sooner or later clasp us in their vice like grasp.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In hoping to convince her brother to embrace Christianity, and in accordance with the religious duties of white womanhood, Burn reminded him that death drew ever near, a morbid thought from a schoolgirl.Footnote ⁴¹

Antebellum white women's fear of death and destruction varied according to their age and therefore life experience. Younger women experienced less death than their mothers, and thus reacted to the political changes of 1860 with more excitement for a change of pace than religious fear of death and destruction.Footnote ⁴² Historians of young antebellum women argue that they were far more likely to seize the Confederate cause as a chance to escape oppressive circumstances than their conservative older counterparts.Footnote ⁴³ Young women and men flocked to secession speeches and conventions, eager for some excitement and enraptured by the romance of independence and a potential glorious war. Yet these young secessionist women were not immune to the melancholy prompted by death and illness. Harriet Palmer's former schoolmate mused that despite her optimistic nature, “if you have ever had any member of your family pass away you can sympathize with us. A gloom came over my spirits this evening and Sister being so unwell I felt a sadness within, inexpressible.” This young southern belle assumed that her teenaged friend also experienced the deep depression that death brought to the cheeriest of youths. The same woman who filled her letters with romantic descriptions of balls and secessionist excitement also lent her thoughts to “the End, the glorious end … [I] sometimes long to lay my head where the wicked will cease from troubling and the wear, be at Rest.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This view of a benevolent afterlife transcended generations of women.

Prayers for the souls of loved ones and desperate petitions for their salvation that began before secession only increased during the Civil War. As the war's casualties skyrocketed, women blamed themselves for God's displeasure and urged their loved ones to do the same. Terrified at the prospect of their husbands’ eternal damnation, and with death a probable outcome, women felt religious confidence enough to insist that their husbands attend services whenever possible. Civil War historians argue that southern white women applied their status as religious caretaker within the home to justify asserting authority over their husbands.Footnote ⁴⁵ Similarly, antebellum South Carolina women used religion to express their political hopes, fears, and predictions. This familiar method allowed them to tentatively enter the political sphere. Religion, emotion, and politics united in women's writings to express their preoccupation with a dying nation.

Though women employed religious concepts recognizable to the antebellum period to express their fears, the frequency of these entries increased dramatically in the months preceding secession. South Carolina's elite women astutely sensed a fundamental change in politics, and the nature of their writings changed along with them. Women in the Palmer family, who kept a steady correspondence for nearly a century, rarely mentioned politics before 1860. State senator Philip E. Porcher's letters to his wife Elizabeth form the exception to this rule. In his letters from the state capital in the 1850s, Porcher simply mentions “the House is consumed discussing different measures,” with no further detail. Perhaps assuming his wife had no interest in politics, he often mentioned the state congress simply to justify his prolonged absence from home.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even early 1860 lacks the political nature of the year's later months – when Emma Dogan was in Charleston during the Democratic National Convention in April 1860, her mother simply warned her against walking the streets alone.Footnote ⁴⁷ Though Sarah Dogan worried about the dangers brought about by high passions and a state of excitement during the convention, she did not ruminate on any political turmoil, despite the fact that the Democratic Party split in two during that very assembly. In the traditional manner of antebellum politics, the issues faded after the convention. By summer of 1860, elite women's letters and diaries reverted to news about society and friends.

By October 1860, however, women could no longer ignore the political changes surrounding them, and increasingly felt part of the process. South Carolinian women continued recording the most important parts of their day in diaries and letters, but now included their feelings about the state of the Union: “a crisis that absorbs everything.” Sally Baxter Hampton attempted to minimize her political discussions, but frequently exceeded her self-imposed one-page limit. She failed to control her pen or thoughts, writing that “it is almost impossible to bring one's mind to anything else now.” “One might as well try to live without oxygen,” she declared.Footnote ⁴⁸ The increased discussion evidenced in other South Carolina women's writings indicate that they felt similarly.

With this new political discussion came apologetics, as women felt the need to justify their discussion of topics culturally coded as masculine.Footnote ⁴⁹ The frequency of such excuses reveals that these subjects remained uncharted territory for most women in South Carolina. An article in popular journal Southern Literary Messenger claiming that mixing women and politics would lead to sexual depravity, abuse of power, and the general corruption of the republic indicates that this defensiveness was necessary.Footnote ⁵⁰ Sally Baxter Hampton considered “turning a penny by writing political letters” because “people here seem electrified at a woman's daring to know & talk so much upon such subjects.”Footnote ⁵¹ As a northern-born socialite, perhaps Hampton felt no need to excuse her political commentary. Other women, however, urgently rationalized their political participation. “I wonder some times if people think it is strange that I should be so warm a secessionist,” Ada Bacot wrote defiantly in her diary, “but why should they, has not every woman a right to express opinions on some subjects, in private if not in public.” Bacot was hesitant to speak openly about politics, and reluctant to leave the private sphere. Nonetheless, Bacot felt “as eager for news as any man in the state, but I know I am not able to do any thing for her defense being a woman, still that does not prevent my being interested.”Footnote ⁵² “Tis said woman has no business with such matters,” she continued, “but what woman in South Carolina does not have the interest of her state at heart.”Footnote ⁵³ The young widow's love for South Carolina was “that of an affectionate daughter for a mother, the purest love in the world.”Footnote ⁵⁴ To Bacot, patriotism was women's business as well, and she invoked the language of motherhood and the private sphere to voice her political thoughts and support for secession.Footnote ⁵⁵

Letters from South Carolina men reveal that they were unaccustomed to and uncomfortable with women discussing current events. Selena Best's husband worried that reading the news would disrupt her pregnancy and urged her, “give yourself no uneasiness about war.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Best's letter reveals a genuine concern for the health of mother and child and his belief that excessive anxiety could negatively affect her health. Her preoccupation with current events was worth comment by her anxious, and perhaps coddling, husband. Other men reacted to women's fears with annoyance. Edward Wells condescendingly informed his sister that she need not be “in the depths of despair” about what she called “our blessed Union” as there was “no use crying over spilt milk.” She, like many others, continuously scanned the newspapers to determine the perpetuity of the Union, an act that her brother claimed would merely “put your eyes out.”Footnote ⁵⁷ These warnings likely fell upon deaf ears, as South Carolina's elite women continued discussing current events and defending the righteousness of their doing so.

Thus women's writings, though private, signified a gradual transition into the public, political sphere. Letters and diaries were far from secret documents, and both came with certain expectations that they would be read by an audience. Diaries were read aloud, shared between a couple, or written for posterity.Footnote ⁵⁸ Family members passed around correspondence, with comments from others sometimes added to letter's postscript. To send a letter, even to family members, was to consider the possibility that one's words would be intercepted or read by eyes outside the family and social circle. Less common was the stipulation that a letter remain private, as indicated by women's requests to burn letters after reading. Esther Simons Palmer frequently implored that her children not circulate her correspondence, indicating either the private nature of the material or that her wishes had previously been ignored.Footnote ⁵⁹ After reporting hearsay about Fort Sumter to her family, author and editor of The Southern Rose Caroline Howard Gilman implored her children, “do not let my statements & speculation get into print. I am only a guesser, and not behind the scenes.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Concerns about personal privacy did not worry Gilman; rather, she hesitated to publish due to the imprecise nature of her sources and concern for her public reputation.Footnote ⁶¹ Sally Baxter Hampton seemed far more comfortable with the publication of her letters, but even she mandated that her mother edit her words before they appeared in newspapers. Hampton wrote “in such wretched style always from haste & incapacity to pause,” in contrast to her mother's “perfect” epistolary style. Hampton described her own writing style as “vicious.”Footnote ⁶² Women increasingly discussed politics as secession loomed, and in doing so acknowledged that their opinions might reach an audience larger than their social circles, perhaps even the public newspaper.Footnote ⁶³ Cognizant of the possibility that their writings, and thereby a piece of themselves, could enter public political discussions, South Carolina women edited their words and thoughts with great care.

Women's political writings were unique in their openness concerning their fears and anxieties toward future violence. The male members of the Palmer family, for instance, certainly did not fill their letters with religious ruminations about death and destruction. This emotional language belonged to the woman's sphere, and thus few men felt comfortable expressing fears and anxieties. Men felt swept away in the “romantic & picturesque element” of sacrificially fighting for their state, already viewing themselves as “famous as patriots or fallen in a soldier's duty,” Sally Baxter Hampton observed.Footnote ⁶⁴ The importance of honor among the secessionist elite barred them from doing anything other than showing a brave face and even excitement for the chance to die for one's country.Footnote ⁶⁵ If southern men anticipated war and violence in the wake of Lincoln's election and of secession, it was with excitement, not anxiety. Finally, after years of a perceived decline in southern power on a national stage, they could prove their mastery with noble military might.

This is not to say that women's fears turned them against the South Carolinian cause. Their anxieties and religious predictions of apocalypse coexisted with patriotic support for secession. After Lincoln's election on 6 November 1860, South Carolina men organized militia drills and some women learned to shoot in anticipation of future violence. Women wore hats adorned with a Lone Star. Sarah Burn wrote that if her state did not secede, she would leave it, and reported that such was the excitement in Charleston that she “would not be surprised if they are needed, if there was a Volunteer Company in Charleston of Ladies – one Lady said if the men had not courage to secede, the Ladies ought to secede from them.”Footnote ⁶⁶ White women embodied all that was good and pure in the South, and a southern gentleman felt obliged to protect them.Footnote ⁶⁷ These patriotic expressions by South Carolina women were therefore manipulations of masculinity to pressure men to secede. Unable to vote and fight themselves, they used their femininity to political ends. Though women like Susan Burn prayed anxiously for the souls of their male loved ones, none surveyed in this study attempted to prevent them from fighting.

Many letters, newspapers, and remembrances mark the excitement in South Carolina in December, particularly at the Secession Convention. Residents and visitors described “lecturing and serenading” all throughout town.Footnote ⁶⁸ Women attended and participated in invigorating political events, many for the first time. The excitement was contagious, especially for young women as they met men outside their normal family circle.Footnote ⁶⁹ Young Babe Sims made a flag for a rally in Columbia and described the atmosphere to Hattie Palmer: “How I wish you were with us. We go to the Legislature and hear all the speeches. I know you are a secessionist, and I often wonder if your southern blood is as fiery as mine. I am a regular fire eater.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Columbia's atmosphere in December provided a delightful change of pace for Sims. Upon learning the initial location for the convention in Columbia's Athenaeum Hall, which barred women from entering, elite women took to the papers to protest.Footnote ⁷¹ “The daughters of Carolina,” they claimed in a letter to the Tri-weekly South Carolinian, “will not admit that their patriotism is less than that of their sons.” Taking care not to appear too political in their protest, they claimed that they by no means championed women's rights like their northern counterparts, and subtly threatened men to “value our smiles, or dread our frowns.” Though they openly approved separation from the oppressive North, these women did not describe their excitement or passion, but rather their “intense anxiety,” with which they looked forward to the convention.Footnote ⁷² Secessionist women, in their most outspoken form of political expression yet, looked ahead to disunion with worry and care for their country.

The signing of the Ordinance of Secession on 20 December 1860 offered emotional catharsis for both men and women. The crowd outside gave a “thunderous shout” when the signers held it aloft on the steps of Charleston's Institute Hall. Towns in peripheral states held parades when South Carolina, the vanguard, seceded.Footnote ⁷³ When the news reached small towns like Society Hill, newly formed local militias fired their guns in salute to independence. South Carolinians burned turpentine barrels and placed celebratory illuminations in the windows of homes and businesses.Footnote ⁷⁴ Hattie Palmer expressed her desire to be amidst the action and remarked that “women would assemble in uniform and armed in Charleston such is the excitement.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The atmosphere in Charleston was like a sparked fire, and the state of South Carolina become swept up in the flames.

These celebrations, however, often adopted a mournful tone. Public speeches portrayed secession as a solemn, grievous, yet necessary event. Fire-eater newspapers used this imagery of death to accuse the North of murder, and women like Keziah Brevard blamed Lincoln and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin for the country's death.Footnote ⁷⁶ Secessionists deliberately evoked political and public mourning to help the populace transition quickly and remove the possibility of reconciliation.Footnote ⁷⁷ Women's letters and diaries reveal that this mourning was not merely a political ploy, but a genuine emotional response. Three days before secession, Sally Baxter Hampton wrote that her adopted state was shrouded in “heavy sorrow … There are but few voices that do not falter – few eyes that are not dimmed … Men seem quite aware that they are moving towards self destruction.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Even Charleston in late 1860 was not entirely celebratory, according to Adele Allston. Though there was “a good deal of excitement about politics,” she wrote; the town itself was “very quiet. Money is very scarce, rice does not sell and so every one has to be saving.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Fully aware of her economic and political context, Allston worried about the economic consequences of secession, which only worsened when the war began.

Young women also felt conflicted toward their state's secession, though they wholeheartedly supported the plight of South Carolina and longed for the romance and excitement of war. Babe Sims discussed secession with excitement, but even this energetic youth found herself contemplating “nothing but the dark times which hide a halo of glory from our country.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Anna Kirkland described her romantic dances in New York, declaring that while Lincoln was “rotten” and she had become “quite a politician and detest Black Republicans,” she did meet and defend many “kind-hearted” northerners, who “love the south and hate abolitionists.” Kirkland danced with an attractive young northern man that identified as “by no means an abolitionist. He hates them as much as I do,” who remarked that he would “give anything to go south.” Amidst secession fervor, women who simultaneously supported South Carolina and hated Lincoln still thought fondly of many northerners. These acknowledgments likely dampened the excitement towards separation.Footnote ⁸¹

Though women reacted to Lincoln's election and to secession with open anxiety, most closed their writings with religious resignation, or, at the very least, belief in God's will. Keziah Brevard mourned Lincoln's election with customary exclamatory grief but declared, “If there is a crisis … we all lay down our lives sooner than free our slaves in our midst … I would give my life to save my country.”Footnote ⁸² To Brevard, Lincoln's election meant emancipation, and therefore chaos and death. Fighting back was her only solution. In the aftermath of Lincoln's election, Ada Bacot feared the outbreak of violence, but by the time of South Carolina's secession she declared herself “one of Carolina's sons ready to stand by her.” Bacot voiced her many misgivings but reasoned, “’tis hardly to be supposed that the north will see us go out of the union, without making some effort to prevent, or bring us back. If she should there must be war. My heart does not quail.”Footnote ⁸³ Anxious women actively invested themselves in the southern cause by witnessing and attending military drills, sewing uniforms, and crafting patriotic cockades. The Emmet Guards thanked the ladies of Columbia for volunteering to make uniforms and sent out the call to the newspaper to attract more female assistance.Footnote ⁸⁴ South Carolina's women were mournful yet resolved patriots, and they expressed these conflicting emotions in their letters and diaries.

These solemn emotions mirrored the tone of Confederate politicians’ speeches. President-elect Jefferson Davis and his contemporaries memorialized the Union as dead in order to look forward to a new Confederacy with God's blessing. Conceptualizing the Union as deceased prevented reconciliation, and the familiar language of mourning allowed Confederates to grieve yet look forward to a future with God on their side.Footnote ⁸⁵ During Caroline Gilman's “solemn night watches” for the cannons of “death and destruction,” she felt “the inestimable value of Christ's revelation.” She concluded her letter willing and determined “to sacrifice every thing to Christian truth.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Susan Burn wrote that though the world was consumed with “wars and the memory of war,” the “Scriptures must be fulfilled … until the predictions are accomplished. Let us look to him in this day of trouble, for in him alone is our help.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Adele Allston predicted “we are to have a war … It makes me sick to think about it.” Her solution was to “pray, and put our trust in the good God who has helped us heretofore, and who alone is able to help us, even as he helped David.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Even Brevard, who was in her heart “opposed to breaking up this beautiful union,” resolved to “act for my home, home of my forefathers for three generations,” who fought and struggled for “right & justice.”Footnote ⁸⁹ These women reconciled their doubts and support for their new nation by submitting themselves to God's will. Religion helped bridge fear and grief with a Christian resignation and acquiescence to future bloodshed.

Shortly before the Secession Convention, Susan Burn predicted that President James Buchanan would not “coerce” South Carolina upon secession but would “protect the Forts.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Six days after South Carolina seceded, Major Robert Anderson moved his troops to Fort Sumter. This military maneuver reminded South Carolinians of the consequences of their actions, sooner than many would have preferred. Far more stressful than the attack on Sumter itself, however, was the tense anticipation of further action. “The whole of South Carolina,” wrote Sally Baxter Hampton, “is at this moment a gunpowder mine & anything so trivial as a cast-off cigar may serve to ignite it.” She feared “the enthusiasm & excitement of so many unoccupied men.”Footnote ⁹¹ Time stood still for South Carolinians – the initial rush of excitement now stretched to a waiting period both eternal and far too brief.Footnote ⁹² Caroline Howard Gilman spent Sundays apprehensively anticipating news of the military action and dreading “to hear the first cannon from Fort Sumter.” Even church provided no refuge, filled as it was with “sad and frightened” women, “some in tears, for the best men and the flower of our youth are in the two forts.”Footnote ⁹³ Many women spent sleepless nights fearing the outbreak of war and contemplating the reality of their state leaving the union.Footnote ⁹⁴ South Carolina's women made politics the center of their lives in late 1860, and now found this new world inescapable.

Unable to cope with their overwhelming anxiety, women took action: they wrote. Isolated from society during secession winter, Sally Baxter Hampton used her letters as a pleasurable “out-let.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Though diaries and letters from winter 1860–61 did not bring happiness, they provided a necessary release for women during this unbearably tense waiting period. Their writings, however, failed to stymie women's preoccupation with current events. Ada Bacot described “constant fear” about Sumter and an ever-present “uneasy feeling” as if “looking for something.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This “constant expectation of bad news” sent Bacot into a depression: “my life is becoming a burden … I never feel lonly but I take no intrest in any thing, every thing I do is mecanical. Nothing gives me the least pleasure.” Despite her earlier assertion of readiness for battle, in these anxious later entries Bacot wished for a continued peace.Footnote ⁹⁷ Hattie Palmer's young friends also felt the stresses that war could bring. “I long for our country to be free,” Babe Sims declared, reaffirming her patriotism, “but when I hear of the profanity and the disregard to God's holy commandments I wonder that God doesn't leave us to ourselves.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Women took to their diaries, letters, and Bibles to help relieve their physical and mental stresses over political events, but they never successfully banished the thoughts from their minds.

During secession winter, women equated their melancholy moods to the weather. The political events leading to secession were often described as a gathering storm.Footnote ⁹⁹ Martha Hartscene predicted the “terrible storm ahead of us” in her long, foreboding letter from September.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Babe Sims asked Harriet Palmer to “pray to the God of battles to girdle our ship that the storm may not overwhelm her.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Bacot described “the cloud which envelops our galant little state” as “[d]ark as the mantle of the night” when discussing South Carolina politics.Footnote ¹⁰² Weeks of rainy weather followed South Carolina's secession and women noted this symbolism. Historian Stephen Berry describes the period between secession and Fort Sumter as the eye of a furious storm with southerners at the center, “safe for the moment but watching nervously as a storm raged about them, beyond their power and their ken.” Berry argues that secessionists “regardless of political stripe” shared this feeling, and southern women were no exception.Footnote ¹⁰³ South Carolinians set this whirlwind of events in motion, but eventually found themselves holding on for dear life lest they get swept away.

After secession, the dreary weather and writing continued. Susan Burn attributed her “dull” Christmas Day to overcast weather, both real and metaphorical: clouds threatened the “political horizon,” she wrote, and “all the world appears to be agitated at the same time.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Caroline Gilman described her tear-filled morning at church as a “gloomy” Sabbath, for both the prospects of violence and the rainy weather itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the day of Lincoln's election, Keziah Brevard described the cloudy, drizzly day and mused, “Nature seems to be weeping o'er our cause.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Hattie Palmer, whose letters revealed an ardent wish for secession, expressed her fear that the poor weather at the beginning of 1861 was an omen for troubled times ahead.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This physical and metaphorical cloud of gloom hovered over South Carolina during the holiday season. Rather than celebrating secession and their new country, women looked fearfully toward a new year filled with violence. On Christmas Eve, Brevard despondently lamented, “though I hope and pray for peace I see nothing to hope for.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Sally Baxter Hampton attempted “some semblance of rejoicing,” but “assuredly no-one can feel the spirit for merriment and festivity” in the face of such “gloomy” times and heavy hearts.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ “Daily, nay hourly,” Hampton felt “anguished” when contemplating the fate of the Union.Footnote ¹¹⁰ New Year's celebrations proved no different. Rather than celebrating, Ada Bacot's last entry for 1860 reiterated that her children were “better off” in Heaven than on Earth during a “revolution.” A “half melancholy feeling … the shadow of some ill about to befall” muffled any holiday excitement.Footnote ¹¹¹ Then, as now, the holiday season was a time for family reunions, filling even antebellum mansions to the brim with extended family and friends. It became increasingly difficult to celebrate such an occasion when some families were already torn apart by disunion and others experienced a “broken circle” as male politicians spent their holidays away from home. This irony was not lost on South Carolinians in late 1860.

This descriptive writing style was heavily influenced by the sentimental or domestic novel, the most popular form of literature for antebellum women. Sentimental novels sought to elicit a strong emotional response and often featured scenes of distress or tenderness, as the ability to deeply feel emotions signaled a morally good character.Footnote ¹¹² South Carolina women sampled the dramatic writing styles of their favorite books when linking the weather to their own moods and the political climate. Antebellum women shared this language of sentimentality, creating an emotional community through deep feelings expressed in both fiction and letters.Footnote ¹¹³

Despite the often melancholy nature of sentimental fiction, women's literature specifically written for late 1860 did not match the downcast atmosphere described by South Carolina women during the holiday season. Rather than addressing the current national discord, popular women's magazines such as Godey's Lady's Book filled their December 1860 issue with images of joyous families and short stories describing holiday celebrations and family reunions.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Women's magazines like Godey's refrained from political discussion for propriety's sake, and Godey's continued this tradition into the Civil War. In December 1861, its frontispiece represented nurses helping soldiers with no clear uniform markers, allowing Godey's to continue to attract both a northern and a southern audience as it had before the war.Footnote ¹¹⁵ This inconsistency between South Carolina women's thoughts and those of their prescriptive literature indicates that women were thinking independently and moved outside their normal sphere, and illuminates the necessity of utilizing both private discussions and public pronouncements when capturing a historic moment. The theme of family reunion commonly found in the December 1860 issue of Godey's, however, also suggests that the magazine, in a last-gasp attempt at nationalism, was projecting an idealized version of Christmas in America to provide a family reunion in fiction that, for some families, would not occur until 1865.Footnote ¹¹⁶

South Carolinian elite women briefly banished their melancholy resignation during the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861, reacting with relief and exuberant celebration. Their fears of violence validated, women felt they could now breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to South Carolina and the Confederacy's bright future. This outbreak of war, free from any casualty, “exalted the senses and the will.” Women described the victory as something sublime.Footnote ¹¹⁷ “Wonderful, miraculous, unheard of in history, a bloodless victory!” Caroline Gilman exclaimed.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Hattie Palmer's cousin wrote that all rejoiced from the news: cannons fired, flags raised, and illuminations sat in each window. The victory at Sumter proved that “God must be on our side.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Others, however, saw the beginning of the conflict that they had, in moments of great sadness and despair, predicted in semi-private writings. The exponential increase in elite South Carolina women's writings in late 1860 reveals that politics became all-consuming in new ways. Prior to the summer of 1860, the same women's writings hardly paused to mention politics, even during a South Carolina election year. When recounting the deaths of loved ones, lamentations lasted no longer than a letter or diary entry, as the family member or friend was in Heaven and therefore free from suffering. Though they also participated in politically symbolic acts such as marching in parades and presenting soldiers with flags and uniforms, elite women discussed their own political opinions by evoking religious, emotional, and descriptive rhetoric found in popular domestic novels, all of which provided a bridge between appropriate women's roles and politics. These methods helped white southern “ladies” form political consciousnesses before the formation of the Confederacy and its ideas of patriotic nationalism.

The overarching emotional frameworks of melancholy and severe anxiety found in women's correspondence in 1860 and 1861 reveal a tentative yet growing emotional community among elite white women and a shared political consciousness that differed from their male counterparts, who often told their wives not to bother with political concerns. Countless diary entries and letters express similar convictions toward the South's righteousness and passionate defenses of slavery, writings that coexisted alongside anxious and anguished musings concerning their love of country and what the future would bring. Only when secession was finally solidified did these women resign themselves to the death of the United States of America. Only then could they mourn their nation with finality yet look forward to springtime and the bloom of the future Confederacy. That many South Carolinian women predicted war before Lincoln's election reveals much about their personal outlooks as well as their developing political consciousness. It is a consciousness we need to take seriously if we are to fully understand not only the collective mind of elite antebellum southern women, but also their politicization during the war. Diaries and letters in the critical year of 1860 go a long way to helping us make better sense of these changes.