A Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama During the Civil War - Softcover

Hague, Parthenia Antoinette

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692284478 ISBN 13: 9780692284476

Publisher: Confederate Reprint Company, The, 2014

Synopsis

This reminiscence of daily life on a Southern plantation during the War Between the States is filled with vivid details of everything from methods of making dyes and preparing foods to race relations and the effects of the conflict. The author provides an unusual and beautifully-written primary source of Southern life inside the Yankee blockade, told from a point of view that is noticeably different from most post-war accounts.

About this title

Book Description:

A memorable and fascinating glimpse into the Civil War home front.

From the Back Cover:

"Hague's memoir provides a rare glimpse, from a woman's perspcetive, of the full activities of a slaveholding household. . . . [It] skillfully constructs an image of elite southern whites as, in essential ways, very much like their northern peers:  industrious, resourceful, devoted to their families, and loyal to the Union."--Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Parthenia Vardaman (later Hague) experienced the Civil War while employed as a schoolteacher on a plantation near Eufaula, Alabama. A Blockaded Family recounts how a frightened and war-weary household dealt with privations during a blockade imposed on the South. The author shows that the Yankees had no monopoly on ingenuity when survival depended upon self-sufficiency. She describes in detail the changes forced by war on farming methods, the daily imperatives of finding enough to eat and making do with substitutes, the manufacture of shoes and clothes on the plantation. A Blockaded Family is memorable for its glimpses of wartime domestic life and of the ways anxious citizens coped as the northern army closed in.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, director of the Institute for Women’s Studies and  Eleonore Raoul Professor of Humanities at Emory University, is the author of Within the Plantation Household; Black and White Women of the Old South (1988) and Feminism without Illustrations:  A Critique of Individualism (1991).

About this edition

• Publisher: Confederate Reprint Company, The
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0692284478
• ISBN 13: 9780692284476
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132