Sunday, June 21, 2020

Historical Fathers


During the 150th anniversary of the war I had a Civil War Sunday feature.  This is a repeat of a blog post from 2011 (with some minor editing)  about well known Civil War figures but in a less well known setting - their role as fathers.

We know these people as statues, and many, now, as people who enslaved other people. (We always knew this, but chose to bury that most uncomfortable fact). But history is complex.   These historical figures were also people, with all their strengths and weaknesses.  That's an uncomfortable truth, too.

Some facts about life in the mid 19th century.

1.  Infant mortality was high, and even if your child made it past infancy, the father was rare who did not lose at least one child in childhood or young adulthood.
2.  Fathers could forbid their daughters from marrying a prospective suitor - but then, it didn't always mean the daughter would obey. (and, obey was the word for that cultural context.) Jefferson Davis faced this decision with his daughter, Winnie, when she fell in love with a Yankee, the grandson of an abolitionist.  And, just like today, sometimes parents must watch their children as adults come to tragic ends.
3.  Then as now, many fathers had to be absent from home frequently, leaving their wives to be both mother and father.  This was the case with all the below Civil War figures.
4.  Many fathers found themselves as single fathers when their wives died in childbirth. The solution, in many cases, was to marry again as quickly as possible.
5.  Although losing children was a fact of life, it caused great sorrow to the grieving parents.  Sometimes they didn't recover.  (Mary Todd Lincoln, for example.)  There was not much that could be done in those days for depression.

The following information is taken in part from "After The War-The Lies and Images of Major Civil War Figures After the Shooting Stopped" by David Hardin.  
Again, I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the people of the Civil War.
Colorized Photo of Lincoln by Matthew Brady, Tioga County, New York Historical Society
United States President Abraham and wife Mary Lincoln had four sons.  Only two outlived their father.  One beloved son, Willie, died while Abraham Lincoln was in the White House and both Abraham and Mary took the death very hard. 

Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina had six children, four boys and two girls.  None of the boys outlived their parents.  Jefferson Davis's son Joseph, died at the age of 5 in April of 1864 from injuries suffered in a fall from the Confederate Executive Mansion.

Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his wife, Ellen, had four children.  As with Lincoln and Davis, Sherman lost a son, Willie (was this a bad luck name?) in 1863 at the age of nine.  A third son, born in 1864, died at the age of six months. Still another son, Tom, became a Jesuit priest but later descended into insanity and died in Louisiana.  Quoting from "After the War:  "The son of the despoiler of Georgia lies in the Jesuit cemetery in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, next to the Jesuit grandnephew of Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy's vice-president."

Finally, Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Custis Lee (George Washington's granddaughter) had seven children.  Unlike the other major figures above, Lee's children all lived into adulthood.  One, Custis Lee (a Major General in the Confederate Army), lived into his 80's.

I need to add a postscript to this - the people that were enslaved by some of these figures.  They are lost to history, buried in unmarked graves on plantations and other places, north and south. (Yes, the Northern United States had legalized slavery, too.) They fathered children and knew they might lose them to disease and accidents, but also the children could be sold "down the river", never to be seen by their fathers (and mothers) again.  Today, these unknown fathers deserved to be remembered, too.

History is a lot more than dry statistics and memorization of battle dates.  It is the people, their culture, and events and how people react and are affected by them.  We should all be thankful that modern medicine spares many modern parents what these people of 150 years ago had to go through as fathers (and mothers).

Happy Father's Day to all who celebrate.

3 comments:

  1. History, to me, was always about the people, how they lived and how events shaped their lives.

    ReplyDelete
  2. ...in the mid '60s I was at the University of Georgia and they were still fighting on the losing side. They still are.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's hard to fathom sometimes how much different things were back then with diseases that many of us survive nowadays being fatal.

    ReplyDelete

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