Something like 620,000 soldiers died during four years of Civil War, far more of disease than bullets or bayonets, but for most of the estimated 200,000 left widowed on both sides, the specific cause was less significant than the shock, pain, and lingering tragedy of loss. For that, fortunately, there is the outstanding recent work by historian Angela Esco Elder, Love & Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (2022), a well-written and surprisingly gripping narrative that brings a fresh perspective to a mostly overlooked corner of Civil War studies. The widows are gone, but their legacy is still celebrated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a neo-Confederate organization comprised of female descendants of rebel soldiers that promotes the “Myth of the Lost Cause” and has long been associated with white supremacy.īut for students of the Civil War curious about the various fates of southern women whose husbands were among the many thousands who lost their lives at places like Shiloh and Chancellorsville, or in some random hospital tent, there is little to learn from the second-hand tales of either the fictional Lucy Marsden nor the real-life Maudie Hopkins-and even less from the pseudohistorical fantasies peddled by the UDC. Like her literary counterpart Lucy Marsden, the star of Allan Gurganus’s delightful novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Maudie married an elderly veteran decades after the war ended and benefited from his pension. In 2008, one hundred forty-three years after Appomattox, ninety-three-year-old Maudie Hopkins of Arkansas passed away, most likely the final surviving widow of a Confederate Civil War soldier.
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