PDF Guide to Louisiana Confederate Military Units; 1861–1865: A Southern Destiny (Southern Literary Studies) by Arthur W. Bergeron Jr. in History

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A Rebel Wife in Texas offers a singular glimpse into nineteenth-century southern culture through the eyes of a captivating and complex woman who; as a product of that culture; both revered and reviled it.Elizabeth Scott Neblett was raised in a slaveholding family in eastern Texas. Despite the frontier conditions; she was very much a southern belle who embraced conventional dictates and aspired to the “cult of true womanhood.” Neblett entered romantic marriage and motherhood with optimism; but over time her experiences as a wife and mother made her severe and increasingly despondent. When the Civil War ripped away the existing social structure and took her husband away from home; she was pressed to assume many of his responsibilities; including managing the family property and its eleven slaves. Frustrated by a growing sense of powerlessness and inadequacy; she frequently railed in anger against herself; her husband; and her children.Skillfully edited and annotated; A Rebel Wife in Texas is a rich resource for anyone researching the nineteenth-century South; not least for its observations on slave and class relations; regional politics; lynching; farm management; medical practices; mental illness; and the Civil War in Texas. It also offers an uncommonly intimate perspective on marriage during that era. The frankness; desperation; and detail with which Neblett discusses birth control and child rearing make this a unique collection of letters. Elizabeth Scott Neblett’s autobiographical record is the fascinating tale of one woman’s life―a life both ordinary and extraordinary. It is also; in important ways; the wider story of a culture rent by turmoil from within and without.