The Effect of the Civil War on Southern Marriage Patterns

In 1864, THE EDITOR OF THE SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSENGER RECEIVED A letter from H. R., who identified herself as an eighteen-year-old, unmarried woman from Buckingham County, Virginia. Hattie, as the editor called the anonymous letter writer, admitted suffering from a "chill feeling of despair" brought on by the "execrable war." She wrote that the reflection has been brought to my mind with great force that after this war is closed, how vast a difference there will be in the numbers of males and females. Having made up my mind not to be an old maid, and having only a moderate fortune and less beauty, I fear I shall find it rather difficult to accomplish my wishes. She asked the editor, "[D]o you think that I will be overlooked 'amidst this wreck of matter and crush of men and horses' [?]" (1) Social historians of the Civil War have generally agreed that fears like Hattie's were well grounded in demographic realities. Nearly 620,000 men were killed in the war, a number approximately equal to the deaths in all other American wars from the Revolution to the Korean War combined. The deaths of huge numbers of men, Nancy Cott has argued, rendered "the assumption that every woman would be a wife ... questionable, perhaps untenable." (2) The death rate was especially great in the Confederacy, which lost approximately one in five white men of military age in the conflict. (3) Catherine Clinton has stated that the reduced population of young men "demographically deprived" southern women of husbands. (4) Drew Gilpin Faust, in her study of elite southern white women during the war, has argued that the loss of such a large proportion of the South's male population undermined the region's established pattern of family formation and threatened the identity of white women as wives and mothers. A generation of southern women faced the prospect of becoming spinsters reliant on their families for support. (5) Similarly, in a recent study of white southern womanhood in the late nineteenth century, Jane Turner Censer has expressed the notion that the Civil War "constituted a watershed" in the likelihood of marriage for southern white women. (6) If it is true that the war condemned a generation of southern women to spinsterhood, then demography, specifically the imbalance in the number of men and women, contributed to what some historians have described as a war-provoked "crisis in gender." (7) Unfortunately, despite repeated calls for more research, the demography of the United States during the Civil War and its aftermath remains a neglected subject. (8) A few scholars have attempted to reconstruct the population history of selected counties, but the geographic diversity of the nation's population, economy, and wartime experiences is too great to permit an inference of general patterns based on these local studies. (9) Consequently, there are no studies of the war's effect on postwar marriage in the South at large. This article attempts to fill that gap. It relies on samples of the federal decennial censuses from 1850 through 1880 to compare white marriage patterns before and after the war. (10) Although this study presents marriage estimates for all regions, the discussion focuses on the South, which suffered three times the rate of military deaths of the North. (11) The results suggest that a modest version of what demographers call a marriage squeeze affected southern white women who reached marriage age during the war. Faced with a shortage of potential spouses in the postwar period, some women postponed marriage or chose less appropriate husbands. Diaries, letters, and memoirs of southern women supplement the quantitative analysis and document women's wartime fears of spinsterhood. However, the results of this study demonstrate that women's feared spinsterhood failed to materialize over the long term. The vast majority (approximately 92 percent) of southern white women who came of marriage age during the war married at some point in their lives. …