page_title: Augusta Jane Evans
section_title: Civil War
hierarchical_section_title: Augusta Jane Evans / Career / Civil War
caption_attribution_description: English: Front of Georgia Cottage, a.k.a. the Hardaway-Evans-Wilson-Sledge House, located at 2564 Springhill Avenue in Mobile, Alabama, United States. Built in 1840, this Greek Revival house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
context_page_description: Augusta Jane Evans, or Augusta Evans Wilson, was an American author of Southern literature and a patriot of the South. She was the first woman to earn US$100,000 through her writing.
  Wilson was a native of Columbus, Georgia, and her first book, Inez, a Tale of the Alamo, was written when she was still young. It was published by Harpers, but met with indifferent success. Her second book, Beulah, was issued in 1859 and became at once popular, still selling well when the American Civil War broke out. Cut off from the world of publishers, and intensely concerned for the cause of secession, she wrote nothing more until several years later when she published her third story, Macaria, dedicated to the soldiers of the Southern Army. This book was burned by some protesters. After the war closed, Wilson travelled to New York with the copy of St. Elmo, which was speedily published and met with great success. Her later works, Vashti; Infelice; and At the Mercy of Tiberius had phenomenal success. In 1868, she married Lorenzo Madison Wilson, of Alabama, and they resided at Spring Hill.
context_section_description: After most of the Southern states declared their independence and seceded from the Union into the Confederate States of America, Evans became a staunch Southern patriot. Her brothers had joined the 3rd Alabama Regiment and, when she traveled to visit them in Virginia, her party was fired upon by Union soldiers from Fort Monroe. "O! I longed for a Secession flag to shake defiantly in their teeth at every fire! And my fingers fairly itched to touch off a red-hot-ball in answer to their chivalric civilities", she wrote to a friend. She became active in the subsequent Civil War as a propagandist. Evans was engaged to a New York journalist named James Reed Spalding. But she broke off the engagement in 1860, because he supported Abraham Lincoln. She nursed sick and wounded Confederate soldiers at Fort Morgan on Mobile Bay. Evans also visited Confederate soldiers at Chickamauga. She sewed sandbags for the defense of the community, wrote patriotic addresses, and set up a hospital near her residence. The hospital was dubbed Camp Beulah by local admirers in honor of her novel. She also corresponded with General P.G.T. de Beauregard in 1862.
  The Civil War cut Evans off from her publishers, so it was many years before she ventured on her third novel Macaria, a propaganda masterpiece and a novel she later claimed was written by candlelight while nursing wounded Confederates. The novel is about Southern women making the ultimate sacrifice for the Confederacy; it promoted national desire for an independent national culture and reflected Southern values as they were at that time. She sent a copy of this book with a letter to the publishers through the blockade. It was carried safely to Havana, and thence to New York City. The book had already been published by a bookseller in Richmond, Virginia, and printed in South Carolina on coarse Confederate paper. It was entered according to the Confederate States of America, and dedicated to the brave soldiers of the Southern army. Some portions of the manuscript were scribbled in pencil while sitting up with the sick soldiers in "Camp Beulah" near Mobile. A Federal officer in Kentucky seized and burned every copy of the Confederate edition of Macaria which he could lay his hands upon. In some way, a Northern publisher obtained a copy, published it but swore he would pay no royalty to so "arch a rebel." J. B. Lippincott & J.C. Derby expostulated with him, and finally secured a contract by which the author would receive a set amount on every copy sold. General George Henry Thomas, commander of the Union Army in Tennessee, confiscated copies and had the books burned.
caption: Evans wrote Macaria and St. Elmo at Georgia Cottage.
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