Book Review : A Confederate Family’s Life in Letters

The Granite Farm Letters: The Civil War Correspondence of Edgeworth and Sallie Bird, edited by John Rozier (University of Georgia Press: $24.95; 330 pages)

For the historian, a trove of family letters is a precious bit of backing on which to pick out a historical design. Sometimes, in its homely details about the price of potatoes or the condition of the roads, it can modify the design itself.

For most of us, the domestic letter-writer of 100 or 400 years ago provides something else. It is a historical companionship, an indication that the abstract past whose big events--a Civil War, a Reformation, an Elizabethan Age--are signposts to where we are now, was also inhabited.

Not especially, perhaps, by people like us. But by people who we could imagine ourselves being, had we lived under such conditions. And if History with a capital H can be seen, also, to be life with a small “l”; why then, our own lower-case life--even if, as contemporaries, we don’t discern it--may take a place someday as upper-case History. It gives us a bit of grandeur.

Only an exceptional correspondent can reach us so directly over centuries. It takes some unusually clear eye to allow us to see through it after generations of dust.

Family’s View of Slavery

In this respect, “The Granite Farm Letters” is a little lacking. There is charm and beguiling detail in this correspondence among a Georgia family where the husband is off fighting for the Confederacy, while the wife does her fairly successful best to run their farm and see that the children are raised to gentry standards. But the eye is cloudy; something keeps us at a distance. That something is slavery and the way it is perceived.

Certainly, Edgeworth Bird, who writes most of the letters, is a man of warm heart, liberal instincts--within the standards of his upbringing--and a deep devotion to his wife, Sallie, and their home. Even better, for a letter writer, he is thin-skinned, without reserve, and nervous about details; which means that we get the details and the nerves.

He is ardent for the Confederacy and determined to do his duty. On the other hand, he doesn’t like Army life, despite the comradeship; he detests bloodshed, and he is continually homesick. It is a useful set of contradictions.

Thus, he writes the most specific advice about what is to be planted and how things are to be managed. It is easy to sense, though--he realizes how competent Sallie is--that it is mainly for the pleasure of thinking about these things.

Wounded in Battle

He was badly wounded at Second Manassas; but it was Gettysburg that shook him, even though, as quartermaster--because of his wounds and some personal connections--he was not in the thick of the fighting. But he held down a friend while the man’s legs were amputated, and the terrible toll began souring him.

“Our unfortunate victory,” he called Gettysburg afterward, declaring that “Gen. Benning won laurels for himself.” The general had sensibly refused orders to make a second charge; laurels for prudence instead of valor mark the withering of Confederate hopes, at least in Edgeworth’s mind. Not long afterward, he writes Sallie to pay off all their debts, since the currency is depreciating.

There is a nice practical humanity to Edgeworth. Gettysburg so upset him that he asked Sallie for extra money for luxuries. After Wilderness, he asked her to send him lots of catsup even if she had to pay $20 a gallon for the vinegar to make it with. He was a kind man and a loving one. “Ah, old Birdie, I never knew my complete dependence on you till I lost your support,” he writes; and at other times he calls her “dear precious old fellow.”

Sallie seems to have returned the ardor. She spent a good deal of time up in Richmond with Edgeworth, leaving Saida, their teen-age daughter, on the farm with relatives. Justifying her delay in returning, Sallie dramatizes the dangers of an upcoming battle by sending her daughter the alarming warning that “perhaps before this letter reaches you the fight will be over and your own beloved father among the slain!”

There is something endearing in this; and in Edgeworth’s advice to Saida to study and be a lady. Even after Sherman invaded Georgia, and Saida was about to be cut off with friends in Savannah, Edgeworth urges her to stay out of rocking chairs. They give people the habit of wiggling even when not sitting down, he writes.

Snobbish Attitude

So far, so good. But the Birds are wholeheartedly identified with the values of their society, and an estranging brittleness sets in. Society was snobbish, so were they. Sallie warns Saida about a friend: “Intimacy with her is, of course, out of the question when her family is so common. It is very sad, when you speak in such warm terms of her, but caste is absolutely necessary in society.”

It is far worse when they speak of their slaves. True, Edgeworth advises that kindness is the best means of controlling them. But we hear of Saida taking two girlfriends to visit the slave quarter to make an old slave “kiss her hand to them.” And in the best of patronizing good humor, the girls try to persuade another black woman to name her new baby Cupid, or else, David Jackson--after one of their boyfriends.

You would do that to a puppy you were fond of.

Edgeworth writes Sallie about a slave who worries her: “Sell him by all means and as far off as possible . . . he should fetch $2,500 or more.” And he goes on to talk about a favorite horse who shouldn’t fetch less “than we’d ask for Peter.”

The editor, John Rozier, chides in a footnote: “Peter was a slave not a horse.” Chiding doesn’t quite do it. “The Granite Farm Letters” are useful material; but it is hard to enter a vision so contaminated.