Review: Lives of Carol Berkin's 'Three Civil War' wives take starkly different public paths

Civil War Wives, historian Carol Berkin's triple biography of three women with unusually public lives, demonstrates that the time and place we're born into is not a reliable predictor of our lives' arc. • Angelina Grimke was born in 1805 in South Carolina; Varina Howell and Julia Dent were both born in 1826, Varina in Mississippi, Julia in Missouri. • All three were the daughters of slave-owning families, raised amid comfort and indulgence, bred to become the wives of wealthy men and carry on the traditions of their families.

They would follow very different paths. Angelina would reject the "peculiar institution" of slavery and become a fiery abolitionist leader and early feminist, famed for her power as a public speaker — the first woman in American history to speak before a legislative body — until her voice was silenced by her marriage to another abolitionist.

Varina would marry, at 18, a handsome former military man twice her age (and never consider giving up her slaves until she had no choice). Jefferson Davis would become a talented U.S. senator — and then, after secession, the president of the Confederacy. Varina would find her own public voice in her fight to free Davis from prison after the war.

Julia would marry a military man, too — over the strenuous objections of his abolitionist family, who found it appalling he would marry a slave owner's daughter. She would not change her ways easily — even when her husband, Ulysses Grant, became the leader of the Union Army. In the White House, she found the apotheosis of her aptitude for homemaking, her public life an extension of her private one.

Berkin, a historian who has taught at Baruch College and City University of New York, has written several books about women in significant eras of American history, including First Generations: Women in Colonial America and Revolutionary Mothers.

Berkin's approach is feminist but hardly doctrinaire — her portraits of the three women in Civil War Wives are deeply researched and place them thoughtfully in the rich context of their times.

Each woman's life was shaped — and shattered — by the issue of slavery and the Civil War that grew out of the conflict over it.

Angelina turned her back on Southern traditions early. The youngest of 14 children, she was essentially raised by an older sister, Sarah, and remained close to her all their lives. First Sarah, then Angelina fell under the influence of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening and its emphasis on social reforms.

The two young women rejected their family's religion, slaveholding and luxurious lifestyle, eventually moving to Philadelphia and becoming Quakers. What began as religious fervor led them to an extraordinary activism in the abolitionist movement, where Angelina gained fame as a writer and speaker — and where her speeches sometimes provoked riots.

Angelina became an early proponent of feminism as well, but when she married a longtime friend and fellow abolitionist, Theodore Weld, in 1838, she retired from public life (after scandalizing Boston by inviting black friends to the wedding). Even though she and Sarah spent months doing most of the research for a bestselling book, American Slavery as It Is, it was published with only Theodore's name on the title page.

Varina, on the other hand, never chose to break with those traditions. She wanted nothing more than to be a planter's wife, to have her own gracious home and be guided by a strong but doting husband. She got the last in Davis, although she struggled to compete with his memories of his deeply beloved first wife, who died only three months after their wedding.

Davis' career took them from their plantation, Brierfield, to the heady social swirl of Washington, D.C., but Varina's social skills and quick wit translated well — although Washington matrons snarked about her wit being a little too quick to be ladylike.

That relative idyll was upended by the war and its aftermath, when Davis was held without charges or trial for two years as Varina undertook a "relentless and resourceful campaign" for his release.

Julia's traditional Southern upbringing left her in some ways poorly prepared for life as a soldier's wife. When she joined Grant at his post after their wedding, it dawned upon her that, raised in a household where slaves attended to every need, she had no idea how to cook or clean house.

Grant, Berkin writes, rarely lost his temper with his wife's general cluelessness, although some of it was amazing: During the war, she told one group of women she had no idea what the Constitution they were arguing about was, and she often visited Grant at Union encampments with one of her slaves in her entourage (until the slave finally ran away). For Grant, who suffered from depression and migraine headaches as well as alcoholism, the sunnily optimistic, childlike Julia was a balm.

Using letters, books and other historical documents, Berkin paints a lively and empathetic picture of these women's lives. In some ways they seem very different from our own. Privilege and position were no protection from the dangers of birth and child-rearing in the 19th century; Angelina had three children despite a severely prolapsed uterus and saw one of them institutionalized; Varina bore six children and buried five of them. Only Julia saw all four of her children survive to adulthood.

In other ways, their lives are not so different from our own. They struggled to make their marriages work, to balance their private lives with what became, whether they wished for it or not, very public ones.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at cbancroft@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8435. She blogs on Critics Circle at blogs.tampabay.com/arts.