Murrell Taylor The Divided Family in Civil War America By Amy (2009)

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. 72A Union woman in St.Louis spoke for many when she declared it an awfulthing.to have a private letter published. But the publication of theseletters, as well as the postal inspection system itself, was more than merelyunpleasant.These actions threatened the wall of privacy that was supposedto surround mid-nineteenth-century families, protecting them from the in-trusion of politics, war, and other public affairs and ensuring stability andhappiness in their personal lives.Privacy assumed an even more importantmeaning during the war, as we have seen, but when families found themselvesdivided along Unionist and Confederate lines, the rupture allowed govern-ment officials and newspaper editors unprecedented access to their privatelives.This transgression a rude violation in the minds of many prompteddivided families to protect the privacy promised by their domestic ideals.73Self-censorship offered one means of shielding private thoughts and newsfrom the eyes of strangers.Writers simply omitted gossip and other intimatenews, waiting until the war was over to share information freely again. I couldgive you a nice little dish of family gossip, a Tennessee man wrote to his wifein 1862, but in these times what is intended for the eyes of one person aloneborder crossing 111has to pass the inspection of those for whom it was not intended. 74 It waspotentially embarrassing for this man to air his family s affairs, as he had noway of knowing how the information might spread.Similarly, a Baltimore manwould not express his feelings of affection to his mother because the gesturewas not agreeable to have subjected to the inspection of a stranger. 75 At thesame time, though, stripping family letters of interesting news frustrated therelatives who received them. Why on earth didn t you say something to meI wanted to hear, Josephine Owen, a Confederate, demanded of her sisterJennet Tavenner, who resided in Union territory and had written a blandletter. Give me a discription [sic] of all your doings all day till you go to bedso that I can imagine I have spent the day with you. 76Other correspondents set out to deceive the inspectors. Hold the blankpart of my flag of truce letters to the fire, a Kentucky man instructed in aletter secretly delivered to his parents by a friend, for I ll write in milk. (Un-able to obtain milk, a Tennessean in Fort Delaware prison opted to write in onion juice instead.)77 Some people asked family members to write theirletters on the inside margins of newspapers, which, they thought, were moreapt to escape the censor s notice.A Missouri man told relatives to direct hisletters to his wife, implying that as a woman she was less likely to have hercorrespondence scrutinized.(The records of intercepted letters, however,suggest that women were not immune from postal inspection.)78 Sometimesthe deception merely involved a more careful parsing of words a Virginiawoman, for example, asked her brother in the Union army to describe hismovements individually, rather than referring to his regiment as a whole. Surely there is nothing imprudent in such details, she concluded.79 All ofthese ploys pushed the boundaries of postal rules and sometimes violatedthem.In 1863 the Daily Richmond Examiner instructed readers to never ap-pend their signatures to their letters when writing to someone in the North.Initials or a private mark would suffice and, if a letter did not pass inspec-tion, would protect the sender from Union retaliation.But this tactic probablyachieved only limited success, given that Union policy explicitly required afull signature.80Each of these strategies tried to regain the privacy that families had lostto wartime postal policies.With milk, cryptic writing, or other methods,people could redraw private boundaries around their letters while insulat-ing themselves from charges of disloyalty or treason [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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